Acount of Heresy: Galileo

Thomas Aquinas defined heresy as, "a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas". The Catholic Church of the Middle Ages and Renaissance expanded on this definition and established specific attributes of heresy. The Inquisition of the Catholic Church followed a rubric of requirements those brought before had to meet in order to be considered heretics. A person was not only condemned as a heretic but also labeled with a degree of heresy based on a stratified system. Inquisitors looked for evidence of heterodoxy, notoriety, marginality, and obstinacy when condemning a heretic. The Inquisition’s rulings were often unfair and founded on faulty or skewed evidence. Many of the famous condemned heretics were exempt by the Church after their deaths. One such case was Galileo Galilei. Though he died in 1642 still deemed as a heretic, it was not until 1992 that Pope John Paul II admitted Galileo’s trial was erroneous.

In 1543 Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres was published after some delay. This piece of scientific literature argued a heliocentric universe. It was a revolutionary idea that contradicted the commonly a

A former student of Galileo’s, Antonio Castelli was a devout Copernican and pulled Galileo into the controversy between which model of the universe of correct. At this time, many scientists accepted Copernicus’s universe as a good mathematical model for predicting movement of heavenly bodies. The consensus however was that Earth was actually at the center of the universe. Even before Galileo made public statements for a heliocentric universe, it was already a discussed and controversial topic.

In later years, despite the ruling, Galileo hoped to publish Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican. He felt the ruling of the congregation would not be held against him because he was befriended Pope Urban VIII. Galileo tried for several years to get the permission of Rome to publish the work. It never came but he did succeed in getting Florence to accept his work. In 1632 Galileo went ahead with publishing the unorthodox work. Although the work was set up as a dialogue between ficticious characters representing each model: Salviati (heliocentric view) and Simplicio (geocentric view), it was obviously written in favor of a Copernican model. Even the name of Simplicio ridicules the model he represented.

Many of Galileo’s contemporaries were enraged with his audacity. After all, Galileo was claiming the apotheosis of philosophy, Aristotle, was wrong.

The controversy stems from a biblical passage in the Old Testament. The passage speaks about Joshua, a follower of God being able to stop the sun in the sky. Many people in Galileo’s time interpreted this as evidence that the sun was going around the Earth. The passage reads:

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