Thursday, August 9, 2007

Done in by Voldemort

Jane Stevenson reviews Galileo, Antichrist: a Biography by Michael White

If you like rip-roaring accounts of the battle between good and evil and are wondering where to go after Harry Potter VII, this could be your book. Michael White offers an epic treatment of the "anti-intellectual and anti-progressive" Catholic church, with Pope Urban VIII as Lord Voldemort versus a tiny band of pure-souled scientific rationalists. From any other perspective, it is enormously irritating. White never offers an argument where an opinion will do. The overall shoddiness of the project is indicated by the illustration captioned "view of Venice from 'Il Gioello', Arcerti, where Galileo died". Galileo died at Arcetri (near Florence), and the photograph is of Florence - it even includes its most famous building, the Duomo.

Nobody would deny that the late medieval church got itself into a terrible mess. But not in quite the ways White implies. He speaks of "the Inquisition" in a way that deliberately blurs the distinctions between three phenomena. There is the inquisition of the 12th and 13th centuries, which encompassed the deaths of large numbers of "heretics" (though not as many as he suggests: Bernardo Gui, whom he calls "one of the most abhorrent Inquisitor Generals", declared 900 defendants guilty of heresy during his career, and executed 42 of them, a rate which a scientific rationalist such as Stalin would have deemed half-hearted). Then there is the Spanish Inquisition, an aspect of 15th-century Spain's commitment to eradicating Muslim and Jewish elements in Spanish culture. And then the Roman Inquisition, founded in 1542, which sought to reclaim enquiry into heresy as an aspect of church government rather than ethnic cleansing. Confusing them is sloppy writing and sloppy thinking. The Roman Inquisition that tried Galileo was bad enough, but on a different order of magnitude from that which White implies.


In this simple-minded narrative, "Science" is a product of "The Renaissance", and Aristotle was first challenged by the circle of Galileo (an honour which probably goes to the sixth-century John Philoponus). But Galileo's revolutionary ideas about gravity drew on 14th-century scholastics' ideas about motion which advanced significantly on those of Aristotle. Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme do not appear in White's pages, and nor does the anti-Aristotelean Nicholas of Cusa, influential on both Kepler and Copernicus. Of course, this trio of intellectually distinguished medieval priests is singularly hard to reconcile with White's assertion that scientific thought ceased in the Christian centuries. Easier to leave them out.

It is also a strike against the Church that Jesuit scientists were unwilling to dismantle their entire worldview on the basis of one individual's opinions. In White's bizarre argumentation, because they accepted a roughly Aristotelean model of the universe, their work was not truly scientific - though in areas such as optics, to which the model was irrelevant, they did work of lasting value.

Galileo was not one of history's more comfortable geniuses. He was unquestionably brilliant, but also loudmouthed, arrogant, opinionated and poorly qualified. He loathed teaching, though he was an inspirational teacher, and preferred to make the money necessary to keep his gang of sponging relatives through inventions, super-weapons in the first instance. He also invented industrial espionage - his is the second telescope. His life was one of extraordinary achievement, marred by a degree of solipsism verging on insanity. White says he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time… in Italy at the height of the Counter-Reformation, when Catholic paranoia was at its most intense"; but it is hard to think of anywhere that would have accommodated this difficult man more patiently. And though White thinks Rome was writhing under the iron heel of a totalitarian and anti-scientific papacy, it contained Europe's first scientific academy, the Lincei, whose members were strongly sympathetic to Galileo's work.

No book so black and white would be complete without a conspiracy theory. The "antichrist" of the title refers to Galileo's denial of the principle of transubstantiation (which ultimately rests on Greek ideas about the nature of matter), on strictly rational post-Aristotelean grounds. According to White, this is why he was suppressed. It can't have helped, certainly, but nor did politics, nor Galileo's capacity to infuriate.

The biggest problem with this version of one of the key moments in the development of European thought is that it represents "science" as synonymous with knowledge, progress, and rationality. But if the Inquisition and suchlike grotesqueries are to be taken as indices of the intrinsic evil of Christianity, then it is only fair to observe that the rather briefer reign of science has thus far produced eugenics, the atom bomb and global warming. There is no system of thought, however noble its intentions, which has managed to do quite what it meant once translated into action on a large scale.


From: Telegraph

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