Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), of Pisa, Padua and Florence, who turned the new telescope on the sky in 1609 and found the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the mountains of the moon — and with them a case for Copernicus that the Aristotelians could not answer. The theological question that came with it, how Scripture is to be read where a demonstration contradicts the plain sense of its words, is the subject of his one sustained piece of theological writing. He was tried in 1633 and spent his last nine years under house arrest at Arcetri.
Works (1)
- Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina — Galileo’s defence of the Copernican opinion against the charge that it contradicts Scripture, written to Christina of Lorraine, mother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1615 — the year before the Congregation of the Index condemned the doctrine. Its argument is that Scripture accommodates itself to common speech and was given to teach how one goes to heaven, and not how heaven goes, so that where a demonstration is certain the interpreter, not the astronomer, must give way. Circulated in manuscript in Galileo’s lifetime and first printed in 1636; this is Thomas Salusbury’s English of 1661, the first. (1 note)