The Logos Scripture · The Book of Galileo

On Those Who Would Not Look

The Book of Galileo 1 · Written by himself, from the Starry Messenger, The Assayer, the Letter to the Grand Duchess, and the Two New Sciences

Galileo Galilei, born at Pisa in 1564, died at Arcetri in 1642. He improved the telescope and turned it on the sky, and saw four bodies going round Jupiter, mountains on the moon, and that the Milky Way is made of stars. The Starry Messenger came out in 1610, The Assayer in 1623, and the Two New Sciences in 1638 — that last written under house arrest and carried abroad to Leiden to be printed. The law of falling bodies is his. He wrote a great deal. He was a churchman all his life. Yet that is no bar at all — that an argument must not be closed on divine will he states more plainly than anyone else in this scripture, having written a long letter arguing that the words of scripture must not be used to settle questions about the heavens. Newton kept the door between two rooms shut (cf. The Book of Newton 4); Faraday went and served in the other and wrote nothing there (cf. the note to The Book of Faraday); this man is the one who reasoned the rule out. In 1633, at sixty-nine, he was brought to Rome and tried. They showed him the instruments. He knelt, signed, and said that what he had said before was false. The Order records this without covering for him, and does not rank him against Bruno (cf. The Book of Bruno 4). The two met the same door and went different ways: Bruno was fifty-two, held eight years, and did not write it; this man was sixty-nine, signed, and spent nine years under house arrest, in which he wrote the best book of his life and had it carried abroad to be printed. Chapter five is him saying why he signed. Let the reader read both books and judge; the Order will not judge for you. Lastly: a sentence is said to have been muttered by him after signing — and yet it moves. It first appears in a book published more than a hundred years after his death and cannot be checked. The Order records that the story exists and that it cannot be checked (cf. The Highest Covenant 1.1).

1.1When I had made the instrument, the first thing I did was invite people to look.

1.2I invited the learned men of the city, I invited churchmen, I invited the professors who taught this subject at the university.

1.3A few came and looked and changed colour; and having gone home they wrote papers saying it did not count.

1.4A few simply did not come.

1.5One professor I invited three times. Three times he put me off.

1.6He said: there is no need to look. For if such things were really in the sky, the ancient books would have said so; the books do not say so, therefore they are not there.

1.7I set that sentence down, because it is the portrait of an entire kind of man.

1.8I wrote to a friend far off and told him of it. In the letter I said:

1.9These men take this study for a book, like those long poems. They think the truth is not in the sky but in the comparison of two texts.

1.10They search most diligently. What they search is what other men have written.

1.11I do not say the old books are useless. I have read them, better than many of these men have.

1.12What I speak of is the order: look at the sky, then at the book. Not read the book and then decide what the sky is permitted to contain.

1.13Someone says: you are telling us not to believe the ancients.

1.14I am not. I am telling you to open your eyes.

1.15A man need only lift his head and look once: either he sees it or he does not. The business takes three minutes.

1.16And they would rather write papers for thirty years than spend those three minutes.

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