The Logos Scripture · The Book of Galileo

On the Words of Scripture and the Facts of the Sky

The Book of Galileo 3 · 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).

3.1I wrote a long letter about a thing I had long been unwilling to write.
3.2They said: what you say does not agree with what stands written. Scripture says the sun stood still. You say the earth moves.
3.3Let me state where I stand: I believe that book. I am a man of the church. I have not come to break it.
3.4What I say is another thing: that book is not for settling questions of this sort.
3.5A cardinal once said a sentence I often quote: scripture teaches how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go.
3.6That sentence I mean to carry further.
3.7Two true things cannot quarrel. If a sentence of scripture will not square with a thing that has been checked, then the error is not in the thing. It is in our way of reading the sentence.
3.8For that sentence was written to be heard by the people of that time, in the manner they could follow.
3.9To say the sun stood still is to speak as the eye sees. We still say the sun rises and sets, and we know it is not the sun that travels.
3.10So there are not two things quarrelling here at all. What quarrels is a way of reading.
3.11Now one more layer, and this is the sentence I care about most.
3.12He who gave us sense, reason and intellect did not do so in order that we should set them aside.
3.13If you say that whatever can be checked ought first to be looked up in a book, and once found there need not be checked —
3.14then what did he give us eyes for?
3.15I do not say this to make men believe less. I say it so that men will not stake their belief on something that will sooner or later be seen.
3.16Whoever stakes it there will, on the day the thing is seen, lose the rest along with it.
3.17It was for the good of that book that I said this. What came after showed I was right, and I take no pleasure in it.
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