The Forbidden Universe (12 page)

Somehow the extraordinary Campanella managed to pass this test, and was duly sentenced to life imprisonment. For the next quarter of a century he was moved around a series of castle dungeons in the Kingdom of Naples. Although most prisoners in that place and time would have suffered horrors from the stark loneliness and the squalor of their own filth in the dark, fending off rats, Campanella’s life was surprisingly non-onerous. Viewing his
imprisonment
as an extended opportunity for study and contemplation – much like being in a monastery – he spent his time refining his ideas and writing. Not only was he supplied with books and writing materials and had at least some light in his cell, but he also received a steady flow of scholarly visitors, mainly from Germany, who took his writings back home to be published. Why his jailers were so obliging is a bit of a puzzle, especially as it must have dawned on them by now that he was as sane as they were – probably more so. Presumably bribes were involved from somebody, somewhere.

The revolt having failed, Campanella’s goal now became the reformation of society through the Vatican and, perhaps oddly, the Spanish monarchy he had plotted to overthrow. Like Bruno, his ambitions were nothing if not excessive.

Only once in his books did Campanella mention Bruno directly – significantly in a defence of Galileo published from prison in 1622 – and even then he was careful to declare that Bruno was a heretic. But Campanella was manifestly familiar with his philosophy and writings, judging by allusions in his work, his favourite being
The Ash Wednesday Supper
. Of course, given Bruno’s fate and the continued opprobrium attached to his name, there was no way Campanella could be more open, especially given that he was trying to win support for Catholic reform – and doing so from prison.

Campanella’s major work is
City of the Sun
(
Civitas Solis
), written in the first years of the 1600s but not published until 1623, in Frankfurt.
⁶
Basically concerned with a utopian society, the text takes the form of a dialogue between the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller and the captain of a ship that had sailed to the New World. The captain relates how, after being shipwrecked, he was found by the inhabitants of the City of the Sun, describing its society in detail to the Grand Master. Clearly Campanella’s ideal republic, the kind he had hoped to establish in Calabria, the City of the Sun is designed and run according to magical and astrological principles. It is a Hermetic-Egyptian utopia, derived from the prediction at the end of
Asclepius
’ Lament. George Lechner of the University of Hartford, a specialist on magical and astrological symbolism in Renaissance art says of
City of the Sun
: ‘In it, Campanella developed the notion of a new city-state, led by a philosopher-priest-king, and guided by Hermetic magical principles.’
⁷
And of course it is no coincidence that it was a city of the sun that was being debated, reminiscent of the ‘
Civitas solis
’
that Bruno discussed with the librarian of the Abbey of St Victor in Paris, saying that the ‘Duke of Florence’ planned to build it.
⁸

Even from prison Campanella played an influential role in events surrounding the next great champion of the sun-centred theory: Galileo Galilei. The Hermetic chain remained unbroken.

Giordano Bruno had made heliocentricity the centre of his Hermetic revolution, the sign that would trigger either the downfall or the reformation of the Church, neither of which was regarded with any great enthusiasm by the Vatican. For Bruno and the Giordanisti, heliocentricity was not just a theory: they believed its acceptance would usher in a new Hermetic utopia. And even with Bruno out of the way, it was feared that he had left behind a secret society – who and where nobody knew – which was proactively committed to bringing the Hermetic revolution about. Tommaso Campanella, Bruno’s spiritual heir, who shared his view of the importance of heliocentricity and was possibly even one of the Giordanisti, had conspired in a rebellion against the Kingdom of Naples and therefore against the Spanish crown, aiming to attack those who were deemed most loyal to the Catholic cause.

Given this context, Copernicus’ original evocation of Hermes Trismegistus’ name in
On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres
was hardly likely to have been missed by those whose job it was to protect the Church. Perhaps placing the sun at the centre had been a devilish Hermetic plot all along? There was no way for those organizations whose task it was to defend the Church – the Inquisition and the Jesuits – to be sure, and every reason for them to be nervous. During the sixteenth century the Roman Church had only just survived its greatest trauma, a seemingly
impossible undermining of its authority by the rise of the Protestant Churches. So who was to say what might happen next? The ideas of Bruno and other Hermeticists were being discussed across Europe, and even highly placed members of the Catholic Church had embraced them. Hermetic principles were being openly advocated. And then there were the Giordanisti – how many there were, and how widely they were spread, nobody knew. Maybe the Inquisition and Jesuits were over-reacting, but these were times that engendered paranoia. And so it was considered that – at the very least – establishing heliocentricity would attract more converts to Hermeticism. More readers would devour Bruno’s works, and possibly attempt to act on his agenda of radical reform.

As long as Copernicus’ idea remained simply a theory, however, the Hermetic implications barely registered. But when an individual claimed he had come up with
proof
, then the Church began to become seriously worried. And ecclesiastical anxiety ran even deeper when it was
discovered
that the threat came from a direct associate of the mystical revolutionary Tommaso Campanella and other Giordanisti suspects, such as Pinelli and his circle in Padua – in other words, Galileo.

The Hermetic interpretation of heliocentricity adds an important and otherwise missing element to the story of Galileo’s persecution, finally making sense of some of its more puzzling aspects. Why, for example, were the Jesuits – Galileo’s main enemies – so zealous about making an example of him? And why exactly did they consider his work so dangerous?

Galileo wrote to a friend in Paris as he was about to leave for Rome to face the Inquisition in 1633:

Comparing Galileo’s work to Luther and Calvin seems rather excessive. How could proving Copernicanism possibly do anything like the same damage to the Church as those famous pioneering Protestants? And during a time when other heretics were challenging fundamental
doctrines
such as transubstantiation, heliocentricity does seem rather tame. There was something else behind the Church’s anxiety, something massive but unstated which lies
somewhere
in the significance of the heliocentric theory to the dangerous Hermeticists.

Because the Galileo affair has been used for so long to score points in the contest between science and religion it has become hedged round with assorted myths propounded by one side or the other. Take for example the well-worn story of Galileo finishing his public recantation of his belief in the motion of the Earth around the sun by muttering the aside, ‘And yet it moves’. This was invented a century after the event, but has been repeated so often it is now considered by many to be the gospel truth. With so many assumptions and so many myths, it is almost impossible to uncover the simple truth. Almost, but not quite.

Galileo has often been depicted as a modern
rationalist-materialist
scientist who had somehow been born out of time, and who was persecuted by superstitious – in other words cretinous – men whose intellects were stuck in the Middle Ages. Galileo is seen as a martyr for science and a victim of irrational religion. But of course the reality is that he was very much a man of his time, and we should no more assess his character and motivation by modern standards than we should Copernicus or Kepler.

While most educated people today still think that
Galileo’s trial was all about a clash between the scientific and religious mindsets, historians have long realized that this is way off the mark. It has therefore become
fashionable
to see the affair as a collision between two great and obstinate egos, two pathologically ‘right men’: Galileo, who refused to be told what he could do or say, and Pope Urban VIII, whose ego had been bruised by Galileo putting his views in the mouth of a character offensively named Simplicio. The prevalent view is that if only Galileo had not been so stubborn, and had made it clear that he was presenting heliocentricity simply as a hypothesis, then all of his trauma could have been avoided. The very fact that the myth of the clash of egos has endured is an acknowledgement that something is still missing. It seems that the elusive ‘something’ may have been a factor that neither side wanted to see the light of day …

On the question of Galileo’s attitude to Hermeticism, ironically other historians argue that he would have nothing to do with it because he was too staunch and conventional a Christian. Particularly after the way he was portrayed in Dan Brown’s thriller
Angels and Demons
(2000) there was a rush to paint him as an especially devout Catholic, respectful of the Church. But there is little evidence for this. Galileo’s published works deal with matters of science, not religion, and his surviving personal letters contain very little on religious matters. Naturally he used the conventional Christian platitudes of the time, and observed the outward trappings – going to church, taking communion and so on – as everybody was compelled to do in that time and place; but no more than this.

In his published works, Galileo explicitly distanced himself from certain of the esoteric arts (most specifically numerology derived from Pythagoras), which is taken by today’s commentators to indicate his modernity and rationalism. However, given what had happened to Bruno,
this could equally have been simply an act of
self-preservation
: one specialist, Giorgio de Santillana, specifically links the disavowal of numerology to Galileo distancing himself from Bruno and his ilk.
¹⁰
And in any case, dismissing one arcane system does not necessarily mean dismissing everything esoteric. And yet on the other hand, Galileo practised astrology. It is often stated in popular histories that, although he drew up horoscopes for wealthy clients, he only did this for the money, and never actually believed in it. In fact, there’s no evidence at all that this was his attitude – it is yet another example of modern projection.

Galileo was undoubtedly a brilliant pioneering scientist who used observation and experiment to work out the laws governing physical phenomena and sought to explain them in mathematical terms. The methods he developed would inspire and shape the next generation and culminate in the genius of Isaac Newton. Both Einstein and Stephen Hawking have hailed Galileo as the father of modern science, and he has been described as ‘the world’s first celebrity scientist’
¹¹
– the Einstein of his day. But there are many ironies in his story and the way it has passed into history, or perhaps more precisely, legend.

The first irony is that what Galileo is best known for now – helping to establish the heliocentric theory – is actually one of the least important aspects of his work. His major contributions to science were in what we today would call the field of physics: motion, optics, acoustics and so on. In astronomy, his big innovation was to improve the telescope to the point that it was good enough for astronomical observations (although he originally thought in terms of military and maritime applications). And while the observations Galileo made with the telescope produced new evidence in favour of Copernicus, the arguments he thought proved the theory were, in fact, entirely mistaken.
Galileo thought that the smoking gun was the phenomenon of the tides, arguing their ebb and flow could only be explained by the Earth’s rotation, airily dismissing Kepler’s suggestion that they were caused by the pull of the Moon. In this, Galileo was, of course, completely wrong.

In fact, his whole attitude to heliocentricity was at odds with the methodical and meticulously worked-out approach that characterized the rest of his work and which rightly justifies his status as the founding father of the modern scientific method. Einstein thought Galileo was so determined to prove Copernicus right that he was blind to the obvious problems with his argument.
¹²
As the Danish science historian Olaf Pedersen, speaking at a conference on the Galileo affair in Cracow in 1984, observed:

In other words, Galileo became convinced by the theory and then set out to find evidence for it – hardly a true scientific approach. He enjoyed his celebrity status and the material benefits it brought. He had a flair for self-publicity, never being one to hide his innovations and discoveries, if anything exaggerating them. But he seems to have made it his mission in life to see the theory of heliocentricity proved, while being uncharacteristically circumspect about his support for it. Although writing to Kepler as early as 1597 that he had ‘become convinced by Copernicus many years ago’,
¹⁴
publicly he was keen to be seen as much more equivocal, even evasive.