Galileo's Dream

Chapter fifteen The Two Worlds

He woke so stiff he could not move, feeling the pressure of full bowel and full bladder, which seemed to be in competition with each other to shove their way out of his second asshole. He was in his bed. Cartophilus was staring him in the face with his peculiar look—either knowing or intensely curious, it was impossible for Galileo to say.

“What?” Galileo croaked.

“You’ve been entangled, maestro.”

“Yes.” He thought about it while he made the effort to roll into a sitting position. “You know what happens to me when I’m gone, isn’t that right, Cartophilus?”

“Yes. I see it here.” He gestured at his device.

“So you saw?”

Cartophilus nodded unhappily. “It keeps getting worse. That must have been quite a noise. All of you were groaning and weeping near the end. It got so bad, I decided to bring you back. I hope I was right.”

“I don’t know.” Galileo tried to hold on to what had happened. Life seen by lightning bolts—”I’ll have to go back, I think.”

Then La Piera swept in with a basket of bread and citrons, followed by Giuseppe and Salvadore, who carried between them a pot of hot mulled wine flavored with grenadine. They in turn were followed by kitchen girls carrying bowls and cups and plates and implements, and flowers in vases. By way of several slow and articulated movements, groaning at each, Galileo stood. He stared at the faces surrounding him as if he had never seen them before. The syncope this time, La Piera told him, had lasted two days. He had to be starving.

“First help me out to the jakes,” he ordered the boys. “I need to make room for food first. God help me not to shit my guts out.”

In the days that followed, he was very subdued. “Things aren’t clear,” he complained to Cartophilus. “I remember it only in bits and pieces. I think Hera must have done something to my mind. I can’t make it hold together.”

But he wrote one last passage to add to Il Saggiatore before sending it off for publication in Rome. The added passage was a curious thing, unlike anything he had written before:

Once upon a time, in a very lonely place, there lived a man endowed by nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very penetrating mind. For a pastime he raised birds, whose songs he much enjoyed, and he observed with great admiration the happy method by which they could transform at will the very air they breathed into a variety of sweet songs.

One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song close to his house, and being unable to connect it with anything but some small bird, he set out to capture it. When he arrived at a road he found a shepherd boy who was blowing into a kind of hollow stick while moving his fingers about the wood, thus drawing from it a variety of notes similar to those of a bird, though by quite a different method. Puzzled, but impelled by his natural curiosity, he gave the boy a calf in exchange for this flute and returned to solitude.

The very next day he happened to pass by a small hut within which he heard similar tones, and in order to see whether this was a flute or a bird he went inside. There he found a boy who was holding a bow in his right hand and sawing upon some fibers stretched over a hollowed piece of wood such that he drew from this a variety of notes, and most melodious ones too, without any blowing. Now you who participate in this man’s thoughts and share his curiosity may judge of his astonishment. Yet finding himself now to have two unanticipated ways of producing notes and melodies, he began to perceive that still others might exist.

His amazement was increased when upon entering a temple he heard a sound, and upon looking behind the gate discovered that it came from the hinges as he opened it. Another time, led by curiosity, he entered an inn expecting to see someone lightly bowing the strings of a violin, and instead saw a man rubbing his fingertip around the rim of a goblet and drawing forth a pleasant tone from that. Then he observed that wasps, mosquitoes, and flies do not form single notes by breathing, as did the birds, but produce their steady sounds by swift beating of their wings. And as his wonder grew, his conviction proportionately diminished that he understood how sounds were produced.

Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly exist, when he believed that he had seen everything, he suddenly found himself plunged deeper than ever into ignorance and bafflement. For having captured in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either by closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not see it move the scales that covered its body, or any other part of it. At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw some thin hard ligaments beneath. Thinking the sound might come from their vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing the creature, he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still unable to determine whether the song had originated in those ligaments. And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to complete ignorance, so that when asked how sounds were created, he answered trembling that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.

I could illustrate with many more examples Nature’s bounty in producing her effects, as she employs means we could never think of without our senses and our experiences to teach us—and sometimes even these are insufficient to remedy our lack of understanding. The difficulty of comprehending how the cicada forms its song, even when we have it singing to us right in our hands, ought to be more than enough reason for us to decline to state how comets are formed or anything else.

When Cesi read this addition to the new book he was puzzled, and wrote back to ask what it meant. Was it a way of saying that Coperni-canism might not be the correct explanation for the movement of the planets after all—the cicada’s song representing therefore something like the music of the spheres?

Galileo wrote back tersely. I know certain things which have been observed by no one but myself. From them, within the limits of my human wisdom, the correctness of the Copernican system seems incontrovertible.

Maffeo Barberini becoming pope had been a miracle; him making his nephew Francesco into a cardinal just three days after Francesco had joined the Lincean Academy was another miracle. The year before, Galileo had helped Francesco to get his doctorate from the University of Pisa, for which favor his uncle the new pope had sent Galileo a gracious letter of thanks. Now Francesco was one of Urban’s closest advisors and confidants.

Then another of Galileo’s disciples, and one of his most enthusiastic supporters, a young man named Giovanni Ciampoli, was appointed to the powerful position of papal secretary. This almost defied belief, given Ciampoli’s grandiloquent self-importance relative to his actual accomplishments and station. He was a rooster, in fact, and yet now he was gatekeeper to the pope and in his company every day—advising, conversing, even reading aloud to him as he ate his meals. Ciampoli read Il Saggiatore to him, in fact, and afterward wrote to Galileo and the Lynxes to say that Urban had often laughed out loud as he listened to it.

And not just the pope was reading Il Saggiatore, it seemed, but everyone in Rome—the literati, the virtuosi, the philosophers, the Jesuits, and everyone else with an interest in intellectual matters. It was the book of the hour; it had completely transcended the original question of the comets, or any of the individual scientific controversies Galileo had gotten embroiled in. It was a rock that people were using to shatter the heavy, somnolent, resentful conformity of the Pauline years. Someone had spoken freely at last, and in the vernacular, about all the new things being discovered. High Barberinian culture was born, emerging like an Athena. Galileo was no longer alone, or part of a faction, but the leader of a movement. With Urban VIII on the Throne of Peter, anything was possible.

Again, however, Galileo’s trip to Rome was delayed by illnesses, and not all of them his own. Urban VIII was so exhausted by his intense campaign for the papacy that he retired into the Vatican for over two months. By the time he was well enough to receive supplicants and visitors, and Galileo had recovered from his own ailments enough to travel, it was the spring of 1624.

But finally the time came. On his last day at Bellosguardo, Galileo rode his mule over to San Matteo to say good-bye to Maria Celeste.

She knew perfectly well why he had to go. She felt that this new pontiff was a direct answer to her prayers, an intercession from God in their favor; she was the one who had first called it a “miraculous conjunction,” giving Galileo both the idea and the phrase. In her letters to him, she had revealed her ignorance of courtly protocol by expressing the hope that he would write Urban VIII to congratulate him on his ascension, not understanding that one at Galileo’s level could not address directly someone so much higher, but must express thanks and best wishes through an intermediary, which Galileo had of course done, using for the purpose Cardinal Francesco Barberini, as he had explained to her in his return letter.

Now Maria Celeste clung to him in her usual way, trying not to cry. Just in the way that she held him, he could feel that no one had ever loved him so intensely. And so of course she always hated it when he went away.

“Are you sure I can’t ask His Holiness to give you all some property?” he said, trying to distract her.

But Maria Celeste said, “What we need is better spiritual guidance! These so-called priests they have inflicted on us, well—you know what they have done. It’s really too much. If we could only have a decent priest, a real priest.”

“Yes yes,” Galileo said. “But not perhaps some land that you could rent? Or an annuity?”

Maria Celeste frowned her quick frown. This was not the kind of thing one asked the pope for, her look said. “I’ll ask the abbess,” she temporized.

Back at Bellosguardo, making his final preparations, a letter from her was brought to him by the convent’s servant Geppo. Please ask Urban for a real priest, it reiterated. Someone educated, and at least somewhat pure of spirit.

Galileo cursed as he read this. There on the page lay his daughter’s beautiful Italian script, the big loops inclining in perfect diagonals to the northeast and northwest, if it had been a map; a true work of art, as always, written by candle in the middle of the night, after the day’s chores were finally done and she had some time to herself. In so many of these beautiful letters, she excused herself for falling asleep as she wrote, and it often took several nights for her to compose one. She apologized also for mentioning the most pressing physical need of the moment, for begging a blanket, or his oldest hen to thicken their broth. And yet now she asked him to ask the new pope for a better spiritual advisor.

“I see the way it is,” he said gloomily as he stared through her letter. “In order to be a Poor Clare and yet not go mad, you have to believe it all, utterly and to the depths of your soul. Otherwise despair would drown you.”

As it had Arcangela, and several other of the sisters, including the poor abbess. Maybe you could even say that most of them were sunk into despair, weighed down by hunger and cold and illness, while Maria Celeste buoyed herself with her belief, and held the rest of them up with her otherworldly goodness. Galileo muttered sulphurously as he considered his two daughters, stuck in the same situation and thereby illustrating a truly Aristotelian either-or in their response to it. Neither was quite sane; but Maria Celeste was beautiful. A saint.

Later, in Rome, when he made the request she had asked for, he also asked for a sinecure for his son Vincenzio, combined with a papal indulgence that would legitimize his birth. This too was granted. The sinecure gave the youth sixty crowns a year, but since it came with the requirement that he perform some religious exercises, he refused to accept it. At this news, Galileo threw up his hands. “I’ve done my duty by these people!” he roared. “They won’t get another scudi from me, not another quattrini. Family, what a fraud! Blood is no thicker than water, as you see when you cut yourself.”

“When it congeals it gets thicker,” Cartophilus pointed out.

“Yes, and when it dries it sticks to you. And so family is the scab on a wound. I’m sick of it. I renounce them all!”

Cartophilus ignored this, knowing it was just talk. And by then there were more pressing problems.

Unfortunately the Grand Duchess Christina was not convinced of the necessity of this trip to Rome, and did not want to pay for it. The new Medici ambassador to Rome, a Francesco Niccolini, cousin to the previous ambassador but one, was informed in a letter from the young Grand Duke Ferdinando II that Galileo was not invited to stay at the embassy or at the Villa Medici. So Galileo had to make arrangements to stay with his ex-student Mario Guiducci, who lived near the church of Santa Maria Maddalena.

This was the first sign that the mirabile congiunture was not quite as miraculous as it had seemed—or that it was already disjuncting, in the way of many a spectacular but brief astrological conjunction.

The second sign of disjunction was far worse. He was still on his way to Rome, resting at Cesi’s villa in Acquasparta, when the news came that Virginio Cesarini, that brilliant and melancholy young cardinal, had died.

This was a real blow, for Cesarini had been perhaps the leading figure in all the competing intellectual circles of the city—known to everyone, high up in the Vatican, and at the same time very much a Lynx, a true Galilean. No one had expected his death, despite his slight frame; but these things happened.

His vacant position at the Holy Office was soon given to the enormously fat Fra Niccolo Riccardi—a priest who seemed sympathetic to the Lynxes, and who loved Galileo’s new book, but who was also anxious to please everybody. He would be little help to them.

Conjunctions and disjunctions; there was nothing for it but to get to Rome as soon as possible, and do what he could. So it was back into the litter to endure again the jounce and squeak of the ruined springtime roads.

On the day of his arrival in the sprawling smoky city, Galileo stayed up late with his host Guiducci, and was brought up to date on the situation. As Galileo had seen in the tight crowded streets, the capital of the world was in a state of high excitement because of the new order of things. For the first time in decades, a pope with ambition was on the Throne of Peter, calling for new building projects, clearing whole quarters of the city, staging gigantic festivals for the populace, and encouraging literary societies and new organizations like the Linceans. No one remembered a time quite like it; it was not just the Lynxes who had felt the miraculous. To have the Borgias out of power (and the Medicis), all replaced by a vigorous, curious intellectual—it was springtime for everyone.

The next morning, therefore, Galileo’s hopes were high as he went to the Vatican to pay his respects. The familiar buildings and gardens had been recently washed. They looked bigger and more imposing, the gardens more luxuriant and beautiful. Giovanni Ciampoli, beaming happily, led him through the papal foyer and the outer salons to the inner garden, now bursting with flowers. There, taking a walk with his brother Cardinal Antonio Barberini, was the new pope, God’s envoy on Earth.

In the first second of the audience, Galileo saw that Maffeo Barberini was a changed man. It was not just the white robes, the surplice, the red vestment over his shoulders framing his elegant goateed head, the ermine-lined red cap, nor the deferent retainers on all sides, and the Vatican itself, although all these things were of course new. It was the look in his eye. Gone was the gleam of mischief Galileo remembered so well, and the look of open admiration for Galileo’s achievements, and the desire to be admired in return. Urban VIII was not present in the same way. His skin was smooth and pink, his domed forehead and long nose shiny. His eyes, round rather than oval, were now like watchful dark pebbles, alert even though his gaze angled away from Galileo’s as if looking at something else. He expected obedience, even obeisance, and already he was used to getting it. He was not even suspicious that he might not get it.

And of course Galileo gave it in full, kneeling and bowing to kiss the sandaled feet, which were perfectly clean and white.

“Rise, my Galileo. Speak to us standing upright.”

As he did so Galileo bit his tongue, checking the congratulations he had prepared. There was no question now of suggesting there had been anything won, or that the matter could have turned out any other way; one had to act as if things had always been like this. Referring to the past would have been a faux pas, even an impertinence. Silently Galileo kissed the big ring on the pontiff’s offered hand. Urban nodded coolly. He let Ciampoli speak for him, only nodding to indicate his approval of what was said, and occasionally murmuring things Galileo could barely hear. One curious glance was sharp, then he returned to the contemplation of some inner landscape. Even for Galileo, his favored scientist, he could not be bothered to be entirely present. It was as if the carapace of power he now wore was so heavy that he needed to attend to it always, and so thick that he did not believe anyone could penetrate it. Now he lived alone, at all times and in all places. Even his brother Antonio watched him as if observing a new acquaintance.

Ciampoli—always one of Galileo’s most peculiar and unhelpful advocates, a man boundless in enthusiasm but shaky in everything else—now spoke eagerly of Galileo’s accomplishments, in ways that pitched them too high, that caused Urban’s gaze at the flowers to sharpen again for a second as he tilted his head to listen. Barberini knew Galileo’s story already, and clearly this was not the moment to rehearse it. Why Ciampoli had been named Urban’s secretary was beyond Galileo to tell.

Soon Urban lifted a hand, and Ciampoli saw, well after Galileo, that the interview was over. Nervously, Ciampoli thanked Galileo for coming, speaking for Urban just as he had a moment before been speaking for Galileo. He was enunciating both halves of the conversation! Then he led Galileo away. No more than five minutes had passed.

Out in the vast antechamber Ciampoli repeated what he had written already in his letters, that he had been reading Il Saggiatore aloud to the pope during meals, and that Urban had laughed and called for more. “I am sure you are now free to write anything you want, about astronomy or anything else.”

But Ciampoli was a fool. He had speculated aloud that he was Virgil reincarnated, or perhaps Ovid. He wrote verses making fun of Urban behind Urban’s back, then distributed these verses to friends like Cesi and Galileo and others, as if the poems would not then eventually circulate and land in the hands of his enemies—and more important, in the hands of Galileo’s enemies.

So now Galileo merely nodded at him and murmured sounds of agreement, deeply irritated and uneasy. That his audience with Urban had gone less well than the ones he had had with Paul! It was startling, disturbing—hard to believe.

Thinking it over intensively in the days that followed, it finally occurred to him that old friends and favored ones were precisely the people that a new pope had to put in their place, which was at the same distance as everyone else: below. A very great distance below.

Clearly he would need another meeting with Urban, without Ciampoli on hand to get in the way. But how to get that was not obvious. Possibly no one ever met privately with this pope.

The next morning he visited Cardinal Francesco Barberini. They met in the little courtyard just inside the wall of the Villa Barberini, overlooking the brown Tiber.

It could be honestly said at this point that Galileo had helped Francesco more than Francesco had helped him. Francesco seemed perfectly willing to acknowledge this; he was gracious, he was grateful, he was without the slightest tinge of that resentment that gratitude so often contains. It was a truly enjoyable meeting rather than the pretense of one, full of laughter and shared memories. Francesco was taller than Urban and more handsome, sanguine and affable, with a big head like a Roman statue’s. His cardinal’s robes and regalia had been made in Paris, where he had lived for several years. That he had been one of the least effective diplomats in Vatican history was not so widely known.

He sounded encouraging when Galileo gingerly brought up the subject of Copernicanism. “My uncle once told me,” he said, “that if it had been up to him in 1616, you would not have been forbidden to write on this subject. That was Paul’s issue, or Bellarmino’s.”

Galileo nodded thoughtfully. “That seems right,” he said as he unpacked a microscope he had brought with him to show people—a kind of telescope of the small, which gave observers new and astounding views of the unsuspected detail and articulation of all the smallest things, including flies and moths, and now, because a trio of bees formed the Barberini family emblem, bees.

Francesco looked into the eyepiece and grinned. “The sting is like a little sword! And those eyes!” He held Galileo by the shoulder. “You always have something new. His Holiness my uncle likes that. You should show it to him.”

“I will if I can. Maybe you can help me?”

But before he next met with the pope, Galileo gave the device to Cardinal Frederick Eutel von Zollern, in the hope of gaining more support from Catholics north of the Alps. The first meeting with Urban had thrown him off his stride. He complained of the endless procession of meetings and banquets, and wrote back to Florence that being a courtier was a young man’s business.

Indeed, in his monomaniacal focus on his own affairs, he did not even seem to notice the matter that was consuming everyone else in Rome at this time, which was the war between Catholic France and Catholic Spain. This conflict was beginning to engulf all of Europe, with no end in sight. The Barberini were closely associated with the French court, as Francesco’s history made clear; but France recently had developed Protestant allies. Their foes, the Spanish Hapsburgs, still controlled both Naples and several duchies in northern Italy, squeezing Rome between them. They had immediate power in Rome as well, being the Church’s principal financial support. So despite his French sympathies, Urban could not openly oppose the Spaniards. In theory he could as pope tell all the Catholic crowns what to do, but in practice that hadn’t been true for centuries, if it ever had been, and now the two Catholic countries ignored him as they fought—or worse, threatened him for not supporting their side. Despite his wealth and the authority of St. Peter, in his foreign relations Urban was finding he had to walk a line even finer than the one on which Paul had balanced: a kind of thread across the abyss, with war waiting below if he fell off.

After about a month in Rome, Father Riccardi, whom Philip III of Spain had long ago nicknamed Father Monster, agreed to a meeting with Galileo to discuss the question of Holy Office censorship and the ban of 1616. This meeting was crucial to Galileo’s hopes, so he was pleased when it was scheduled.

But in the meeting itself, Riccardi was very clear and unequivocal. His views were only Urban’s here, Riccardi said, and the pope wanted Copernicanism to remain theory only, with never a suggestion that it had any basis in physical fact. “I myself am sure that angels move all the heavenly bodies,” Riccardi added at the end of this warning. “Who else could do it, seeing that these things are in the heavens?”

Galileo nodded unhappily.

“Don’t concern yourself too much,” Riccardi advised. “We judge that Copernicanism is merely rash, rather than perverse or heretical. But the fact of the matter is, this is no time to be rash.”

“Do you think it’s possible that the pope could say that the theory is permissible to be discussed as a hypothetical mathematical construct only, ex suppositione?”

“Perhaps. I will ask him about that.”

Galileo settled in to Guiducci’s house in Rome. He had begun to understand that his visit needed to be a campaign. Weeks passed, then months. Urban agreed to see him several times, although they were for the most part very formal and brief occasions, and in the company of others. At no time did Urban meet his eye.

Only during his final audience of the visit did the matter of Copernicus come up, and even then, only accidentally. Ciampoli was the one who raised the subject, seizing a lull in the conversation to remark, “Signor Galilei’s fable concerning the cicada and the varying origins of music was both witty and profound, wasn’t it? I recall you said it was your favorite part when I read it to you.”

Galileo, his face reddening, watched the pope closely. Urban continued to contemplate a bed of flowers, apparently still thinking of other things. Even in the months of Galileo’s stay, the carapace of papal power had thickened on him. His eyes were glazed; sometimes he stared at Galileo as if trying to remember who he was.

But now he said, “Yes,” firmly, as if waking up. He shifted his absent gaze to Galileo, looked him straight in the eye for a second, then looked at the flowers again. “Yes, it seemed to refer to what we have spoken of before. A parable of God’s omnipotence, which is sometimes overlooked in philosophical discussions, it seems to us, although we see the power everywhere. As we are sure you will agree.”

“Of course, Holiest Holiness.” Galileo gestured helplessly at the garden. “Everything illustrates that.”

“Yes. And because God is omnipotent, there is no way for mankind to be sure of the physical cause of anything whatsoever. Isn’t that right.”

“Yes….” But Galileo’s head tilted to the side, despite his efforts to stay motionless and deferent. “Although one has to remember that God created logic, too. And it is clear He is logical.”

“But He is not confined by logic, because He is omnipotent. So, whether a physical explanation is logical or not, whether it conserves the appearances poorly or adequately, or even with perfect precision, all that makes no difference when it comes to determining that explanation’s actual truth in the physical world. Because if God had wanted to do it otherwise, He could have. If He wanted to do it one way while making it look like another way, He could do that too.”

“I cannot imagine that God would want to deceive His—”

“Not deceive! God does not deceive. That would be as if to say God lied. It is men who deceive themselves, by thinking they can understand God’s work by their own reasoning.” Another round-eyed quick look, sharp and dangerous. “If God had wanted to construct a world that looked like it ran one way, when actually it ran another way, even a supposedly impossible way, then that is perfectly within His abilities. And we have no way to judge His intentions or desires. For any mere mortal to assert otherwise would be an attempted restriction on God’s omnipotence. So any time we assert that a phenomenon has only a single cause, we offend Him. As your curious and beautiful fable makes so eloquently clear.”

“Yes,” Galileo said, thinking hard. Again he thought, but could not say, But why would God lie to us? And so he had to think of something else. “We see through a glass darkly,” he admitted.

“Exactly.”

“And so, this line of argument suggests that anything can be supposed?” Galileo dared to ask. “Theories, or simply patterns seen, and only expressed ex suppositione?”

“I am sure you will always, in all your studies and writing, continue to make our argument for omnipotence. This is the work God has sent you to do. When you make this ultimate point clear, then all your philosophy is blessed. There is no contradiction to our teaching.”

“Yes, Sanctissimus.”

Escorting Galileo out of the Vatican after the audience, Ciampoli was ecstatic. “That was His Holiness telling you to proceed! He said that if you included his argument then you can discuss any given theory you like! He has given you permission to write about Copernicus, do you see?”

“Yes,” Galileo said shortly. He himself could not be sure what Urban had meant. Barberini had changed.