Echoes from the Pulpit: A Preacher against Galileo's Astronomy (1610–1615)

Abstract

This paper presents one of the outcomes of my ongoing research into the controversy surrounding the publication of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius in Florence in 1610. In the course of the past three years I have studied sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Florentine cosmologica! and theological literature very closely, in particular the antiCopernican texts (treatises and sermons) produced by Dominican friars. These are all dependent in various ways on the work of Giovanni Maria Tolosani (1470-1549), the first Catholic author to write against heliocentrism (1547). Here I focus on the sermons of Galileo's contemporary Raffaello delle Colombe, a theologian and preacher of some repute at the convent of Santa Maria Novella. He was a ruthless antagonist of the new astronomy and his little-known sermons form an essential part of the campaign launched in Florence against Galileo in 1610, which led to the denunciation of Galileo to the Inquisition in 1615. My purpose in this paper is to draw attention to the work of this preacher and to its original context.The Dominicans v. CopernicusThe Dominican inquisitor Bartolomeo Spina (1475-1546) was an obstinate enemy of witches and prolific author of Aristotelian and Thomistic comments. In 1542 Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, 1468-1549) summoned Spina to Rome to appoint him Master of the Holy Palace, a function he carried out until 1546, dedicating the last years of his life to combating heresy and heretics. Just a few months before his death he was working on a systematic refutation of Copernicus's masterpiece De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (1543), a work of his that never came to fruition. His principal objections were to the notions of the centrality of the Sun in the universe and the motion of the Earth, which denied both biblical cosmology and Aristotelian philosophy. Cut short by his death, his project was taken up and completed by another Dominican, Spina's pupil and friend, Giovanni Maria Tolosani (d. 1549).1Born in Colle val d'Elsa near Siena, Tolosani considered himself a citizen of Florence through his affiliation with the Florentine convent of San Marco. In learned circles he was deemed one of the most authoritative commentators on La sfera, the work on cosmology by Leonardo Dati (1360-1425).2 By the early sixteenth century Tolosani had authored two treatises devoted to the reform of the Julian calendar (De correctione calendara and Opusculum de emendatione temporum),3 and was to spend the rest of his life writing the vast unpublished apologia De purissima ventate divinae Scripturae adversus errores humanos, to which an appendix of twelve pamphlets dealing with specific points was added in the years 1547-49. One of these appendices contained Spina's refutation of Copernicus's De revolutionibus. Tolosani's anti-Copernican pamphlet was titled De coelo supremo immobili et terra infima stabili, ceterisque coelis et elementis intermethis mobilibus, in reference to the furthest limit of the universe, the empyrean, and to a central Earth, both motionless. Between these the celestial spheres, it was maintained, travelled in circular motions. The booklet dates to the first half of 1547 and was first brought to light in 1973 by Eugenio Garin, who published it in the original Latin.4De coelo supremo belongs to the genre of Tridentine controversialism dealing with the 'errors' of heretics and their refutation. It was customary for sixteenth-century controversialists to compose treatises in which the opinions of so-called heretics were exposed mainly in order pointedly to reject them. Their works played a key role in the fight against the Protestant reform, but also against philosophical and scientific heresies such as heliocentrism.5 By 1616 the Dominicans were using this weapon repeatedly to counter an increasingly influential heliocentric astronomy, and after the suspension of the De revolutionibus this type of literature proliferated even more. Between the second half of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century, many Dominican friars - including Vincenzo Pons, Paolo Grisaldi, Serafino Razzi, Tommaso Malveda, Michele Zanardi and Paolo Minerva - embraced anti-Copernican controversy. …