Professor Adam Small contemplates the inspiring life of Galileo.
More and more, I am taken by the importance of stories in giving meaning to life.
Recently, in this space, I recounted the wonderful story of the “Elephant Whisperer”.
I turn now to another enthralling story – one of an exceptional life that can bring inspiration at this time: the story of Galileo’s life and his love for his daughter Virginia. My source is Dava Sobel’s engrossing book Galileo’s Daughter(what a lovely writer Sobel is).
In passing, it does not matter that Jesus was not born at this time of the year. It was shivering cold then up north, so the shepherds would not have “watched their flocks” outside at night! But this is no reason why we should not drift with the season’s songs of angelic joy!
Galileo was sincerely devoted to the church, and, apart from his dedication to science (such as his invention of the telescope), he was also a family man, caring of his kin: his mother, brother, nephews, and mistress Marina Gamba and their three children – two daughters and a son. He doted particularly on the elder daughter Virginia, who “mirrored his own brilliance, industry and sensibility”.
This early renaissance story is a “drama of science, faith and love”. (As far as Galileo’s liaison with Marina is concerned, it was nothing to “write home about” – the culture of the time simply preferred that a scientist did not settle down in marriage!)
Of central importance to Galileo’s story is the insight of Copernicus, who preceded him by a hundred years, that our Sun was the centre of our part of the universe, not the Earth.
The church at the time saw this as heresy. In hindsight we know how wrong this view was, yet, it would be unwise for us simply to put the church down: had it not been for it as institution, we could not now have shared in the heritage of wisdom in general which has come to us over the centuries by way of its caretakership. We have to bear this in mind.
The tension between Galileo’s devotion to the church, on the one hand, and his scientific conviction, on the other, must have been extremely frustrating for him.
In any case, he was more than once summoned to Rome to explain his position to the Inquisition, where Cardinal Bellarmino was not helpful – for the cardinal was not a man of insight, but he was a foremost “canis Dei” (dog of God, sniffing out evil!).
Virginia came to adopt the name Maria Celeste, thus paying homage to her father’s consort with the stars. At a very early age she found herself in the Convent of San Matteo, in their hometown of Arcetri. And she fearfully dreaded things when her father left their home for Rome.
Father and daughter wrote to each other voluminously, and friends delivered the letters. Dava Sobel gathered all these letters – an immaculate piece of research, and her book To Father is structured around this.
Apart from the “struggle” side of Galileo’s story, there is its engaging human content. Virginia knew of her father’s love of a dish of stewed ortolans (little finch-like birds), and she enjoyed cooking this for him and had someone take it to him when he could not himself visit her at the convent.
She often also did sewing for him, when he needed a neglected trousers or jacket to look neat again – as when the English poet John Milton came to visit him in Arcetri, and he did not want to meet the visitor in his “working clothes”.
All in all, the stalwart fathers of the church did not quite know how to handle this scientist. According to their wits, he was a heretic, but, equally, they recognised his respect for the church.
The following lines of poetry are a summation of all this:
Apart from being a founder of Science,
Galileo, you were a God-fearing family man
(living a life not perchance
but one carefully reasoned):
you took your mother
under your roof,
were father of two daughters and a son
with your mistress Marina.
There was always the ring of caring
in your coming and going
– more even, there was your doting love of Virginia,
your beloved Maria Celeste,
who adored you just like you adored the stars.
You glossed over the painful scars
inflicted on you by the Church Fathers’
condemnations of you
as they pressured you to forgo the truth.
Virginia, in-between all this, prepared for you,
to your liking, dishes of ortolans
– food you loved – as you sat, daylong
and also at night (by lamp-light),
to write your heliocentric Copernican texts,
which we now have as a lasting legacy.
The only thing you were not truthful about
– it is nothing much –
was your confession to the Church
that you were wrong: you ‘confessed’ simply
to rid yourself of their hounding and pounding,
to get on with your earnest hard work.
In fact, platitudinously speaking,
you took the Cardinals for a ride,
giving them a wide berth
– all those men of a Flat Earth.
Virginia died before Galileo, of dysentery. It is not sure how she contracted the disease. She was, in any case, of weak physical constitution, and never in good health.
She passed on, dying on April 2, 1634 (Marina died earlier even, in 1619), and Galileo was left lonesome, forlorn and longing.
But afterward, as a father, you heard
Maria’s voice talking with you
beauteously, saying: You were right, father,
Copernicus was no fool.
His thinking, like yours, was uplifting.
In Galileo’s old age, a young man, Vicenzio Viviano, quite fortuitously – out of the blue almost – came to live with him and, as was his kindly manner, he came to love the young man as a son.
When he died, Viviano arranged his burial, and took care of all his affairs, even supervising the erection of a tombstone over his grave. Galileo himself, like Virginia, was never physically strong. He died of kidney failure in 1642.
Importantly, in death, Galileo reached out,
happy at the thought
of meeting his glorified Maria again,
– he did not cry as the time came for him
to head Home,
(leaving the whole bother with Rome far behind).
And she was waiting for him
– a glittering star in his beloved
brightly shining sky.
Galileo, as is human, always had familial problems. His own son was helpful to him in the assembly of material for the making of his telescopes, but was at times difficult; his brother Michelangelo’s son, also Vicenzio, disappointed him by hanging out with “rapscallions”; and Michelangelo (a favoured Italian name at the time) himself often intruded on his brother’s privacy.
It was a thing of honour for Galileo, even a matter of pride, when he was invited to be a member of the Lyncean Academy of the time, an equivalent of our modern academies of Science and Art: it implied high scientific and artistic stature. The Academy also became Galileo’s publisher.
At times, the great scientist was misguided in his assessment of people’s intent.
For instance, he believed Cardinal Matteo Barberini, who later became Pope Urban VIII, to be a man well disposed towards science. But Barberini shared the church’s distrust of Galileo. When he became pope, Galileo naively thought he would support the Copernican view.
But the new pope turned out to be one of those men who would not risk themselves, in spite of their knowledge of what was right.
Galileo’s talents did not extend only to science. To start with, he was going to be a medical doctor. He was also gifted in music, playing the lute and organ, and was versed in visual art. Importantly also, his scientific work was not merely theoretical: it was through experimentation that he decided between thought and thought in his debate of ideas – and he was prepared, always, to open himself to the critique of observers. His reasoning was not only one of words, but of life.
In conclusion, let us return to the essential beauty of Galileo’s story: his love of Viviani, of his family by and large, his obsession with planets and stars, and, above all, his passion for Virginia, his Maria Celeste, to whom he journeyed when he died, his joyful vision being to meet her glorified self. And she was waiting for him.
Appropriate to Galileo’s life-story (as a legacy to ourselves who are living now), are these words of Thornton Wilder’s immaculate recountal: The Bridge of San Luis Rey: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Times