Table Of ContentBURNED ALIVE
a lberto a. m a rtín ez
B U R N E D A L I V E
g i o r d a n o b r u n o ,
g a l i l e o
and
i n q u i s i t i o n
the
reaktion books
Published by
reaktion books ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2018
Copyright © Alberto A. Martínez 2018
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78023 896 8
CONTENTS
Introduction 7
1 The Crimes of Giordano Bruno 14
Pythagoras and Copernicus 17 The Moving Earth and the
|
Fugitive Friar 28 Prisoner of the Inquisition 37 Censured
| |
Propositions in Bruno’s Books 47 Fire and Smoke 70 Why
| |
the Romans Killed Bruno 77
2 Aliens on the Moon? 100
Kepler Announces Life in Other Worlds! 103 Campanella
|
Imprisoned and Tortured 115 Bellarmine and the Enemies
|
of Bruno 123 Galileo in Danger 137
|
3 The Enemies of Galileo 161
Campanella Defends Galileo from Prison 171 Galileo Defends
|
the Pythagorean Doctrines Again 179 Inchofer Against the
|
New Pythagoreans 203 No Life in Other Worlds, No Living
|
Earth 211 Campanella’s Exile and Death 232
|
4 Worlds on the Moon and the Stars 238
How Heretical, Really? 239 Bellarmine’s Innumerable Suns 247
|
Critiques after Galileo’s Death 251 Conclusion 264
|
references 281
acknowledgements 329
photo acknowledgements 333
index 335
Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up at the sky?
Acts 1:11
I have indeed asserted infinite particular worlds similar to the
Earth, which with Pythagoras I consider a star, similar
to which is the Moon, other planets and other stars,
which are infinitely many.
Giordano Bruno to the Inquisition in Venice, 1592
INTRODUCTION
M
ost people know about Galileo. They know that he said
the Earth moves around the Sun. And they know that he
got in trouble with the Catholic Church for doing so. The
Roman Catholic Inquisition condemned old Galileo to surrender
his freedom for the rest of his life. Nowadays he is admired as a hero
in the history of science.
Fewer people know about Giordano Bruno. Years before Galileo,
Bruno too was put on trial by the Inquisitors. They imprisoned him
for almost eight years. Then they finally condemned him to what
was feared as the worst kind of punishment: the jailors gagged him,
tied him to a post in a public place in Rome, and set the pyre on fire
to broil and burn him alive.
Historians say that Giordano Bruno was not condemned for
his beliefs about astronomy or cosmology – unlike Galileo. Still,
Bruno is increasingly famous. He was featured in the remake of the
popular tv series Cosmos. Its first episode, which dedicated much
of its airtime to Giordano Bruno, aired in 2014 and was watched
by roughly seven million people in the u.s. The narrator, the astro
physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, said that Bruno risked his life by
voicing his vision of the cosmos: ‘the penalty for doing so, in his
world, was the most vicious form of cruel and unusual punishment.’
Soon, many commentators complained that Cosmos had misrepre
sented Bruno by echoing the myth that the Inquisition killed him
for his cosmological views.
This book shows, despite all expectations, that Giordano Bruno
really was burned alive for his beliefs about the universe. Bruno
7
burned alive
argued that the Earth has a soul and that many worlds exist.
However, historians didn’t know that those beliefs were con sidered
heresies, that is, crimes against God, punishable by death. By inspect
ing books on heresies and Catholic law, I found that these beliefs
were heretical long before Bruno advocated them. Bruno didn’t
know this, and neither did later science writers. Furthermore, this
book will show that these same censured beliefs were involved in
the Catholic opposition to Galileo.
For over a hundred years, people have wondered whether the
infamous trial of Galileo was connected to the Inquisition’s previous
trial against Bruno. This book will show that these trials were indeed
linked. Some of Galileo’s critics were annoyed that he seemed to
support Bruno’s ‘horrendous’ beliefs: that many worlds exist and that
the Earth moves because it has a soul.
Christians denounced such beliefs as ‘Pythagorean’. In ancient
times Pythagoras was allegedly the Greek author of the theory that
Earth is one of the stars and that it moves. But historians didn’t
know that for a thousand years prominent Christians demonized
Pythagoras and his disciples as deceptive sinners and false imitators
of Jesus Christ. This book will illuminate the Copernican Revolution
in that neglected context. Surprisingly, Bruno’s condemnation was
caused mainly by his obstinate defence of such beliefs: the existence
of many worlds and the soul of the world. Most importantly, this
book reveals an unpublished Latin manuscript in which Galileo’s
most critical judge, the author of the most negative reports used by
the Inquisition against him, censured Galileo and the Copernicans
for those same beliefs. The Inquisition condemned the Copernicans
as a heretical ‘sect’ of New Pythagoreans.
This story is about the roots of the notorious conflict between
science and Christianity. Actually, the two have not often opposed
one another.1 In fact, Christianity has often sponsored and sup
ported the sciences. But we still struggle to understand what exactly
happened between Bruno, Galileo and the Church.
There is another reason, too, why this story needs to be told: the
Roman Inquisition won. Not only did it succeed in killing Bruno
and silencing Galileo, it also succeeded in preventing people from
knowing Bruno’s beliefs. To this day, more than four hundred years
after Bruno died, most scientists and teachers are unaware that
Giordano Bruno’s account of the universe was far more correct than
8
Introduction
the beliefs of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. To this day, scientists
don’t know that Bruno belongs among those famous men.
This is because the Inquisition banned and burned Bruno’s
books. The clergymen of the Index of Forbidden Books prohibited
all Catholics from reading, quoting, discussing or even mention
ing any of Bruno’s beliefs. They were forbidden from even writing
Bruno’s name. He was a heretic, and Catholics should not write
about heretics. Thus they buried his role in the history of astronomy
and cosmology.
But here’s what really happened. Like Copernicus, Bruno too
believed and argued that the Earth really does move, at a time
when hardly anyone else asserted this, and long before Galileo
and Kepler. Yet Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo wrongly claimed
that the Sun and the stars do not move. But Bruno rightly said
that they move. In 1613 Galileo realized that the Sun spins on its
axis, yet did not realize that it also really moves through space, as
Bruno expected.
Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo believed that the Sun is the
centre of the entire universe. But here too they were wrong. Instead,
Bruno rightly insisted that the Sun is not the centre, not at all. He
alone rightly explained that our universe has no centre. Copernicus,
Kepler and Galileo also believed that the stars were all arranged in
a spherical heaven, but that was another big mistake. Instead, Bruno
thoughtfully argued that the stars are distributed homogeneously
throughout a boundless, infinite space.
And Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo thought that the Sun is
not a star. To the contrary, Bruno rightly insisted that the Sun is a
star, all the stars are suns, and many of them are larger than our Sun.
He first published these claims in 1584. Only five decades later, in
1633, did Galileo briefly suggest that the stars are suns – in just one
phrase in the fictitious voice of one character in his Dialogue of the
Two Chief Systems of the World.
Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler mistakenly said that the orbits
and motions of the planets were circular. But in 1584 Bruno rightly
denied it, insisting that no heavenly motions are really circular. Only
35 years later did Kepler realize and prove that the orbits of planets
are not really circular. Galileo apparently never agreed with Bruno’s
or Kepler’s claims that the orbits were not circular. He mistakenly
argued that all natural motions are circular.
9
