Finally Maculano spoke. He backtracked, as if to give Galileo another chance to avoid such a spectacular error. “Did you obtain permission for printing the same book, and if so by whom, and for you or for someone else?”
Galileo, buying time in order to rethink the matter, launched into a long, detailed, and impressively coherent description of the complicated interactions he had had with Riccardi and the Holy Office in Florence. The book had been approved by all of them. To that he added a detailed account of the convoluted chain of events by which the book had finally been printed in Florence rather than Rome, blaming this shift on the advent of the plague, rather than on Cesi’s death. This was a very little lie, compared to the other one, and perhaps not important; although it was true that since Cesi’s death the Linceans had fallen far out of favor with the Jesuits, so that here and now it was perhaps better not to mention him.
After perhaps ten minutes of steadily talking his way through the previous couple of years—really a testament to his powers of mind, as he had to be thinking hard about other things, Galileo finished. “The printer in Florence printed it strictly observing every order given by the Father Master of the Sacred Palace.”
Maculano nodded. Implacable, he returned to his question a third time.
“When you asked the above-mentioned master of the Sacred Palace for permission to print the above-mentioned book, did you reveal to the same Most Reverend Father Master the injunction previously given to you concerning the directive of the Holy Congregation, just mentioned?”
Now Galileo, his eyes bulging slightly outward, swallowed and then spoke slowly. “When I asked him for permission to print the book, I did not say anything to the Father Master of the Sacred Palace about the above-mentioned injunction, because I did not judge it necessary to tell it to him—having no scruples, since with the said book I had neither held nor defended the opinion of the Earth’s motion and the sun’s stability. On the contrary, in the said book I show the contrary of Copernicus’s opinion, and show that Copernicus’s reasons are invalid and inconclusive.”
He was sticking with the lie.
The room was silent. For a moment they all seemed frozen.
Maculano put down his notes and the copy of the injunction. He looked over at Father Sinceri, stared again at Galileo. His silence grew longer and longer; his face reddened slightly. Galileo held his ground and did not look away, or blink, or spread his hands. He did not make any move at all. His face was pale, that was all. For what seemed an endless moment everyone was still, as if they had all together fallen into one of Galileo’s syncopes.
“No,” Maculano said. He gestured to the nun.
With this the deposition ended, and Signor Galilei was assigned a certain room in the dormitory of the officials, located in the Palace of the Holy Office, in lieu of prison, with the injunction not to leave it without special permission, under penalty to be decided by the Holy Congregation; and he was ordered to sign below and was sworn to silence.
I, Galileo Galilei, have testified as above.
His handwriting in this signature was very shaky. By the time he had finished scratching out the letters of the sentence, Maculano had left the room.
For Galileo to assert under the stricture of an oath both legal and sacred that in his Dialogo he had been trying to refute Copernicus’s world system was astonishing to everyone who heard about it. Maculano had not been expecting it; no one could have, it went so against the grain of the evidence in hand, there on almost every page.
What did Galileo expect them to do? Accept a blatant lie? Did he think they could not tell it was a lie, or would not say it was if they knew it? Or did he think that the existence of a few feeble disclaimers in his final pages would obscure the work of the previous three hundred? Could anyone be that stupid?
No. No one could be so stupid as to miss the point of the Dialogo. Galileo had been very deliberate when he wrote it. As in all of his writing, he had worked hard to achieve clarity and to be persuasive, to win the debates with his philosophical foes by means of impeccable logic and telling examples. All his gifts as a writer had been put to use, and in Tuscan Italian at that, so anyone could read it and not just scholars trained in Latin. Everyone could see that the book’s purpose was clear.
The special commission of three clerics that Urban had convened to report on the book was now called on, and they were unanimous in judging it to be a piece of advocacy for Copernicanism, not that it took Jesuitical expertise to do so. The first commissioner, Oreggi, made his evaluation in a single paragraph, concluding the opinion is held and defended which teaches that the earth moves and the sun stands still, as one gathers from the whole thrust of the work.
The second commissioner, Melchior Inchofer, was a livid, choleric, second-rater of a priest, pulled out of the inner depths of the Holy Office of the Index specifically for this job. His report on Galileo’s book was a vituperation that filled seven dense pages, complaining bitterly that Galileo ridiculed those who are strongly committed to the common scriptural interpretation of the sun’s motion as if they were small-minded, unable to penetrate the depth of the issue, half-witted, and almost idiotic. He does not regard as human those who hold the earth’s immobility.
This last statement referred to one of Galileo’s jokes, a passage in the book where he said some of the anti-Copernican arguments were not worthy of man’s definition as homo sapiens: “rational animals,” he wrote, here has only the genus (animals) but lacks the species (rational). Inchofer did not appreciate the joke.
The third commissioner’s report, by one Zaccaria Pasqualigo, was less angry than Inchofer’s, but even more detailed, and ultimately the most devastating. It described the Dialogo argument by argument, pointing out errors in fact and logic, the best of which was: He tries to show that, given the earth’s immobility and the sun’s motion along the ecliptic, the apparent motion of sun spots cannot be saved. This argument is based on a premise about what de facto exists and infers a conclusion about what de facto may exist.
In other words, a tautology. What joy for a theologian to identify a tautology in Galileo’s supposedly superior reasoning!
So these three commisioners’ reports lay there on the desks of the Vatican like coffin nails, along with the nun scribe’s transcript of the first deposition. Galileo versus the evidence of his own book. An assertion under oath that black was white. It was so blatant it could even be taken as insolence, as contempt of the court. He wasn’t stupid, he must be enacting some kind of a plan—but what? And what should the Inquisition do in response?
Day after day passed in which nothing seemed to happen, while behind the scenes the machinations of the Holy Office gnawed at the situation with a grinding that was almost audible throughout the city. The accused was under arrest in the Vatican, and going nowhere. Only his single servant was allowed him. The more time that passed, the more nervous he might become concerning his supremely risky tactic, whatever it was.
During these suspended days, which slowly turned into weeks, Niccolini reported what he could to Cioli and Grand Duke Ferdinando. He had inquired of Maculano’s secretary what could be expected next. Maculano’s secretary had replied that the matter was being considered by His Holiness the Pope, but that Galileo was being treated in extraordinary and agreeable ways, being held in the Vatican as opposed to Castel Sant’Angelo, where those on trial before the Inquisition were usually held. They even allow his servant to wait on him, to sleep there, and what is more, to come and go as he pleases, and they allow my own servants to bring him food in his room. But Signor Galilei must have been enjoined from discussing or disclosing the contents of the cross-examination, since he did not want to say anything to us, not even whether he can or cannot speak.