Campanella (1568-1639): Hermetic Science in Utopian City of the Sun; Galileo (1564-1642): Starry Messenger of Science (The New Magic)
Presented on: Thursday, December 22, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Italian Renaissance
Presentation 12 of 13
Campanella (1568-1639): Hermetic Science in Utopian City of the Sun; Galileo (1564-1642): Starry Messenger of Science (The New Magic)
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, December 22, 1983
Transcript:
The date of December 22nd, 1983. This is the last lecture in a series of lectures on the Italian Renaissance by Roger Weir. Tonight's lecture is entitled Campanella who lived 1568 to 1639: Hermetic Science in Utopian City of the Sun; Galileo who lived 1564 to 1642: The Starry Messenger of Science - The New Magic.
I'll try and recapitulate a little bit so we can. I know we're all busy, so we'll make this a short evening. After the break well we'll just get on to the library for about 15 minutes and call it an evening.
In the largest sense what I've been trying to establish is the sound of one voice and the continuity of one mind reviewing in an introductory series of lectures the progression of civilization as it appeared in human beings. Not as it appeared in ideas. Not as it appeared in the textbook or coffee table book histories. But in purely locating it phenomenally in the human beings for whom we have evidence that they existed, much like our own existence. The movement in this way is properly...properly turned...termed a chronologica mystica in so far as whatever mysteries pertain to the human being are the guiding elements and notions of the continuity of this progression. So, I've tried not to editorialize too much but just to present the material. We have arrived in the series at large at the twentieth century. That is, I'm not only giving the series on Thursday nights but I'm giving the series on Tuesday nights. And whereas the Thursday nights have been devoted to catching up several broad areas that were passed over. The Tuesday night series has gone on ahead and we had this past Tuesday Herbert Spencer who died in 1903. So, we're up to our century. Even though the Tuesday night series will go back and for the next two months we'll stay in the 19th century. The next lecture there, next Tuesday is on Richard Wagner. A very important major figure.
Our series here on the Italian Renaissance was meant to connect two series that had already been given. one of them was the origins of hermetic science that went from Ficino to Leibniz and Newton. The other series was a series of the high Middle Ages that was taking the mystical experience of men up to Dante. So, this series has gone from Dante to Ficino, filling in. But then extending beyond for Ficino in a way which was not covered in the hermetic science lecture. That is to say the Italian Renaissance, when it reached the high Renaissance, had produced a quality of human being that hadn't been seen since the 3rd century AD. Now there was a brilliant flourish in the 12th century where you had individuals like Evan Robbie [?] and Maimonides, Roger Bacon, Grotteschi [?]. A century of real genius and a collection of human beings of very high order. But they'd been handicapped somewhat by the situation of the medieval world around them.
Whereas in the high Renaissance it appeared as if man was going to leap free. The titanic strugglings of Leonardo and Michelangelo seemed to indicate that man was entering into a new echelon of his creative capacities. And in fact, I will present one of the real great heroes of the high Renaissance next week. Even though the lecture is not here the lecture will be on 2029 Hyperion at the Whirling Rainbow Institute. And that figure, Raphael, is really the hero. He's the golden boy of the high Renaissance. Had he have not died in his 30s we may have had a very powerful integration. He had not the detrimental psychological habits of Michelangelo. Nor the meandering genius of Leonardo. He had the capacity to bring it together. All one has to do is look at a Raphael Madonna or the great fresco of the School of Athens showing Plato and Aristotle walking hand-in-hand in the center of the portrait down towards the viewer in harmony to realize that Raphael is very much the hero of the whole picture.
But by and large there was a bifurcation. It was as if individual human beings meeting the obstacle in their way split into two. And the same phenomenon would happen again around the end of the 17th century. The same phenomenon that produced science and religion in warfare with each other. But this time in the high Renaissance what human beings met was the intractable intolerance of the church. And in particular, specifically, those facilities of the church the Jesuits and the Dominican Order and the Inquisition and the papacy that had set themselves up as arbiters of the human mind. As not only shepherds of the human spirit but watchdogs over what that human spirit might aspire to. So that with Ficino at the end of his life, with the advent of Savonarola, it became apparent that wisdom would have to go underground.
And this was the beginnings of the whole occult tradition in the Western world. That is to say there had been beginnings in the 3rd century AD. It had all been brought up above ground. It been brought up above ground to the extent that in Venice Andrea Montaigne had produced a tarot deck based on the old classical virtues. Five orders of 10 each. Montaigne tarot deck has just been reproduced in a limited set of 500 copies. And we have a copy over at the Whirling Rainbow Institute. Plotinus had been translated. All of Plato, Dionysius the Areopagite, Pythagoras, the Corpus Hermeticum. All of it was above ground for those who were in San Francisco in the mid-60s, Florence in the 1470s was the same situation. It was a glorious unveiling of all the mystery traditions. They were all brought out on the street. They were taught in the patios. They were celebrated in the parks and there were human beings who were arrayed in the gorgeous clothing of flora as a vivid natural Athena. And the goddess of love reigned supreme.
This was intolerable to the church. We are used to thinking of Christians as people, but Christianity is not made up of people but of doctrine hammered out in council after council, so that the authority of the church as an ecclesiastical structure was totaled. The freeing of human beings from this authority was not to be brooked. It meant the complete dissolution of the church. There may well have been even more Christians than ever before but there would not have been a church. And so, the organs dedicated to self-preservation sought to squelch, to infiltrate, to silence the dawning majesty of man's mind liberated.
And so, the occult tradition from those individuals who learn from Ficino took it underground. So underground, so completely, that many of you have never heard of two of the greatest geniuses of the whole movement who were responsible for almost every aspect of the occult tradition, Trithemius and Trismosin. They were the teachers of Paracelsus; teachers of Agrippa; the teachers who made their students look like students. But their works were so completely hidden from public view that they appeared as mythical figures. There are no biographies of either of them. There are some works starting to come out. But in general, no one has heard of them because the tradition, the Hermetic tradition, the occult tradition, became indeed hidden. It went underground so that one would have to learn by word of mouth again. One would have to apply oneself to the quest and the search, the labyrinthine approaches. The great hermetic teachers protecting themselves not only from persecution. One is never afraid of persecution on behalf of the truth. But the preservation of the material, the continuity of the teaching is the first responsibility. Above even accepting or even searching out martyrdom is the preservation of the continuity of the truth. And so, it stayed largely underground. Several individuals refused to let it rest there.
We had the great lecture, not so much that my lecture was great, but the lecture on the great Paracelsus. Who strove mightily in his ramblings across the face of Europe to churn up the existing order. We had, last week, the great Giordano Bruno and his traveling to churn up the face of Europe, the mind of Europe. And tonight, we have the third great figure. Heroically Galileo attempting, thinking that if you could show someone the actual events, they would not be able to argue it. Why would they argue it? Why would they deny it? If you can lead someone to a window and say look for yourself, what do you see? What do you make out of this? What conclusions would you draw? So, Galileo is one of those great heroes of civilization. He is like the knight braving the lion's roar. Believing all the while that the roar is just one of protection for its own integrity and if it is demonstrated that that integrity is not impaired by the truth, in fact the covering up of the truth is what impairs the integrity. But the lion will turn its face and roar the other way. Will guard you instead of guard against you. He was wrong.
The whole notion of a renaissance, of a rebirth, is attributable as a historical observation to Jacob Burckhardt. The Renaissance in Italy. Jacob Burckhardt was a native of Basel where Germany and Switzerland and France come together. A contemporary of Burkhardt in the same city was Nietzsche. The young Hermann Hesse was a bookseller in Basel. Karl Jung was associated with Basel or as the Europeans call it, Basle.
The notion of a renaissance then is due to the German enlightenment coming into its fruition. And in fact, the major figure of that whole involvement was Richard Wagner, who I'll be talking about on Tuesday. So, if you're interested in how this mentality flowered.
What Burkhardt pointed back to because the Hermetic tradition had been underground most of this time. So that when it resurfaced again in the 19th century it came out as a cultural flower just as it come out in the Renaissance. It didn't come out as occult metaphysics. It came out as cultural beauty. And the same movement that produced the great architecture of Brunelleschi, the sculpture of Donatello, and the paintings of half a dozen great figures produced Goethe and Wagner and Beethoven.
In the work the Renaissance in Italy near the end Burkhardt writes on Religion and the Spirit of the Renaissance. And here in translation is some of his language for you. he writes, "But in order to reach a definite conclusion with regard to the religious sense of the men of this period, we must adopt a different method. From their intellectual attitude in general we can infer their relation. Both to the divine idea and to the existing religion of their age." It's going to make a bridge between the divine idea and the existing religion of their age. Which in Burkhardt's view implicitly here are different. The divine idea is different. It requires a bridging of man from his traditional mode, his habitual life to something other. When Wagner expresses it at the end of his life in the great music in the Parsifal. We get the sense of the emotional feeling of the transcendental bridge being experienced.
So, Burkhardt is writing here. These modern men the representatives of the culture of Italy were born with the same religious instincts as other medieval Europeans. But they're powerful individuality made them in religion, as in other matters, altogether subjective. And the intense charm which the discovery of the inner and outer universe exercised upon them, rendered them markedly worldly. In the rest of Europe, religion remained till a much later period something given from without. And in practical life egoism and sensuality alternated with devotion and repentance. As this great pendulum. One finds in the medieval mind a lot of worldliness on a lot of devotion and back and forth. But in Italy it was somewhat different. It tended to come together. It tended to want to integrate, to be full. The center of this fullness was the person, the human being. And it was the ability to reach out into the world and bring together the flower of experience. In terms of the mind of the inner person that created this rebirthing.
There are many ways to approach this. I have thought to try to find the Renaissance in the person and in the vision of Dante. Because consistently all the way through all of the figures that we have taken there was an homage paid to Dante as the maestro. Even in Galileo hundreds of years later, 300 years later.
Galileo's first published work was the dimensions of Dante's Inferno [On the Shape, Location, and Size of Dante's Inferno]. The physical dimensions. This becomes a very startling fact when you have a little background. Dante's Inferno was under the ground. The center of the inferno where the devil was, where Satan has his repose, was the center of the earth. The cosmology that was taught that was the doctrine of the church, based on Aristotle and Ptolemy, was that the center of the universe was coextensive with the center of the earth. And in an unnoticed way it meant that Satan occupied the center of the universe. It was not a point that had ever been realized. It was not some realization that had occurred because men did not think. Persons who accept doctrinaire authoritarianism become rather like last year's mayonnaise. They just spread any way the knife is going. But they don't reflect, and they don't think. It doesn't occur to them that they are holding a very dangerous stick of dynamite in terms of intellectual capacity. What Galileo was doing, very subtly. He was 24 years old. He was saying I have the mathematical ability to estimate the interior of the earth. I can tell you how large it is. I can also tell you that it is not the center of the universe. It would take him a long time to be able to prove this. but it was an idea that had come to him as a young man.
So, we need to review him just a little bit up to that point to see what a startling situation this was. This is intellectual courage on his part. We're dealing with somebody who was born the year Michelangelo died, 1564. Shakespeare is born that year; Galileo is born. The tremendous intellectual liberty of the early Renaissance, it played itself out. And that daring insightfulness of the high Renaissance had been nabbed in midair and turned in. Some of them killed, Bruno, 1600. But in 1564 there was still a little bit of the elan left. And in Pisa where our dear Galileo was born - Pisa was affiliated with Florence, the Florentine Republic - his father wanted him to be a wool merchant. It was a nice safe job, but Galileo as a youngster was always toying around with mathematical things.
Now mathematics have been left out of the curriculum. Just like in our day and age metaphysics is left out of the curriculum. You can teach almost any inanity in universities, but you cannot teach metaphysics - they do not like that. They take you into the little rooms and they review for you that your job is in jeopardy if you persist. It's just like the Inquisition. I have been in those little rooms. I have survived those little rooms and walked out of my own free will.
But mathematics was left out. Why? Because mathematics was beginning to have capacity, substance. But like any capacity of freedom there's no telling where it will go. Bertrand Russell observed once, very wisely, he said, "Thought is wild. It will go where it wants to go." And men fear thought like the plague. Because they will discover that what they thought they believed was in fact untenable. Even before they were holding such views. And so, we have to learn to change.
Galileo was a mathematical genius, but he was refused instruction in mathematics. But Galileo was also a genius in feistiness. Sometimes you have to be ready to kick your way out of the bag. You have to be a Houdini; existence gives you this. Handcuffed in the trunk dropped over Niagara Falls and you get out. And Galileo was great at that. And so, he bribed a tutor who knew a little bit about mathematics. Who actually had a set of Euclid. Now Euclid wasn't quite banned but you weren't supposed to read him. Nobody read it. Well Galileo bribed this tutor to take him as far as the end of the first book. There are six books in Euclid. So, he got passed the 47th proposition. He got into enough capacity so that he could teach himself. And it was when he was about 12 or 13 years old that he finally mastered a great deal of Euclid. And came into possession of that treasure that Euclid bestows. Euclid is about geometry, but it's about the ordering of the mind, taking axiom by axiom, step by step, how a mental structure can be built and extended indefinitely. And Euclid was just as valuable to Galileo as it was when it was taught in Alexandria in the great Hellenistic universities there. It opened up Galileo as a human being. It opened up his mind to be able to think, to conceive.
When it became apparent to his father that he was not going to be a wool merchant. That in fact he was very capable of being troublesome. He was sent to the University of Pisa and allowed to study mathematics there. In six years, he was a professor at the University of Pisa. He was in fact one of those geniuses. He had the capacity to be able to think broadly and focus it into a single physical act. He was rather like Gandhi in that sense. He had a genius for finding exactly the right action that would highlight a whole spectrum of thought. And it was while he was a student at Pisa that he began to take on the authoritarian textbook Aristotle. He sort of liked Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. They were interesting. He liked the rhetoric. But he couldn't stand the mathematics in Aristotle. And students and faculty were getting on his nerves. So, he took two balls, one of them small and one of them large and he went to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And in front of a great public display, he dropped them over the edge. And they fell at the same time. And from this he wrote a nice little paper saying that there is, in this, a law. In dealing with the law of acceleration. That the velocity increases, squares itself and that in fact gravity seems to have an effect rather equal. When Galileo was working in Pisa, he was told that it would be better for him if he perhaps didn't make so much out of the situation. So, he went to a friend of his and the friend told him that I think you're in trouble. And this of course being 1592 just about the time Bruno was seized by the Inquisition, Galileo realized that he'd better walk out while he could.
So, he sought employment at the most liberal institution in northern Italy at this time, the University of Padua. And he went to Padua in 1592. They paid him two and a half times what he'd been paid in Pisa. He'd been paid sixty crowns in Pisa which was just barely enough. I don't know if they had peanut butter that's what you could have 60 crowns a year. Well, he got 144 crowns a year in Padua. Plus, they gave him a secretary - somebody to jot down notes and to help him. And he had lots of students. And Galileo was always a very interesting lecturer. Very rambunctious kind of an individual.
He also augmented his income. Galileo, since he had been a boy, was a tinkerer. And he was very good at putting together little inventions of his own. He made compasses. Later on, he made thermometers. No one had ever seen these. He made all sorts of little gadgets, and he sold these things to get a little extra money. One account, a book which is still extant shows that he had made some 300 compasses over a period of just a couple of years. So, he was busy all the time. And of course, the people that could afford these exotic instruments were the wealthy or the influential. And so, Galileo's name began to be mentioned across the face of Europe as being a very clever man. He began toying around with an invention. He'd heard that somebody had made a glass. They called it a glass in those days. Which was able to magnify an image five times. So, Galileo, thinking about this, made the first crude telescope since one had been made four hundred years before by Roger Bacon and completely forgotten about by the Western world. We still haven't read Roger Bacon. His books are still in cipher. But Galileo's telescope was remarkable. You could take this telescope and peer out to see and you could tell what a ship was 50 miles away.
Now Padua was associated with Venice. Just like Pisa was associated with Florence. And Venice was a maritime power. This was a very important thing when you're a naval power - to be able to tell if it's friend or foe half a day before they get there. So, Galileo's telescope was the rage in Venice. And he had presented it free to the Doge. And of course, before he could make his humble way out of the Doge's palace he was detained. And he was assured that he would be retained at the University of Padua and a thousand gold florins a year for life if he wished. Well Galileo had unfortunately been thinking about returning to Florence. He loved Florence. he loved being there.
And in fact, family problems had sort of built up for Galileo. I don't have time to go into all of them but the letters between Galileo and his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, presented in this wonderful 1870 volume which I own, The Private Life of Galileo. I was...I had outlined it all and was going to give you the detail. Suffice to say that his, when his father passed on, Galileo became the center of family. Now an Italian man who's the center of the family is responsible. He's responsible for the young men getting employment. And for the young girls either being married or put in convents. And of course, he's responsible for everyone to eat. And he's the counselor. And so, Galileo shouldered all these responsibilities. All through his life there were relatives leaning on him needing him. And he has a real champion, a real hero, a real knight of the marketplace, shouldered this responsibility.
Well, he wanted to go back to Florence because it would be closer to his family ties. He had spent 18 years in Padua, and he was extremely happy. But the difficulty was that he was in fact at a point in his life where the one thing that he wanted to do more than anything else was publish.
Galileo had been thinking about the problem of the center of the universe for a long, long time. If the Sun does not move around the earth. If in fact the earth moves around the Sun, the center goes from the earth to the Sun. So that the whole geocentric universe shifts its foundations. Now if you move a house 93 million miles it's going to really crack the structure. And that's what it did for men's minds. If you move that cornerstone 93 million miles there's not much of the old structure left. If you move it 93 inches, it does the same thing. Galileo had for a long time wanted not to believe this, but something had happened to him because he began making better and better telescopes. And in three days running around 1608, 1609, right around the turn of the year he'd observed a phenomenon that nobody had ever seen before. And it bothered him because every time he didn't want to believe it, did not want to see it, and would take his telescope and set it up it was still there. What in fact he saw were four new planets revolving around another planet. These are the moons of Jupiter. And they don't have the names that he gave them he called them the Medician planets. Good Florentine. You know who sharpens their spikes. Well, the Medician planets, the four large moons of Jupiter, were conclusive proof to Galileo that not only is the earth spherical and has a center, and the Sun spherical has a center, the moon spherical has a center, but Jupiter is spherical and has a center around which four other spheres revolved. So, it was inescapable that the earth couldn't be the center of the universe. But there had to be at least two and maybe three centers. Maybe the Sun and the earth and Jupiter and what else.
So, Galileo had fractured in his own estimation a belief structure which ostensibly he would have been comfortable with. He would love to have just been a tinkerer and an inventor and made things and entertained himself. He is very much at home in gardens. He was a master playing the lute. He could have taught music. He was a great painter. He could have been a painter. He could have entertained himself in many ways. But it bothered him to no end that he could see them there night after night. Not only the moons of Jupiter. But he definitely saw Venus as a circle, as a globe, as a sphere. And Venus had phases just like our moon: it was a crescent, it was full, it was gibbous, it was new. And if Venus has phases like our moon and there are bodies revolving around another planet, what else is there to find. Well, he found that there are spots on the Sun. This was very, very difficult. The Sun had been an arcane prototype of gold and purity since man had come out of the trees. The Sun was blemished - it had spots on it. And the spots moved in regular rotation. It meant the Sun revolved. And Galileo trying to stuff his hands in his pocket just couldn't do it because he found that Saturn had rings. And it was just too much for him to take. All of these spectacles were actual. He couldn't make them go away. He would bring pupils in, and he would set up the telescope and he would ask them what do you see and they would see it too.
Later on, when it became all the rage of the wealthy to have Galileo show them the heavens with his telescopes, he commented one time that Maria Medici, one of the spoiled little daughters of one of the grand dukes, immediately fell to her knees before the window before he even set up the telescope. The world of the splendor had overcome her before she'd even been shown. And Galileo this great iconoclast probably just shaking his head to himself. What have I done? He decided to publish a book in 1610. It came out and it was called The Starry Messenger. The Starry Messenger. It was as much of a hermetic flag-waving as anyone would ever find. Here it is, The Starry Messenger, revealing great unusual and remarkable spectacles opening these to the consideration of every man. And especially of philosophers and astronomers is observed by Galileo Galilei - gentleman of Florence, professor of mathematics in the University of Padua - with the aid of a spyglass, lately invented by him.
"Lately invented by him. in the surface of the Moon, in innumerable fixed stars, in nebulae and above all in four planets swiftly revolving about Jupiter at differing distances and periods and known to no one before the author recently perceived them and decided that they should be named the Medician Stars, Venice 1610." That's what the title page read. It bowled over the age. I don't have time to go into it, but it became a cause célèbre. Everybody had to get his two cents worth in and of course those who doubted him just made themselves ridiculous. There were individuals who tried to smuggle impressions of the glass to make their own telescopes. So that they could say that they hadn't seen them. There were all kinds of rumors circulated. It goes on and on and on. And Galileo watched books rush into print accusing him of confusing his aging eyes, seeing double and triple and maybe quadruple with something that actually existed there. And all this time he was taking his telescopes around and he was making more of them. And he sent them off to influential people including a man who would become the Pope.
Galileo in 1610 opened the door of a whole situation. He had produced in The Starry Messenger the sense of shape which our civilization had with the atomic bombs. The sense that somehow, we have to deal with the situation; That we were unprepared to even countenance. And so, the response on Galileo's part was that of the good craftsman. The fine dependable Italian center of the family man. To assure everyone that there were even more things that he hadn't mentioned. And that anyone could find them. And the fact that anyone could find them was what bothered the church.
Well, we'll take a little break, and we'll go down the library and we'll see what, what became of this.
I should mention that Galileo never officially married. He lived with a mistress Marina Gamba for a long time and had three children by her. Family life was very disrupted in this age as it is in our own. Galileo, in order to secure safety for his two daughters, used his influence to get special dispensations to allow the two of them to go into the same convent. Ordinarily sisters cannot go into the same convent. There also was a rule that boys and girls have to be at least 16 years old. The Council of Trent decided at one of its meetings one time in the Middle Ages that 16 was the rock bottom. But Galileo even got that set aside and one of his daughters was 13, the other was 10. The reason being is that there was so much corruption and brutality that it was the only way that he could ensure that they would be taken care of. In fact, they were in the Poor Clares, the women associated with Saint Francis, the Franciscan Order. And the poverty was very, very great.
By 1615, 1615 to 1616, Galileo was summoned to Rome to explain. The Pope considered that Galileo was not an evil man but simply had to change his opinions. To the...to the Jesuits, to the Inquisition what Galileo had written in The Starry Messenger was just his opinion. The man in charge was Cardinal Bellarmine Immaculate, who passed judgment on Bruno. But Galileo was not the kind of personality that Paracelsus and Bruno were. Even though he was feisty like they were. He was, as we would say in this country, cagey. So, he rolled over and let them have their way. He made no effort or pretense to further anything that he had said. He simply laid it out on the table as it were, saying here are the instruments you look for yourselves what do you see. What do you make out of it? You tell me. So, he was in somewhat better shape than Bruno. He was left alive. He was left free.
And then a friend of his became Pope Urban the Eighth, 1623. Now Urban the Eighth is a very strange character. And if you review all the Galileo material you find very little key insight into his personality. But in this book that I gave to PRS a number of years ago, by one of the fellows of the Warburg Institute D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. And near the end of it, Magic and Urban the Eighth. Magic. Campanella who had been seized also. All the intellectual and spry spirits of Italy were seized at this time. I guess you're getting the picture. This isn't just Bruno and Galileo; they were examples of what happened en masse.
After Galileo, the Italian genius, lay completely fallow for centuries because the church had its way to beat people under the ground. You will do what we say. You will think the way we will think. I had the only place that the discoveries bore fruition here in those places outside of the reach of the Inquisition. Outside of the reach of the Jesuits. Outside of the structure of the church. It was not a persecution of free thought by Christianity, but by an authoritarian structure that had ceased having the Christian experience at its center as early as the 4th century AD, a very professional, very 17th century at protecting themselves. But now this Pope, who'd been a friend of Galileo's, also dabbled in magic. Now this kind of dabbling in magic, psychologically, is a need to find a shortcut to control. Is really what it is. You want to control those powers so that you can use those powers to control other people. That's demonic magic. What is demonic about it is that it seeks to impose an immoral controlling structure upon the elemental powers of the universe. Supposing that there is no ethical bias in the universe. Supposing that it is simply a matter of mechanical redistribution of forces and energy. This is what makes it demonic.
Now Campanella was born in South Italy, around Naples. Roughly a contemporary of Galileo. When he was freed in April of 1629, Walker writes here, by the next year he had obtained the Pope's permission to found a college at Rome for the training of missionaries in accordance with the principles set forth in his book. Notice to say missionaries who would convert the whole world to Campanella's kind of Catholicism. These incidents confirmed the conjecture that Campanella and the Pope did actually practice this magic together. It seems also highly probable that Campanella made it up especially for this purpose and occasion. That he had not evolved this magic before he came to Rome in 1626 as indicated by the fact that it's not mentioned in the first two versions of the Città del Sole [The City of the Sun]. Whereas in the final version, published in 1637, there's a description of the Solarians practicing it. Followed by discussion of the Bulls, the papal bulls, against astrology and so on.
Now Campanella was trying to find a way to bridge the spiritual and the demonic in magic. There's a very real problem to these people at this time. Dozens of people wasted themselves on this kind of integrative speculative quest: John Dee, Edward Kelly, Campanella; there were just dozens of it. It's the whole Faustian theme that if, if a good man can just find a way of dealing with both the spiritual and the demonic at the same time maybe he can become some sort of a super man and keep it together. The Faustian theme that evil is manageable. There are many flaws in this, many flaws. For those that think about these things the first flaw is the supposition that evil exists as a phenomenon. Because in order to believe in this kind of quest you have to feed energy to the notion, the notion, the mental notion that evil exists. So, you have to conjure it into existence otherwise you have nothing to work with. This is what traps the Faustian urge all the time. Because the making of evil displaces the good. So that what is phenomenally there is displaced by what is mentally supposed to be there. And so, one is trying to control increasingly mental fictions. And one falls more and more into the kind of bad habits of daydreaming which screen out the conscious modes and allow all kinds of nightmare propensities to come to the fore. Goya has a very famous etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
So Urban the Eighth, this Pope, this friend of Galileo was, as we would say, tempted by this. Consequently, he was in a precarious situation psychologically for new worldviews, for new phenomenal evidence that the universe was much larger because he's trying to, he's trying to deal with it and make his little hedges here and there. Galileo visited him, presented him with all of his evidence. Urban liked to think of himself as an intellectual, as a scientist, a man among men. And he would glance at Galileo's writings and look at his demonstrations and thought that he understood. And so, he gave permission, Papal permission, to Galileo to publish. And Galileo like a good Italian man of substance, and all of his material to be reviewed by the censors and nobody really ran with it.
So, he published another book which made The Starry Messenger look like a pamphlet. Galileo published in 1632, January, the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He chose the dialogue form, a Platonic form. And in the four books they each called a day; he presents it here over and over again conclusively. That if we're following some kind of reasonable logic and we are basing ourselves on the experimental method of trying to make sure that other people can see what we see, hear what we hear. That we write up our experiments in such a form so that other people can duplicate them for themselves. That we will have an evidence which transcends the personal limitations. The limitations of the country. The limitations of time. We will have something we can count on. We will have scientific proof not opinion. And that on the basis of scientific proof, like the structures of geometry, we can build a thought mode based on scientific evidence. of where we are. what we are. What the universe looks like. and this is what Galileo presented in all humility.
The Jesuits couldn't stand it. The fact now The Starry Messenger had been enough to deal with, but the dialogue was stupendous. It was an intellectual work at the highest-quality. It was a symphony of ideas. And the implications just willing everywhere. It had so many entrances and exits that nobody was going to be able to stop this up. It was really something.
One of Galileo's friends was Johannes Kepler. We've never got to Kepler yet. We'll do a special lecture on him. Kepler wrote to Galileo he said it is the most marvelous publication. outdoing even the great sages of antiquity. And it promised a completely new world because they were just beginning. Galileo, Kepler very, very much understood that this was opening a door that they haven't even walked into the new world yet. It was just opening a door of possibility. Because they knew where they had come from. They knew their limitations. And both Kepler and Galileo very much real realist. The practical men. Able to build these inventions like thermometers and compasses and telescopes. They could see that this led long ways away from where men had ever been before. They realized also because they were not just, what we would think today as dull scientific, mathematical individuals. These were Renaissance men. They were wide open. They realized that there was going to have to be a whole new mentality. They weren't double guessing themselves. But this led into a whole new world order. So that you began to have the speculations at this time of utopian possibilities for man.
Now the first utopia had been written by Sir Thomas More. Sir Thomas More had been a student of the great Hermeticist John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's in London. Dean Colet had studied under Ficino.
The second waves of utopias were by those individuals in around the year 1610, 1620 when all of this material came back up again. You had all of these utopias that came out at this time. And two of the most famous were Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and Tommaso Campanella the City of the Sun. The City of the Sun and the New Atlantis are parallels. Both of them are sea voyages where the captain comes upon an intelligent race of human being that have never been seen before. And they live a highly organized intelligent life. And in fact, they have a planned society. And they use intelligence rather than an authoritarian belief structure to further themselves. And so, the report is coming back but by contrast we would do the same if we could.
Campanella in writing The City of the Sun, also at the same time was trying to defend Galileo in print. The 1632 publication of The Dialogue - these utopias exist in the PRS library in this volume called Famous Utopias [of the Renaissance], upstairs. The magic books and the utopias are together upstairs. Don't let him walk you away from anything, go and get it.
The Dialogue when it came out was such a rankling bag of worms for the authoritarian structures that they began a campaign of trying to discredit Galileo. The tack that worked with Urban the Eighth was the whispered suggestion that Galileo had set him up as a patsy. That right under his nose this impudent upstart, bearing the dedication to the Pope on the front page had pulled a fast one. And how was he gonna let him do this. And Urban the Eighth, as we've seen already, was in the kind of precarious psychological mode. And he couldn't take it. He was in rage. He was angry for years on end. That's how he was. Years on end.
They brought Galileo back to Rome in 1633 and they began putting him on trial. Examination after examination. But Galileo was tough. He was able to fend off the entire situation because he was not a theologian, he was a scientist. He had made his own equipment. He'd assiduously done experiments. In 1633 he was 67 years old. He said, "I'm not going anywhere. I'm not trying to promote anything that I haven't checked over a hundred thousand times. You show me where the calculations are wrong. You pick up the equipment and use it and tell me you don't see these things." And on this basis Galileo defended himself. Now it's pointed out in lots of superficial histories that Galileo made recapitulation, that he said he was sorry that he had published all these things. Really what he had done was he put the whole onus of proof not on the speculative minds of people who argue by opinion but onto the scientific method which could be verified by anybody at any time. Galileo is a real hero of civilization - bona fide hero.
They couldn't get to him even by threat of torture because Galileo had found that honesty of presence, which makes one invulnerable. Yes, he feared torture - anyone one would - but he had reached the equilibrium that was supposed to belong to Satan at the center of all gravity. He found himself there, he found himself very comfortable with the truth. And that he didn't feel compelled to change his mind. He would write all kinds of letters to the Pope saying "I'm glad if anyone can show me where I'm wrong. I'm not interested in holding these opinions if I'm wrong. I only want to explore and express what is there."
So, they decided that they would place Galileo under house arrest. His own house. They left him his garden. They left him his telescope. They left him his mind. And he promised not to write anymore. That is, he wouldn't publish. They wanted to collect all the copies of The Dialogue and they wrote to the publisher. In fact, they sent armed men as they do, and no copies were there. They have been sold out - every single copy - and it was making its rounds all over Europe. And the doors were opening up because this was 1632 and it was really coming along.
Galileo lived for another 10 years. He was beset by a lot of arthritis. He had suffered one time in his life a severe chill and had affected his metabolism so that he was very arthritic. He lived until 1642 and he kept notes. Most of them are not translated into English but if you see an Italian edition of Galileo's writings - about 15 or 20 volumes - he was meticulous because his essential honesty, the honesty of a high Renaissance man, was that he didn't want to make up anything, but he wanted to explore what was really there as much as he could.
Now Galileo closes out the Italian Renaissance. There really isn't anybody after him worth talking about for a long time. It's a case in point of how authoritarian structures can actually kill the inquiring spirit in their own locale. But Galileo's example was just a herald to the rest of Europe, to Protestant Europe in particular. It became the touchstone. That every man's evidence counts. That the only way that we can have any kind of a bona fide reality is to inquire among ourselves as to what we experience together. And so, in a way one of the foundations of Western democracy was reaffirmed. That value of the individual, the value of individuals conferring together, the value of putting decisions on what has come to be called the scientific basis.
In fact, just four years after Galileo died, Leibniz would be born. And the entire work of the man became the subject of incredible advances. The mathematics at the end of the 17th century was so far in advance of Galileo that he would look like a primer. So that the next two generations after him, not in Italy but in Northern and Western Europe, took what Galileo gave. It's like a real Italian father putting out the bowl for the whole family to eat what they would like out of the same bowl. Northern and Western Europe took that bowl and just developed it to an extraordinary extent. Newton and Leibniz are impossible without Galileo. Kepler was extremely important because he solved some of the mathematical conundrums that were developed by Galileo's discoveries. He found - you see mathematics has been based for 1,500 years on circles. And circles are convenient to deal with. But when you have shapes that are not circles. When you have ellipses, the mathematics becomes more difficult. And when you have hyperbolic curves that are infinite, the mathematics becomes astounding.
By the time of that next generation or so of Leibniz and Newton they were dealing with irregular curves in complete mathematical control. All of this was positive on the fact that mathematics was a science. That is to say, it was not based on the speculative fantasizing opinions of great minds but was founded upon what we could discover about physical universe. The physical reality. So much so that the foreword to this translation of The Dialogue is by Albert Einstein. And Einstein says that his whole work is all based on the example of Galileo. That what we can see in astronomy, what we can experience in physics, has to have some tie in with what we can describe mathematically. And conversely whatever we could describe mathematically has to have some relationship. So that the ordering of a very high sophisticated mathematical darn is real. And the insistence on translating it into phenomenal working is the very core of what we call technology. Technology is applied science. Making it work, making it work.
This is what Einstein says, "The conception of the world still prevailing at Galileo's time may be described as follows: there is space and within it there is a preferred point, the center of the universe. Matter, at least its denser portion, tends to approach this point as closely as possible. Consequently, matter has assumed approximately the spherical shape of the earth." The matter of the universe is just the earth. "Consequently, matter has assumed approximately the spherical shape of the earth owing to this formulation of the earth as the center of the terrestrial sphere practically coincides with that of the universe. Sun, Moon, and stars are prevented from falling towards the center of the universe by being fastened onto rigid transparent spherical shells whose centers are identical with that of the universe or space." Shells. There are ten shells. Spherical shells. "These spherical shells revolve around the immovable globe or center of the universe with slightly differing angular velocities. The lunar shell has the smallest radius. It includes and encloses everything terrestrial. The outer shells with their heavenly bodies represent the celestial sphere whose objects are envisioned as eternal, indestructible and inalterable. In contrast to the lower terrestrial sphere which is enclosed by the lunar shell and contains everything that is transitory, perishable, and corruptible." Galileo broke all those shells wide open. Everything moves. He found before he died the Sun moves. The stars rotate, probably very slowly. The planets all move.
Einstein writing about 1945, "Naturally this naïve picture cannot be blamed on the Greek astronomers who, in representing the motions of the celestial bodies, used abstract geometrical constructions which grew more and more complicated with the increasing precision of astronomical observations. Lacking a theory of mechanics, they tried to reduce all complicated motions to the simplest motions they could concede. Namely uniform circular motions and superimpositions thereof." Attachment to the idea of circular motion as the truly natural one is still clearly discernible in Galileo. But he begins to introduce, the first time, the laws of inertia. And the true laws of motion. And this cracks open the whole conception of the earth as the center of the universe.
And Einstein says here, "Let me interpolate here that a close analogy exists between Galileo's rejection of the hypothesis of a center of the universe for the explanation of the fall of heavenly bodies. And the rejection of the hypothesis of an inertial system for the explanation of inertial behavior of matter. This matter is the basis of the theory of general relativity." Einstein is very aware that he had followed in the path of Galileo. Only he had taken it, of course, an enormous jump ahead. He had cracked the wide-open spaces that had been freed by Galileo's cracking of the old shells. He'd cracked the Newtonian mechanical universe wide open. But he's paying homage to Galileo by saying I know, I know more than perhaps anybody, what he had to go through psychologically and mentally to have the courage to do it. Because you're left with a completely new world, completely new universe. And this is very, very difficult to countenance. Especially when you're required by your own ethics to make it provable.
So, Galileo really is a hero and is the culmination of the Italian Renaissance by having introduced this whole method. And the content which he put into it. Now I don't like to end a course with people being burnt and in prison and so forth. So next week if you can I'll end the course with the hero of the Renaissance. I saved the frosting on the cake till last. Raphael's vision of man is gorgeous and accurate. And we'll see that at 2029 Hyperion next Thursday. And you'll get some food free, and you'll get some tea or coffee or whatever. And we'll have some slides and present sort of an entertaining grand finale to this this year in this course. So come if you can. Christmas will be over with. Come in and recuperate. See you.
END OF RECORDING