Rome. 1633. The offices of the Roman inquisition. Galileo Galilei stands accused of heresy. Despite prior warnings from inquisitors, Galileo has continued to espouse a dangerous idea, an idea church censors had spent decades repressing—pulling any mention of it from the bookshelves, banning publication of any new books on the subject and meting out severe punishments to violators. Indeed, only 33 years earlier, a former priest by the name of Giordano Bruno had been literally burned at the stake in part for espousing this very dangerous ideas.
What was this idea which the censors in the inquisition found so threatening? What was this idea that they said could shake the very foundations of society, an idea that could lead to widespread violence by causing people to doubt known truths and even the very authority of the Church?
This dangerous idea, this incitement to blasphemy and violence, was the idea that the Earth was not in fact the center of creation. Rather, Galileo had claimed, and persisted in claiming even after being told to renounce the belief, that the Earth orbited around the Sun, rather than the other way around. To make matters worse he’d purported to prove it by painstaking observations of the heavens through a new contraption which he had greatly improved, called a telescope, which allowed him to observe the orbits of the planets and discover that their movements were consistent with moving around the Sun and not the Earth. He’d even published a book making that argument, spreading his heresy to any reader who happened across it.
The public needed to be protected from this offensive belief. Galileo was found to be strongly suspected of heresy. He had to renounce his heresy, and affirmatively declare that the Earth was the center of the Universe! If he did not, well, the inquisition had many tools at its disposal to help wayward souls see the truth. The stake was only the last them.
. . .
For more, listen to the Podcast episode and check out my book, History Stories for Everyone, where I dive deeper into this and some of history’s other most fascinating and relatable human stories:
