From Life of Galileo
These are the quotes from the play that particularly resonate with the major concerns of our production.
SCENE ONE:
“GALILEO: For where faith has been enthroned for a thousand years doubt now sit. Everyone says: right, that’s what it says in the books, but let’s have a look for ourselves.” P. 7
“GALILEO: This has created a draught which is blowing up the gold-embroidered skirts of the prelates and princes, revealing the fat and skinny legs underneath, legs like our own. The heavens, it turns out, are empty. Cheerful laughter is our response. But the waters of the earth drive the new spinning machines, while in the shipyards, the ropewalks and sail-lofts fiven hundred hands are moving together in a new system.” P. 7
“GALILEO: It is my prophecy that our own lifetime will see astronomy being discussed in the marketplaces. Even the fishwives’ sons will hasten off to school.” P. 7
“GALILEO: The universe has lost its centre overnight, and woken up to find it has countless centres. So that each one can now be seen as the centre, or none at all. Suddenly there is a lot of room.” P. 8
“GALILEO: I particularly want you to understand it. Getting people to understand it is the reason why I go on working and buying expensive books instead of paying the milkman.
ANDREA: But I can see with my own eyes that the sun goes down in a different place from where it rises. So how can it stay still? Of course it can’t.
GALILEO: You can see, indeed! What can you see? Nothing at all. You just gawp. Gawping isn’t seeing.” P. 8
“MRS. SARTI: Well. Let’s hope your new time will allow us to pay the milkman, Mr. Galilei” p. 9
“GALILEO: (to Ludovico) I’ll have to take you first thing in the morning. That’ll be your loss, Andrea. You’ll have to drop out of course. You don’t pay, see?” (p. 11)
“LUDOVICO: Nobody can drink a glass of wine without science these days, you know.” (p. 12)
“GALILEO: I teach and I teach, and when am I supposed to learn?” (p. 13)
“PROCURATOR: Don’t forget that even if the Republic pays less well than certain princes it does guarantee freedom of research…In Mr. Cremonini’s case we nto only failed to hand him over to the Inquisition when he was proved, proved, Mr. Galilei—to have made irreligious remarks, but actually granted him a rise in salary. As far as Holland Venice is known as the republic where the Inquisition has no say.” (p. 13-14).
“PROCURATOR: What use would it be to you to have limitless spare time for research if any ignorant monk in the Inquisition could just put a ban on your thoughts? Every rose has its thorn, Mr. Galilei, and every ruler has his monks.
GALILEO: So what’s the good of free research without free time to research it?” What happens to it results?” p. 14
“PROCURATOR: What is worth scudi is what brings scudi in. If you want money you’ll have to produce something else. When you’re selling knowledge you can’t ask more than the buyer is likely to make from it.” P. 14
“GALILEO: I see. Freedom of trade, freedom of research. Free trading in research, is that it? …
PROCURATOR: Here you have a chance to research,t o work. Nobody supervises you, nobody suppresses you…Don’t underrate trade, Mr. Galilei. Nobody here would stand for the slightest interference with your work or let outsiders make difficulties for you.” (p. 15)
“PROCURATOR: As for the material aspects: why can’t you give us another nice piece of work like those famous proportional compasses of yours, the ones that allow complete mathematical dunces to trace lines, reckon compound interest on capital, reproduce a land survey on varying scales and determine the weight of cannon balls?” p. 15
“GALILEO: I admit I enjoy doing my stuff for you gentlemen of Venice in your famous arsenal and in the shipyards and cannon foundries. But you never give me the time to follow up the hunches which come to me there and which are important for my branch of science. That way you muzzle the threshing ox.” (p. 15)
GALILEO: Listen to me, Andrea: Don’t talk to other people about our ideas.
ANDREA: Why not? GALILEO: The big shots won’t allow it.
ANDREA: But it’s the truth.
GALILEO: But they’re forbidding it.—And there’s something more. We physicisits may think we have the answer, but that doesn’t mean we can prove it. (p. 16)
“GALILEO: Faced with the stars we are like dull-eyed worms that can hardly see at all. Those old constructions people have believed inf or the last thousand years are hopelessly rickety: vast buildings most of whose wood is in the buttresses propping them up.” (p. 17)
SCENE 2:
“GALILEO: Today it is with deep joy and all due deference that I find myself able to demonstrate and hand over ot you a completely new instrument, namely my spyglass or telescope, fabricated in your world-famous Great Arsenal ont eh loftiest Christian and scientific principles, the product of seventeen years of patient research by your humble servant.” (p. 18)
“PROCURATOR: (waxes poetic about how it’ll be another feather in the cap of Venetian culture, how it will be turned over to manufacture and garner large profits but also:) …What is more, has it struck you that in wartime this instrument will allow us ot distinguish the number and types of the enemy’s hsips at least two hours before he does ours, with the result that we shall know how stronge he is and be able to choose whether to pursue, join battle, or run away? VERY LOUD APPLAUSE” p. 19
“LUDOVICO: (embarrassed): I congratulate you, sir.
GALILEO: I’ve improved it.
LUDOVICO: Yes, sir. I see you’ve made the casing red. In Holland it was green
…
VIRGINIA: It strikes me they’re all very pleased with Father.
LUDOVICO: And it strikes me I’m starting to learn a thing or two about science.” (P. 20)
SCENE 3: Tracks an entire night until Church bells ring
“SAGREDO: But this goes against two thousand years of astronomy.” (p. 21)
“GALILEO: The moon can be an earth complete with mountains and valleys, and the earth can be a star. An ordinary celestial body, one of thousands…Both of them are lit by the sun, and so they give off light. What the moon is to us, we are to the moon. It sees us sometimes as a crescent, sometimes as a half moon, sometimes full and sometimes not at all.
SAGREDO: In other words,t ehre’s no difference between he moon and earth…
GALILEO: Exactly. And that’s what we can see. Keep your eye glued to the telescope, Sagredo, my friend. What you’re seeing is the fact that there is no difference between heaven and earth. Today is 10 January 1610. Today mankind can write in its diary: Got rid of Heaven.” (p. 22)
“SAGREDO: My dear Mr. Priuli. I may not be competent to judge this instrument’s value for commerce but its value for philosophy is so boundless that…
PROCURATOR: For philosophy indeed. What’s a mathematician like MR. Galilei go tot do with philosophy?” (p. 23)
“GALILEO: Then I like buying books about other things besides physics, and I like a decent meal. Good meals are when I get most of my ideas.” (p. 24)
“GALILEO: I’m about to show you one of the shining milk-white clouds in the Milky Way. Tell me what it’s made up of. SAGREDO: They’re stars, an infinite number. GALILEO: In Orion alone there are 500 fixed stars.T hose are the countless other worlds,t he remote stars the man they burned talked about. He never saw them, he just expected them to be there.” (p. 25)
“SAGREDO: In other words that it’s just a lot of stars. Then where’s God?
GALILEO: In ourselves or nowhere.” (p. 26)
Galileo asserts that the reason Bruno was burned at the stake was “Because he couldn’t prove it. Because it was just a hypothesis.” (p. 26)
Sagredo questions whether that makes any difference and Galileo replies with “A tremendous difference. Look, Sagredo, I believe in Humanity, which means to say I believe in human reason. If it weren’t for that belief each morning I wouldn’t have the power to get out of bed.
SAGREDO: Then let me tell you something. I don’t. Forty years spent among human beings has again and again brought it home to me that they are not open to reason. Show them a comet with a red tail, scare them out of their wits, and they’ll rush out of their houses and break their legs. But try making one rational statement to them, and back it up with seven proofs, and they’ll just laugh at you.
GALILEO: That’s quite untrue, and it’s a slander. I don’t see how you can love science if that’s what you believe. Nobody who isn’t dead can fail to be convinced by proof.
SAGREDO: How can you imagine their pathetic shrewdness has anything to do with reason?
GALILEO: I’m not talking about their shrewdness. I know they call a donkey a horse when they want to sell it and a horse a donkey when they want to buy. That’s the kind of shrewdness you mena. But the horny-handed old woman who gives her mule an extra bundle of hay on the eve of a journey, the sea captain who allows for storms and doldrums when laying in stores, the child who puts on his cap once they have convinced himt hat it may rain: these are the people I pin my hopes to, because they all accept proof. Yes, I believe in reason’s gentle tyranny over people. Sooner or later they have to give in to it. Nobody can go on indefinitely watching me—(he drops a pebble on the ground)—drop a pebble, then say it doesn’t fall. No human being is capable of that. The lure of a proof is too great. Nearly everyone succumbs to it; sooner or later we all do. Thinking is one of the chief pleasures of the human race.” (p. 27)
“GALILEO: It’s a question about the heavens, something to do with the stars. This is it: are we to take it that the greater goes round the smaller, or does the smaller go round the greater?
MRS SARTI (cautiously): I never know where I am with you, Mr. Galilei. Is that a serious question, or are you pulling my leg again?
GALILEO: A serious question.
MRS. SARTI: Then I’ll give you a quick answer. Do I serve your dinner or do you serve mine?
GALILEO: You serve mine. Yesterday it was burnt.
MRS. SARTI: And why was it burnt? Because I had to fetch you your shoes in the middle of my cooking. Didn’t I fetch you your shoes?
GALILEO: I suppose so.
MRS. SARTI: You see, you’re the one who has studied and is able to pay. (Mrs. Sarti, amused, goes off)
GALILEO: Don’t tell me people like that can’t grasp the truth. They grab at it.” (p. 28)
“VIRGINIA: What sort of night was it, Father?
GALILEO: Clear.
VIRGINIA: Can I have a look?
GALILEO: What for? (Virginia does not know what to say.) It’s not a toy.
VIRGINIA: No, Father.
GALILEO: Anyhow the tube is a flop, soeverybody will soon be telling you. You can get it for 3 scudi all over the palce and the Dutch invented it ages ago.
VIRGINIA: Hasn’t it helped you see anything fresh in the sky?
GALILEO: Nothing in your line. Just a few dim little spots to the left of a large planet; I’ll have to do something to draw attention to them. (talking past his daughter to Sagredo)…Run along to your mass. (exit Virginia)” (p. 29)
“SAGREDO (reads out the end of the letter): ‘My most ardent desire is to be closer to you, the rising sun that will illuminate this age.’ The grand duke of Florence is aged nine.
GALILEO: That’s it. I see; you think my letter is too submissive. I’m wondering if it is submissive enough—not too formal, lacking in authentic servility. A reticent letter would be all right for someone whose distinction it is to have proved Aristotle correct, but not for me. A man like me can only get a halway decent job by crawling on his belly. And you know what I think of people whose brains arent’ capable of filling their stomachs.” (p. 30)
“SAGREDO: How could the people in power give free reint o somebody who knows the truth, even if it concerns the remotest stars? Do you imagine the Pope will hear the truth when you tell him he’s wrong, and not just hear that he’s wrong?...You may be a skeptic in science, but you’re childishly credulous as soon as snything seems likely to help you pursue it. You don’t believe in Aristotle, but you do believe in the Grand Duke of Florence. Just now, when I was watching you at the telescope and you were watching those new stars, it seemed to me I was watching you stand on blazing faggots; and when you said you believed in proof I smelt burnt flesh. I am fond of science, my friend, but I am fonder of you. Don’t go to Florence, Galileo.” (p. 30-31)
“GALILEO: I’m going to take them by the scruff of the neck and force them to look through this telescope.” (p. 30)
SCENE 4
“PHILOSOPHER: The universe of the divine Aristotle…add up to an edifice of such exquirite proportions that we should think twice before disrupting its harmony.” (p. 37)
“GALILEO: How about your highness now taking a look at his impossible and unnecessary stars through this telescope?” (p. 37)
“FEDERZONI: You’ll be surprised: the crystal spheres don’t exist. PHILOSOPHER: Any textbook will tell you that they do, my good man. FEDERZONI: Right, then let’s have new textbooks.” (p. 38)
“GALILEO: Gentlemen, in all humility I ask you to go by the evidence of your eyes.
MATHEMATICIAN: My dear Galileo, I may strike you as very old fashioned, but I’m in the habit of reading Aristotle now and again, and there, I can assure you, I trust the evidence of my eyes.
GALILEO: I produce my observations and everyone laughs: I offer my telescope so they can see for themselves, and everyone quotes Aristotle.
FEDERZONI: The fellow had no telescope.
MATHEMATICIAN: That’s just it.” (p. 39)
“GALILEO: Truth is born of the times, not of authority. Our ignorance is limitless: let us lop one cubic millimeter off it. Why try to be clever now that we at last have a chance of being just a little less stupid? …
PHILOSOPHER: You highness, ladies and gentlemen,I just wonder where all this is leading?
GALILEO: I should say our duty as scientists is not to ask where the truth is leading.
PHILOSOPHER: Mr. Galilei, truth might lead us anywhere!
GALILEO: Your highness. At night nowadays telescopes are being pointed at the sky all over Italy. Jupiter’s moons may not bring down the price of milk. But they have never been seen before, and yet all the same they exist. From this the man in the street concludes that a lot else might exist if only he opened his eyes. It is your duty to confirm this. What has made Italy prick up its ears is not the movements of a few distant stars but the news that hitherto unquestioned dogmas have begun totter—and we all know that there are too many of those. Gentlemen, don’t let us fight for questionable truths…They don’t read much, but rely on the evidence of their five sense, without all that much fear as to where such evidence is going to lead them…Very much like our mariners who a hundred years ago abandoned our coasts without knowing what other coasts they would encounter, if any. It looks as if the only way today to find that supreme curiosity which was the real glory of classical Greece is to go down to the docks.” (p. 40)
SCENE 6:
“MONK: Which is better, I ask you: to have an eclipse of the moon happen three days later than the calendar says, or never ot have eternal salvation at all?” (p. 49)
“SECOND ASTRONOMER: There ARE phenomena that present difficulties for us astronomers, but does mankind have to understand eeverything?” (p. 49)
“THE VERY THIN MONK: They degrade humanity’s dwelling place to a wandering star. Men, animals, plants and the kingdoms of the earth get packed on a cart and driven in a crcle round an empty sky.Heaven and earth are no longer distinct, according to them. Heaven because it is made of earth and earth because it is just on more heavenly body. There is no more difference between top and bottom, between eternal and ephemeral. That we are short-lived we know. Now they tell us that heaven is short-lived too. There are sun, moon and stars , and we live on the earth, it used ot be said, and so the Book has it; but now these people are saying the earth is another star. Wait till they say man and animal are not distinct either, man himself is an animal, there’s nothing but animals!” (p. 49)
“VERY OLD CARDINAL: I am told that this Mr. Galilei moves mankind away from the centre of the universe and dumps it somewhere on the edge. Clearly this makes him an enemy of the human race. We must treat him as such. Mankind is the crown of creation, as every child knows, God’s highest and dearest creature. How could He take something so miraculous, the fruit of so much effort, and lodge it on a remote, minor, constantly elusive star? Would he send His Son to such a place?...I am not just any old creature on any insignificant star briefly circling in no particular place. I am walking, with a firm step, on a fixed earth, it is motionless, it is the centre of the universe, I am at the centre and the eye of the Creator falls upon me and me alone…In this way everything comes visibly and incontrovertibly to depend on me, mankind, God’s great effort, the creature on whom it all centres, made in God’s own image, indestructible and…(he collapses).” (p. 51)
“LITTLE MONK: confidentially: You’ve won. EXIT. GALILEO (trying to hold him back): IT has won. Not me: reason has won. (The little monk has already left) (p. 51)
SCENE 7:
“VIRGINIA: I’d like to look beautiful. GALILEO: You’d better, or they’ll go back to wondering whether it turns or not.” (p. 52)
“THE FIRST SECRETARY: The first carnival since the plague years.” (p. 53)
“BARBERINI: ‘The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his palce where he arose.’ So says Solomon, and what does Galileo say? GALILEO: When I was so high—(he indicates with his hand)—your Eminence, I stood on a ship and called out ‘The shore is moving away.’ Today I realize that the shore was standing still and the ship moving away.” (p. 54)
“BARBERINI: Unfortunatley I once studied some astronomy, Bellarmin. It sticks to you like the itch.” (p. 54)
Barberini describes Rome’s origins: “Two little boys, so runs the legend, were given milk and shelter by a she-wolf. Since that time all her children have had to pay for their milk.” (p. 55)
“BELLARMIN: Think for an instant how much tought and effort it cost the Fathers of the Curch and their countless successors to put some sense into this appalling world of ours…We have shifted the responsibility for such occurrences as we cannot understand—life is made up of them—to a higher Being, and argued that all of them contribute to the fulfillment of certain intentions, that the whole thing is taking place according to a great plan.” (p. 56)
“BELLARMIN: Wouldn’t you also think it possible that the Creator had a better idea of what he was making than those he has created? GALILEO: But surely, gentlemen, mankind may not only get the motions of the stars wrong but the Bible too?” (p. 56)
“BARBERINI: Don’t tip the baby out with the bathwater, Galileo my friend. WE shan’t. We need you more than you need us.” (p. 57)
“BARBERINI: At which he turns himself back into a lamb. You too, my dear fellow, ought really to have come disguised as a good orthodox thinker. It’s my own mask that permits me certain freedoms today.” (p. 57)
“VIRGINIA: You are very kind, your Eminence. I really understand practically nothing about such things. THE INQUISITOR: Indeed? (he laughs) In the fisherman’s house no one eats fish, eh? It will tickle your father to hear that almost all your knowledge about the world of the stars comes ultimately from me, my child.” (p. 59)
SCENE 8:
“GALILEO: That might come in handy if it led you to admit that two and two sometimes make four.” (p. 61)
“THE LITTLE MONK: …the potential dangers for humanity in wholly unrestricted research…” (p. 61)
“THE LITTLE MONK: They have been assured that God’s eye is always on them—probingly, even anxiously—that the whole drama of the world is constructed around hem so that they, the performers, may prove themselves int heir greater or lesser roles. What would my people say if I told them that they happen to be on a small knob of stone twisting endlessly through the void round a second-rate star, just one among myriads? What would be the value or necessity then of so much patience, such understanding of their own poverty? What would be the use of Holy Scripture, which has explained and justified it all—the sweat, the patience, the hunger, the submissiveness—and now turns out to be full of errors? No: I can see their eyes wavering, I can see them letting their spoons drop, I can see how betrayed and deceived they will feel. So nobody’s eye is on us, they’ll say. Have we got to look after ourselves, old, uneducated and worn-out as we are? The only part anybody has devised for us is this wretched, earthly one, to be played out on a tiny star wholly dependent on others, with nothing revolving round it. Our poverty has no meaning: hunger is no trial of strength, it’s merely not having eaten: effort is no virtue, it’s just bending and carrying. Can you see now why I read into the Holy Congregations decree a noble motherly compassion; a vast goodness of soul?” (p. 62-63)
“GALILEO: Goodness of soul! Aren’t you really saying that there’s nothing for them, the wine has all been drunk, their lips are parched, so they had better kiss the assock? Why is there nothing for them? Why does order in this country meant he orderliness of a bare cupboard, and necessity nothing but the need to work oneself to death? When there are teeming vineyards and cornfields on every side? Your Campagna peasants are paying for the wars which the representative of gentle Jesus is waging in Germany and Spain. Why does he make the earth the centre of the universe? So that the See of St. Peter can be the centre of the earth! That’s what it is all about. You’re right, it’s not about the planets, it’s about the peasants of the Campagna. And don’t talk to me about the beauty given to phenomena by the patina of age! You know how the oyster produces its pearl? By a mortally dangerous disease which involves taking some unassimilable foreign body, like a grain of sand, and wrapping it in a slimy ball. The process all but kills it. To hell with the pearl, give me the healthy oyster. Virtues are not an offshoot of poverty, my dear fellow. If your people were happy and prosperous they could develop the virtues of happiness and properity. At present the virtues of exhaustion derive from exhausted fields, and I reject them. Sir, my new pumps will perform more miracles int hat direction than all your ridiculous superhuman slaving. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’, since your fields are nto fruitful and you are being decimated by wars. Am I supposed to tell your people lies?” (p. 63)
The Little Monk objects that they “have the higest of all motives for keeping our mouths shut—the peace of mind of the less fortunate” and then Galileo points out that the fruits of labor are supplying the state with the means to bribe Galileo into silence.
“GALILEO: If I were to agree to keep my mouth shut my motives would be thoroughly low ones: an easy life, freedom from persecution, and so on.” (p. 64)
“GALILEO: The sum of the angles ina triangle cannot be varied to suit the Vatican’s convenience. I can’t calculate the courses of flying bodies in such a way as also to explain witches taking trips on broomsticks.” (p. 64)
“THE LITTLE MONK: But don’t you think that the truth will get through without us, so long as it’s true?
GALILEO: No, no, no. The only truth that gets through will be what we force through: the victory of reason will be the victory of people who are prepared to reason, nothing else. Your picture of the Campagna peasants makes them look like the moss ont ehir own huts. How can anyone imagine that the sum of the angles ina triangle conflicts with THEIR needs? But unless they get moving and learn how to think, they will find event he finest irrigation systems won’t help them. Oh, to hell with it: I see your people’s divine patience, but where is their divine anger?
THE LITTLE MONK: They are tired.” (p. 64-65)
“GALILEO: An apple from the tree of knowledge! He’s wolfing it down. He is damned forever, but he has got to wolf it down, the poor glutton. I sometimes think I’ll have myself shut up ina dungeon ten fathoms below ground in complete darkness if only it will help me to find out what light is. And the worst thing is that what I know I have to tell people, like a lover, like a drunkard, like a traitor. It is an absolute vice and leads to disaster. How long can I go on shouting it inot the void, that’s the question.” (p. 65)
SCENE 9:
“GALILEO: What do you want to explain? You are fully in line with the Holy Congregation’s decree of 1616. You cannot be faulted. You did of course study mathematics here, but that’s no reason why we should need to hear you say that two and two makes four. You are quite within your rights in saying that this stone—(he takes a little stone from his pocket and throws it down to the hall)—has just flown up to the ceiling…Listent o me: someone who doesn’t know the truth is just thick-headed. But someone who does know it and call it a lie is a crook. Get out of my house.” (p. 67)
“SARTI: But nobody goes blindly into a serious affair like this. I really think you ought to go to a proper astronomer at the university and get himt o cast your horoscope so you know what you’re in for. Why are you laughing?
VIRGINIA: Because I’ve been.
SARTI (very inquisitive): What did he say?
VIRGINIA: For three months I’ll have ot be careful, because the sun will be in Aries, but then I shall get a particularly favourable ascendant and the clouds will part. So long as I keep my eye on Jupiter I can travel as much as I like, because I’m an Aries.
SARTI: And Ludovico?
VIRGINIA: He’s a Leo. (little pause) That’s supposed to be sensual.” (p. 68)
“ANDREA: Mother’s got great baskets full of letters. The whole of Europe wants to know what you think, you’ve such a reputation now, you can’t just say nothing.
GALILEO: Rome allowed me to get a reputation because I said nothing.
FEDERZONI: But you can’t afford to go on saying nothing now.
GALILEO: Nor can I afford to be reoasted over a wood fire like a ham.” (p. 69)
“FEDERZONI: The needle’s floating. Holy Aristotle, they never checked up on him! (They laugh.)
GALILEO: One of the main reasons why the sciences are so poor is that they imagine they are so rich. It isn’t their jobt o throw open the door to infinite wisdom but to put a limit to infinite error.” (p. 70-71)
“VIRGINIA: Father says theologians have their bells to ring; physicists have their laughter.” (p. 71)
“GALILEO: Things are beginning to move. Federzoni, we may yet see the day when we no longer have to look over our shoulder like criminals eveyr time we say two and two equals four.” (p. 72)
“GALILEO: I value the consolations of the flesh. I’ve no use for those chicken-hearts who see them as weaknesses. Pleasure takes some achieving, I’d say.” (p. 72)
“GALILEO: You think your peasants will go by the saintliness of their mistress in deciding whether to pay rent or not? LUDOVICO: In a sense, yes.” (p.73)
“THE LITTLE MONK: God made the physical world, Ludovico; God made the human brain; God will permit physics.” (p. 74)
“MRS. SARTI: If I choose to forfeit eternal bliss by sticking with a heretic that’s my business, but you have no right to trample all over your daughter’s happiness with your great feet.
GALILEO (gruffly): Bring the telescope.” (p. 74)
“LUDOVICO: You, Mr. Galileo, may see rich cornfields from your coach as you pass, you eat our olives and our cheese,w ithout a thought, and you have no idea how much trouble it takes to produce them, how much supervision. GALILEO: Young man, I do not eat my olives without a thought. “ (p. 75)
“THE LITTLE MONK (amazed): He’s theatrening you.
GALILEO: Yes, I might stir up his peasants to think new thoughts. And his servants and his stewards.
FEDERZONI: How? None of them can read Latin.
GALILEO: I imhgt write in the language of the people, for the many, rather than in Latin for the few. Our new thoughts call for people who work with their hands. Who else cares about knowing the causes of things? People who only see bread on their table don’t want to know how it got baked; that lot would sooner thank God than thank the baker. But the people who make the bread will understand that nothing moves unless it has been made to move. Your sister pressing olives, Fulganzio, won’t be astounded but will probably laugh when she hears that the sun isn’t a golden coat of arms but a motor: that the earth moves because the sun sets it moving.
LUDOVICO: You will always be the slave of your passions.” (p. 75-76)
“ANDREA: And our kindest regards to all the Marsilis.
FEDERZONI: Who command the earth to stand still so their castles shan’t tumble down.
ANDREA: And the Cenzis and the Villanis!
FEDERZONI: The Cervillis!
ANDREA: The Lecchis!
FEDERZONI: The Pirleonis!
ANDREA: Who are prepared to kiss the pope’s toe only if he uses it to kick the people with!” (p. 76)
“GALILEO: My object is not to establish that I was right but to find out if I am. Abandon hope, I say, all ye who enter on observation. They may be vapours, they may be spots, but before we assume that they are spots—which is what would suit us best—we should assume that they are fried fish. In fact we shall question everything all over again. And we shall go forward not in seven-league boots but at a snail’s pace. And what we discover today we shall wipe off the slate tomorrow and only write it up again once we have again discovered it. And whatever we wish to find we shall regard, once found, with particular mistrust. So we shall approach the observation of the sun with an irrecovable determination to establish that the earth does NOT move. Only when we have failed, have been utterly and hopelessly beaten and are licking our wounds in the profoundest depression, shall we start asking if we weren’t right after all, and the earth does go round. (with a twinkle) But once every other hypothesis has crumbled in our hands thent here will be no mercy for those who failed to research, and who go on talking all the same. Take the cloth off the telescope and point it at the sun!” (p. 76-77)
“GALILEO: I’ve got to know.” (p. 77)
SCENE 10:
“When the Almighty made the universe / He made the earth and then he made the sun / Then round the earth he bade the sund to turn—That’s in the Bible, Genesis, Chapter One. / And fromt hat time all creatures here below / Were in obedient circles meant to go.” (p. 79)
“Then tenant gives his landlord hell / Not caring in the least. /His wife now feeds her children well /On the milk she fed the priest.” (p. 80)
“BOTH: Good people who have trouble here below / In serving cruel lords and gentle Jesus /Who bid you turn the other cheek just so / They’re better placed to strike the second blow: / Obedience isn’t going to cure your woe / So each of you wake up, and do just as he pleases!” (p. 81)
SCENE 11:
“VANNI: Your name was mentioned upstairs. They’re blaming you for those pamphlets against the Bible tha have been selling ll over the place lately.
GALILEO: I know nothing about pamphlets. The Bible and Homer are my preferred reading.
VANNI: Even if that weren’t so I’d like to take this chance to say that we manufacturers are behind you. I’m not the sort of fellow that knows much about the stars, but to me you’re the man who’s battling for freedom to teach what’s new.” (p. 83)
“VANNI: If anybody ever tries launching anything against you, please remember you’ve friends in every branch of business. You’ve got the north Italian cities behind you, sire.
GALILEO: As far as I know nobody’s thinking of launching anything against me.
VANNI: No?
GALILEO: No.
VANNI: I think you’d be better off in Venice. Fewer clerics. You ould take up the cudgels from there. I’ve a travelling coach and horses, Mr. Galilei.
GALILEO: I don’t see myself as refugee. I like my comforts.
VANNI: Surely. But from what I heard upstairs I’d say there was a hurry. It’s my impression they’d be gald to know you weren’t in Florence just now.
GALILEO: Nonsense. The Grand Duke is my pupil, and what’’s more the pope himself would never stand for any kind of attempt to trap me.
VANNI: I’m not sure you’re good at distinguishing your friends from your enemies, Mr. Galilei.
GALILEO: I can distinguish power from impotence. (He goes off brusquely) VANNI: Right. I wish you luck. (Exit)
GALILEO: (returning to Virginia) Every local Tom, Dick, and Harry with an axe to grind wants me to be his spokesman, particularly in places wehre it’s not exactly helpful to me. I’ve written a book about the mechanics of the universe, that’s all. What people make of it or don’t make of it isn’t my business.” (p. 84)
“VIRGINIA: What’s the Cardinal Inquisitor doing in Florence, Father?
GALILEO: I don’t know. He behaved quite respectfully. I knew what I was doing when I came to Florence and kept quiet for all those years. They’ve paid me such tributes that now they’re forced to accept me as I am.” (p. 85)
SCENE 12:
“POPE: I am not going to have the multiplication table broken. No!
THE INQUISITOR: Ah, it’s the multiplication table, not the spirit of insubordination and doubt: that’s what these people will tell you. But it isn’t the multiplication table. No, a terrible restlessness has descended on the world. It is the restlessness of their own brain which these people have transferred to the unmoving earth. They shout ‘But look at the figures’. But where do their figures come from? Everybody knows they originate in doubt. These people doubt everything. Are we to base humans ociety on doubt and no longer on faith? ‘You are my lord, but I doubt if that’s a good thing’. ‘This is your house and your wife, but I doubt if they shouldn’t be mine.’ “ (p. 87)
“INQUISITOR: For the last fifteen years Germany has been running with blood, and men have quoted the Bible as they hacked each other to pieces.” (p. 88)
“INQUISITOR: So what do these wretched mathematicians do but go and point their tubes at the sky and inform the whole world that your Holiness is hopelessly at sea in the one area nobody has yet denied you?” (p. 88)
“INQUISITOR:…Thanks to the example of this wretched Florentine all Italy, down to the last stable boy, is now gossiping about the phases of Venus, nor can they fail at the same time to think about a lot of other irksome things that schools and others hold to be incontrovertible. Give the weakness of hteir flesh and their liability to excesses of all kinds, what would the effect tbe if they were to believe in nothing but their own reason, which this maniac has set up as the sole tribunal?” (p. 88)
“INQUISITOR: The abolition of top and bottom, for one. They’re not needed any longer.” (p. 88)
“INQUISITOR: This evil man knows what he is up to when he writes his astronomical works not in Latin but in the idiom of fishwives and wool merchants.” (p. 89)
“POPE: But those star charts are based on his heretical theories. They presuppose certain notions on the part of the heavenly bodies which are impossible if you reject his doctrine. You can’t conemn the doctrine and accept the charts.
INQUISITOR: Why not? It’s the only way.
POPE: This shuffling is getting on my nerves. I cannot help listening to it.” (p. 89)
“INQUISITOR: Practically speaking one wouldn’t have to push it very far with him. He is a man of the flesh. He would give in immediately.
POPE: He enjoys himself in more ways than any man I have ever met. His thinking springs from sensuality. Give him an old wine or a new idea, and he cannot say no.” (p. 89)
"POPE: At the very most he can be shown the instruments.
INQUISITOR: That will be enough your Holiness. Instruments are Mr. Galilei’s speciality.” (p. 90)
SCENE 13:
After being informed of Galileo’s immiment recantation: “ANDREA: The moon is and earth and has no light of its own….And he is the one who showed us this. LITTLE MONK: And no force will help them to make what has been seen unseen.” (p. 93)
“ANDREA: So force won’t do the trick. There are some things it can’t do. So stupidity has been defeated, it’s not invulnerable. So man is not afraid of death. FEDERZONI: This truly is the start of the age of knowledge. This is the hour of its birth. Imagine if he had recanted.” (p. 93)
“FEDERZONI: Like nightfall in the morning, it would have been.
ANDREA: As if the mountain had said ‘I’m a lake.’” (p. 94)
“FEDERZONI: You know, he never paid you for your work. You could never publish your own stuff or buy yourself new breeches. You stood for it because it was ‘working for the sake of science’.
ANDREA: (loudly) Unhappy the land that has no heroes!” (p. 94)
“GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.” (p. 95)
SCENE 14:
“VIRGINIA: Section four: with respect to Holy Church’s policy concerning the unrest in the Arsenal in Venice I agree with the attitude adopted by Cardinal Spoletti towards the disaffected rope-makers…
GALILEO: Yes. (He dictates) I agree with the attitude adopted by Cardinal Spoletti towards the disaffected rope-makers, namely that it is better to hand out soup to them in the name of Christian brotherly love than to pay them more their hawsers and bell ropes. Especially as it seems wiser to encourage their faith rather than their acquisitiveness. The apostle Paul says ‘Charity never faileth.’ How’s that?” (p. 97)
“ANDREA: Your utter capitulation has been effective. We understand the authorities are happy to note that not a single paper expounding new theories has been published in Italy since you toed the line…When [Descartes] heard about your recantation he shoved his treatise on the nature of light away in a drawer…The only way I can do research is by going to Holland…Federzoni is back to grinding lenses in some shop in Milan…Fulganzio, our little monk, has given up science and gone back to the bosom of the church.” (p. 100)
“GALILEO: Barberini called it the itch. He wasn’t entirely free of it himself. I’ve been writing again…Oh, they let me have pens and paper. My masters aren’t stupid. They realize that deeply engrained vices can’t be snapped off just like that…
ANDREA: They’re making you plough water. They allow you pens and paper to keep you quiet. How can you possibly write when you know that’s the purpose?
GALILEO: Oh, I’m a creature of habit.” (p. 101)
“ANDREA: And we thought you had deserted! No voice against you was louder than mine!
GALILEO: Very proper. I taught you science and I denied the truth.
ANDREA: This alters everything. Everything.
GALILEO: Really?
ANDREA: You were hiding the truth. From the enemy. Even in matters of ethics you were centuries ahead of us.
GALILEO: Elaborate that, will you Andrea?
ANDREA: Like the man in the street we said ‘He’ll die, but he’ll never recant.’ You came back: ‘I’ve recanted, but I’m going to live.’—‘Your hands are stained’, we said. You’re saying: ‘Better stained than empty.’” (p. 102)
“ANDREA: SO in ’33 when you chose to recant a popular point in your doctrine I ought to have known that you were simply backing out of a hopeless political wrangle in order to get on with the real business of science.
GALILEO: Which is…
ANDREA: Studying the properties of motion, mother of those machines which alone are goingt o make the earth so good to live on that heaven can be cleared away.
GALILEO: Aha.
ANDREA: You gained the leisure to write a scientific work which could be written by nobody else. I fyou had ended up at the stake in a halo of flames the other side would have won.
GALILEO: They did win. And there is no scientific work that can only be written by one particular man.
ANDREA: Why did you recant, then?
GALILEO: I recanted because I was afraid of physical pain.
ANDREA: No!
GALILEO: They showed me the instruments.
ANDREA: So it wasn’t planned?
GALILEO: It was not.
Pause.
ANDREA (loudly): Science makes only one demand: contribution to science.
GALILEO: And I met it. Welcome to the gutter, brother in science and cousin in betrayal! Do you eat fish? I have fish. What stinks is not my fish but me. I sell out, you are a buyer. O irresistible glimpse of ht ebook, the sacred commodity! The mouth waters and the curses drown. The great whore of Babylon, the murderous beast,t he scarlet woman, opens her thighs and everything is altered. Blessed be our horse-trading, whitewashing, death-fearing community!
ANDREA: Fearing death is human. Human weaknesses don’t matter to science. (this contradicts what he said in court at the recantation)
GALILEO: Don’t they?—My dear Sarti, even as I now am I think I can still give you a tip or two as to what matters to that science you have dedicated yourself to…In my spare time, of which I have plenty, I have gone over my case and considered how it is going to be judged by that world of science of which I no longer count myself a member. Evena wool merchant has not only to buy cheap and sell dear but also to ensure that the wool trade continues unimpeded. The pursuit of science seems to me to demand particular courage in this respect. It deals in knowledge procured through doubt. Creating knowledge for all about all, it aims to turn all of us into doubters. Now the bulk of the population is kept by its princes, landlords, and priests in a pearly haze of superstition and old saws which cloak what these people are up to. The poverty of the many is as old as the hills, and from pulpit and lecture platform we hear that it is as hard as the hills to get rid of. Our new art of doubting delighted the mass audience. They tore the telescope out of our hands and trained it on their tormentors, the princes, landlords and priests. These selfish and domineering men, having greedily exploited the fruits of science, foundt hat the cold eye of science had been turned on a primaeval but contrived poverty that could clearly be swept away if they were swept away themselves. They showered us with threats and bribes, irresistible to feeble sould. But can we deny ourselves to the crowd and still remain scientists? The movements of the heavenly bodies have become more comprehemsible, but the people are as far as ever from calculating the moves of their rulers. The battle for a measurable heaven has been won thanks to doubt; but thanks to credulity the Rome houswife’s battle for milk will be lost tima nd time again. Scinece, Sarti, is involved in both these battles.” (p. 104)
GALILEO: To what end are you working? Presumably for the principle that science’s sole aim must be to lighten the burden of human existence. If the scientists, brough to heel by self-interested rulers, limit themselves to piling up knowledge for knowledge’s sake, then science can be crippled and your new machines will lead to nothing but new impositions. You may in due course discover all that there is to discover, and your progress will nonetheless be nothing but a a progress away form mankind. The gap between you and it may one day become so wide that your cry of triumph at some new achievement will be echoed by a universal cry of horror.—As a scientist I had a unique opportunity. In my day astronomy emerged into the market place. Given this unique situation, if one man had put up a fight it might have had tremendous repercussions. Had I stood firmt he scientists could have developed something like the doctors’ Hippocratic oath, a vow to use their knowledge exclusively for mankind’s benefit. As things are,t he best htat can be hoped for is a race of inventive dwarfs who can be hired for any purpose. What’s more, Sarti, I have come to the conclusion that I was never in any real danger. For a few eyars I was as strong as the authorities. And I handed my knowledge to those in power for htem to use, fail to use, misuse—whatever best suited their objectives. ..I betrayed my profession. A man who does what I did cannot be tolerate dint he ranks of science.
VIRGINIA: You are accepted in the ranks of the faithful.
GALILEO: Correct. –Now I must eat.” (p. 104-105)
“GALILEO: What’s the night like?
VIRGINIA (at the window): Clear.” (p, 105)
SCENE 15:
“May you now guard science’s light, Kindle it and use it right, Lest it be a flame to fall / Downward to consume us all.” (p. 129)
SCENE ONE:
“GALILEO: For where faith has been enthroned for a thousand years doubt now sit. Everyone says: right, that’s what it says in the books, but let’s have a look for ourselves.” P. 7
“GALILEO: This has created a draught which is blowing up the gold-embroidered skirts of the prelates and princes, revealing the fat and skinny legs underneath, legs like our own. The heavens, it turns out, are empty. Cheerful laughter is our response. But the waters of the earth drive the new spinning machines, while in the shipyards, the ropewalks and sail-lofts fiven hundred hands are moving together in a new system.” P. 7
“GALILEO: It is my prophecy that our own lifetime will see astronomy being discussed in the marketplaces. Even the fishwives’ sons will hasten off to school.” P. 7
“GALILEO: The universe has lost its centre overnight, and woken up to find it has countless centres. So that each one can now be seen as the centre, or none at all. Suddenly there is a lot of room.” P. 8
“GALILEO: I particularly want you to understand it. Getting people to understand it is the reason why I go on working and buying expensive books instead of paying the milkman.
ANDREA: But I can see with my own eyes that the sun goes down in a different place from where it rises. So how can it stay still? Of course it can’t.
GALILEO: You can see, indeed! What can you see? Nothing at all. You just gawp. Gawping isn’t seeing.” P. 8
“MRS. SARTI: Well. Let’s hope your new time will allow us to pay the milkman, Mr. Galilei” p. 9
“GALILEO: (to Ludovico) I’ll have to take you first thing in the morning. That’ll be your loss, Andrea. You’ll have to drop out of course. You don’t pay, see?” (p. 11)
“LUDOVICO: Nobody can drink a glass of wine without science these days, you know.” (p. 12)
“GALILEO: I teach and I teach, and when am I supposed to learn?” (p. 13)
“PROCURATOR: Don’t forget that even if the Republic pays less well than certain princes it does guarantee freedom of research…In Mr. Cremonini’s case we nto only failed to hand him over to the Inquisition when he was proved, proved, Mr. Galilei—to have made irreligious remarks, but actually granted him a rise in salary. As far as Holland Venice is known as the republic where the Inquisition has no say.” (p. 13-14).
“PROCURATOR: What use would it be to you to have limitless spare time for research if any ignorant monk in the Inquisition could just put a ban on your thoughts? Every rose has its thorn, Mr. Galilei, and every ruler has his monks.
GALILEO: So what’s the good of free research without free time to research it?” What happens to it results?” p. 14
“PROCURATOR: What is worth scudi is what brings scudi in. If you want money you’ll have to produce something else. When you’re selling knowledge you can’t ask more than the buyer is likely to make from it.” P. 14
“GALILEO: I see. Freedom of trade, freedom of research. Free trading in research, is that it? …
PROCURATOR: Here you have a chance to research,t o work. Nobody supervises you, nobody suppresses you…Don’t underrate trade, Mr. Galilei. Nobody here would stand for the slightest interference with your work or let outsiders make difficulties for you.” (p. 15)
“PROCURATOR: As for the material aspects: why can’t you give us another nice piece of work like those famous proportional compasses of yours, the ones that allow complete mathematical dunces to trace lines, reckon compound interest on capital, reproduce a land survey on varying scales and determine the weight of cannon balls?” p. 15
“GALILEO: I admit I enjoy doing my stuff for you gentlemen of Venice in your famous arsenal and in the shipyards and cannon foundries. But you never give me the time to follow up the hunches which come to me there and which are important for my branch of science. That way you muzzle the threshing ox.” (p. 15)
GALILEO: Listen to me, Andrea: Don’t talk to other people about our ideas.
ANDREA: Why not? GALILEO: The big shots won’t allow it.
ANDREA: But it’s the truth.
GALILEO: But they’re forbidding it.—And there’s something more. We physicisits may think we have the answer, but that doesn’t mean we can prove it. (p. 16)
“GALILEO: Faced with the stars we are like dull-eyed worms that can hardly see at all. Those old constructions people have believed inf or the last thousand years are hopelessly rickety: vast buildings most of whose wood is in the buttresses propping them up.” (p. 17)
SCENE 2:
“GALILEO: Today it is with deep joy and all due deference that I find myself able to demonstrate and hand over ot you a completely new instrument, namely my spyglass or telescope, fabricated in your world-famous Great Arsenal ont eh loftiest Christian and scientific principles, the product of seventeen years of patient research by your humble servant.” (p. 18)
“PROCURATOR: (waxes poetic about how it’ll be another feather in the cap of Venetian culture, how it will be turned over to manufacture and garner large profits but also:) …What is more, has it struck you that in wartime this instrument will allow us ot distinguish the number and types of the enemy’s hsips at least two hours before he does ours, with the result that we shall know how stronge he is and be able to choose whether to pursue, join battle, or run away? VERY LOUD APPLAUSE” p. 19
“LUDOVICO: (embarrassed): I congratulate you, sir.
GALILEO: I’ve improved it.
LUDOVICO: Yes, sir. I see you’ve made the casing red. In Holland it was green
…
VIRGINIA: It strikes me they’re all very pleased with Father.
LUDOVICO: And it strikes me I’m starting to learn a thing or two about science.” (P. 20)
SCENE 3: Tracks an entire night until Church bells ring
“SAGREDO: But this goes against two thousand years of astronomy.” (p. 21)
“GALILEO: The moon can be an earth complete with mountains and valleys, and the earth can be a star. An ordinary celestial body, one of thousands…Both of them are lit by the sun, and so they give off light. What the moon is to us, we are to the moon. It sees us sometimes as a crescent, sometimes as a half moon, sometimes full and sometimes not at all.
SAGREDO: In other words,t ehre’s no difference between he moon and earth…
GALILEO: Exactly. And that’s what we can see. Keep your eye glued to the telescope, Sagredo, my friend. What you’re seeing is the fact that there is no difference between heaven and earth. Today is 10 January 1610. Today mankind can write in its diary: Got rid of Heaven.” (p. 22)
“SAGREDO: My dear Mr. Priuli. I may not be competent to judge this instrument’s value for commerce but its value for philosophy is so boundless that…
PROCURATOR: For philosophy indeed. What’s a mathematician like MR. Galilei go tot do with philosophy?” (p. 23)
“GALILEO: Then I like buying books about other things besides physics, and I like a decent meal. Good meals are when I get most of my ideas.” (p. 24)
“GALILEO: I’m about to show you one of the shining milk-white clouds in the Milky Way. Tell me what it’s made up of. SAGREDO: They’re stars, an infinite number. GALILEO: In Orion alone there are 500 fixed stars.T hose are the countless other worlds,t he remote stars the man they burned talked about. He never saw them, he just expected them to be there.” (p. 25)
“SAGREDO: In other words that it’s just a lot of stars. Then where’s God?
GALILEO: In ourselves or nowhere.” (p. 26)
Galileo asserts that the reason Bruno was burned at the stake was “Because he couldn’t prove it. Because it was just a hypothesis.” (p. 26)
Sagredo questions whether that makes any difference and Galileo replies with “A tremendous difference. Look, Sagredo, I believe in Humanity, which means to say I believe in human reason. If it weren’t for that belief each morning I wouldn’t have the power to get out of bed.
SAGREDO: Then let me tell you something. I don’t. Forty years spent among human beings has again and again brought it home to me that they are not open to reason. Show them a comet with a red tail, scare them out of their wits, and they’ll rush out of their houses and break their legs. But try making one rational statement to them, and back it up with seven proofs, and they’ll just laugh at you.
GALILEO: That’s quite untrue, and it’s a slander. I don’t see how you can love science if that’s what you believe. Nobody who isn’t dead can fail to be convinced by proof.
SAGREDO: How can you imagine their pathetic shrewdness has anything to do with reason?
GALILEO: I’m not talking about their shrewdness. I know they call a donkey a horse when they want to sell it and a horse a donkey when they want to buy. That’s the kind of shrewdness you mena. But the horny-handed old woman who gives her mule an extra bundle of hay on the eve of a journey, the sea captain who allows for storms and doldrums when laying in stores, the child who puts on his cap once they have convinced himt hat it may rain: these are the people I pin my hopes to, because they all accept proof. Yes, I believe in reason’s gentle tyranny over people. Sooner or later they have to give in to it. Nobody can go on indefinitely watching me—(he drops a pebble on the ground)—drop a pebble, then say it doesn’t fall. No human being is capable of that. The lure of a proof is too great. Nearly everyone succumbs to it; sooner or later we all do. Thinking is one of the chief pleasures of the human race.” (p. 27)
“GALILEO: It’s a question about the heavens, something to do with the stars. This is it: are we to take it that the greater goes round the smaller, or does the smaller go round the greater?
MRS SARTI (cautiously): I never know where I am with you, Mr. Galilei. Is that a serious question, or are you pulling my leg again?
GALILEO: A serious question.
MRS. SARTI: Then I’ll give you a quick answer. Do I serve your dinner or do you serve mine?
GALILEO: You serve mine. Yesterday it was burnt.
MRS. SARTI: And why was it burnt? Because I had to fetch you your shoes in the middle of my cooking. Didn’t I fetch you your shoes?
GALILEO: I suppose so.
MRS. SARTI: You see, you’re the one who has studied and is able to pay. (Mrs. Sarti, amused, goes off)
GALILEO: Don’t tell me people like that can’t grasp the truth. They grab at it.” (p. 28)
“VIRGINIA: What sort of night was it, Father?
GALILEO: Clear.
VIRGINIA: Can I have a look?
GALILEO: What for? (Virginia does not know what to say.) It’s not a toy.
VIRGINIA: No, Father.
GALILEO: Anyhow the tube is a flop, soeverybody will soon be telling you. You can get it for 3 scudi all over the palce and the Dutch invented it ages ago.
VIRGINIA: Hasn’t it helped you see anything fresh in the sky?
GALILEO: Nothing in your line. Just a few dim little spots to the left of a large planet; I’ll have to do something to draw attention to them. (talking past his daughter to Sagredo)…Run along to your mass. (exit Virginia)” (p. 29)
“SAGREDO (reads out the end of the letter): ‘My most ardent desire is to be closer to you, the rising sun that will illuminate this age.’ The grand duke of Florence is aged nine.
GALILEO: That’s it. I see; you think my letter is too submissive. I’m wondering if it is submissive enough—not too formal, lacking in authentic servility. A reticent letter would be all right for someone whose distinction it is to have proved Aristotle correct, but not for me. A man like me can only get a halway decent job by crawling on his belly. And you know what I think of people whose brains arent’ capable of filling their stomachs.” (p. 30)
“SAGREDO: How could the people in power give free reint o somebody who knows the truth, even if it concerns the remotest stars? Do you imagine the Pope will hear the truth when you tell him he’s wrong, and not just hear that he’s wrong?...You may be a skeptic in science, but you’re childishly credulous as soon as snything seems likely to help you pursue it. You don’t believe in Aristotle, but you do believe in the Grand Duke of Florence. Just now, when I was watching you at the telescope and you were watching those new stars, it seemed to me I was watching you stand on blazing faggots; and when you said you believed in proof I smelt burnt flesh. I am fond of science, my friend, but I am fonder of you. Don’t go to Florence, Galileo.” (p. 30-31)
“GALILEO: I’m going to take them by the scruff of the neck and force them to look through this telescope.” (p. 30)
SCENE 4
“PHILOSOPHER: The universe of the divine Aristotle…add up to an edifice of such exquirite proportions that we should think twice before disrupting its harmony.” (p. 37)
“GALILEO: How about your highness now taking a look at his impossible and unnecessary stars through this telescope?” (p. 37)
“FEDERZONI: You’ll be surprised: the crystal spheres don’t exist. PHILOSOPHER: Any textbook will tell you that they do, my good man. FEDERZONI: Right, then let’s have new textbooks.” (p. 38)
“GALILEO: Gentlemen, in all humility I ask you to go by the evidence of your eyes.
MATHEMATICIAN: My dear Galileo, I may strike you as very old fashioned, but I’m in the habit of reading Aristotle now and again, and there, I can assure you, I trust the evidence of my eyes.
GALILEO: I produce my observations and everyone laughs: I offer my telescope so they can see for themselves, and everyone quotes Aristotle.
FEDERZONI: The fellow had no telescope.
MATHEMATICIAN: That’s just it.” (p. 39)
“GALILEO: Truth is born of the times, not of authority. Our ignorance is limitless: let us lop one cubic millimeter off it. Why try to be clever now that we at last have a chance of being just a little less stupid? …
PHILOSOPHER: You highness, ladies and gentlemen,I just wonder where all this is leading?
GALILEO: I should say our duty as scientists is not to ask where the truth is leading.
PHILOSOPHER: Mr. Galilei, truth might lead us anywhere!
GALILEO: Your highness. At night nowadays telescopes are being pointed at the sky all over Italy. Jupiter’s moons may not bring down the price of milk. But they have never been seen before, and yet all the same they exist. From this the man in the street concludes that a lot else might exist if only he opened his eyes. It is your duty to confirm this. What has made Italy prick up its ears is not the movements of a few distant stars but the news that hitherto unquestioned dogmas have begun totter—and we all know that there are too many of those. Gentlemen, don’t let us fight for questionable truths…They don’t read much, but rely on the evidence of their five sense, without all that much fear as to where such evidence is going to lead them…Very much like our mariners who a hundred years ago abandoned our coasts without knowing what other coasts they would encounter, if any. It looks as if the only way today to find that supreme curiosity which was the real glory of classical Greece is to go down to the docks.” (p. 40)
SCENE 6:
“MONK: Which is better, I ask you: to have an eclipse of the moon happen three days later than the calendar says, or never ot have eternal salvation at all?” (p. 49)
“SECOND ASTRONOMER: There ARE phenomena that present difficulties for us astronomers, but does mankind have to understand eeverything?” (p. 49)
“THE VERY THIN MONK: They degrade humanity’s dwelling place to a wandering star. Men, animals, plants and the kingdoms of the earth get packed on a cart and driven in a crcle round an empty sky.Heaven and earth are no longer distinct, according to them. Heaven because it is made of earth and earth because it is just on more heavenly body. There is no more difference between top and bottom, between eternal and ephemeral. That we are short-lived we know. Now they tell us that heaven is short-lived too. There are sun, moon and stars , and we live on the earth, it used ot be said, and so the Book has it; but now these people are saying the earth is another star. Wait till they say man and animal are not distinct either, man himself is an animal, there’s nothing but animals!” (p. 49)
“VERY OLD CARDINAL: I am told that this Mr. Galilei moves mankind away from the centre of the universe and dumps it somewhere on the edge. Clearly this makes him an enemy of the human race. We must treat him as such. Mankind is the crown of creation, as every child knows, God’s highest and dearest creature. How could He take something so miraculous, the fruit of so much effort, and lodge it on a remote, minor, constantly elusive star? Would he send His Son to such a place?...I am not just any old creature on any insignificant star briefly circling in no particular place. I am walking, with a firm step, on a fixed earth, it is motionless, it is the centre of the universe, I am at the centre and the eye of the Creator falls upon me and me alone…In this way everything comes visibly and incontrovertibly to depend on me, mankind, God’s great effort, the creature on whom it all centres, made in God’s own image, indestructible and…(he collapses).” (p. 51)
“LITTLE MONK: confidentially: You’ve won. EXIT. GALILEO (trying to hold him back): IT has won. Not me: reason has won. (The little monk has already left) (p. 51)
SCENE 7:
“VIRGINIA: I’d like to look beautiful. GALILEO: You’d better, or they’ll go back to wondering whether it turns or not.” (p. 52)
“THE FIRST SECRETARY: The first carnival since the plague years.” (p. 53)
“BARBERINI: ‘The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his palce where he arose.’ So says Solomon, and what does Galileo say? GALILEO: When I was so high—(he indicates with his hand)—your Eminence, I stood on a ship and called out ‘The shore is moving away.’ Today I realize that the shore was standing still and the ship moving away.” (p. 54)
“BARBERINI: Unfortunatley I once studied some astronomy, Bellarmin. It sticks to you like the itch.” (p. 54)
Barberini describes Rome’s origins: “Two little boys, so runs the legend, were given milk and shelter by a she-wolf. Since that time all her children have had to pay for their milk.” (p. 55)
“BELLARMIN: Think for an instant how much tought and effort it cost the Fathers of the Curch and their countless successors to put some sense into this appalling world of ours…We have shifted the responsibility for such occurrences as we cannot understand—life is made up of them—to a higher Being, and argued that all of them contribute to the fulfillment of certain intentions, that the whole thing is taking place according to a great plan.” (p. 56)
“BELLARMIN: Wouldn’t you also think it possible that the Creator had a better idea of what he was making than those he has created? GALILEO: But surely, gentlemen, mankind may not only get the motions of the stars wrong but the Bible too?” (p. 56)
“BARBERINI: Don’t tip the baby out with the bathwater, Galileo my friend. WE shan’t. We need you more than you need us.” (p. 57)
“BARBERINI: At which he turns himself back into a lamb. You too, my dear fellow, ought really to have come disguised as a good orthodox thinker. It’s my own mask that permits me certain freedoms today.” (p. 57)
“VIRGINIA: You are very kind, your Eminence. I really understand practically nothing about such things. THE INQUISITOR: Indeed? (he laughs) In the fisherman’s house no one eats fish, eh? It will tickle your father to hear that almost all your knowledge about the world of the stars comes ultimately from me, my child.” (p. 59)
SCENE 8:
“GALILEO: That might come in handy if it led you to admit that two and two sometimes make four.” (p. 61)
“THE LITTLE MONK: …the potential dangers for humanity in wholly unrestricted research…” (p. 61)
“THE LITTLE MONK: They have been assured that God’s eye is always on them—probingly, even anxiously—that the whole drama of the world is constructed around hem so that they, the performers, may prove themselves int heir greater or lesser roles. What would my people say if I told them that they happen to be on a small knob of stone twisting endlessly through the void round a second-rate star, just one among myriads? What would be the value or necessity then of so much patience, such understanding of their own poverty? What would be the use of Holy Scripture, which has explained and justified it all—the sweat, the patience, the hunger, the submissiveness—and now turns out to be full of errors? No: I can see their eyes wavering, I can see them letting their spoons drop, I can see how betrayed and deceived they will feel. So nobody’s eye is on us, they’ll say. Have we got to look after ourselves, old, uneducated and worn-out as we are? The only part anybody has devised for us is this wretched, earthly one, to be played out on a tiny star wholly dependent on others, with nothing revolving round it. Our poverty has no meaning: hunger is no trial of strength, it’s merely not having eaten: effort is no virtue, it’s just bending and carrying. Can you see now why I read into the Holy Congregations decree a noble motherly compassion; a vast goodness of soul?” (p. 62-63)
“GALILEO: Goodness of soul! Aren’t you really saying that there’s nothing for them, the wine has all been drunk, their lips are parched, so they had better kiss the assock? Why is there nothing for them? Why does order in this country meant he orderliness of a bare cupboard, and necessity nothing but the need to work oneself to death? When there are teeming vineyards and cornfields on every side? Your Campagna peasants are paying for the wars which the representative of gentle Jesus is waging in Germany and Spain. Why does he make the earth the centre of the universe? So that the See of St. Peter can be the centre of the earth! That’s what it is all about. You’re right, it’s not about the planets, it’s about the peasants of the Campagna. And don’t talk to me about the beauty given to phenomena by the patina of age! You know how the oyster produces its pearl? By a mortally dangerous disease which involves taking some unassimilable foreign body, like a grain of sand, and wrapping it in a slimy ball. The process all but kills it. To hell with the pearl, give me the healthy oyster. Virtues are not an offshoot of poverty, my dear fellow. If your people were happy and prosperous they could develop the virtues of happiness and properity. At present the virtues of exhaustion derive from exhausted fields, and I reject them. Sir, my new pumps will perform more miracles int hat direction than all your ridiculous superhuman slaving. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’, since your fields are nto fruitful and you are being decimated by wars. Am I supposed to tell your people lies?” (p. 63)
The Little Monk objects that they “have the higest of all motives for keeping our mouths shut—the peace of mind of the less fortunate” and then Galileo points out that the fruits of labor are supplying the state with the means to bribe Galileo into silence.
“GALILEO: If I were to agree to keep my mouth shut my motives would be thoroughly low ones: an easy life, freedom from persecution, and so on.” (p. 64)
“GALILEO: The sum of the angles ina triangle cannot be varied to suit the Vatican’s convenience. I can’t calculate the courses of flying bodies in such a way as also to explain witches taking trips on broomsticks.” (p. 64)
“THE LITTLE MONK: But don’t you think that the truth will get through without us, so long as it’s true?
GALILEO: No, no, no. The only truth that gets through will be what we force through: the victory of reason will be the victory of people who are prepared to reason, nothing else. Your picture of the Campagna peasants makes them look like the moss ont ehir own huts. How can anyone imagine that the sum of the angles ina triangle conflicts with THEIR needs? But unless they get moving and learn how to think, they will find event he finest irrigation systems won’t help them. Oh, to hell with it: I see your people’s divine patience, but where is their divine anger?
THE LITTLE MONK: They are tired.” (p. 64-65)
“GALILEO: An apple from the tree of knowledge! He’s wolfing it down. He is damned forever, but he has got to wolf it down, the poor glutton. I sometimes think I’ll have myself shut up ina dungeon ten fathoms below ground in complete darkness if only it will help me to find out what light is. And the worst thing is that what I know I have to tell people, like a lover, like a drunkard, like a traitor. It is an absolute vice and leads to disaster. How long can I go on shouting it inot the void, that’s the question.” (p. 65)
SCENE 9:
“GALILEO: What do you want to explain? You are fully in line with the Holy Congregation’s decree of 1616. You cannot be faulted. You did of course study mathematics here, but that’s no reason why we should need to hear you say that two and two makes four. You are quite within your rights in saying that this stone—(he takes a little stone from his pocket and throws it down to the hall)—has just flown up to the ceiling…Listent o me: someone who doesn’t know the truth is just thick-headed. But someone who does know it and call it a lie is a crook. Get out of my house.” (p. 67)
“SARTI: But nobody goes blindly into a serious affair like this. I really think you ought to go to a proper astronomer at the university and get himt o cast your horoscope so you know what you’re in for. Why are you laughing?
VIRGINIA: Because I’ve been.
SARTI (very inquisitive): What did he say?
VIRGINIA: For three months I’ll have ot be careful, because the sun will be in Aries, but then I shall get a particularly favourable ascendant and the clouds will part. So long as I keep my eye on Jupiter I can travel as much as I like, because I’m an Aries.
SARTI: And Ludovico?
VIRGINIA: He’s a Leo. (little pause) That’s supposed to be sensual.” (p. 68)
“ANDREA: Mother’s got great baskets full of letters. The whole of Europe wants to know what you think, you’ve such a reputation now, you can’t just say nothing.
GALILEO: Rome allowed me to get a reputation because I said nothing.
FEDERZONI: But you can’t afford to go on saying nothing now.
GALILEO: Nor can I afford to be reoasted over a wood fire like a ham.” (p. 69)
“FEDERZONI: The needle’s floating. Holy Aristotle, they never checked up on him! (They laugh.)
GALILEO: One of the main reasons why the sciences are so poor is that they imagine they are so rich. It isn’t their jobt o throw open the door to infinite wisdom but to put a limit to infinite error.” (p. 70-71)
“VIRGINIA: Father says theologians have their bells to ring; physicists have their laughter.” (p. 71)
“GALILEO: Things are beginning to move. Federzoni, we may yet see the day when we no longer have to look over our shoulder like criminals eveyr time we say two and two equals four.” (p. 72)
“GALILEO: I value the consolations of the flesh. I’ve no use for those chicken-hearts who see them as weaknesses. Pleasure takes some achieving, I’d say.” (p. 72)
“GALILEO: You think your peasants will go by the saintliness of their mistress in deciding whether to pay rent or not? LUDOVICO: In a sense, yes.” (p.73)
“THE LITTLE MONK: God made the physical world, Ludovico; God made the human brain; God will permit physics.” (p. 74)
“MRS. SARTI: If I choose to forfeit eternal bliss by sticking with a heretic that’s my business, but you have no right to trample all over your daughter’s happiness with your great feet.
GALILEO (gruffly): Bring the telescope.” (p. 74)
“LUDOVICO: You, Mr. Galileo, may see rich cornfields from your coach as you pass, you eat our olives and our cheese,w ithout a thought, and you have no idea how much trouble it takes to produce them, how much supervision. GALILEO: Young man, I do not eat my olives without a thought. “ (p. 75)
“THE LITTLE MONK (amazed): He’s theatrening you.
GALILEO: Yes, I might stir up his peasants to think new thoughts. And his servants and his stewards.
FEDERZONI: How? None of them can read Latin.
GALILEO: I imhgt write in the language of the people, for the many, rather than in Latin for the few. Our new thoughts call for people who work with their hands. Who else cares about knowing the causes of things? People who only see bread on their table don’t want to know how it got baked; that lot would sooner thank God than thank the baker. But the people who make the bread will understand that nothing moves unless it has been made to move. Your sister pressing olives, Fulganzio, won’t be astounded but will probably laugh when she hears that the sun isn’t a golden coat of arms but a motor: that the earth moves because the sun sets it moving.
LUDOVICO: You will always be the slave of your passions.” (p. 75-76)
“ANDREA: And our kindest regards to all the Marsilis.
FEDERZONI: Who command the earth to stand still so their castles shan’t tumble down.
ANDREA: And the Cenzis and the Villanis!
FEDERZONI: The Cervillis!
ANDREA: The Lecchis!
FEDERZONI: The Pirleonis!
ANDREA: Who are prepared to kiss the pope’s toe only if he uses it to kick the people with!” (p. 76)
“GALILEO: My object is not to establish that I was right but to find out if I am. Abandon hope, I say, all ye who enter on observation. They may be vapours, they may be spots, but before we assume that they are spots—which is what would suit us best—we should assume that they are fried fish. In fact we shall question everything all over again. And we shall go forward not in seven-league boots but at a snail’s pace. And what we discover today we shall wipe off the slate tomorrow and only write it up again once we have again discovered it. And whatever we wish to find we shall regard, once found, with particular mistrust. So we shall approach the observation of the sun with an irrecovable determination to establish that the earth does NOT move. Only when we have failed, have been utterly and hopelessly beaten and are licking our wounds in the profoundest depression, shall we start asking if we weren’t right after all, and the earth does go round. (with a twinkle) But once every other hypothesis has crumbled in our hands thent here will be no mercy for those who failed to research, and who go on talking all the same. Take the cloth off the telescope and point it at the sun!” (p. 76-77)
“GALILEO: I’ve got to know.” (p. 77)
SCENE 10:
“When the Almighty made the universe / He made the earth and then he made the sun / Then round the earth he bade the sund to turn—That’s in the Bible, Genesis, Chapter One. / And fromt hat time all creatures here below / Were in obedient circles meant to go.” (p. 79)
“Then tenant gives his landlord hell / Not caring in the least. /His wife now feeds her children well /On the milk she fed the priest.” (p. 80)
“BOTH: Good people who have trouble here below / In serving cruel lords and gentle Jesus /Who bid you turn the other cheek just so / They’re better placed to strike the second blow: / Obedience isn’t going to cure your woe / So each of you wake up, and do just as he pleases!” (p. 81)
SCENE 11:
“VANNI: Your name was mentioned upstairs. They’re blaming you for those pamphlets against the Bible tha have been selling ll over the place lately.
GALILEO: I know nothing about pamphlets. The Bible and Homer are my preferred reading.
VANNI: Even if that weren’t so I’d like to take this chance to say that we manufacturers are behind you. I’m not the sort of fellow that knows much about the stars, but to me you’re the man who’s battling for freedom to teach what’s new.” (p. 83)
“VANNI: If anybody ever tries launching anything against you, please remember you’ve friends in every branch of business. You’ve got the north Italian cities behind you, sire.
GALILEO: As far as I know nobody’s thinking of launching anything against me.
VANNI: No?
GALILEO: No.
VANNI: I think you’d be better off in Venice. Fewer clerics. You ould take up the cudgels from there. I’ve a travelling coach and horses, Mr. Galilei.
GALILEO: I don’t see myself as refugee. I like my comforts.
VANNI: Surely. But from what I heard upstairs I’d say there was a hurry. It’s my impression they’d be gald to know you weren’t in Florence just now.
GALILEO: Nonsense. The Grand Duke is my pupil, and what’’s more the pope himself would never stand for any kind of attempt to trap me.
VANNI: I’m not sure you’re good at distinguishing your friends from your enemies, Mr. Galilei.
GALILEO: I can distinguish power from impotence. (He goes off brusquely) VANNI: Right. I wish you luck. (Exit)
GALILEO: (returning to Virginia) Every local Tom, Dick, and Harry with an axe to grind wants me to be his spokesman, particularly in places wehre it’s not exactly helpful to me. I’ve written a book about the mechanics of the universe, that’s all. What people make of it or don’t make of it isn’t my business.” (p. 84)
“VIRGINIA: What’s the Cardinal Inquisitor doing in Florence, Father?
GALILEO: I don’t know. He behaved quite respectfully. I knew what I was doing when I came to Florence and kept quiet for all those years. They’ve paid me such tributes that now they’re forced to accept me as I am.” (p. 85)
SCENE 12:
“POPE: I am not going to have the multiplication table broken. No!
THE INQUISITOR: Ah, it’s the multiplication table, not the spirit of insubordination and doubt: that’s what these people will tell you. But it isn’t the multiplication table. No, a terrible restlessness has descended on the world. It is the restlessness of their own brain which these people have transferred to the unmoving earth. They shout ‘But look at the figures’. But where do their figures come from? Everybody knows they originate in doubt. These people doubt everything. Are we to base humans ociety on doubt and no longer on faith? ‘You are my lord, but I doubt if that’s a good thing’. ‘This is your house and your wife, but I doubt if they shouldn’t be mine.’ “ (p. 87)
“INQUISITOR: For the last fifteen years Germany has been running with blood, and men have quoted the Bible as they hacked each other to pieces.” (p. 88)
“INQUISITOR: So what do these wretched mathematicians do but go and point their tubes at the sky and inform the whole world that your Holiness is hopelessly at sea in the one area nobody has yet denied you?” (p. 88)
“INQUISITOR:…Thanks to the example of this wretched Florentine all Italy, down to the last stable boy, is now gossiping about the phases of Venus, nor can they fail at the same time to think about a lot of other irksome things that schools and others hold to be incontrovertible. Give the weakness of hteir flesh and their liability to excesses of all kinds, what would the effect tbe if they were to believe in nothing but their own reason, which this maniac has set up as the sole tribunal?” (p. 88)
“INQUISITOR: The abolition of top and bottom, for one. They’re not needed any longer.” (p. 88)
“INQUISITOR: This evil man knows what he is up to when he writes his astronomical works not in Latin but in the idiom of fishwives and wool merchants.” (p. 89)
“POPE: But those star charts are based on his heretical theories. They presuppose certain notions on the part of the heavenly bodies which are impossible if you reject his doctrine. You can’t conemn the doctrine and accept the charts.
INQUISITOR: Why not? It’s the only way.
POPE: This shuffling is getting on my nerves. I cannot help listening to it.” (p. 89)
“INQUISITOR: Practically speaking one wouldn’t have to push it very far with him. He is a man of the flesh. He would give in immediately.
POPE: He enjoys himself in more ways than any man I have ever met. His thinking springs from sensuality. Give him an old wine or a new idea, and he cannot say no.” (p. 89)
"POPE: At the very most he can be shown the instruments.
INQUISITOR: That will be enough your Holiness. Instruments are Mr. Galilei’s speciality.” (p. 90)
SCENE 13:
After being informed of Galileo’s immiment recantation: “ANDREA: The moon is and earth and has no light of its own….And he is the one who showed us this. LITTLE MONK: And no force will help them to make what has been seen unseen.” (p. 93)
“ANDREA: So force won’t do the trick. There are some things it can’t do. So stupidity has been defeated, it’s not invulnerable. So man is not afraid of death. FEDERZONI: This truly is the start of the age of knowledge. This is the hour of its birth. Imagine if he had recanted.” (p. 93)
“FEDERZONI: Like nightfall in the morning, it would have been.
ANDREA: As if the mountain had said ‘I’m a lake.’” (p. 94)
“FEDERZONI: You know, he never paid you for your work. You could never publish your own stuff or buy yourself new breeches. You stood for it because it was ‘working for the sake of science’.
ANDREA: (loudly) Unhappy the land that has no heroes!” (p. 94)
“GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.” (p. 95)
SCENE 14:
“VIRGINIA: Section four: with respect to Holy Church’s policy concerning the unrest in the Arsenal in Venice I agree with the attitude adopted by Cardinal Spoletti towards the disaffected rope-makers…
GALILEO: Yes. (He dictates) I agree with the attitude adopted by Cardinal Spoletti towards the disaffected rope-makers, namely that it is better to hand out soup to them in the name of Christian brotherly love than to pay them more their hawsers and bell ropes. Especially as it seems wiser to encourage their faith rather than their acquisitiveness. The apostle Paul says ‘Charity never faileth.’ How’s that?” (p. 97)
“ANDREA: Your utter capitulation has been effective. We understand the authorities are happy to note that not a single paper expounding new theories has been published in Italy since you toed the line…When [Descartes] heard about your recantation he shoved his treatise on the nature of light away in a drawer…The only way I can do research is by going to Holland…Federzoni is back to grinding lenses in some shop in Milan…Fulganzio, our little monk, has given up science and gone back to the bosom of the church.” (p. 100)
“GALILEO: Barberini called it the itch. He wasn’t entirely free of it himself. I’ve been writing again…Oh, they let me have pens and paper. My masters aren’t stupid. They realize that deeply engrained vices can’t be snapped off just like that…
ANDREA: They’re making you plough water. They allow you pens and paper to keep you quiet. How can you possibly write when you know that’s the purpose?
GALILEO: Oh, I’m a creature of habit.” (p. 101)
“ANDREA: And we thought you had deserted! No voice against you was louder than mine!
GALILEO: Very proper. I taught you science and I denied the truth.
ANDREA: This alters everything. Everything.
GALILEO: Really?
ANDREA: You were hiding the truth. From the enemy. Even in matters of ethics you were centuries ahead of us.
GALILEO: Elaborate that, will you Andrea?
ANDREA: Like the man in the street we said ‘He’ll die, but he’ll never recant.’ You came back: ‘I’ve recanted, but I’m going to live.’—‘Your hands are stained’, we said. You’re saying: ‘Better stained than empty.’” (p. 102)
“ANDREA: SO in ’33 when you chose to recant a popular point in your doctrine I ought to have known that you were simply backing out of a hopeless political wrangle in order to get on with the real business of science.
GALILEO: Which is…
ANDREA: Studying the properties of motion, mother of those machines which alone are goingt o make the earth so good to live on that heaven can be cleared away.
GALILEO: Aha.
ANDREA: You gained the leisure to write a scientific work which could be written by nobody else. I fyou had ended up at the stake in a halo of flames the other side would have won.
GALILEO: They did win. And there is no scientific work that can only be written by one particular man.
ANDREA: Why did you recant, then?
GALILEO: I recanted because I was afraid of physical pain.
ANDREA: No!
GALILEO: They showed me the instruments.
ANDREA: So it wasn’t planned?
GALILEO: It was not.
Pause.
ANDREA (loudly): Science makes only one demand: contribution to science.
GALILEO: And I met it. Welcome to the gutter, brother in science and cousin in betrayal! Do you eat fish? I have fish. What stinks is not my fish but me. I sell out, you are a buyer. O irresistible glimpse of ht ebook, the sacred commodity! The mouth waters and the curses drown. The great whore of Babylon, the murderous beast,t he scarlet woman, opens her thighs and everything is altered. Blessed be our horse-trading, whitewashing, death-fearing community!
ANDREA: Fearing death is human. Human weaknesses don’t matter to science. (this contradicts what he said in court at the recantation)
GALILEO: Don’t they?—My dear Sarti, even as I now am I think I can still give you a tip or two as to what matters to that science you have dedicated yourself to…In my spare time, of which I have plenty, I have gone over my case and considered how it is going to be judged by that world of science of which I no longer count myself a member. Evena wool merchant has not only to buy cheap and sell dear but also to ensure that the wool trade continues unimpeded. The pursuit of science seems to me to demand particular courage in this respect. It deals in knowledge procured through doubt. Creating knowledge for all about all, it aims to turn all of us into doubters. Now the bulk of the population is kept by its princes, landlords, and priests in a pearly haze of superstition and old saws which cloak what these people are up to. The poverty of the many is as old as the hills, and from pulpit and lecture platform we hear that it is as hard as the hills to get rid of. Our new art of doubting delighted the mass audience. They tore the telescope out of our hands and trained it on their tormentors, the princes, landlords and priests. These selfish and domineering men, having greedily exploited the fruits of science, foundt hat the cold eye of science had been turned on a primaeval but contrived poverty that could clearly be swept away if they were swept away themselves. They showered us with threats and bribes, irresistible to feeble sould. But can we deny ourselves to the crowd and still remain scientists? The movements of the heavenly bodies have become more comprehemsible, but the people are as far as ever from calculating the moves of their rulers. The battle for a measurable heaven has been won thanks to doubt; but thanks to credulity the Rome houswife’s battle for milk will be lost tima nd time again. Scinece, Sarti, is involved in both these battles.” (p. 104)
GALILEO: To what end are you working? Presumably for the principle that science’s sole aim must be to lighten the burden of human existence. If the scientists, brough to heel by self-interested rulers, limit themselves to piling up knowledge for knowledge’s sake, then science can be crippled and your new machines will lead to nothing but new impositions. You may in due course discover all that there is to discover, and your progress will nonetheless be nothing but a a progress away form mankind. The gap between you and it may one day become so wide that your cry of triumph at some new achievement will be echoed by a universal cry of horror.—As a scientist I had a unique opportunity. In my day astronomy emerged into the market place. Given this unique situation, if one man had put up a fight it might have had tremendous repercussions. Had I stood firmt he scientists could have developed something like the doctors’ Hippocratic oath, a vow to use their knowledge exclusively for mankind’s benefit. As things are,t he best htat can be hoped for is a race of inventive dwarfs who can be hired for any purpose. What’s more, Sarti, I have come to the conclusion that I was never in any real danger. For a few eyars I was as strong as the authorities. And I handed my knowledge to those in power for htem to use, fail to use, misuse—whatever best suited their objectives. ..I betrayed my profession. A man who does what I did cannot be tolerate dint he ranks of science.
VIRGINIA: You are accepted in the ranks of the faithful.
GALILEO: Correct. –Now I must eat.” (p. 104-105)
“GALILEO: What’s the night like?
VIRGINIA (at the window): Clear.” (p, 105)
SCENE 15:
“May you now guard science’s light, Kindle it and use it right, Lest it be a flame to fall / Downward to consume us all.” (p. 129)