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Br. Paul M. Nguyen, OMV

Modern Church History, Orlando
March 27, 2015
On Bellarmine and Galileo and Fidelity to the Church
St. Robert Bellarmine, SJ, wrote in 1615 to Foscarini, provincial of the Carmelites, who
had tried to reconcile Galileos cosmology and astronomy with the Scriptures. Bellarmine
stubbornly challenged the attempt for several reasons, seemingly unable to find neutral ground to
verify the accuracy of the empirical case and subsequently holding fast to orthodox positions on
the interpretations of key passages of Scripture that referred to astronomical observations and
understandings.
Bellarmines rebuttal comes in three points. The first concerns method and approach. He
commends Foscarini and Galileo for speaking hypothetically, leaving room for deviation in
specific cases; he simultaneously distances Copernicus from them by stating that he spoke
absolutely. Bellarmine affirms that a system that explains celestial movements by fixing the sun
and letting the earth revolve about it can still fittingly explain common observations. However,
in the next breath, he takes issue with Foscarinis general interpretations of scripture that do not
follow through to applying them to particular observations and aspects of the new theory.
Bellarmine also claims that philosophers and scholastic theologians are greatly offended by this
proposal of the revolution of the earth about the sun, which injures the faith and contradicts the
Scriptures.
His second point concerns citations of scripture that state literally and have always been
interpreted to reflect the movement of the sun, moon, and stars about the stationary earth, which
itself is emphasis. He equates mistakes on this plane with other points of doctrine that are evident
from the Scriptures.

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In his third point, Bellarmine approaches particular passages and gives the analogy of
Solomon speaking about the rising and setting of the sun compared to a man on a ship departing
the shore, to accentuate the notion of the perspective of the observer. He claims that Solomon did
not only claim to record his own observations, subject to his point of view, but, as an inspired
author of Sacred Scripture, to record the fullness of truth concerning the movement of these
heavenly bodies.
This is the error of St. Robert Bellarmine on this issue. He did not take issue with a
variety of mathematical models that, for the computational convenience set things up differently,
but he took issue with the proposition that the bodies out there actually corresponded to that
mathematical model. This is perhaps a fundamental reason why the Church thinks in centuries,
in order to test with time the theories that arise, to obtain a sufficiently neutral perspective that is
anchored outside the contended sides of the debate. In this case, the wise observer here could and
did derive rules of motion and computational models that satisfied all of the observations
(especially the more accurate ones); it would ultimately take an observer at a point in space on
neither the earth nor the sun to witness the veracity of the new model.
But that empirical evidence having been obtained, the Church still needed to reconcile
those conclusions with the standing tradition of the interpretation of passages of Scripture that
refer to the movements freshly corrected. Contrary to Bellarmines piercing literary mode of
interpretation, they would have to be held only in an analog with respect to the speaker/author,
and not from the divine objective perspective. This challenged his faith in the literal accuracy of
the inspired texts, a laudable piety that nonetheless failed in striking the balance between faith
and reason in this case. History shows that with patience and diligent investigation with the eyes
of faith, the truth that sustains both human experience and the inspired Scriptures is revealed.