Galileo, Astronomer & Person of Prayer

 

A historian has discovered that a 16th century printing of The Almagest—a highly influential ancient astronomy text—contains extensive annotations from Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who later overthrew that text’s conception of a geocentric cosmos.Reproduced with permission of the National Central Library of Florence

The Lord is gracious and merciful,
    slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
 The Lord is good to all,
    and his compassion is over all that he has made.

 All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord,
    and all your faithful shall bless you.
 They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom
    and tell of your power,
 to make known to all people your[b] mighty deeds
    and the glorious splendor of your[c] kingdom.
 Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
    and your dominion endures throughout all generations.

                                                                    psalm 145: 8-13 NRsvue 

Earlier this year I wrote about the unexpected discovery of a copy of an important medieval text with what had been a partially blank page on which Psalm 145 had been written in and annotated. Ivan Malara, the scholar who found this insertion recognized the hand-writing of Galileo, a supposition that has now been supported by a number of other experts in the field. Here are a couple of paragraphs from my March blog entry: 

Here is the description from an article in the Smithsonian Magazine: 

Historian Ivan Malara spotted the inscriptions in January while leafing through a 1551 copy of the Almagest at Italy’s National Central Library of Florence. Malara realized that a loose page in the text—a second-century C.E. astronomical manual by the Greco-Roman polymath Ptolemy, which asserts that Earth is at the center of the universe—contained a transcription of Psalm 145. The handwriting was reminiscent of Galileo’s, an astronomer often lionized as the “father of modern science.” Additional annotations in the book’s margins similarly matched Galileo’s hand.

There are lots of reasons to remember Galileo, not the least of which is the conflict between the astronomer and the Roman Catholic church regarding his proposition that our solar system is heliocentric rather than geocentric .Galileo was tried for his supposedly heretical premise that the Earth and other planets were in orbit around the Sun rather than the Earth being at the centre. He did avoid torture or execution but as the result of two trials for heresy he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life and ordered not to promulgate his dangerous views. 

The update to this story was about the authentication but there was something else that caught my attention. Here is a paragraph from a recent Smithsonian piece: 

At first, the psalm—both a prayer and a poem exalting God’s greatness—had bemused Malara. This was the only early printing of The Almagest he had seen with a biblical reference, and it seemed contrary to both the modern stereotype of Galileo flouting religious authority and Malara’s own experience studying Galileo’s writings. But in another 16th century printing of The Almagest in Florence, he found a note by an unknown author claiming that “Galileo, before studying Ptolemy, offered a prayer to God.” That jibes with a 1673 letter written by the mathematician Alessandro Marchetti, who also said Galileo prayed each time he sat down with The Almagest.

The story many of us have heard through the years is that Galileo poked the Church in the eye and the mighty church poked back. We have come to realize that Jesuit scholars were coming to similar conclusions about our heliocentric solar system around the same time as Galileo. Now we're told that Galileo was a person of prayer and brought those sensibilities to his important work.

We live and we learn, thanks be to God, Creator of the Universe. 

                                                                 Galileo on Trial