Galileo's Prayer

What does a handwritten copy of Psalm 145 reveal about one of history's greatest scientists? 

Robert explores a newly-discovered note in Galileo's personal copy of the Almagest and argues that the astronomer's worldview was shaped not by hostility to faith, but by a radical conviction that God—not the earth, the sun, the state, or even the Church—stood at the center of things. 

Along the way, he examines Galileo's relationship to the Bible, the legacy of the Reformation, and the Hebraic tradition's enduring skepticism toward human authority. At a moment when every ideology seeks to place something at the center of the universe, Galileo's forgotten prayer points toward a different possibility. 

Transcript

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Hey everybody, welcome back to Hebraica. I want to share a fascinating story. I recently came across in Science magazine, and I want to share it with you because it touches on a few of my favorite topics, namely science, faith, the Bible, and the way great minds have wrestled with the idea of God. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I'm a little obsessed with great scientists of the past, guys like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Aximander. Little known fact about me is I actually enrolled as an engineering student when I when I first went to college, only to discover pretty quickly that engineering requires quite a bit of mathematics, which I'm terrible at. So I changed my major, and uh that was the end of my scientific career. But I've always been fascinated by these figures, and to this day, I read quite a bit about them, about their backgrounds, about uh their their work, and about their their private lives, which I which I always find fascinating. Not because these people are brilliant scientists, but because they wrestle with some of the biggest questions that a human being can ask. Questions like, what is the universe? Where did it come from? What's it made of? And human beings. Who are we? Where did we come from? What is life? What is the fundamental principle or principles that hold the cosmos together? And for some of them, what does any of that have to do with God? This science magazine story caught my attention because it sheds light on how one great scientist, Galileo Galilei, thought about these questions, and because it sheds unexpected light on how he understood God and truth and the pursuit of knowledge. It's an incredible story. It starts in the archives of the National Central Library in Florence just a few months ago. This past January, an Italian postdoctoral fellow named Ivan Malara was in these archives, browsing old manuscripts as part of his research on the life and works of Galileo. And one of the books he looked at was a printed copy of The Almagest, which is a very famous astronomical treatise from the second century A.D. written by a Greek thinker named Claudius Ptolemy. Leafing through the pages, Malara came upon something strange. On one of the blank pages, he saw that someone had handwritten the words of Psalm 145. And Malara immediately recognized the handwriting. After a few hours of painstaking examination, he confirmed it. The handwriting belonged to none other than Galileo. It's an astonishing discovery. The first on grounds of historical interest. I mean, this is a handwritten note from Galileo. That's that's a pretty big deal. Uh, second, because of where the note was found, there appears to be an even deeper significance. The book in which the note was written was the Almagest. And the Almagest had been a kind of Bible for European astronomers for more than a thousand years. It was the cornerstone of what's called the geocentric model of the universe. It's just a fancy way of saying a model that put the earth at the center of the cosmos, which in Galileo's day was not just accepted science, it was a pillar of Catholic doctrine. Someone may ask, why would Galileo, the man who would become famous for embracing the heliocentric or sun-centered model of the universe, model proposed by a Polish astronomer named Copernicus, and as a result for drawing down the wrath of the Catholic Church, why would Galileo, of all people, be transcribing a chapter from the Bible in the Almagest? For most people, Galileo is remembered as a kind of scientific rock star who defied the church and helped overturn the old intellectual order. Now, there's some truth to this conception. Galileo was in fact hounded and persecuted by the church for his heliocentric ideas. He was even tried and convicted on, quote, strong suspicion of heresy and uh put on house arrest for the rest of his life. It's also true that the Catholic Church banned his book, uh Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, and banned it for many years, uh, only acknowledging its error in convicting Galileo in 1992. But Galileo was no secularist. He was not anti-Christian. In fact, scholars have long since proven that he, like Isaac Newton and Copernicus himself, was much more serious about his faith than people today might believe. So, why then did Galileo find himself in such bitter conflict with the religious authorities of his day? If Christianity was so important to him, why did he call the church's doctrine into question? To answer that, it's important to understand how Galileo thought about truth. To put it in simple terms, Galileo believed that God was the source of all truth, and that God had revealed himself in two books, as it were, the first being scripture or the Bible, an actual book, the second being the book of nature, which bore witness to God for all men to see. Now, because God's revealed word and his creation both stemmed directly from him, Galileo believed that the Bible and nature could never contradict each other. If there were contradictions or apparent contradictions, it didn't mean that scripture was wrong. It meant that men, human beings, were reading and interpreting it wrong. Now, that was a bold position in the seventeenth century. Not surprising for a bold personality like Galileo, but it was mainly a function of the times. The early seventeenth century was a moment when all of Europe was still aflame in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, which had broken out a century earlier, with the advent of the printing press and the widespread translation of the Bible from Old Latin into the vernacular languages, into Italian, Spanish, French, etc., Europeans across the continent were beginning to notice major disparities between the biblical text and the Christianity they saw represented in the established church. The Reformation had taught Europe nothing if not to ask a provocative question, which was: what if the respected authorities are wrong? The result was a revolution, a wholesale reevaluation of everything, of European politics, society, thought, everything was up for questioning, including the church itself and its doctrines. The big question, the question above all the questions, was the question of authority. Who had the right to interpret scripture and to decide truth? For over a millennium, the church had offered a simple answer. Only the bishops, men linked to the apostles and trained in theology, and of course the chief bishop, the Pope, could decide the true meaning of Scripture. The Reformers flipped that reasoning on its head. If the Bible was indeed the Word of God, as the church claimed, then the Bible and only the Bible could decide truth. Which is to say, the bishops and their teachings had to be measured against Scripture and not the other way around. Galileo was no Protestant. He died a proud Catholic. But he, like many Europeans, was heavily influenced by that Reformation spirit. On the question of authority, Galileo believed that neither the priest nor the scientist could define truth. Only God could do that, as he had revealed himself in the dual witness of Scripture and nature. Galileo honored the church, and he was traumatized by its censorship of his writings. But he believed that every human authority, whether kings or popes, philosophers or scientists, was fallible and therefore subject to correction. Human individuals and institutions, even the sacred institution of the church, could, like the kings and priests of ancient Israel, make mistakes, which brings us back to Psalm 145. What's most interesting to me about all this is the particular psalm that Galileo chose to write in the book. Of all the chapters in the Bible, why this one? The truth is, Psalm 145 is not your average psalm. In the Jewish tradition, it's been long said that anyone who prays this psalm with sincerity three times a day will merit a share in the world to come. And if you open your Bible and read the words of this psalm, the words of King David, you'll quickly understand why. Where some psalms focus on David, his triumphs, his setbacks, or on the trials of God's people amid the nations, Psalm 145 is holy and purely about God, about his power, his wisdom, his kingship, and his love for and faithfulness to his creation. But as a popular TV host used to say, don't take my word for it. I'd like to read to you an English translation of David's prayer from the King James Bible, which was actually published during Galileo's lifetime. Psalm 145, David's Psalm of Praise. I will extol thee, my God, O King, and I will bless thy name for ever and ever. Every day will I bless thee, and I will praise thy name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts. I will speak of the glorious honor of thy majesty, and of thy wondrous works, and men shall speak of the might of thy terrible acts, and I will declare thy greatness. They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness, and shall sing of thy righteousness. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great mercy. The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works. All thy works shall praise thee, O Lord, and thy saints shall bless thee. They shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom, and talk of thy power, to make known to the sons of men his mighty acts, and the glorious majesty of his kingdom. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations. The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down. The eyes of all wait upon thee, and thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest thine hand and satisfiest the desire of every living thing. The Lord is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear him. He also will hear their cry and will save them. The Lord preserveth all them that love him, but all the wicked will he destroy. My mouth shall speak the praise of the Lord, and let all flesh bless his holy name for ever and ever. Amen. I think about Galileo praying these words each time he sat down to read the Almagest and seek out the truth of the cosmos. Whether the universe was geocentric or heliocentric was one of the deepest and most controversial questions of his age. The implications and the stakes were enormous. No wonder then, as the article in Science magazine notes, that several of Galileo's contemporaries testified separately that he prayed whenever he sat down to study Ptolemy. And now we know it wasn't just any prayer. Each time he sat down with this text, Galileo consciously reoriented his gaze on God and asked for his help. The popular view is that Galileo distrusted religion. But the real story is that he trusted in God and God alone and was skeptical of everything else, including religion. Man was made in the image of God, endowed with reason, but man was compromised by sin and selfishness and by the sheer finitude of human life. It was in this radical God-centeredness that Galileo showed himself most Hebraic, as will anyone who reads the Bible regularly with its frequent rebukes and challenges to kings and priests, nations and empires. No one and no institution comes out looking holy. Not because everyone's evil, but because only God is holy. The Hebraic perspective inspires a certain skepticism toward human authority. We see it in the Hebrew prophets. Nathan challenged David, Elijah challenged Ahab. Jeremiah challenged kings, priests, and nations alike. We see it in the life of Jesus and the apostles, all of whom were unafraid to challenge the establishment. We also see it in rabbinic Judaism, which carried over the same readiness to dig, interrogate, debate, dissent in the name of higher truth. And at the same time, that perspective also inspires humility, especially intellectual humility. And it makes it difficult for any would-be revolutionary to overturn a previous order and then stand up claiming to have discovered the final answer. The prophet Isaiah lamented that all of us, all we like sheep, have gone astray. We're all blinded by desire and pride. We're all prone to error. And that's why all our doctrines and all our ideas, however brilliant they may seem, must always be subordinate to divine truth. And therefore, since we glimpse the divine only in pieces, subject to revision. Galileo understood that. And his handwritten copy of Psalm 145 was, I think, a reminder to himself to keep it all in perspective. Some scientists in Galileo's day, and certainly in ours, saw the reality of a sun-centered cosmos as proof that the Bible was wrong. For Galileo, it just meant that humans had interpreted the Bible incorrectly. When he looked up at the stars and the planets, he saw them all revolving, literally or figuratively, around the divine being who had created them. Which is why he never set out to investigate them without first praising that being. Every age puts something at the center of the cosmos. Man, the nation, the market, science. Galileo's note reminds us that the deepest question is not what sits at the center of it all, but who. For Galileo, it wasn't the earth, it wasn't man, it wasn't the state, it wasn't the church, it wasn't even the sun. At the end of the day, he was neither geocentric nor heliocentric. He was theocentric. Ultimately, he saw all of it stemming from and orbiting around the all-powerful, all-knowing God at the center of it all. A God who loved and cared for his creation. And that Galileo understood the awe and fear of that God, the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that was the beginning of wisdom. I want to say a quick word of thanks to everyone who's been listening and reaching out to me in support of this podcast. Appreciate you very much. Means a lot to know. There are human beings out there listening to the sound of my voice. I would uh encourage you to drop me a line, Robert at RobertW. Nicholson.com, and uh would appreciate your your feedback, any questions you may have. In the meantime, many blessings to you all. Until next time.