(Another, it seems, successful attempt at “scanning the brain” of a long–dead person is “Thought science,” as I called this approach.)

Inadvertently, when I was writing a recent review of Cardinal Vincenzo Montefalco’s book on Cardinal Bellarmino’s apology, I got carried away and “skipped” an interesting and richly themed episode, which was clearly contradictory:

The man who so gently and almost affectionately advises Galileo and his friends not to get into trouble, but to make an easy compromise AT THIS STAGE, namely, to recognize the Copernican doctrine as only a successful and reliable mathematical find, but not to loudly proclaim that the cosmogonic Copernican hypothesis REFLECTS REALITY, suddenly becomes an ardent and steadfast enemy of this system in general and in 1616, he sought to BAN the teachings of Copernicus (73 years after the first publication of the latter’s book).

Moreover, he remained Galileo’s friend and defender until his death in 1621 and even gave him something like a “Safe Conduct”!

How to combine and, most importantly, how to EXPLAIN such an obvious “inconsistency”???

Cardinal Montefalco and I didn’t really bother to think about this in my review of his work, but I, as an ordinary dogmatic scholar, attributed it to Bellarmino’s deep faith.

Not an answer, not an explanation, but my typical labelling!

And, just now, while washing the dishes after dinner, I suddenly thought that I could correctly explain this contradiction, in no way connecting it with firmness in faith, but with Bellarmino’s sober and extraordinary mind!

Let’s read it again (the HEADS OF the INQUISITION at that time!!!) a letter to a friend of Galileo:

“It seems to me that you and Segnior Galileo would have acted cautiously if you had been content with presumptive statements and rejected the absolute ones; Copernicus did the same, as I always thought…

Indeed, if it is said that the assumption of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun better explains the observed phenomena than the hypothesis of epicycles and eccentrics, then this is an excellent statement and it does not involve any danger!

It is quite enough for mathematics.

But when they begin to claim that the Sun is really at the center of the world and only rotates around itself, not moving from east to west, and that the Earth is in the third heaven and orbits the Sun at high speed, this is a very dangerous thing, not only because it irritates all philosophers and learned theologians, but because it harms the Holy Faith, and implies the falsity of the Holy Scriptures.”

It is quite obvious that in the letter he gently suggests that the supporters of the Copernican doctrine compromise, FOR NOW!

AND WHAT does he see?

The hard-core fanaticism of Galileo and other supporters of the Copernican doctrine. Dogmatism. similar to the religious one!

The dogmatic ANTI-DOGMA of the Holy Scriptures!

And THIS is demonstrated to him not by some illiterate peasants and primitive plebs, but by the ELITE OF THOUGHT in Italy at that time, the best and most talented minds of that time!

And he asks himself a purely rhetorical question:

If such intelligent and sensible people CANNOT, or rather DO NOT WANT to, draw that fine line between recognizing the Copernican system as a successful and justified MATHEMATICAL device and publicly and EXTREMELY DANGEROUS for THEMSELVES, proclaiming this system as REAL, then this teaching has been allowed and hundreds of thousands and millions of fools around the world will ALSO start screaming that this is the truth and the Holy Scriptures are blatantly deceiving them!!!

(And at that time, there was a fierce and stubborn war between Catholicism and the rising tide of Martin Luther’s Protestantism!)

A true Catholic believer and a person invested with the dignity of a cardinal (there were even intentions to make him Pope) IS OBLIGED to prevent such a decline in faith and morality.

A crowd is a crowd, and a herd is a herd, they don’t think, they just mumble everything and obediently swallow any absurdity, immediately erecting it into an unshakable idol, which they fervently begin to worship.

And Bellarmino, realizing the futility of his attempt at a subtle, intelligent and PRUDENT approach to the teachings of Copernicus, comes to a sad conclusion FOR HIMSELF:

Copernicus’ teaching should be BANNED ALTOGETHER, because a herd of millions of fools will immediately accept it as an immutable truth, and they are not capable and UNWILLING to think intelligently and subtly like him! (Scientists at Galileo’s level showed him this in all its clarity!)
It is easier for the flock to accept with blunt indifference a strict ban on a certain teaching that is COMPLETELY UNKNOWN to THEM than for thousands of pastors in churches to explain to fools that this is “just a subtle and ingenious mathematical trick”!

When herd slaves can neither read nor count properly!

So, on the initiative of a TALENTED AND HONEST cardinal, the papal bull BANNING THE TEACHINGS OF Copernicus appeared!

(An interesting, opposite curiosity happened in the twentieth century, when Max Planck published his work on the quanta of electromagnetic radiation in 1900. Planck himself believed that this was just a purely mathematical device that eliminated the contradiction between the then theory of radiation and experiment, called the “ultraviolet catastrophe.” And Planck himself, after Einstein’s bold 1905 claim that quanta were NOT a mathematical abstraction, but a real physical object called “photons,” continued to consider his discovery only a mathematical device! And later, even gently persuaded A.F.Joffe not to “exaggerate” the meaning of quanta towards a certain reality!

Such are the paradoxes!)

Faciant meliora potentes.

If I’m wrong, let my seniors correct me.

21 XII 2025