Chapter One
She who was so precious to you
Most Illustrious Lord Father
We are terribly saddened by the death of your cherished sister, our dear aunt;but our sorrow at losing her is as nothing compared to our concern for yoursake, because your suffering will be all the greater, Sire, as truly you have noone else left in your world, now that she, who could not have been more preciousto you, has departed, and therefore we can only imagine how you sustain theseverity of such a sudden and completely unexpected blow. And while I tell youthat we share deeply in your grief you would do well to draw even greatercomfort from contemplating the general state of human misery, since we are allof us here on Earth like strangers and wayfarers, who soon will be bound for ourtrue homeland in Heaven, where there is perfect happiness, and where we musthope that your sister's blessed soul has already gone. Thus, for the love ofGod, we pray you. Sire, to be consoled and to put yourself in His hands, for, asyou know so well, that is what He wants of you; to do otherwise would be toinjure yourself and hurt us, too, because we lament grievously when we hear thatyou are burdened and troubled, as we have no other source of goodness in thisworld but you.
I will say no more, except that with all our hearts we fervently pray the Lordto comfort you and be with you always, and we greet you dearly with our ardentlove.
From San Matteo, the 10th day of May 1623.
Most affectionate daughter,
S. Maria Celeste
The day after his sister Virginia's funeral, the already world-renownedscientist Galileo Galilei received this, the first of 124 surviving letters fromthe once-voluminous correspondence he carried on with his elder daughter. Shealone of Galileo's three children mirrored his own brilliance, industry, andsensibility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante.
Galileo's daughter, born of his long illicit liaison with the beautiful MarinaGamba of Venice, entered the world in the summer heat of a new century, onAugust 13, 1600-the same year the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was burned atthe stake in Rome for insisting, among his many heresies and blasphemies, thatthe Earth traveled around the Sun, instead of remaining motionless at the centerof the universe. In a world that did not yet know its place, Galileo wouldengage this same cosmic conflict with the Church, treading a dangerous pathbetween the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic and the heavens he revealedthrough his telescope.
Galileo christened his daughter Virginia, in honor of his "cherished sister."But because he never married Virginia's mother, he deemed the girl herselfunmarriageable. Soon after her thirteenth birthday, he placed her at the Conventof San Matteo in Arcetri, where she lived out her life in poverty and seclusion.
Virginia adopted the name Maria Celeste when she became a nun, in a gesture thatacknowledged her father's fascination with the stars. Even after she professed alife of prayer and penance, she remained devoted to Galileo as though to apatron saint. The doting concern evident in her condolence letter was only tointensify over the ensuing decade as her father grew old, fell more frequentlyill, pursued his singular research nevertheless, and published a book thatbrought him to trial by the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
The "we" of Suer Maria Celeste's letter speaks for herself and her sister,Livia-Galileo's strange, silent second daughter, who also took the veil and vowsat San Matteo to become Suor Arcangela. Meanwhile their brother, Vincenzio, theyoungest child of Galileo and Marina's union, had been legitimized in a fiat bythe grand duke of Tuscany and gone off to study law at the University of Pisa.
Thus Suor Maria Celeste consoled Galileo for being left alone in his world, withdaughters cloistered in the separate world of nuns, his son not yet a man, hisformer mistress dead, his family of origin all deceased or dispersed.
Galileo, now fifty-nine, also stood boldly alone in his worldview, as Suor MariaCeleste knew from reading the books he wrote and the letters he shared with herfrom colleagues and critics all over Italy, as well as from across the continentbeyond the Alps. Although her father had started his career as a professor ofmathematics, teaching first at Pisa and then at Padua, every philosopher inEurope tied Galileo's name to the most startling series of astronomicaldiscoveries ever claimed by a single individual.
In 1609, when Suor Maria Celeste was still a child in Padua, Galileo had set atelescope in the garden behind his house and turned it skyward. Never-before-seen stars leaped out of the darkness to enhance familiar constellations; thenebulous Milky Way resolved into a swath of densely packed stars, mountains andvalleys pockmarked the storied perfection of the Moon; and a retinue of fourattendant bodies traveled regularly around Jupiter like a planetary system inminiature.
"I render infinite thanks to God," Galileo intoned after those nights of wonder,"for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hiddenin obscurity for all previous centuries."
The newfound worlds transformed Galileo's life. He won appointment as chiefmathematician and philosopher to the grand duke in 1610, and moved to Florenceto assume his position at the court of Cosimo de' Medici. He took along with himhis two daughters, then ten and nine years old, but he left Vincenzio, who wasonly four when greatness descended on the family, to live a while longer inPadua with Marina.
Galileo found himself lionized as another Columbus for his conquests. Even as heattained the height of his glory, however, he attracted enmity and suspicion.For instead of opening a distant land dominated by heathens, Galileo trespassedon holy ground. Hardly had his first spate of findings stunned the populace ofEurope before a new wave followed: He saw dark spots creeping continuouslyacross the face of the Sun, and "the mother of loves," as he called the planetVenus, cycling through phases from full to crescent, just as the Moon did.
All his observations lent credence to the unpopular Sun-centered universe ofNicolaus Copernicus, which had been introduced over half a century previously,but foundered on lack of evidence. Galileo's efforts provided the beginning of aproof. And his flamboyant style of promulgating his ideas-sometimes in bawdyhumorous writings, sometimes loudly at dinner parties and staged debates-transported the new astronomy from the Latin Quarters of the universities intothe public arena. In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo,warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions of theheavenly bodies, they said, having been touched upon in the Psalms, the Book ofJoshua, and elsewhere in the Bible, were matters best left to the Holy Fathersof the Church.
Galileo obeyed their orders, silencing himself on the subject. For sevencautious years he turned his efforts to less perilous pursuits, such asharnessing his Jovian satellites in the service of navigation, to help sailorsdiscover their longitude at sea. He studied poetry and wrote literary criticism.Modifying his telescope, he developed a compound microscope. "I have observedmany tiny animals with great admiration," he reported, "among which the flea isquite horrible, the gnat and the moth very beautiful; and with greatsatisfaction I have seen how flies and other little animals can walk attached tomirrors, upside down."
Shortly after his sister's death in May of 1623, however, Galileo found reasonto return to the Sun-centered universe like a moth to a flame. That summer a newpope ascended the throne of Saint Peter in Rome. The Supreme Pontiff Urban VIIIbrought to the Holy See an intellectualism and an interest in scientificinvestigation not shared by his immediate predecessors. Galileo knew the manpersonally-he had demonstrated his telescope to him and the two had taken thesame side one night in a debate about floating bodies after a banquet at theFlorentine court. Urban, for his part, had admired Galileo so long and well thathe had even written a poem for him, mentioning the sights revealed by "Galileo'sglass."
The presence of the poet pope encouraged Galileo to proceed with a long-plannedpopular dissertation on the two rival theories of cosmology: the Sun-centeredand the Earth-centered, or, in his words, the "two chief systems of the world."
It might have been difficult for Suor Maria Celeste to condone this course-toreconcile her role as a bride of Christ with her father's position aspotentially the greatest enemy of the Catholic Church since Martin Luther. Butinstead she approved of his endeavors because she knew the depth of his faith.She accepted Galileo's conviction that God had dictated the Holy Scriptures toguide men's spirits but proffered the unraveling of the universe as a challengeto their intelligence. Understanding her father's prodigious capacity in thispursuit, she prayed for his health, for his longevity, for the fulfillment ofhis "every just desire." As the convent's apothecary, she concocted elixirs andpills to strengthen him for his studies and protect him from epidemic diseases.Her letters, animated by her belief in Galileo's innocence of any hereticaldepravity, carried him through the ordeal of his ultimate confrontation withUrban and the Inquisition in 1633.
No detectable strife ever disturbed the affectionate relationship betweenGalileo and his daughter. Theirs is not a tale of abuse or rejection orintentional stifling of abilities. Rather, it is a love story, a tragedy, and amystery.
Most of Suor Maria Celeste's letters traveled in the pocket of a messenger, orin a basket laden with laundry, sweetmeats, or herbal medicines, across theshort distance from the Convent of San Matteo, on a hillside just south ofFlorence, to Galileo in the city or at his suburban home. Following the angrypapal summons to Rome in 1632, however, the letters rode on horseback some twohundred miles and were frequently delayed by quarantines imposed as the BlackPlague spread death and dread across Italy. Gaps of months' duration disrupt thecontinuity of the reportage in places, but every page is redolent of daily life,down to the pain of toothache and the smell of vinegar.
Galileo held on to his daughter's missives indiscriminately, collecting herrequests for fruits or sewing supplies alongside her outbursts on ecclesiasticalpolitics. Similarly, Suor Maria Celeste saved all of Galileo's letters, asrereading them, she often reminded him, gave her great pleasure. By the time shereceived the last rites, the letters she had gathered over her lifetime in theconvent constituted the bulk of her earthly possessions. But then the motherabbess, who would have discovered Galileo's letters while emptying Suor MariaCeleste's cell, apparently buried or burned them out of fear. After thecelebrated trial at Rome, a convent dared not harbor the writings of a"vehemently suspected" heretic. In this fashion, the correspondence betweenfather and daughter was long ago reduced to a monologue.
Standing in now for all the thoughts he once expressed to her are only those hechanced to offer others about her. "A woman of exquisite mind," Galileodescribed her to a colleague in another country, "singular goodness, and mosttenderly attached to me."
On first learning of Suor Maria Celeste's letters, people generally assume thatGalileo's replies must lie concealed somewhere in the recesses of the VaticanLibrary, and that if only an enterprising outsider could gain access, themissing half of the dialogue would be found. But, alas, the archives have beencombed, several times, by religious authorities and authorized researchers alldesperate to hear the paternal tone of Galileo's voice. These seekers have cometo accept the account of the mother abbess's destruction of the documents as themost reasonable explanation for their disappearance. The historical importanceof any paper signed by Galileo, not to mention the prices such articles havecommanded for the past two centuries, leaves few conceivable places where wholepackets of his letters could hide.
Although numerous commentaries, plays, poems, early lectures, and manuscripts ofGalileo's have also disappeared (known only by specific mentions in more thantwo thousand preserved letters from his contemporary correspondents), hisenormous legacy includes his five most important books, two of his originalhandmade telescopes, various portraits and busts he sat for during his lifetime,even parts of his body preserved after death. (The middle finger of his righthand can be seen, encased in a gilded glass egg atop an inscribed marblepedestal at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence.)
Of Suor Maria Celeste, however, only her letters remain. Bound into a singlevolume with cardboard and leather covers, the frayed, deckle-edged pages nowreside among the rare manuscripts at Florence's National Central Library. Thehandwriting throughout is still legible, though the once-black ink has turnedbrown. Some letters bear annotations in Galileo's own hand, for he occasionallyjotted notes in the margins about the things she said and at other times madeseemingly unrelated calculations or geometric diagrams in the blank spacesaround his address on the verso. Several of the sheets are marred by tiny holes,torn, darkened by acid or mildew, smeared with spilled oil. Of those that arewater-blurred, some obviously ventured through the rain, while others look morelikely tear-stained, either during the writing or the reading of them. Afternearly four hundred years, the red sealing wax still sticks to the foldedcorners of the paper.
These letters, which have never been published in translation, recast Galileo'sstory. They recolor the personality and conflict of a mythic figure, whoseseventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schismbetween science and religion. For although science has soared beyond his quaintinstruments, it is still caught in his struggle, still burdened by an impressionof Galileo as a renegade who scoffed at the Bible and drew fire from a Churchblind to reason.
This pervasive, divisive power of the name Galileo is what Pope John Paul IItried to tame in 1992 by reinvoking his torment so long after the fact. "Atragic mutual incomprehension," His Holiness observed of the 350-year Galileoaffair, "has been interpreted as the reflection of a fundamental oppositionbetween science and faith."
Yet the Galileo of Suor Maria Celeste's letters recognized no such divisionduring his lifetime. He remained a good Catholic who believed in the power ofprayer and endeavored always to conform his duty as a scientist with the destinyof his soul. "Whatever the course of our lives," Galileo wrote, "we shouldreceive them as the highest gift from the hand of God, in which equally reposedthe power to do nothing whatever for us. Indeed, we should accept misfortune notonly in thanks, but in infinite gratitude to Providence, which by such meansdetaches us from an excessive love for Earthly things and elevates our minds tothe celestial and divine."
Copyright © 2000 Dava Sobel. All rights reserved.
