C CUNYB/Clarke December, :
AFabulous World (–) has ratified this prohibition, which was made by the congregation of cardinals that was
established for censuring books, I would very much like to know what people think
about it now in France, and whether their authority is sufficient to turn the prohibition
into an article of faith. (i.)Descartes suspected the Jesuits of having had a part in the condemnation,
and he returned to the same concerns two months later. Convinced that
Galileo’s scientific theory had been condemned as ‘heretical’, he could not
see any way in which to publish his ownWorldbecause of the necessary
link between the motion of the Earth and the fundamental principles of
his physics.I shall tell you that all the things that I explained in my treatise, among which is
this view about the motion of the earth, depend so much on one another that it is
enough to know that one of them is false to conclude that all the arguments that
I used are unsound. Although I thought that they were based on very certain and
evident demonstrations, I would not wish to defend them for anything in the world
against the authority of the church....My desire to live in peace, and to continue the
life that I have begun by adopting the motto:he lives well who lives in secret, means
that I would prefer to rid myself of my fear of attracting more attention than I want
(as a result of my writing) than to have wasted the time and trouble that I used in
composing it. (i.–)Descartes was astonished that any churchman should write in support
of Galileo, because the prohibition applied even to proposing the motion
of the Earth as ‘an hypothesis in astronomy’.However, given that the
condemnation was issued by a group of cardinals, rather than by the Pope
or a general council of the church, he still had reason to hope that his
Worldmight some day ‘see the light of day’ (i.).
It is difficult to avoid the impression, from these letters, that Descartes
accepted the inerrancy of the Bible and even the authority of the Catholic
Church to interpret its meaning. This apparently deferential response
to the church’s decree contrasts with that of Galileo. While the great
Florentine mathematician had accepted that the Scripture is infallible
about matters of faith and morals, he challenged Bellarmine’s claim that
the motion of the Earth or the Sun had any essential connection with faith
and morals. He argued, instead, that when a scientific theory is supported
bythe evidence and yet seems to contradict particular passages in the Bible,
weshould not adopt a literal interpretation of those Biblical sentences
and, in that way, we can avoid the apparent contradiction.By contrast,
Descartes seems to have accepted the authority of the church to decide