Galileo, feeling grim,
A young monk came to visit him.
The monk was born of common folk.
It was of science that they spoke.
The Florentine Ambassador's palace in Rome. Galileo is listening to the little monk who whispered the papal astronomer's remark to him after the meeting of the Collegium Romanum.
GALILEO: Go on, go on. The habit you're wearing gives you the right to say whatever you want. (2)
THE LITTLE MONK: I studied mathematics, Mr Galilei.
GALILEO: That might come in handy if it led you to admit that two and two sometimes makes four. (5)
THE LITTLE MONK: Mr Galilei, I have been unable to sleep for three days. I couldn't see how to reconcile the decree I had read with the moons of Jupiter which I had observed. Today I decided to say an early mass and' come to you. (9)
GALILEO: In order to tell me Jupiter has no moons? (10)
THE LITTLE MONK: No. I have managed to see the wisdom of the decree. It has drawn my attention to the potential dangers for humanity in wholly unrestricted research, and I have decided to give astronomy up. But I also wanted to explain to you the motives which can make even an astronomer renounce pursuing that doctrine any further. (16)
GALILEO: I can assure you that such motives are familiar to me.
THE LITTLE MONK: I understand your bitterness. You have in mind certain exceptional powers of enforcement at the Church's disposal. (20)
GALILEO: Just call them instruments of torture. (21)
THE LITTLE MONK: But I am referring to
other motives. Let me speak about myself. My parents were peasants in the Campagna, and I
grew up there. They are simple people. They know all about olive trees, but not much else.
As I study the phases of Venus I can visualize my parents sitting round the fire with my
sister, eating their curdled cheese. I see the beams above them, blackened by hundreds of
years of smoke, and I see every detail of their old worn hands and the little spoons they
are holding. They are badly off, but even their misfortunes imply a certain order. There
are so many cycles, ranging from washing the floor, through the seasons of the olive crop
to the paying of taxes. There is a regularity about the disasters that befall them. My
father's back does not get bent all at once, but more and more each spring he spends in
the olive groves; just as the successive childbirths that have made my mother increasingly
sexless have followed well-defined intervals. They draw the strength they need to carry
their baskets sweating up the stony tracks, to bear children and even to eat, from the
feeling of stability and necessity that comes of looking at the soil, at the annual
greening of the trees and at the little church, and of listening to the bible passages
read there every Sunday. They have been assured that God's eye is always on them -
probingly, even anxiously -: that the whole drama of the world is constructed around them
so that they, the performers, may prove themselves in their greater or lesser roles.
(46)
What would my people say if I told them that they happen to be on a small knob of stone
twisting endlessly through the void round a second-rate star, just one among myriads? What
would be the value or necessity then of so much patience, such understanding of their own
poverty ? What would be the use of Holy Scripture, which has explained and justified it
all - the sweat, the patience, the hunger, the submissiveness - and now turns out to be
full of errors? No: I can see their eyes wavering, I can see them letting their spoons
drop, I can see how betrayed and deceived they will feel. So nobody's eye is on us,
they'll say. Have we got to look after ourselves, old, uneducated and worn-out as we are ?
The only part anybody has devised for us is this wretched, earthly one, to be played out
on a tiny star wholly dependent on others, with nothing revolving round it. Our poverty
has no meaning: hunger is no trial of strength, it's merely not having eaten: effort is no
virtue, it's just bending and carrying. Can you see now why I read into the Holy
Congregations decree a noble motherly compassion; a vast goodness of soul?
(65)
GALILEO: Goodness of soul! Aren't you really saying that there's nothing for them, the wine has all been drunk, their lips are parched, so they had better kiss the cassock? Why is there nothing for them? Why does order in this country mean the orderliness of a bare cupboard, and necessity nothing but the need to work oneself to death? When there are teeming vineyards and cornfields on every side? Your Campagna peasants are paying for the wars which the representative of gentle Jesus is waging in Germany and Spain. Why does he make the earth the centre of the universe ? So that the See of St Peter can be the centre of the earth! That's what it is all about. You're right, it's not about the planets, it's about the peasants of the Campagna. And don't talk to me about the beauty given to phenomena by the patina of age ! You know how the Margaritifera oyster produces its pearl? By a mortally dangerous disease which involves taking some unassimilable foreign body, like a grain of sand, and wrapping it in a slimy ball. The process all but kills it. To hell with the pearl, give me the healthy oyster! Virtues are not an offshoot of poverty, my dear fellow. If your people were happy and prosperous they could develop the virtues of happiness and prosperity. At present the virtues of exhaustion derive from exhausted fields, and I reject them. Sir, my new pumps will perform more miracles in that direction than all your ridiculous superhuman slaving. - 'Be fruitful and multiply', since your fields are not fruitful and you are being decimated by wars. Am I supposed to tell your people lies? (91)
THE LITTLE MONK much agitated: We have the highest of all motives for keeping our mouths shut - the peace of mind of the less fortunate. (94)
GALILEO: Would you like me to show you a Cellini clock that Cardinal Bellarmin's coachman brought round this morning? My dear fellow, authority is rewarding me for not disturbing the peace of mind of people like your parents, by offering me the wine they press in the sweat of their countenance which we all know to have been made in God's image. If I were to agree to keep my mouth shut my motives would be thoroughly low ones: an easy life, freedom from persecution, and so on. (102)
THE LITTLE MONK: Mr Galilei, I am a priest.
GALILEO: You're also a physicist. And you can see that Venus has phases. Here, look out there! He points at the window Can you see the little Priapus on the fountain next to the laurel bush? The god of gardens, birds end thieves, rich in two thousand years of bucolic indecency. Even he was less of a liar. All right, let's drop it. I too am a son of the Church. But do you know the eighth Satire of Horace? I've been rereading it again lately, it acts as a kind of counter weight. He picks lip a small book. He makes his Priapus speak - a little statue which was then in the Esquiline gardens. Starting:
Stump of a figtree, useless kind of wood
As I once; then the carpenter, not sure
Whether to make a Priapus or a stool
Opted for the god . . . (117)
Can you imagine Horace being told not to mention stools and agreeing to put a table in the poem instead? Sir, it offends my sense of beauty if my cosmogony has a Venus without phases. We cannot invent mechanisms to pump water up from rivers if we are not to be allowed to study the greatest of all mechanisms right under our nose, that of the heavenly bodies. The sum of the angles in a triangle cannot be varied to suit the Vatican's convenience. I can't calculate the courses of flying bodies in such a way as also to explain witches taking trips on broomsticks. (126)
THE LITTLE MONK: But don't you think that the truth will get through without us, so long as it's true? (128)
GALILEO: No, no, no. The only truth that gets through will be what we force through: the victory of reason will be the victory of people who are prepared to reason, nothing else. Your picture of the Campagna peasants makes them look like the moss on their own huts. How can anyone imagine that the sum of the angles in a triangle conflicts with their needs ? But unless they get moving and learn how to think, they will find even the finest irrigation systems won't help them. Oh, to hell with it: I see your people's divine patience, but where is their divine anger? (137)
THE LITTLE MONK: They are tired!
GALILEO: tosses him a bundle of manuscripts: Are you a physicist, my son? Here you have the reasons why the ocean moves, ebbing and flowing. But you're not supposed to read it, d'you hear? Oh, you've already started. You are a physicist, then? The little monk is absorbed in the papers. (143)
GALILEO: An apple from the tree of knowledge! He's wolfing it down. He is damned for ever, but he has got to wolf it down, the poor glutton. I sometimes think I'll have myself shut up in a dungeon ten fathoms below ground in complete darkness if only it will help me to End out what light is. And the worst thing is that what I know I have to tell people, like a lover, like a drunkard, like a traitor. It is an absolute vice and leads to disaster. How long can I go on shouting it into the void, that's the question. (152)
THE LITTLE MONK: indicating a passage in the papers: I don't understand this sentence. (154)
GALILEO: I'll explain it you, I'll explain it to you. (155)
(Translated by John Willett. New York:
Arcade Publishing, 1994: 64-69.
Found at http://www.uky.edu/~engjlg/hon201/brecht.htm)