A few days ago, I was contacted by a former student of mine, to ask me to support with a letter the initiative to include a book, preserved in the National Library and Archives of Bolivia in Sucre, in the “Memory of the World for Latin America and the Caribbean” program of UNESCO.
This book is nothing more than a copy of Galileo Galilei’s famous treatise, “Dialogues about the two maximum systems of the world”, printed in 1632 in Italian. The copy preserved in Sucre is part of a Latin edition of 1641, a year before the death of the illustrious scientist.
I gladly agreed to collaborate and wrote a letter of support to UNESCO, but I also decided to spread, through this column, that initiative which, if accepted – and I have no doubt about it – will give prestige to the National Library of Sucre.
I confess that I did not know, like most of my readers, the existence of that copy, so I was assailed by the curiosity to know more about the story of its arrival in Bolivia.
The first edition of this “bestseller”, which openly sides with the “Copernican revolution”, represented at the time a challenge to the religious authorities of the Catholic Church, who already had the controversial physicist in their sights.
Galileo’s greatest sin, in the eyes of his judges, was to defend Copernicus without showing categorical scientific evidence (such as Maduro’s ballot papers) and also spreading – in the “vulgar” language – the heliocentric system. An ecclesiastical tribunal, composed of his Jesuit opponents, ended up including the book in the “Index librorum prohibitorum”, forcing Galileo to abjure his ideas, but without excommunicating him. Galileo abjured (the provocative phrase “eppur si muove” is a legend) and the court decreed house arrest for life, as Bolivian prosecutors use to do. For his part, Galileo devoted his last years to laying the foundations of modern science.
A year before his death, the book was reprinted in France in Latin, the official language of European scientists. A copy of that “forbidden” edition arrived in Bolivia, presumably in the backpack of a Jesuit belonging to the group that directed, since its foundation (1624), the Royal and Pontifical University of San Francisco Javier at Sucre. Was the book then used for lectures at that young university? We don’t know for sure, but we can’t rule it out, since in Bolivia today no one professes Ptolemy’s geocentric theory and few the “Evo-centric” theory of MAS.
This story inspires me with some reflections, which I expressed in the letter sent to UNESCO.
In the first place, I emphasize the historical importance of the book: Galileo put all his prestige, earned with his experimental work in Astronomy, at the service of the Copernican revolution, going so far as to risk his life against the defenders of the Ptolemaic system, according to them validated by the Bible.
Then, the fact that this forbidden book arrived in Bolivia in the hands of the Jesuits contrasts with the inclemency of other Jesuits in the Curia in condemning Galileo. A few days before the departure of Eduardo Pérez SJ, it is good to remember that there have been and there are exemplary Jesuits and that they are the vast majority of that order.
Finally, the book now in Bolivia’s custody reveals the interest of an anonymous Jesuit scientist, a follower of Galileo, in spreading the new science in the New World, certainly with greater freedom than in Europe.
To conclude, I will recall that only thirty-two years ago the Church recognized its error, rehabilitating the distinguished physicist and humble Catholic faithful that was Galileo Galilei.