Comment on “Galileo’s discovery of scaling laws,” by Mark A. Peterson [Am. J. Phys. 70 (6), 575–580 (2002)]–Galileo and the existence of hell

Mark A.

Peterson

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Galileo Galilei, “Due lezioni all’Accademia Fiorentina circa la figura, sito e grandezza dell’Inferno di Dante,” in Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, edited by G. Barbèra (Ristampa della Edizione Nazionale, Florence, 1933), Vol. 9, pp. 31–57, translated by Mark A. Peterson, $http://www. mtholyoke.edu/∼mpeterso/classes/galileo/inferno.html.$ See also Mark Peterson, “Dante’s Physics,” in The Divine Comedy and the Encyclopedia of Arts and Sciences, edited by Giuseppe C. DiScipio and Aldo Scaglione (Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam, 1988), pp. 163–180.

See Ref. 1 for a full description of these two views.

For useful diagrams (which agree with the Manetti–Galileo description discussed below), see Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, translation and commentary by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton U.P., Princeton, 1970), Vol. 1 (Inferno), pt. 2, pp. 43–44.

See Galileo’s “The Starry Messenger” (1610) in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, translated with notes by Stillman Drake (Doubleday, New York, 1957), pp. 21–58. Drake notes (p. 24, n. 2) that, though here Galileo intimates his acceptance of the Copernican system, it was not until 1613 that he unequivocally supported it in print.

For a careful discussion, see Annibale Fantoli, Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church, translated by George V. Coyne (Vatican Observatory Publications, Vatican City, 1994), pp. 161–248.

I thank Professor Fantoli for drawing my attention to the importance of this point. He also notes that, by Galileo’s time, voyages to the southern hemisphere had disproved Isidore of Seville’s hypothesis (critiqued by Thomas Aquinas) that hell might be located there.

See Galileo, Opere, Vol. 9, p. 33.

See Refs. 1 and 2.

For a helpful overview, see Leonardo Olschki, “Galileo’s literary formation,” in Galileo, Man of Science, edited by Ernan McMullin (Basic Books, New York, 1967), pp. 140–159.

“Hell,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (Encyclopedia Press, New York, 1913), Vol. 7, p. 207.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Supplement to Part III, Question 69, Article 1, as translated in The Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Chicago, 1952), pp. 885–886.

Reference 12, Question 97, Article 7, pp. 1071–1072.

Edward Moore, “The geography of hell,” in Studies in Dante (Clarendon, Oxford, 1968), Vol. 3, p. 135.

D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964), p. 4.

This letter is available in Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, edited by Robert S. Haller (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1973), pp. 95–111; Dante had earlier set out his theory of the four levels of interpretation in his Convivio (1307), pp. 112–114.

For instance, in his essay “The Divine Comedy” [The Poets’ Dante, edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff (Farrar, Straus and Girous, New York, 2001), p. 119], Jorge Luis Borges notes that “Dante never presumed that what he was showing us corresponded to a real image of the world of death… I believe, nevertheless, in the usefulness of that ingenious concept: the idea that we are reading a true story.” For a discussion of the “truth” of Dante’s “fiction,” see Charles S. Singleton, Dante Studies 1 (Harvard U.P., Cambridge, MA, 1965), pp. 61–83.

Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (Princeton U.P., Princeton, 1987).