of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, published in Rome his spiritual exercises. There he wrote this testimony of blind submission:
“Take, Lord, and receive all my freedom, my memory, my understanding, and my will.”
And as if that were not enough:
“To get everything right, I must always believe that what I see as white is black, if the Church hierarchy so determines.”
FORBIDDEN TO BE CURIOUS
Knowledge is sin. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of that tree and look what happened to them.
Some time later, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei were punished for having shown that the earth moves around the sun.
Copernicus did not dare publish his scandalous revelation until he felt death approaching. The Catholic Church included his work in the Index of Forbidden Books.
Bruno, wandering poet, spread the word about Copernicus’s heresy: the earth was but one of the planets of the solar system, not the center of the universe. The Holy Inquisition locked him up in a dungeon for eight years. Several times he had the chance to repent, and several times Bruno refused. In the end, this obstinate mule was set aflame before a crowd in the Roman market at Campo de’ Fiori. While he burned, they brought a crucifix to his lips. He turned away.
A few years later, exploring the heavens with the thirty-two lenses of his telescope, Galileo confirmed that the condemned man was right.
He was imprisoned for blasphemy.
He broke down during the interrogation.
In a loud voice, he swore that he cursed any who believed the earth moved around the sun.
And under his breath, they say, he murmured the phrase that made him famous for all time.
THE DANGEROUS VICE OF ASKING
Which is worth more? Experience or doctrine?
By dropping stones and pebbles, big balls and little balls, Galileo Galilei proved that velocity remains the same no matter the weight. Aristotle was wrong, and for nineteen centuries no one had noticed.
Johannes Kepler, another curious fellow, discovered that plants do not rotate in circles when they follow the light over the course of a day. Wasn’t the circle supposed to be the perfect path of everything that revolves? Wasn’t the universe supposed to be the perfect work of God?
“This world is not perfect, not nearly,” Kepler concluded. “Why should its paths be perfect?”
His reasoning seemed suspicious to Lutherans and Catholics alike. Kepler’s mother had spent four years in prison accused of practicing witchcraft. They must have been up to something.
But he saw, and helped others to see in those times of obligatory gloom:
he deduced that the sun turns on its axis,
he discovered an unknown star,
he invented a unit of measure he called the “diopter” and founded
modern optics.
And when his final days were drawing near, he let it be known that just as the sun determined the route of plants, the seas obeyed the moon.
“Senile dementia,” his colleagues diagnosed.
RESURRECTION OF SERVET
In 1553 in Geneva, Miguel Servet was reduced to ashes along with his books. At the request of the Holy Inquisition, John Calvin had him burned alive using green wood.
As if that were not fire enough, French inquisitors burned him again, in effigy, a few months later.
Servet, a Spanish physician, lived his life in flight, changing names, changing kingdoms. He did not believe in the Holy Trinity or in baptism before reaching the age of reason. And he committed the unpardonable insolence of showing that blood does not lie still, rather it flows through the body and is purified in the lungs.
That is why he is known today as the Copernicus of physiology.
Servet wrote: “In this world there is no truth, only passing shadows.”
And his shadow passed.
Centuries later, it returned. It was stubborn, like him.
EUROEVERYTHING
On his deathbed, Copernicus published the book that founded modern astronomy.
Three centuries before, Arab scientists Mu’ayyad al-Din al-’Urdi and Nasir al-Din Tusi had come