Vicisti, Galilei
Aug. 21st, 2015 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerAn idea for a book that I'm not a good enough researcher and historian to write...
What if, instead of being imprisoned and tortured till he recanted, Galileo had found patrons wealthy enough to protect him, and what if the whole thing had escalated into all-out war, resulting in yet another sack of Rome and the breaking of the Catholic Church? What if the dominant power in Europe in the later seventeenth century and onwards had been atheist? Would we now be living in a scientific utopia, or would religion have reasserted itself, possibly in the form of extreme Calvinism backed by scientific determinism? I can't feel that would have been any better.
Thing is, even if I were up to writing it, I probably wouldn't. Alternate history's not my thing unless there's magic involved, and this would have to be strictly real-world.
Quite a good title though.
(Julian the Apostate is supposed to have said "Vicisti, Galilaee"--"You have conquered, Galilean"--either when he was fatally wounded or when he died, meaning that a Christian had killed him and that now he was out of the way Rome would become Christian again, but of course like much of the history we think we know this turns out to be just propaganda or hearsay, and Julian was probably actually killed by a Persian, or a passing hot sausage salesman, or maybe not at all. Who knows? Maybe that's him over there in the corner...)
What if, instead of being imprisoned and tortured till he recanted, Galileo had found patrons wealthy enough to protect him, and what if the whole thing had escalated into all-out war, resulting in yet another sack of Rome and the breaking of the Catholic Church? What if the dominant power in Europe in the later seventeenth century and onwards had been atheist? Would we now be living in a scientific utopia, or would religion have reasserted itself, possibly in the form of extreme Calvinism backed by scientific determinism? I can't feel that would have been any better.
Thing is, even if I were up to writing it, I probably wouldn't. Alternate history's not my thing unless there's magic involved, and this would have to be strictly real-world.
Quite a good title though.
(Julian the Apostate is supposed to have said "Vicisti, Galilaee"--"You have conquered, Galilean"--either when he was fatally wounded or when he died, meaning that a Christian had killed him and that now he was out of the way Rome would become Christian again, but of course like much of the history we think we know this turns out to be just propaganda or hearsay, and Julian was probably actually killed by a Persian, or a passing hot sausage salesman, or maybe not at all. Who knows? Maybe that's him over there in the corner...)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-08-22 09:23 am (UTC)A nice thought but Galileo successfully resisting the Catholic Church would not have produced that effect. All the breaking of the Catholic Church would have done is mean that the Religiious Wars would have been about which version of Protestantism was the "true" Christianity, rathet than a struggle for Protestantism to survive a resurgant Catholicism.
But agree, a nice idea. And a nice title.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-25 01:17 am (UTC)Allan is almost certainly correct that atheism is not what would have happened, particularly since by all accounts Galileo wasn't an atheist. Assuming even that the breaking of the Catholic Church is what would have happened; a takeover seems likelier to me. But a takeover that would leave the Catholic Church based on strict scientific principles with regard to the Observable.