The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

by Arthur Koestler

From the purely legal point of view the sentence was certainly a miscarriage of justice. If one works through the maze of verbiage, it appears that he was found guilty on two counts: firstly, of having contravened both Bellarmine’s admonition, and the alleged formal injunction of 1616, and having ‘artfully and cunningly extorted the licence to print by not notifying the censor of the command imposed upon him’; and secondly, of having rendered himself ‘vehemently suspect of heresy, namely, of having believed and held the doctrine which is contrary to sacred Scripture that the sun is the centre of the world’. Concerning the first count, no more need be said about the dubious character of the document referring to the alleged absolute injunction; as for the second, the sun-centred universe had never been officially declared a heresy, since neither the opinion of the Qualifiers, nor the decree of the Congregation of 1616, had been confirmed by infallible pronouncement ex cathedra or by Ecumenic Council. Had not Urban himself said that the Copernican opinion ‘was not heretical but merely reckless’?