The Silence of the Wolves, or, Why it Took the Holy Inquisition Seventy-Three Years to Ban Copernicanism

Abstract

I give two main answers to the question why Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (1543) had so long been officially ignored in ‘Rome’. The first is that cosmological issues were of only peripheral importance in such times of life-and-death contestations with Protestant reformers. The second is that it took – in a very contingent way – the personality of Cardinal Bellarmine, driven by an anti-reformationist emphasis on authority, to unite with a ‘synergy effect’ two separate dogmatic strands: (1) the old teaching of the superiority of theology over all other forms of knowledge, made binding in the Papal Bull Apostolici Regiminis (1513), and, (2) the Decree of the Council of Trent on the Holy Scripture (1546), which stated that only the Church, and not the single believer (as Luther had claimed), had the authority to bindingly interpret the Scripture in matters of faith and morals. The synergy between the two strands had the surprising epistemic result of any biblical passage becoming a ‘matter of faith.’