Since leaving The Satanic Temple, I’ve given considerable thought to what I’d write for my first LORE piece. There are any number of moments where the history of Satanic or heretical ideas intersect with our group’s mission, but one in particular kept popping in my head. As a group of Satanists dedicated to challenging unjust and illegitimate authority in all forms, in particular their claims to be absolute arbiters of simple facts, the perfect example seemed to me to be the Galileo Affair.
Unless you’re a member of the frustratingly persistent Flat Earth truther movement (and I really hope you aren’t), the Earth rotating around the sun while spinning on its own axis is one of the most basic facts of science. It was also one of the most controversial assertions in Western history, dangerous enough to draw the attention of the head of a major religion and to threaten its advocates with absolute ostracization. This seems, in retrospect, an excessively severe punishment for something that has nothing to do with fundamental Catholic principles such as Transubstantiation or the Trinity. Why then the extreme measures?
Popular imagination has many misconceptions about pre-Christian Europe and the Mediterranean’s scientific knowledge. Despite childhood stories of Christopher Columbus, Europeans since the ancient Greeks insisted that the earth was a globe, with the mathematician Eratosthenes having correctly calculated the circumference in the third century BCE. The relative position of the earth to the stars, planets, and sun was a more contentious question. One of the most popular ideas was geocentrism, contemporaneously referred to as Ptolemaic cosmology. The philosopher Ptolemy developed a model that attempted to align the motions of the planets with the writings of Aristotle. This idea persisted well past the fall of the Western Roman Empire, thanks to the Islamic world’s veneration of Aristotle. As trade resumed in the Mediterranean with the Islamic world over the following centuries, this formalized system to explain the cosmos was returned to Catholic Europe and became the accepted order of the greater universe.
The problem was that careful study of the movements of the planets revealed a fixed earth required elaborate explanations. While stars seem to move with a regular arc in the night sky, the planets wander, sometimes backtracking over days. Ptolemaic cosmology had to invent complex mathematics and explanations for how this was possible. It wasn’t until the observations of Copernicus that a simpler solution was proposed. By replacing the fixed position of the earth with the sun, the math to explain planetary motion could be simplified.
Like most hypotheses, this model has problems that kept it from solving every shortcoming of the Ptolemaic system, leaving the question mired in controversy. People continued to investigate, and in the 1600s Galileo Galilei, using advanced telescopes, observed details of the planets never seen before. Between the shadows of craters on the moon, other objects rotating around Jupiter, and most crucially, the planet Venus demonstrating phases, he concluded that the heliocentric model was the only model consistent with these observations.
The story from here is I think familiar to most. The Catholic Inquisition with full backing of the Pope, sentenced Galileo to house imprisonment under suspicion of heresy and placed a total ban on his work. What isn’t as often discussed is why the Church declared heliocentrism as heresy.
Here I want to stress, that “heresy” is not simply a contravention of theological doctrine on the part of the heretic. It is a political accusation against a non-accepted line of thought, and the Inquisition existed to enforce a rigid ideological order. This is demonstrated by the actions taken against prominent heretical movements prior to the Galileo affair, in particular the Fraticelli. The “Little Brethren” were an order of Catholics who believed that one could not follow the example of Christ without embracing poverty, and they presented a very real threat to the tenuous order the Church had established in Europe.
Feudal Europe had congealed into a strictly tiered society after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a social order that was condoned, and granted divine authority by the Church. Those who work, the peasants, made sure the realm was fed, while those who fought, the nobles, maintained this order, while those who prayed, the Church, saw to the ultimate salvation of all Christendom. An idyllic and simple structure that masked a society in constant tension. Kings, and most notably the Holy Roman Emperor, had for centuries chafed at the power and land the Church held. This was kept in check by the Church claiming exclusive authority over the personal dispensation that would absolve the lords of their sins so that they could be admitted into Heaven. This practice of indulgences translated to material wealth, as the Church accepted payments for absolution. To demand that the clergy swear off material wealth was to demand that they unilaterally disarm in this cold war with the secular powers. It was for this that Fraticelli priests and monks were persecuted by the Inquisition, a political act to prevent a threat to Papal power.
Other movements faced similar persecution. Waldensians held to a similar ethic of radical poverty, though their assertion that the Pope himself was the figure of the Anti-Christ made their stance more dramatically political. Of note too were local inquisitions that persecuted women and others for the crimes of witchcraft. Whether in response to a desperate population’s fear over declining harvests, or cynical men in power seeking to eliminate enemies and steal their property, these witch hunts served to reinforce established patriarchal and political social orders (and a topic I plan to return to in the future).
It is in this context that we must understand Galileo’s trial, even more so because of the high profile nature of it. Most importantly, the political charge being adjudicated was who had the authority to determine matters of fact.
In seventeenth century European thought, every facet of the earth, the stars, the sun, and beyond was a manifestation of God. The Pope, as sole conduit to God determined by his spiritual link to Saint Peter, was the one and only authority on all matters of the world. Academics could debate hypotheticals, but declarations of fact were reserved to the Pope alone. This was the fundamental conflict: by claiming facts revealed to him through observation and deduction, Galileo was challenging the most basic authority of the Pope. The democratic implications of observation and scientific inquiry were so fundamentally threatening to the authority of the Pope that the Church refused to acknowledge heliocentrism until 1992, long after the theory had made both suborbital satellites and moon landings a possibility.
Sadly, scientific theories continue to struggle with political power that denies the conclusions which observation and study lead to. The theory of evolution by natural selection faced a similar force of denial by religious authorities, and to this day elected officials deny its explanatory power, some going so far as to remove it from school curricula. For the evangelical mind, the common ancestry of all life on earth challenges multiple fundamentalist ideologies: the dominance of man over and apart from nature as well as the narrative of the creation of the world and its life in a matter of six days. While the theory of evolution does threaten to encourage a critical examination of the Bible, it also presents a more fundamental challenge: namely, the authority of that Bible to determine the facts of the world itself.
While bad faith actors like Ben Shapiro may assert that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” what can be considered a fact is not cut and dry. I would argue that the most fundamental function of a society is determining how those matters of fact are agreed upon. The authority to speak on matters of fact can only come from earned and just authorities, whose examination of the matter is transparent, open to criticism, and most importantly falsifiable. I myself come from a background in the sciences, with an amateur’s fascination with history, and I welcome good faith critiques and corrections for all my work. And in the matter of those who claim false and unjust authority, I and the rest of the LORE Satanic Collective will fight to expose and condemn those usurpers.