Posts Tagged ‘Inquisition’
“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist.”*…
Our environment…
This map shows a slice of our Universe. It was created from astronomical data taken night after night over a period of 15 years using a telescope in New Mexico, USA. We are located at the bottom. At the top is the actual edge of the observable Universe. In between, we see about 200,000 galaxies.
Each tiny dot is a galaxy. About 200,000 are shown with their actual position and color. Each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. We are located at the bottom. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is just a dot. Looking up, we see that space is filled with galaxies forming a global filamentary structure. Far away from us (higher up in the map), the filaments become harder to see…
For a (much crisper, more vivid, and interactive) version: “The Map of the Observable Universe.”
* Stephen Hawking
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As we explore, we might recall that it was on this date in 1616 that The Minutes of the Roman Inquisition recorded the conclusion that Galileo’s writings in support of Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the solar system were “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.” The next day, Galileo was called before Cardinal Bellarmine, who (on Pope Paul V’s instruction) ordered Galileo to abandon the teaching. Shortly thereafter, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and other heliocentric works were banned (entered onto the Index Librorum Prohibitorum) “until correction.”
Sixteen years later, Galileo “published” Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo)– that’s to say, he presented the first copy to his patron, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Dialogue, which compared the heliocentric Copernican and the traditional geo-centric Ptolemaic systems, was an immediate best-seller.
While there was no copyright available to Galileo, his book was printed and distributed under a license from the Inquisition. Still, the following year it was deemed heretical– and he joined Copernicus on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum: the publication of anything else Galileo had written or ever might write was also banned… a ban that remained in effect until 1835.
“The sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.”*…
Mary, Queen of Scots wrote 57 encrypted messages during her captivity in England; until recently, all but 7 of them were believed lost. Meilan Solly tells the tale of their discovery and decryption…
Over the course of her 19 years in captivity, Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote thousands of letters to ambassadors, government officials, fellow monarchs and conspirators alike. Most of these missives had the same underlying goal: securing the deposed Scottish queen’s freedom. After losing her throne in 1567, Mary had fled to England, hoping to find refuge at her cousin Elizabeth I’s court. (Mary’s paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, was the sister of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII.) Instead, the English queen imprisoned Mary, keeping her under house arrest for nearly two decades before ordering her execution in 1587.
Mary’s letters have long fascinated scholars and the public, providing a glimpse into her relentless efforts to secure her release. But the former queen’s correspondence often raises more questions than it answers, in part because Mary took extensive steps to hide her messages from the prying eyes of Elizabeth’s spies. In addition to folding the pages with a technique known as letterlocking, she employed ciphers and codes of varying complexity.
More than 400 years after Mary’s death, a chance discovery by a trio of code breakers is offering new insights into the queen’s final years. As the researchers write in the journal Cryptologia, they originally decided to examine a cache of coded notes housed at the National Library of France as part of a broader push to “locate, digitize, transcribe, decipher and analyze” historic ciphers. Those pages turned out to be 57 of Mary’s encrypted letters, the majority of which were sent to Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador to England, between 1578 and 1584. All but seven were previously thought to be lost…
What they found and how they made sense of it: “Code Breakers Discover—and Decipher—Long-Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots,” from @meilansolly in @SmithsonianMag.
* Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters
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As we crack codes, we might spare a thought for a rough contemporary of Mary’s, a man who refused to communicate in code: Giordano Bruno. A Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer whose concept of the infinite universe expanded on Copernicus’s model, he was the first European to understand the universe as a continuum where the stars we see at night are identical in nature to the Sun. Bruno’s views were considered dangerously heretical by the (Roman) Inquisition, which imprisoned him in 1592; after eight years of refusals to recant, on this date in 1600, he was burned at the stake.
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition”*…
On the long-term effects of suppression and persecution…
From Imperial Rome to the Crusades, to modern North Korea or the treatment of Rohingya in Myanmar, religious persecution has been a tool of state control for millennia.
While its immediate violence and human consequences are obvious, less obvious is whether it leaves scars centuries after it ends.
In a new study we have attempted to examine the present day consequences of one of the longest-running and most meticulously documented persecutions of them all – the trials of the Spanish Inquisition between 1478 to 1834…
Details at “Extraordinarily, the effects of the Spanish Inquisition linger to this day.”
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As we tolerate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1492 that Catholic monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile took control of the Emirate of Grenada (1238-1492), the last Moorish stronghold in Spain. King Boabdil surrendered to Spanish forces in the Alhambra palace, surrendering the key to the city– an event Christopher Columbus witnessed as he received the support of the monarchy to sail to the Indies.
Pursuant to the Inquisition, Ferdinand and Isabella had targeted Muslims and Sephardic Jews (also called the Megorashim), forcing them either to convert to Christianity or to leave Spain within four months without any possessions. Failure to leave resulted in torture and/or death.
“We forced our opponents to change their minds”*…
There are those who say this pandemic shouldn’t be politicised. That doing so is tantamount to basking in self-righteousness. Like the religious hardliner shouting it’s the wrath of God, or the populist scaremongering about the “Chinese virus”, or the trend-watcher predicting we’re finally entering a new era of love, mindfulness, and free money for all.
There are also those who say now is precisely the time to speak out. That the decisions being made at this moment will have ramifications far into the future. Or, as Obama’s chief of staff put it after Lehman Brothers fell in 2008: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
In the first few weeks, I tended to side with the naysayers. I’ve written before about the opportunities crises present, but now it seemed tactless, even offensive. Then more days passed. Little by little, it started to dawn that this crisis might last months, a year, even longer. And that anti-crisis measures imposed temporarily one day could well become permanent the next.
No one knows what awaits us this time. But it’s precisely because we don’t know because the future is so uncertain, that we need to talk about it…
In a crisis, what was once unthinkable can suddenly become inevitable. We’re in the middle of the biggest societal shakeup since the second world war…
In a fundamentally optimistic essay, historian Rutger Bregman peers through the Overton Window to explain the seemingly-sudden ripening of ideas that seemed impossible just months ago: “The neoliberal era is ending. What comes next?”
See also: “Bruno Latour: ‘This is a global catastrophe that has come from within’.”
And for some (more) historical context, in the form of a scientist’s computer model that tracks “cycles” he has detected in the U.S. since 1780– culminating (so far) in his prediction in Nature in 2010 that 2020 would see huge unrest– see “This Researcher Predicted 2020 Would Be Mayhem. Here’s What He Says May Come Next.”
* Margaret Thatcher in 2002, alluding to Tony Blair and New Labour when asked what she saw as her great achievement. (N.B., as the piece excerpted above explains, in 2020, Bernie Sanders’s “moderate” rival Joe Biden is proposing tax increases double what Hillary Clinton planned four years ago. Similarly, though Sanders ran on a more radical climate plan than Biden in 2020, Biden’s climate plan is more radical than that Sanders had in 2016.)
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As we buckle up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1633 that Galileo delivered his Fourth (and final) Deposition to the court of the Inquisition, which had raised theological objections to his heliocentric view of the solar system (for the second time, he had been tried in 1616 for the same offense, and both censured and censored– his books were banned). This second trial, occasioned by his publication of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which resurfaced his heliocentric view, ended the following day, when the Inquisitor issued these rulings:
- Galileo was found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the center of the universe, that the Earth is not at its center and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to “abjure, curse, and detest” those opinions.
- He was sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition. (On the following day this was commuted to house arrest, under which he remained for the rest of his life.)
- His offending Dialogue was banned; and in an action not announced at the trial, publication of any of his works was forbidden, including any he might write in the future
Galileo before the Holy Office, a 19th-century painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury
“Life swarms with innocent monsters”*…
“The Taming the Tarasque,” from Hours of Henry VIII, France, Tours, ca. 1500
From dragons and unicorns to mandrakes and griffins, monsters and medieval times are inseparable in the popular imagination. But medieval depictions of monsters—the subject of a fascinating new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan [which includes the image above]—weren’t designed simply to scare their viewers: They had many purposes, and provoked many reactions. They terrified, but they also taught. They enforced prejudices and social hierarchies, but they also inspired unlikely moments of empathy. They were medieval European propaganda, science, art, theology, and ethics all at once…
Finding the meaning in monsters: “The Symbols of Prejudice Hidden in Medieval Art.”
* Charles Baudelaire
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As we decode dragons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1542, with Pope Paul III’s papal bull Licet ab initio, that the Roman Inquisition formally began. In the tradition of the medieval inquisitions, and “inspired” by the Spanish Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition gave six cardinals six cardinals the power to arrest and imprison anyone suspected of heresy, to confiscate their property, and to put them to death.
While not so much in the prudish spirit of Savonarola’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” the Roman Inquisition– which lasted in the 18th century– was ruthless in rooting out what it considered dangerous deviations from orthodoxy. Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Cesare Cremonini were all persecuted. While only Bruno was executed, the others were effectively (or actually) banished, and in the cases of Copernicus and Galileo, their works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books).
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