Arthur Koestler: 'The Greatest Scandal in Christendom', Catholic Mind, January 1965, 4-12Legend has turned Galileo into a martyr of the freedom of thought and Urban VIII into its benightedoppressor. In fact it was a clash of temperaments, wantonly provoked and aggravated by unluckycoincidences. To understand what really happened, a word must be said about the background the grandtopography of the universe, as Galileo's contemporaries envisioned it.For the last 2000 years, according to the orthodox doctrine, the solid earth had been regarded as the center ofthe world round which the sun, the planets and the stars revolved in their orbits; it was based on the legacy ofAristotle and had been elaborated in detail by Ptolemy, an Alexandrian astronomer of the 2nd century A.D.As against this there existed another grand scheme of even more ancient origin. The Pythagorean school,which had flourished between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC., had taught that the earth rotated on its own axis:at least one Pythagorean, Aristarchus of Samos, held that in addition to its daily rotation the earth alsotraveled through space in its annual revolutions round the sun; the five known planets did the same, so thatthe sun, and not the earth, was the center and hub of the universe.The geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy had prevailed. But the rival heliocentric system of thePythagoreans was never quite forgotten. It was preserved in the writings of the Latin compilers. It crops upunexpectedly in medieval manuscripts; it was finally revived and elaborated in detail by Canon Koppernigk,called Copernicus, a somewhat crotchety cleric in the God-forsaken province of Varmia on the Baltic Sea.Copernicus died in 1543, 21 years before Galileo's birth. The first printed copy of his book, On therevolutions of the heavenly spheres, was handed to him on his deathbed. For more than half a century itaroused little interest. It was addressed, as the title-page said, "to mathematicians only." It was clu...