Politics on Trial: Galileo vs the Inquisition

Past Present Future

D&HR Media Ltd

Society & Culture, History, News, Politics, Philosophy

4.8 • 747 Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2025

⏱️ ? minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s trial is one of the most notorious in history but also one of the most misremembered. Galileo’s epic confrontation with the Catholic Church over the question of whether the earth moves round the sun – culminating with his interrogation and condemnation in Rome in 1633 – was not just a matter of truth vs ignorance or science vs superstition. It was also twenty-year long struggle on the part of both sides to find a way to co-exist. Did they succeed? Not exactly, but it wasn’t for want of trying. Then – and perhaps now – science and religion needed each other. Out now on PPF+: Part 2 of David’s conversation with Robert Saunders about the 1975 European referendum and the question of why it all ended up so differently in the Brexit referendum of 2016. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus David’s new 20-part series Postwar – about the 1945 general election and the making of modern Britain – starts on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow and the first 10 episodes will be available to download on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d8v1 Next time in Politics on Trial: Charles I vs Parliament Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:48.5	Subject to availability, serving time supply. Hello, my name's David Ransman, and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas podcast.
1:06.6	Today, we're returning to our series about epic political trials, and it's one of the really epic ones.
1:14.7	Galileo in front of the Inquisition in Rome in 1633.
1:20.2	Truth against prejudice, science against religion, an open mind against a set of closed minds, right?
1:32.2	No, wrong. It was really nothing like that at all.
1:47.3	The trial of Galileo is up there with the trial of Socrates as one of the totemic events in the history of the West, the Western imagination. It's full of symbolism. And the two events are sometimes treated as not all that dissimilar. So they do
1:53.6	have one obvious thing in common. The two men, by chance, were both 70 years old when they were put on
2:00.0	trial, Socrates and Galileo.
2:02.4	So they were put on trial right at the end of their lives. In Socrates's case, the trial ended
2:06.2	his life. Galileo, it didn't end his life, but it wasn't that long after. And they had both
2:11.8	been doing most of their lives, that adult life, the thing for which they were put on trial. Socrates's case,
	...

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