Galileo and the church

This book questions the traditional "grand narratives" of science and religion in the seventeenth century. The binary oppositions underlying the story - between reason and faith, between knowledge and authority, between Scripture and the light of nature - have moulded it into a formative myth: the banner of modern rationalism, liberalism, and individualism. While deconstructing the oppositions behind the conflict, the book offers an analysis of the complex intellectual/institutional field in which the drama of Galileo and the Church unfolded. The well-known contradictions among the documents of Galileo's trials are reread as expressions of the contradictory nature of the Counter-Reformation church. A flashback into the formative years of Tridentine Catholicism demystifies its monolithic and brutally coercive tendencies. Rather, the church appears to have been torn between different cultural orientations and divided institutionally as well as theologically. The traditional intellectual elite of the Dominicans adopted an orthodox Thomist allegiance and refused innovation in the name of Thomist rationalism. Their reaction to the challenge raised by the Counter-Reformation consisted in