The Roman Inquisition. Thomas F. Mayer

Introducing Bellarmino’s fede and thereby contradicting his testimony proved to be a serious mistake. “In any manner whatsoever” (as the precept minute reads) almost becomes redundant.⁹²

      Galileo’s interrogator continued with a series of questions about the interview with Bellarmino. Asked whether anyone else had been present and whether they or anyone else had also given him a precept, he replied, “It could be that some precept was given to me that I not hold nor defend the said opinion, but I do not remember because this is a matter of some years ago.”⁹³ Damaging as this admission was, Galileo quickly made his situation worse in his reply to a question whether he would remember the precept’s content were it read to him: “I do not claim not to have broken that precept in any way.” After having been told what the precept said, he once more exacerbated matters by saying, “I remember that the precept was that I could not hold nor defend, and it could be that there was also nor teach. I also do not remember that there was that detail, in any fashion, but it could be that it was there.” In short, he admitted that he might have received the precept in the strongest wording including quovis modo. The “Summary” (No. 5) recorded Galileo’s statement with scrupulous accuracy: “he confesses the precept.”⁹⁴

      In his brief defense of 10 May, Galileo first denied that he had received a precept (twice called a comandamento) and then claimed to have an oral order from Bellarmino that did not contain “in any manner whatsoever,” in both cases relying again on Bellarmino’s fede. He concluded that “when the said two details [teach, and quovis modo] are removed, and only the two noted in the present affidavit are retained [that is, not defended or held], there is no point in doubting that the command given in it is the same precept given in the Sacred Congregation of the Index’s decree.”⁹⁵ But as Pagano points out, in between Galileo made another damaging admission, or at least accepted without demur a serious point his interrogator had made. The “command” had been “given to me and registered.”⁹⁶ That last word can only refer to the precept minute, which, of course, contains the strongest form of the order to Galileo. In his last interrogation on 21 June he spoke of “that precept” he had received as the watershed in his intellectual life, after which he scrupulously and sincerely adhered only to Ptolemy’s cosmology, as he continued to maintain throughout the balance of this interrogation he had always done.⁹⁷ Galileo’s sentence the next day brims with the charge that he had violated the precept. so it is no surprise that he confessed to doing so in his abjuration the same day, saying that he had been properly condemned for having published the Dialogue “after having been judicially warned with a precept by the same [Holy Office] that I was completely to leave the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immobile and that the earth is not the center of the world and moves, and that I could not hold, defend nor teach in any way whatsoever, orally or in writing, the said false doctrine.”⁹⁸

      Thus, except in his defense of 10 May, Galileo admitted that he received a precept, probably from Bellarmino, and at least left open the possibility that it took the strong form. Galileo’s own testimony isolates document No. 3 all the more.

       Successive ac incontinenti

      Now that the precept minute has been established as authentic, one phrase in it demands careful attention, mainly because it has been taken to mean that Seghizzi violated his instructions to give Galileo a chance to accept whatever Bellarmino had said, going on successive ac incontinenti.

      The words “successive ac incontinenti” are linked by “et” to the last word in the warning Bellarmino gave, “deserat” (“abandon”). Right from the first, the phrase has been translated as linking the two actions without any temporal interval between them whatsoever. Wohlwill, while translating the phrase in various ways, “und darauf folgend und sofort” (“and thereafter and immediately”), “ohne ihm [Galileo] zur Antwort Zeit zu lassen” or “ohne Pause” (“without giving Galileo time to reply” or “without a break”), and “unmittelbar darauf” (“immediately thereafter”), never allowed it to include even an extra moment.⁹⁹ Wohlwill’s contemporary and competitor Karl von Gebler similarly rendered it as “gleich darauf ohne Unterbreching” (“immediately thereafter without interruption”).¹⁰⁰ It has usually been translated into English as “immediately thereafter.” Fantoli gives the most elaborate translation-cum-gloss: “an intervention that immediately followed Bellarmine’s warning, apparently without Galileo having had time to display his acquiescence.”¹⁰¹ The conclusion from such translations follows that Seghizzi violated the contingency in Paul V’s instructions that he was to act only if Galileo “refused to obey” (“recusaverit parere”).

      Neither Wohlwill nor von Gebler tried to establish what successive ac incontinenti might have meant in the seventeenth century. Several of their contemporaries did better, including Philippe Gilbert and Franz Reusch. Both turned to inquisitorial manuals, Gilbert to the Repertorium Inquisitorum (1575) and Reusch to Eliseo Masini’s widely used text for provincial inquisitors, Sacro arsenale (first edition 1621 and frequently reprinted). Quintiliano Mandosio added a note to a passage in the Repertorium that left incontinenti almost without limits as to how much time was meant.¹⁰² Masini gave instances of actions linked by successive ac incontinenti, as well as more with only the first word.¹⁰³ In one with the whole phrase, Masini paralleled it to immediatamente, a word seemingly as strong as its modern English cognate.¹⁰⁴ Yet this cannot be what Masini meant, since he joined two actions that could never occur strictly “immediately” after one another: fetching a suspect from prison (even if in the same building) in order to confront another suspect. Thus on Masini’s evidence successive can signify no more than “after,” perhaps “as soon as possible after” or better “directly” in both a temporal and procedural sense. This comes close to Beretta’s gloss of “in continuity with the previous event,” that is, part of the same legal proceedings, even if he continues to use the temporal meaning of “immediately.”¹⁰⁵

      Uses found in Peña’s “Introductio” (written before his death in 1612), as well as in inquisition records, support the same meaning. Thus, Peña once wrote of asking the same questions “successive in the same or another examination.”¹⁰⁶ At least three times it has the simple meaning “after” in the Holy Office’s own records, including indicating a prison visitation that must have begun sometime later than the first event indicated.¹⁰⁷ It also occurs in the records of peripheral tribunals. In Naples, we find it several times in Tommaso Campanella’s processo, for example, twice to link the examination of two witnesses, once to introduce the swearing in of another after an interval.¹⁰⁸ Likewise, it occurs in Romagna in a similar sense a number of times in the records of Rodrigo Alidosi’s trial when witnesses successive “appeared.”¹⁰⁹ The two words and the joint phrase were also known in the governor of Rome’s court.¹¹⁰

      The entry in Du Cange makes successive seem a fifteenth-century neologism since it cites only a letter of Pius II of 1459.¹¹¹ Most dictionaries have equally thin entries for it. The only other textual citation in any yet found, Andreas Stübelius’s Thesaurus latinitatis, quotes a bad reading from Aelius Spartianus on Caracalla taken from Robert Constantin’s Supplementum linguae latinae, which should be emended to successisse.¹¹² The full title of Constantin’s work underscores the word’s rarity: Supplementum linguae Latinae, seu dictionarium abstrusorum vocabulorum.¹¹³ Johann Matthias Gesner cited the same passage without correction in his slightly later Novus Linguae et Eruditionis Romanae Thesaurus.¹¹⁴ Although certainly rare, a number of uses of the word come up in a search of the Patrologia latina database covering patristic and medieval writing before 1215.¹¹⁵ The interval between then and the seventeenth century still needs investigation, but, by the later period, the word appears fairly frequently, for example, two or three times in Melchior Adam, Vitae Germanorum iureconsultorum et politicorum.¹¹⁶ Since successive need not mean much more than “after,” by itself it says nothing about whether Galileo had a chance to respond.

      Perhaps because they found its meaning obvious, successive