The truth of the moderns and the deception of the ancients. Heavenly motions and the biblical hermeneutics of Paolo Antonio Foscarini

Paolo Antonio Foscarini is among Galileo’s most frequently named correspondents. His case revolves around the well-known treatise he wrote to defend the Copernican system, the Letter concerning the opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus about the mobility of the earth and the stability of the sun and the new Pythagorean system of the world, published in January 1615 and listed in the Roman Index only a year later. It was this book that tipped the scales of Roman censorship towards a condemnation of heliocentrism; moreover, the remarks written to the author by Cardinal Bellarmine on receiving the book, insisting that heliocentrism may be considered and treated as a hypothesis but not a fact, anticipated the official attitude of the Catholic Church towards the new astronomy until the early 19th century. Analyzing two further writings by the same author, this paper shows that Foscarini’s Letter must not be considered, as it has generally been, as an extemporaneous and ingenuous proposal, but rather as part of a wider, systematic project of renewing theology and natural philosophy, that has to be read within the dynamic context of the Italian scientific culture in the years that preceded the condemnation of Copernicus.