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As with 2001 , the symbolic resolution of this tension grows out of a
battle to the death between science as knowledge and science as power, but
now with Galileo playing Bowman's part and the Catholic Church playing
the part of HAL. To sustain this polarity, Bronowski has to tinker with
various historical facts. 55 He presents Galileo as the “creator of modern
scientific method,” something scientific historians have long known to be
an exaggeration, and the Catholic Church as science's mortal enemy. The
story's death-struggle could not work to reveal science's unique heroism as
nature's prophet unless those who opposed it were utterly against nature.
This is because the “content of the form,” to borrow a phrase from one of
White's titles, is the form. 56 Bronowski could not make science history's
savior without conforming the facts of history to the formal parameters of
romance. For this reason, he represents Galileo's condemnation in 1633 as
both absolute and inevitable. Having invented science twenty years before,
the Italian astronomer's fate was already sealed. There was “never any doubt
that Galileo would be silenced, because the division between him and those
in authority was absolute.” The church believed that “faith should domi-
nate; and Galileo believed that truth should persuade.” 57 Only a polarity
of this kind could give the romantic hero's scientific stance its redemptive
meaning. If the progress of history arose because science had put civiliza-
tion on the same course as natural evolution, its protagonist would need
to have a purely scientific motive and its antagonist a polluted one. And so
Bronowski also needed to overlook the church's general friendliness to sci-
ence, the various Catholic scientists and clergy who by this time had already
accepted the Copernican position, the minority of dissenting cardinals who
voted against Galileo's condemnation, and the papacy's earlier demonstra-
tions of appreciation for the astronomer's accomplishments. 58
The biblical model that structures this evolutionary romance, in fact,
makes an overt appearance as Bronowski closes this episode of his drama.
By reminding his readers that John Milton had visited the blind astronomer
as he languished under house arrest during his final years, Bronowski also
finds an opportunity to identify Galileo with the hero of Milton's Samson
Agonistes (1671). Galileo's fatal flaw, as we see throughout the narrative, was
a naiveté born from his very greatness as a scientist. Consumed, like Sam-
son, by the splendor of the supernatural gift he was given, he became blind
to the mundane political seductions that would betray him into the hands
of a Philistine pope. But because Samson's supernatural powers were not
his own, they transcended his weakness and were destined to triumph in
spite of him. Thus just as the biblical hero “destroyed the Philistine empire
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