I was interested in this book because of the question the title itself suggests: what did Galileo see? Not literally what were the images he saw through his telescope — we have his drawings as evidence of that — but what did it mean to him, how did he interpret what he saw?
The mythology that has come down to us is that what Galileo saw was the confirmation, if not the revelation, that the heavens were not populated by perfect, unblemished spheres of light. He saw the Moon like we see it — spotted, rough, undeniably imperfect, maybe beautiful in its own way but not the “heavenly object” that the Church had prepared us to see. And what happened was the birth of modern science, a blow against superstition and a struggle that we still fight today.
But Lipking wants us to think a little more closely, especially about Galileo’s historical and intellectual context. The seventeenth century is often taken to be the century in which the scientific revolution bloomed, and it certainly was an amazing century — Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Bacon, . . . We might forget that this was also the century that began with Shakespeare, gave us Milton, Locke, Hobbes — poets, philosophers, . . . writers and thinkers of all sorts. Not everyone was a scientist.
I’ve always had difficulty thinking of the seventeenth century as one thing — it seems like a collection of almost unconnected lanes — the lanes occupied by Shakespeare and the poets, political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, early modern thinkers about the nature of knowledge and the methods of science like Bacon and Descartes, and scientists themselves like Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton. But Lipking’s message is that those lanes don’t really exist — all of these thinkers, writers, and researchers lived in a much more common intellectual world.
He does not give us a tightly focused study of Galielo’s observations. What he does instead is fill in the landscape of the seventeenth century mind, one that would no doubt see very different things through Galileo’s telescope than we see in retrospect. That mind blended spaces of mathematics, physics, and astronomy with theology, astrology, alchemy, and poetry, all as ways to see the truth about our world and ourselves.
For us now, the Moon that appears in poetry is quaint and metaphorical. For the mind of the seventeenth century, poetry was itself revelatory of meaning. Poetry gave us something different from theories and facts, something that rivaled science for truth.
Lipking doesn’t offer a simple answer to the question of what Galileo saw, and the book is not a discussion of that moment of looking through the telescope. Instead he paints the broader picture of the seventeenth century, to help us see that it wasn’t as single-minded a march toward science against superstition as we are prone to see it today. And whether we call astrology and alchemy errors, the theology of the church superstition, or the poetic world of Milton a flight of fanciful imagination, those things, in the here and now of the seventeenth century, were real and valid and world-infusing.
Lipking’s book is not so much an explicit argument for one position or another as an exposition of the intellectual landscape in which Galileo, and others, lived. Galileo, from this perspective, is not an ahistorical genius — he is, like anyone, a person of his time. Understanding what he saw requires that we understand what a person of his time brought to his experience. To look through the telescope then and to look through it now are two very different experiences.
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