Wilma's "Life of Galileo'

The power of doubt

ROBERT ZALLER

“Truly men hate the truth,” Robinson Jeffers says in his poem, Cassandra: “They’d liefer/ Meet a tiger on the road.” Cassandra was an ancient truth-teller whom no one would believe. Copernicus was a truth-teller of more recent vintage, and Galileo Galilei, who discovered the laws of falling bodies and the moons of Jupiter, was his disciple.

Both men endured a long and complex relationship with the truth’s official guardian, the Roman Catholic Church. Copernicus was actually encouraged in his inquiries by a papal sponsor, Paul III, while Urban VIII likewise admired Galileo. Nonetheless, Copernicus took care not to publish his radical conclusion— that the earth was not the center of the universe— until he lay on his deathbed in 1543. The great Polish astronomer had no fear of offending his God; he had less confidence in his patron.

Galileo, a man of quite different temperament, kept his truces with the Church but couldn’t resist publishing his researches. In The Sidereal Messenger, he revealed that the heavens were imperfect (since telescopic inspection of the moon revealed mountains and craters similar to those found on earth) and that their census was incomplete, since the largest planet had satellites.

This latter point was especially contentious, since Galileo’s elder contemporary, Giordano Bruno, had recently gone to the stake for suggesting that God in his plenipotence could have created an infinity of worlds, and Jupiter’s moons were the first evidence since antiquity that this possibility might in fact be the case. When, in his Dialogue Between the Two World Systems, Galileo affirmed the theories of Copernicus (by then officially condemned by the Church), he was arrested, interrogated and threatened with torture. Fearing Bruno’s fate, Galileo recanted.

Brecht: Another disillusioned truth-teller

History has forgiven Galileo, but, as Bertolt Brecht suggests, Galileo may have been less easy on himself. Brecht too fancied himself a truth-teller to the capitalist society of his time, and he too faced persecution, first by Nazi Germany and then, after World War II, by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the United States. Welcomed home to East Germany and given the run of the Berliner Ensemble, he lived to see the suppression of the East German workers’ uprising in June 1953, and died in 1956, the year when the Twentieth Party Congress and the Polish and Hungarian revolutions revealed the full bankruptcy of Soviet Communism.

The epic struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism for the soul of early modern Christian Europe— already the subject of Brecht’s Mother Courage— had its obvious analogue in the battle between Communism and the “Free World” in the playwright’s own time. If science was the neutral truth-term between the confessional ideologies of the former period, art held a similar significance for Brecht. Like the modern artist, the early modern scientist was often obliged to conceal the truth in order to protect it. Brecht saw this as the lesson of Galileo’s life, and he saw Galileo himself as the flawed hero who became the prototype of the Aesopian artist speaking truth to power, or at least to a posterity hopefully more fit to receive it.

Anachronistic— deliberately

The Life of Galileo was Brecht’s most heavily rewritten play; he was still at work on a third version of it when he died. The Wilma’s new production uses the David Edgar translation, which provides a colloquial edge but eloquence when it’s needed, and keeps the references to labor struggle that other versions trim or omit as anachronistic or (in a Cold War context) as ideologically uncomfortable. The references are anachronistic, but deliberately so: In linking Galileo to the proletariat, Brecht clearly means to pose the relation of the intellectual to social justice. Truth, as he suggests, loses its intrinsic virtue as the servant of power— that is, it becomes less true, and ultimately false.

To pose this very Aesopian paradox is to get to the heart of Brecht’s play. Fixed truth— whether that of Ptolemaic astronomy or religious orthodoxy— is inevitably appropriated by power; living truth is self-questioning by necessity. The triumph of the scientific method was to establish skepticism as its ruling principle, and therefore to render all truth, even the most firmly established law, provisional. Whereas faith— the repose of certainty in the given order— was once the touchstone of truth, now doubt, once faith’s shadow double, has replaced it.

This is a cultural sea change with whose consequences we are still grappling. Indeed, a very significant “faith-based” community, both here and, as we know all too well, abroad, still finds the epistemology of doubt unacceptable.

The new salvation

The Life of Galileo meets this challenge head-on. “Doubt makes me happy. Why?” asks the young monk who has become one of Galileo’s acolytes (played by John Zak, the wonderful Caliban of last year’s The Tempest), with what are perhaps the most important five words in the play. Hamlet plays with doubt like the intoxicated Renaissance intellectual that he is, yet doubt destroys him. Brecht suggests, per contra, that doubt is a form of salvation instead, if we take salvation to mean not the promise of eternal bliss but responsiveness to experience in the here and now.

This may be as hard a road as faith once was, when it had not yet congealed into dogma. But, as Brecht suggests, it is the light we have to go by now, the light of free science and of what Keats called, for the poets, negative capability; and, in what we may still call good faith, Brecht exhorts us to embrace it.

Echoes of Peter Ustinov

John Campion is the excellent Galileo in Blanka Zizka’s capable production, and, if he reminds one a little too much of Peter Ustinov in the early scenes, he gains in stature as the evening progresses. Of the actors in multiple roles, Scott Greer, David Hovey and Ross Manson are particularly noteworthy. Sarah Sanford is the pious spinster daughter whose happiness, unfortunately, must be sacrificed to science, and Grace Gonglewski the long-suffering housekeeper whose other duties are broadly hinted at. Zac Chew and Dante Mignucci have the children’s roles. Mimi Lien has designed a catwalk backdrop to what is essentially a bare stage but which serves, with Tyler Micoleau’s crisp lighting and Troy Robert Herion’s music, to keep the play’s many scenes moving briskly. Only the choral interjections seemed underdone, more Broadway than Berlin.

The Life of Galileo is, despite references to Brecht’s earlier, agitprop style, one of his most conventional plays, and its longer scenes sometimes have an almost Shavian loquacity. This can be remedied by cuts, but the cure can be worse than the disease. Brecht (like Shaw) needs to be heard out at full length, even at the risk of the occasional longueur, and Zizka has properly served him. I can imagine bolder stagings of this play, and more complex and urbane readings of Brecht’s irony. But to offer a work that takes not merely the play but the passion of ideas seriously, and to bring it off well, is daring enough these days.