NONFICTION - June 19, 1994

GALILEO: A Life by James Reston Jr. (HarperCollins: $25; 288 pp.) “Galileo guffawed,” writes James Reston Jr. in this muscular new biography, and such is Reston’s command that you can hear the snort. And see the snorter, this unruly Renaissance genius, lusty, disheveled, obstreperous, arrogant, “his large frame lumbering forward and his red hair flowing, ready to stop and argue almost any proposition as if it were an invitation to a fight.” In a spirited evocation of Galileo’s charisma and capacity, Reston traces his galactic collision course with the only power on earth or heaven able to bring him to his knees: the Roman Catholic Church. For Galileo was, above all, a believer, his logic ever at odds with illogical faith. (In his famed lecture before the Academy of Florence, Galileo, in all seriousness, limned the appearance and dimensions of Dante’s hell). The church was the law in those days, and more: a dictatorship empowered not only to excommunicate but also to torture and, in extremis, put out contracts--on Lutherans, heretics and mad scientists claiming that the earth, biblical center of the universe (Joshua, Ecclesiastes, Solomon, etc.), revolved about the sun.

It was a mighty struggle, one that the “winner” has yet to live down (its lukewarm 1992 acknowledgment that “errors were made” notwithstanding). Forced to deny what he could see in the sky was the polymath for whom Renaissance man was coined. Somewhat better rounded than today’s version--someone who can simultaneously cough and watch “Coach”-- Galileo had mastered and amplified math, astronomy, physics and medicine by his mid-20s; invented the telescope, thermometer, compass and a theoretical telephone; excelled at, and composed for, the lute; gardened with great skill; translated epics from the Greek to amuse himself; taken on--and whipped--not only Ptolemy but also Aristotle. He lost to the almighty church, of course, but only by split decision, a contest of which Reston’s account is fresh, sinewy and altogether admirable.