Am Tor des Himmels

Am Tor des Himmels, a Novelle by G. von Le Fort, published in 1954. The central story consists of the so-called ‘Galileisches Dokument’, in which a student of Galileo relates the events leading to Galileo's appearance before the Inquisition in Rome. Galileo himself, referred to not by name but as ‘der Meister’, remains in the background of the action, which centres on three characters: the German student, who is the narrator of the central story representing the ‘document’, Diana, and the Cardinal, her uncle, who provide the opportunity to discuss the problems which science presented to the Church in challenging the validity of the Ptolemaic system. The student and Diana move from Padua to Rome shortly before Galileo's trial. Here the student is invited to work in the Cardinal's observatory. The Cardinal himself believes in the truth of Galileo's theories, but fears that its acknowledgement by the Church will lead to disbelief and confusion and thus threaten the authority of the Church. His fears appear to be justified, for his niece Diana has already abandoned her faith in God and dedicated herself to ‘the master’. In pronouncing the anathema, the Cardinal accordingly denies the truth. In the author's interpretation of the historic recantation, Galileo responds by similarly masking the truth. Galileo's student, believing throughout that the new discoveries should not affect true faith, returns to his native Germany.

The frame introducing the ‘document’ (see Rahmen) is set in and after the 1939-45 War, thus making it possible to examine the relevance of the problem to modern times. An air raid destroys the document as well as the faith of the narrator, a distant relation of the student. After the war her friend, a young scientist, returns to continue his research, convinced, like the student, that the progress of science cannot be halted. Yet it is he who resumes the search for God, and thus revives the abandoned conviction of the 17th-c. student that faith should grow independently of the laws of causality. The symbolical title has also a specific reference to the observatory in Padua.