Kepler's Witch (25 page)

Kepler admits in his letters that he was no great treasure. He was irascible and often unkind, and he vacillated between bouts of anger and windstorms of guilt and repentance. He never tried to understand Barbara, because gentlemen did not feel the need to understand their wives, only to provide for them. When he brought her to tears, he was immediately sorry, which never solved anything exactly, because what he considered important and what Barbara considered important were so very far apart.

It galled her that some of the people referred to them as “Mr. and Mrs. Stargazer.” Although Kepler thought this was highly amusing and often referred to himself as “Mr. Stargazer,” Barbara took these things to heart. Few women in her day had much education. For all of her complaining, she wanted nothing extravagant—freedom from poverty, social respect, a warm family, and her husband's attention. Mr. Stargazer, the man whose mind was forever turning toward the heavens and to his endless calculations of the planetary orbits, was all too often absent, off in the world of his books.

In contrast, Barbara Kepler read almost nothing—no novels, no stories, and certainly no mathematics or astronomy. The one consolation she had was her prayer book, for she was intensely pious. But this too
created a difficulty for her, for though Johannes was also deeply religious and his spirituality and hers ran along parallel lines, religion and piety are not the same thing. The religious person wishes to experience the full range of the faith, to understand its traditions, and to face its weaknesses without flinching. Kepler wanted to study the heavens as his contribution to the faith. In the course of his studies, he had developed a theological position that was his own, and even as a strict Lutheran, which he remained all his life, no matter what the Tübingen consistory (the duke's council of advisers, both religious and secular) whispered about him while he lived in Prague and said openly later after he had moved to Linz, he had charted his own religious course through the troubled waters of the seventeenth century.

Barbara, on the other hand, was pious and would not have dreamed of doing what Johannes had done. Pious people often take their religion in narrow slices and are little interested in the grand sweep of its history or the range of its theological opinions. Indeed, there are religious people who are also pious; the two categories are not mutually exclusive. There is a sliding scale, however. In their intense search for a relationship with God, the strictly pious person often avoids intellectual challenges and cannot abide even the most favorable critique of the faith. For Barbara, her faith was in her Lutheran prayer book, and she could no more chart an independent theological opinion than she could understand the movements of the heavens.

What troubled her most was her own husband's reputation within the Lutheran community. Pious Lutherans who knew them well could see that Barbara's melancholy was growing, and they blamed Johannes for leading her away from the true Lutheran faith. Without trying to understand Kepler's exact position on Calvinism and predestination, they had heard rumors that he was a crypto-Calvinist, an idea he thoroughly rejected, and so they believed that Barbara's melancholy was the direct result of dark thoughts brought about by a belief in predestination and a fear that her soul was in jeopardy. This was not really the case, but given the times and Kepler's reputation, one could see how some people might have believed this. In truth, the idea of discussing his theological opinions
with Barbara never even occurred to Kepler. This did not mean that Barbara was stupid, not by any means; it meant she was ordinary and lived in an age when women were not expected to be educated or to have rational opinions. Barbara just had the bad luck of being married to a man who was not ordinary.

Almost all of Barbara's side of the story has been lost, sad to say. Four hundred years later, all we have are Johannes's letters and Johannes's description of Barbara, but nothing of her description of him. The he said–she said is all too one-sided. With the single exception of one complaining letter that Barbara wrote to Johannes while he was visiting Graz, a letter that seems to back up his less than flattering hints about her, Barbara herself remains mute. One can at least say in all fairness, however, that Barbara and Johannes were constantly zipping past each other like shooting stars, constantly missing one another in understanding, constantly fighting over trivial things, a fact that drilled itself into Johannes's soul. He knew that Barbara's melancholy, which was perpetual, had sickened her body as well, and he felt a great empathy for her struggle, for he too had suffered bouts of depression. Often during an argument his comments would cut her to the bone, and immediately he would realize what he had done, that he had gone too far, and would pull back from the brink. He apologized profusely then, no matter who was right or who was wrong, which showed the depths of the fellow feeling he had for her. At those times, he would have plucked out his own eye rather than say something to embitter her further. For this reason, though there was no love between them and little passion, their marriage never sank to the point of open warfare; neither took the other to court or carried difficulties beyond the bounds of the family.

Surprisingly, however, in spite of the lack of love, the Kepler family grew at a fair clip. Barbara had difficulty in childbirth, but she still gave birth to three children in the years that they were in Prague. On July 9, 1602, she bore a daughter that they named Susanna, possibly in memory of their first little Susanna, who had died so soon after birth in Graz. On December 3, 1604, she gave birth to a son, Friedrich, and then on December 21, 1607, she gave birth to another son, Ludwig. Given the religious
climate of the times, Kepler chose to have all three children baptized in an Utraquist service, the Czech Reformed church that followed Jan Hus and proclaimed that the people should receive Communion
sub utraque specie,
under both species, rather than by a Lutheran minister. By Rudolf's decree, only Catholic and Utraquist clergy were allowed inside the city, and therefore the Utraquists were the closest thing to Protestants that Kepler could find, and besides, one of his friends, a vastly rich young man who had squandered fortunes on his interest in alchemy, Peter Vok von Rozmberk, was also a leader in the Utraquist church.

Kepler's had his suspicions about alchemy, something Rozmberk's misfortune may have had a hand in. In his last years, he got into a bit of a controversy with an English alchemist and practitioner of occult science, Robert Fludd. Kepler's critique of Fludd's work was devastating. He took Fludd's ideas and analyzed them factually and rationally as a modern scientist would, while Fludd, who saw himself called to be a priest of secret knowledge, responded that Kepler saw only the outside of things and not the inside. This later controversy acts as a window into Kepler's view of occult sciences, a view he may well have developed while surrounded by alchemists and theosophists in Prague. It also may account for Isaac Newton's later coolness and his refusal to acknowledge Kepler, for Newton was a great devotee of alchemy and the secret sciences.

Barbara and Johannes chose godparents for all three children from the highest ranks of Prague society. Susanna's godmothers were three wives of imperial guards, while her godfathers were members of the nobility that the Keplers had met in Graz—Baron Ludwig von Dietrichstein, Baron Herwart von Hohenberg, Baron Weickhard, and Baron Dietrich von Auersperg. Friedrich's godfathers included the Baden ambassador, Joseph Hettler, the imperial treasurer, Stephan Schmid, and the venerable scholar Johannes Mathäus Wackher von Wackenfels, Kepler's distant relative and the imperial adviser. Little Ludwig's godfathers included Philip Ludwig and his son Wolfgang Wilhelm von Pfalz-Neuburg, both Protestant counts of the Palatinate, whose prince elector was Frederick, the Winter King, the man who accepted the throne of Bohemia after the Protestant rebellion in 1618, starting the Thirty Years' War.

Kepler loved his children, doted on them, and showed them a level of patience he rarely showed anyone else, including his wife. Little Friedrich was his favorite, though the boy took up much of his father's time. Just after Friedrich was born, Kepler wrote a letter to Herwart von Hohenberg, admitting that the noise around the house was keeping him from his work and from maintaining a proper correspondence with his friends and colleagues. Troops of women kept marching through the house to visit Barbara in her bed after the difficult birth. Children ran about, demanding attention. And Kepler had to play the host to all those who came to visit, so he couldn't easily slip away into his study.

Johannes didn't complain much, however, about the other troops, the battalions of his relatives, who kept visiting him from Swabia. He was, after all, their celebrity relative, and a trip to Prague was a pilgrimage for many of them. His mother, Katharina, arrived in 1602. Two years later, his sister Margaretha showed up, expecting to see the sights and hanging on Johannes's every word. Margaretha later married Pastor Georg Binder of Heumaden in 1608, a man who became a central figure in Katharina's trial for witchcraft. Eventually, even Heinrich, the unlucky brother who wandered through the world with a dark cloud over his head, came to visit, stayed, and joined the imperial guard. He even married and had two daughters.

And then there was travel. In 1601, after Jobst Müller, Barbara's father, had died, Kepler traveled to Graz to settle her estate. That was when Barbara sent her letter, the one that got Kepler in trouble with Tycho Brahe. In October 1606, another round of plague mysteriously boiled up in the city, and Kepler fled Prague with his entire family to Kunstadt in Moravia. Kepler must have had some money set aside at the time, for not everyone could leave the city. Only those with enough money to travel could do so, which meant that the middle and upper classes could escape, while the poor had to stay behind in the city to suffer and die by the score. Because of the plague, the emperor at that time remained in Brandeis. In November of that year, he summoned Kepler to attend him at his court there, which meant that Kepler had to return first to Prague by himself, and then from there go on to Brandeis. By the beginning of the next year,
the plague had burned itself out, and those who had left returned to the city. Kepler's family returned with them and took up residence once again in their home in the New Town, near the Emmaus monastery.

By the spring of 1609, Kepler traveled to the Frankfurt book fair, and from there to Heidelberg to supervise the final printing of the
Astronomia Nova
. The book was finally finished and the dedication to the emperor complete, but all along the way Kepler had struggled with Tycho Brahe's heirs for the right to publish his own work, because so much of it was based on Tycho's observations. Science had not yet evolved to the point where data could be exchanged freely. The emperor had promised 20,000 gulden to Tycho's family to purchase his instruments and his observations so that Kepler might be able to finish the
Rudolphine Tables
. However, as with so many other imperial promises, the emperor did not have the money to cover his intentions, and while Kepler and Tycho's family waited for the promised pay, the emperor's bureaucrats dithered. Over the next year, the Brahe family received a few thousand talers, but this did not come close to paying the emperor's debt.

Meanwhile, Kepler's own research led him further away from the Tychonic system. Because they had not yet received the promised price for the observations and instruments, Tycho's family, led by Franz Gansneb Tengnagel von Camp, Tycho's son-in-law, resisted any publication on Kepler's part that would use his old master's observations. They did this because they didn't want to see any diminishment of Tycho's glory, and there was money in it. Tengnagel was not a very accomplished astronomer, but he had enough of a reputation as one of Tycho's former assistants to promise the emperor a publication of his own based on his father-in-law's observations. But no publication was forthcoming, because Tengnagel was simply not competent to do the work. All that Tycho's family could see was the potential profit that they could gain by taking control of the
Rudolphine Tables,
but there was no one in that family with the dedication, training, and mathematical acumen to do the necessary work to compile the tables, not to mention the ability to take those observations and create a proper theory of planetary orbits, which was something far beyond their intellectual means.

Kepler's luck did hold out, however. The emperor appointed Johannes Pistorius, his father confessor and a friend of Kepler's, to supervise Kepler's work. Because the two men had been friends for some time, this was a fairly easy relationship. Meanwhile, Tengnagel busied himself bolstering the family's demands. In 1604, the Brahe family forced Kepler to sign an agreement in which he promised not to publish anything using Tycho's observations without Tengnagel's personal approval. A few years later, Tengnagel, who had been a Lutheran like Tycho, sniffed the political winds and converted to the Catholic church, so he could join the imperial council. This made Kepler even more dependent upon him. However, Tengnagel had promised the emperor he would finish his own version of Tycho's work, but in four years time he had done almost nothing. Now, as a member of the imperial council, he could stop Kepler from publishing without ever having to publish anything himself. However, this did not stop Kepler from researching his own theories using Tycho's observations. The agreement allowed him to continue to work on the
Astronomia Nova,
even if he couldn't publish it without permission. When Tengnagel did not produce his own version after four years, Kepler believed that he was free of any obligation to Tycho's family, but Tengnagel still tried to stop him from publishing.

Finally, the two sides reached an agreement that allowed Kepler to publish the
Astronomia Nova,
as long as Tengnagel could insert a short preface to the work, in which he would explain that Kepler's book was based on Tycho's observations, that it did not follow the Tychonic planetary theory, and that Kepler had used Tycho's observations for his own purposes. Nevertheless, Kepler agreed to this insertion so that the book could be published. Now, after many centuries, Kepler's
Astronomia Nova
is accepted around the world as one of the foundational texts in modern astronomy, while Tengnagel's inserted preface has become a mere tidbit of history.