Kepler's Witch (42 page)

Kepler, of course, had no idea about any of this. He was not much of a politician and disliked intrigue in general. He saw in the love of power
that drives so many great men the evil that had brought death to the world. Likely, all he noticed the day Wallenstein marched through the streets in triumph was a city in full celebration.

He had work to do himself, however. He needed to present himself to the emperor. Putting it off as long as he could, he finally dragged himself up the Steep Stair to the castle and waited in the great hall to be announced to the emperor. Standing there, Kepler may have thought of his friend Jessenius and the headsman's ax. But surprisingly, Ferdinand was in a splendid mood. His son, another Ferdinand, a boy who would later become Emperor Ferdinand III, had just been named king of Bohemia, an important stepping stone to the imperial throne, and was crowned at St. Vitus Cathedral with every bit of trumpeted glory that the Habsburg family could gather into one place. Which was considerable. The whole world was there, and Ferdinand was luminous with glory. He had gotten everything he wanted—power, fame, the ascendancy of the Catholic church—and then suddenly, standing before him, was his old imperial mathematician, nearly forgotten after years of war, a rarity in the imperial court, a man who had actually completed something. He had brought a book to present to his emperor, a copy of the
Rudolphine Tables,
named after Ferdinand's unfortunate uncle Rudolf, that was a compilation and summary of the greatest work of astronomical observation of the time.

Kepler thought he was about to be fired, but—
mirabile dictu!
—the emperor welcomed him kindly and with some ceremony. This fearsome Emperor Ferdinand, who had earlier cast him out of Graz, whom Kepler had dreaded for so long, was unaccountably gracious. And the court, whose halls he had haunted for so long waiting to be paid, was suddenly full of admirers. Kepler was another man of the hour, or as much of one as a mathematician could be. He was certainly no Wallenstein, but he had done his part, and the emperor praised him.

Kepler's depression, which had been partly fed by fear of this meeting, suddenly lifted like a morning fog burned off by afternoon sun. He was once again in Prague, the center of intellectual life in the empire, and he was the imperial mathematician, praised and admired by the court. The
emperor was unaccountably pleased with him, and it seemed that, at least for now, his job was not in jeopardy.

But so much had changed. Where were Kepler's old friends? Tycho, his old master, was dead. Jessenius the peacemaker was dead. And where were the others? Where were the Lutherans, the Augsburgians, the Utraquists, and the Bohemian Brethren? All had disappeared. In Rudolf's day the city had boiled with arts and arcane sciences, but in Ferdinand's empire Prague Castle had become a true fortress. Soldiers were everywhere. The Old Town, which had once been a glorious hodgepodge of Catholic and Protestant and Jew, was now Catholic to the core. The Jews were still there, for they had been loyal to the emperor, which is one of the reasons so many of the Protestant uprisings quickly rampaged through the ghetto. But now, the Protestants were all gone, and the city seemed to have lost something of its feisty soul.

Still, Kepler had to admit that the emperor was kind to him. Ferdinand bestowed on Kepler 4,000 gulden and commanded that the cities of Ulm and Nuremberg split the cost of it between them. Kepler never saw a penny of this money, but it was a nice thing for Ferdinand to say. Kepler asked to stay in the service of the emperor and to continue to live in Habsburg lands, and Ferdinand was more than happy to oblige. Ferdinand told him that he would find a position for Kepler at the imperial court and then perhaps a teaching position at one of the universities.

But, of course, there was this little matter of Kepler's religion. A trifle, really. Ferdinand let it be known quietly that Kepler would have to convert to Catholicism for all of these wonderful things to happen. After all, his own church had abandoned him, so where else could he go? Why not do it? He wasn't really a Calvinist at heart—everyone knew that—and the position the emperor would find for him would be a good one. Why not convert? Some of his best friends were Catholic. Some of his relatives too. There were the Ficklers, who would be glad to welcome him back to the true faith. And even his own long departed father-in-law, Jobst Müller, had converted.

At this point, the Jesuits appeared on stage. The Jesuits had befriended Kepler. He and Father Albert Curtius in Dillingen had been writing back
and forth for years. Father Paul Guldin in Vienna, who had been raised a Protestant, but who as a young man had converted to Catholicism and joined the Jesuits, was a longtime friend. The last shoe finally dropped when Guldin, in a letter to Kepler, asked if he might be interested in joining the Catholic church. After all, there were great advantages in it, not only in this world but in the next. Kepler wrote back to him on February 1, 1628: “Just as I entered my life,” he wrote, “my parents initiated me into the Catholic church, sprinkled me with the holy water of baptism, and thus endowing me as a child of God. Since that time until now, I have never left the Catholic church.”
³
Kepler, however, meant these words differently than the Jesuits meant them. Kepler believed that the Catholic church was not limited to those who accepted papal authority, but extended to everyone baptized in the name of Christ. Baptism, anointing with chrism, and faithful adherence to the teachings of Jesus were the marks of a true Catholic. Some Catholics followed Rome, while others followed the Augsburg Confession. “If you tell me that the church is that group of people united under one pope to spread the errors once cast off by the Augsburgians, and to rule them in matters of conscience, then you set forth the single characteristic which would prevent me from accepting the church you speak of, if this were offered by itself.”
⁴
The rule of one pope could not define the church for Kepler. Only the rule of one's conscience could do that. “Just as quarrels occur among the burghers and political factions of a city, so too, because of human frailty, mistakes happen among the citizens of the one church, separated by time and space.”
⁵

Kepler's idea of the church was similar to the ideas expressed by St. Augustine in his
City of God.
There exists a mystical union among all believers, and differences between Christians, for all their violence, cannot destroy the Body of Christ. The divisions within the church are the result of human error, perhaps even human sin. They are not what God intended for us. This was the same belief that Kepler had already expressed to the members of his own church, a belief that had finally gotten him excommunicated. Who was this Kepler to council peace in the time of war? In some ways, the Jesuits were true friends at least, and for all their desire to convert him, they were willing to accept him when the Württemberg
Lutherans would not. But he was still a potential convert, a possible victory for them and for the Roman Catholic church, and neither he nor they could forget that.

Because of his baptism, Kepler believed, and therefore because of his membership in the Catholic church, he did not need the religious authority of the pope to teach him what the Scriptures and the fathers of the church had already taught him. Like a good Lutheran, he denied magisterial authority to any office within the church and reserved that authority to the texts of Scripture and tradition, and to the Holy Spirit that was granted to him in his baptism. He knew the religious practices and beliefs that he could not accept, ideas that in his view had built up over the centuries and that he considered to be dark innovations. He denied the adoration of Jesus in the Eucharist. Following Luther, he rejected the veneration of religious icons, pictures of saints, and even pictures of Jesus. He rejected the Mass as a sacrificial act, and the sharing of Communion only in the form of bread. The early church, he said, did not practice these things or hold these beliefs. He was not a proud man, he said, and recognized that the Catholic church was the mother church of the West. But he must obey Christ, whose rule commanded the church itself. “Therefore, do not think poorly of me, best friend, for I abide in the Catholic church. In order to reject what I do not consider to be Catholic or apostolic, I am prepared, not only to surrender the rewards which his Imperial Majesty has graciously and generously consented to offer me, but also to give up the Austrian lands, the entire kingdom, and even—and this weighs heavier than all the others—astronomy itself.”
⁶

Kepler would give up everything he loved and treasured in this world to maintain his grasp on his belief in God and Christ. He had to follow his conscience, which he could not surrender without surrendering his soul. For Kepler to give up his beliefs, beliefs that he had suffered so much over with his own church, would be to give up Christ himself.

As in so many other times in Kepler's life, the forces around him began to congeal all because he would not give up his conscience. Soon after he sent his letter to Guldin, he received a letter from the imperial representatives in Linz. The Reformation Commission (named as such, but actually
a product of the Counter-Reformation) had reconvened, and Kepler, appearing on the list of non-Catholics, received a fairly standard letter commanding him to reveal himself ready or not ready to “accommodate” himself to the work of the commission. In other words, he would have to become Catholic or he would lose his position as district mathematician for Upper Austria. He had already told the Jesuit Paul Guldin that he was not willing to convert to Catholicism, which meant that sooner or later, he would lose his position as imperial mathematician. The fire was already lit; the Reformation Commission in Linz had merely added a bucket of coals to it. Kepler wrote again to Guldin, saying:

In effect, Kepler was asking no more than what Thomas More had asked of Henry VIII. He would do none harm, he would think none harm. What he would do, to the limits of his conscience, would be to practice the faith within a Catholic milieu, if he could do so without causing scandal or division. But like Thomas More's, Kepler's own fame had worked against him. He could not be allowed to slink into the corners of the church, to spend his life in quiet and peace. He was famous, a man of science, a man whose conversion would be a great victory for the forces of Catholicism and the Counter-Reformation. He was an honest man, and was known to be honest. He was nonpolitical, and known to be nonpolitical. He was also known to have suffered on this account. If they could turn him, then their victory would have been that much sweeter. For the same reasons, then, that the Lutherans excommunicated him, the Counter-Reformation could not allow him to camp out in the middle between the great armies.

Before Guldin responded to Kepler's letter, he sent it to an unnamed brother in the order. He wanted to make sure that Kepler got the best advice from the most proper sources, but this backfired. The implication was that Kepler's friendship had not mattered as much as the push to convert him, and Guldin had referred the matter to a higher authority. His letter back to Kepler was riddled with heavy-footed theological argument. When Kepler received Guldin's response, he smelled betrayal. He had already experienced enough of clergymen who could not keep confidences in the Lutheran church, and he considered his letters to Guldin to be confidential, between friends, and not a matter for public discussion within the Jesuit order. He understood quite well what the Jesuits, and indeed the emperor, wanted from him, but he could not give it. After reading Guldin's response, he sent a short letter back restating his personal reasons for holding the beliefs he held without trying to muster any theological arguments to support them. And that was that. The debate was over.

So Kepler was alone. He held to his beliefs and would not change them. His beliefs kept him outside of all the churches, and that was the way it had to be. But even so, he felt the loneliness deep inside him. True believers
on both sides, Protestant and Catholic, friends on both sides, fretted about his salvation. During the long struggle with his own church, Lutheran friends had often written to him and worried about his apparent fall from the true faith. And what would this mean for the salvation of his soul? Now Guldin was doing much the same. “I assure you seriously that I have never been farther from toying with my salvation,” Kepler wrote to him.

As before in Graz, Kepler's faith had put him in an uncomfortable position. He had rejected the Jesuits' advances, and therefore the emperor's. Württemberg no longer accepted him. Many of his former Protestant patrons had been executed or exiled, so his list of powerful friends was growing shorter. Suddenly, as if from heaven, Kepler found himself with a new patron—Wallenstein himself, the new general colonel commander-in-chief of the emperor's armies. But it was an odd relationship; both men were interested in the comings and goings of the heavens, but for very different reasons. Wallenstein was an astrology addict. Like every egomaniac, he believed that he had a destiny that the stars would sooner or later reveal to him. To a certain degree, Kepler was responsible for this.