Kepler's Witch (6 page)

Thus, the heavens contain a celestial light that the ordered mind contemplates and, in doing so, plumbs the secret places of God, revealing even the Creator to the observing mind, for only by design, a divine design, could such heavenly order come about. And this design is not only
wonderful in itself, but also useful to human beings, for the order of the heavens is also a moral lesson. Its perfection, regularity, and harmony teach the divine law of righteousness to the human soul, fallen and beset by chaos. Nothing in the heavens occurred by chance for Melanchthon. It is God's will that human beings know the divine, and the study of the perfection of the sky is one of the ways into that knowledge, a knowledge and a truth that will set you free. Those who believe that the heavens exist only by chance wage war against the human soul.

For Melanchthon, unlike Luther, the order of the heavens revealed God's mind, both as Creator and as Father of the human race. The movements of the sun and moon, stars and planets are used to regulate human action, setting forth times for planting and for harvesting, times to buy and sell, and times for rest. By ordering human lives, God reveals the truth—that order is of God and that chaos is of the Evil One. Those who stand on the side of the angels support God's order on earth as it is revealed in the heavens. The stately movement of the celestial spheres, therefore, becomes the template for human morality.

The stars also carry prophecy, portents and signs of events to come, most commonly disasters. God reveals the future in the stars, for the stars reveal the mind of God. Events in this world come from the movements of the heavens as effect follows cause. Thus, Melanchthon, like most thinkers of his day, trusted in the astrological sciences, for the stars in their perfection were closer to God, to the First Mover of Aristotle, who moves all things without Himself being moved. Therefore, a person can read the stars and predict the future, at least in a general way. Nevertheless, not all readings of the heavens are equally valid. Any attempt to observe the sky in order to predict specific events or to read the particulars of the future was superstition for Melanchthon. True astrology is the science of the subtle influences that the stars have over the inclinations of human souls and human societies.
⁵
This was not too far from Kepler's own view, in which the stars helped to shape the general flow of the world, its tendencies and its limitations, but did not control individual events. (Contemporary science no longer believes this of the stars, but still there are influences. Our own genes have taken the place of
Melanchthon's and Kepler's stars, and the inclinations of our hearts are influenced by strings of proteins.)

It is this embrace of astrology more than anything else that puts Kepler at a distance from our age. Astrology lost its credibility in the century after Kepler, when Newton, who still believed ferociously in alchemy, abandoned it for a more thoroughgoing mechanical cosmology. What Newton did not acknowledge, however, for which he was chided by other astronomers in his time, was that this mechanical insight had first been Kepler's. In Kepler's own day, however, astrology was still queen and the larger towns all across Europe, from Stuttgart to Leonberg, from Tübingen to Prague all built astronomical clocks, not to tick off the seconds of a person's life—
Click!
Then gone forever—but to map out the heavenly realms, to give insight into the events of the day. Kepler's attachment to astrology followed Melanchthon's and was Lutheran to the bone. Kepler's warnings about using astrological predictions as a reliable guide mirrored Melanchthon's concerns.

Oddly enough, this ease with astrology puts the sensibilities of the seventeenth century at some distance even from those of modern Christians. Although liberal Christians follow Newton and wave off astrology as empty pseudo-science, conservative and fundamentalist Christians fear it as a manifestation of the occult, as dark superstition. How different this is from the ideas held by the founders of Protestantism and seventeenth-century Christians in general, who saw the stars and their movements as divinely created sacraments, windows into the mind of God. Still, the stars were incomplete windows. Astronomy can reveal the order of God built into the world and open the eyes of human beings to God's good government, but it cannot achieve the revelation of Christ and the story of the salvation of humanity. Astronomy can make visible something of the intentions God had for the world, but not the story of God's relationship with the human race. The mind that shaped the world has left its imprint in the world and has given us access to it. Partly, according to Melanchthon, this is because the human mind originated in the heavens and is a direct creation of God. But the human mind has fallen, been corrupted by sin, and the story of God's generosity cannot, therefore, be written in the stars.

On October 16, 1584, after Kepler graduated from the Latin school, his parents sent him off to the lower seminary, the school at Adelberg, once a monastery of the Premonstratensian Order near Mt. Hohenstaufen. Two years later he went on to the upper seminary in the Cistercian abbey at Maulbronn. The children of the wealthy who attended the Latin school afterward studied at the
Pädagodium,
a college in Stuttgart or in Tübingen, which was meant to prepare them for entry into the university. The monastery schools, on the other hand, were an alternative route into the university reserved mainly for the gifted children of the lower classes, which finally led to an education at the
Stift,
the Lutheran seminary.
⁶
All told, there were thirteen monastery schools in the duchy of Württemberg, forming a system that was unique throughout the empire, and with the
Stift
they formed a separate school system from the
Pädagodium
and the normal university.

It was in Adelberg that Kepler formed his ideas on the ubiquity doctrine that got him into so much trouble in his later life. The ubiquity doctrine was Luther's response to Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the hidden substance, the underlying reality, of the bread and wine were transformed during the Mass into the Body and Blood of Christ. Luther disagreed with this, as did all the Reformers, and presented the alternative idea that the communicant does indeed receive the Body and Blood, because, by his existence as God, Christ's Body and Blood became universal and were everywhere. A person could receive the true presence of Christ because Christ was everywhere. The Calvinists denied this idea, claiming that the bread and wine remain bread and wine and that the communicant receives special assistance from Christ, who is in heaven, during Communion. It was this idea that Kepler leaned toward, since he could not find any mention of the ubiquity doctrine in either Scripture or the church fathers. (The Lutheran church eventually abandoned the ubiquity doctrine altogether.)

Time and again, the preachers railed against the Calvinists. They took special note of the Calvinist doctrine of Communion and shot as many holes in it as they could. But Kepler, true to form, studied the scriptural texts mentioned, meditated on them, and finally concluded that the
Calvinists were right all along. But that was as far as he would go with them. He could never accept the doctrine of predestination, for he thought it barbaric that God would condemn people for no fault of their own, just because they weren't “chosen.” One of his fellow seminarians at the time teased him about his constant doubts, saying “Freshman, do you want to contest the predestination as well?” As it turned out, he did. After a great internal debate, he decided that he could not accept that pagans would be damned by a loving God, just because they had never learned of Christ.
⁷

On March 5, 1587, his brother Christoph was born. Two years later, in 1589, after Heinrich the father tried to sell sixteen-year-old Heinrich the son into slavery, Heinrich the son ran away from home. Soon after, Heinrich the father also disappeared, for the last time, running off to fight for the king of Naples and then to die somewhere far away. All indications are that he was not much missed.

Meanwhile, young Johannes, off in the seminary, thrived. Up at four in the morning on summer days and five in the winter, Johannes lived the life of a monk, singing psalms as the sun rose, scrubbing hallways and classrooms, then studying the rest of the day. The boys ate and worked and studied and prayed from waking to sleeping, with no time for play. They ate in silence, and all of them dressed in the same knee-length coat without sleeves. They read, studied, and even disputed in Latin, so that they became more adept in that language than in their own workaday German. Along the way, they read Xenophon, Demosthenes, Virgil, and Cicero, but no Catullus or Ovid. They studied rhetoric, dialectics, and music. Later on, once they reached the upper seminary, they would study geometry and arithmetic.
⁸

He loved the study and pursued it with the same intensity he pursued everything. But then he started having trouble. His doubts about the ubiquity doctrine and his typically aggressive defense of his own views set both his teachers' and his schoolmates' teeth on edge. Preachers from Tübingen visited Adelberg while Kepler was there, and they preached Lutheran doctrine with great fire and vehemence. But Kepler, true to form, his mind always toeing out new paths, didn't quite agree with any of them, because he was always looking for the other side, the place where those vilified
enemies of the true faith were right. In particular, he didn't like the manner of the sermons, the viciousness of them. And typically he argued his positions forcefully and with wry humor, which led to arguments and sometimes to fistfights. “Be careful,” a friend of his told him. “Take such stands in the classroom only. If you speak like that in public, you could be called a heretic.”

“My beliefs are my beliefs,” Kepler told him. “I will make no secret of them.”
⁹
After the first flush of Reformation, new ideas were no longer the fashion, and young Kepler the prodigy produced new ideas like sparks from a rocket. Denied health and strength and stature, he found his one compensation in his mind, forever questing, forever seeking the answers to the mysteries. As a boy, in his few spare hours he studied prosody and wrote his own comedies; he memorized the longest psalms in the Bible, just because they were the longest. His poems, he said, were mostly word games, acrostics, anagrams, and griphens. He loved paradoxes. Night after night, this intense, small dark-haired boy sat by the fire with the family Bible in his lap, his finger tracing out the lines, his mouth silently moving with the words, shoving each line into his memory.

This intensity carried over into school, into his study, his prayers, and his battles. When he fought with his classmates, he meant everything he said. He was always in control of his words, and when his words burned, he meant them to. Perhaps this was why in later life he berated himself so for his quick rages, why one minute he was searing and vicious and the next apologetic. He was, though he never admitted it, a haughty genius as a young man, with that blind and simple arrogance of the young. Every day, he practiced in his life what he practiced in his science—he attacked, he ridiculed, he challenged his opponents as he waged war on the world. His violent tempers were gradually reformed, though they plagued him from time to time throughout his life, and where he once demanded, he later offered. He was more the Christian gentleman when he left the seminary than when he entered.
¹⁰

F
ROM
K
EPLER'S
A
STRONOMIA
N
OVA
1609

Where Kepler enters Tübingen University and prepares for his calling as a priest of the Book of Nature.

J
OHANNES
K
EPLER STUDIED AT
T
ÜBINGEN
from 1588 to 1594. During that time, Elizabeth I was still queen of England and would remain so until the earliest days of the seventeenth century. On July 19, 1588, one month before Kepler arrived, the Most Fortunate Spanish Armada sailed within striking distance of the English coast. All that year, astrologers had been predicting disaster for Spain, but no one had listened, for who would dare speak against the Armada, with its hundred galleons, its thousands of brave soldiers, the hope and power of the nation? Soon after setting out from Cadiz, however, with horns blaring and banners flying, the Armada ran into trouble. Strong storms out of the North Sea pounded the Spanish ships one after another, decimating the fleet. Then the British sent a single fire ship out among the Spaniards who, seared by panic, cut their anchors and drifted away. When all this was over, only a few crippled, ragged-bone vessels from the Most Fortunate Armada returned home.
¹

That year, Kepler's future master Tycho Brahe, in Denmark, declared that, because of his observation of the comet in 1577, the comet that
Kepler had watched with his mother, Katharina, he had concluded that the crystalline spheres of ether in the Aristotelian cosmology did not exist. A few years later, Shakespeare received his first review, a bad one, from Robert Greene, a rival playwright and pamphleteer. Pope Sixtus V presided over the Counter-Reformation in Rome, while Jesuit colleges sprouted up throughout Europe like overnight mushrooms. The Turks advanced into Austria close to Vienna. On the other side of the world, the Jamestown colony was still thirteen years away, while the landing at Plymouth Rock wouldn't happen until 1620, the year of Katharina Kepler's trial for witchcraft. Galileo was then teaching mathematics in Pisa, but would later move to Padua. In Prague, the young Habsburg prince Ferdinand II returned from his studies at a Jesuit college in Bavaria and, still full of fervor, prepared for a journey to Rome to see the pope. He had one purpose in mind—to bring the full weight of the Counter-Reformation to the empire. Almost invisibly, Europe inched toward the Thirty Years' War.

On October 4, 1587, Johannes Kepler registered at Tübingen University. The registration was called the
depositio,
because the students had to “deposit” their “horns,” or
cornua
. In essence, this was a leftover medieval university ritual, presided over by the older students, in which the incoming freshmen had to dress up as billy goats and prance around as a rite of initiation. Moreover, the freshmen had to pay for the honor of it all.
²
In September 1588, Johannes took and passed his baccalaureate examination. Everyone agreed that he had done brilliantly, but because there were no spaces available at the
Stift
(the seminary), the university turned him back to Maulbronn for one more year. Finally, on September 17, 1589, he returned to Tübingen, possibly on foot, emerging from the wooded area of the Schönbuch and onto the twisted streets of the lower town.

From the bridge across the Neckar, Tübingen rises like music, a crescendo swelling from the riverside up through the town to the
obere Stadt,
the upper town, to the Stiftkirche, the seminary church, and then winds back along the ridge to the Hohentübingen, the fortress on the crest. Tübingen is a tall city, cramped into the narrow space between the rivers, so that the buildings, even the meanest half-beam houses, seem to rise up and up like trees. The town was old even in Kepler's day, starting
with a few narrow streets and a few thatched houses built by the Alemanni, the proto-Germans who had lived there after the fall of Rome. Sometime in the eleventh century, the counts of Tübingen built themselves a fortress on the high hill overlooking the old town and then expanded the village into a city, with a new marketplace, a new parish church, and new city walls. Pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela, the great pilgrimage site dedicated to St. James, stopped at the church in Tübingen to rest and prepare for the push first into France and then into Spain. Across the pilgrim road from the church they built a hostel to house the pilgrims, which the city later used to warehouse victims of the Black Death.

In 1342, the counts of Tübingen ran out of money and sold the city to the counts of Württemberg, making Tübingen part of a larger and more powerful political order. In 1477, Count Everhard the Bearded of Württemberg founded the university. An etching of him standing languid in full armor, holding an unsheathed sword beside him, its tip resting on the ground as a sign of peace, forms the centerpiece of the grisaille artwork on the Tübingen town-hall façade. Above his head, on the brick face of a wide dormer, the astronomical clock still ticks away the seasons and charts the motions of the skies.

In the late sixteenth century, astronomical clocks, which tracked the position of the sun as it traveled through the zodiac, were more than pretty showpieces used to bolster civic pride. They were practical tools for farmers and merchants, charting not only the time of day, but also the phases of the moon, the seasons of the year, and the general comings and goings of the heavens. At the end of the sixteenth century, people throughout Europe ordered their world astrologically. The swirling motions of the planets, the sun, and the moon meant fortune or failure to both peasants and kings alike. Kepler spent much of his life writing horoscopes—it was a lucrative business—and in an age before psychology and economics, it was the main way in which people mapped the troubles of their lives. One can imagine Kepler, newly arrived in town, pack on his back, standing within a knot of farmers, merchants, and students, staring at the clock as if to read God's plan for the day. Farmers planted and harvested according to the clock, while merchants bought and sold according to it. As a ministerial student,
Kepler was deeply aware of the influence that the heavens had on earthly affairs, all of which was mapped out every day, every week, and every month by the clock. The clock was a window into God's mind.

Throughout the late sixteenth century, Tübingen's population was relatively small. However, in all of southwest Germany, it was second only to Stuttgart. The town fluctuated between three thousand and thirty-five hundred inhabitants, but only a few of those were citizens. The university too was small, with four or five hundred students, a hundred of which belonged to the
Stift.
³
The university was the heart of the town's social and cultural life. The students often staged plays in the marketplace and gave lectures to the townspeople. During the carnival of 1591, on Ash Wednesday, Kepler played Herodias, the wife of Herod Antipas, in a play entitled
Ioannes Decollatus,
concerning the beheading of John the Baptist. He was flush that year, because the town council of Weil der Stadt had voted him a scholarship, the
Stipendium Ruffinum,
out of a fund endowed by a priest named Rudolf Ruff in 1494. They gave it to him because of his “
Fürtrefflich und herlich Ingenium,
” his “extraordinary and glorious ingenuity.” This tripled his pocket money. He was suddenly so rich that he lost a quarter of a
Reichstaler,
otherwise known as a “taler” or “dollar,” while gambling with the boys.

Most of the university students were the sons of wealthy merchants, landed gentry, and minor nobility, and they were a rowdy lot. The university had its own police force, its own magistrate, and even its own jail, although because the authorities expected the town's magistrate to keep order, they gave him jurisdiction over the students. He could turn them over to the university magistrate for trial, but because most students were the sons of important men, the university rarely did anything. All too often, regular students meandered through town, drinking and brawling heroically, when they had a mind to. Not a few young women were raped in the streets, but there was little justice for them.

Meanwhile, the seminarians at the
Stift
scurried to class and busied themselves with study, a bright contrast to the rest of the students. Students at the university wore gowns with hems colored to indicate their field of study: medicine, law, theology. The quality of the gowns varied widely, and the poorest were usually those of the seminary students—dark monastic robes. The seminarians were by all accounts the serious ones, because they attended by the duke's good graces and studied at his command, and because they were the sons of obscure parents, who had no protection from the consequences of their misdeeds. Years before, when they first entered the monastery schools, they had sworn themselves to the duke's service, promising lifelong fealty, to serve at his discretion and to leave at his discretion. They slept in unheated cells, rising in the predawn darkness at four or five to recite their morning prayers while the sunlight gathered in the stained-glass windows and suffused red-gold throughout the nave.
⁵
After prayers, the rector of the seminary lectured on the theological point of the day. The sermons were often charged with sectarian politics, with hot brimstone against the pope and with sly warnings against the Calvinists. While the students listened, beneath their feet the long-dead Dukes of Württemberg slept on to resurrection day. Here Kepler listened to the Word of God proclaimed to the students. Here, his Lutheranism, held at some cost by his family, took seed, sent down roots, and blossomed.

Sermons and lectures at the university were public entertainment then as much as public instruction, and people often walked miles to hear a good preacher. The Stiftkirche was a “hall church,” specifically designed without pillars so that everyone in the congregation could see the preacher. As with all things Lutheran, each lecture, each sermon was intensely scriptural. The boys gathering in the seminary church every morning, shivering from the cold, yawning, rubbing sleep from their eyes,
attended as best they could as each preacher fought to make Scripture come alive. The great characters of the Old and New Testaments walked before them—Gideon, Samuel, David, Daniel, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, and all about them danced St. Paul, whose words permeated the writings of Dr. Luther like water permeates soil.
⁶

Lutheranism was more than just the religion of his parents and grandparents for Kepler. It was a religion that made sense to him. He saw it as a religion that never asked him to submit his reason to any other authority than God. In religion, one need not consult any other authority than the Scriptures and the fathers of the church. Even when princes commanded, they could not violate his conscience. Neither could Satan, the Prince of Darkness, or any other demon. For Kepler, God not only preserved the heavens above, but also the reasoning mind that contemplated them. Kepler would sit in the stone church, his breath floating visibly before him, reciting Luther's Morning Prayer:

A prayer for inner peace. A prayer for salvation. A prayer for freedom from evil. A vital prayer, a necessary prayer, for the intellectual environment in which the faculty preached was a turbulent one. Throughout his life, Kepler remained an Augsburg Lutheran because, he believed, it allowed him freedom of conscience. There was no church authority standing between him and the Scriptures or between him and the church fathers. He could follow his own path, think his own thoughts, and find
God in his own way, without pope or bishops standing between him and his Redeemer.

The Counter-Reformation, meanwhile, gathered like storm clouds in the distance. But for the Württemberg orthodoxy, the immediate threat came from the followers of other Reformers, from Calvin and Zwingli, who from the Lutheran point of view had taken the Reformation along paths that God had not intended and were therefore heretics. Lutheranism was the middle way between conservative Catholics and radical Anabaptists and Calvinists, those rebaptizers and predestinarians. Controversies that nearly came to blows within the Lutheran confession earlier in the century had finally settled themselves by the promulgation of the Book of Concord in 1580, eight years before Kepler's arrival at Tübingen. While Catholics looked to the Council of Trent for guidance, Lutherans looked to the Book of Concord—and to the university theologians who preached it, men such as Jakob Heerbrand, who taught theology to Kepler, and Matthias Hafenreffer, who taught Scripture. After the heady years of the early Reformation and the subsequent years of turbulence with both Rome and Geneva, the first islands of Lutheran orthodoxy had appeared above the flood, thanks to the work of university theologians who were streamlining the faith for Lutheran unity and for the creation of a pure doctrine. But repression follows orthodoxy like a jackal. The
Stift
quickly developed a culture of denunciation, with students denouncing each other for minor infractions of the rules, suspicious talk, and potential heresy. Kepler received his share of denunciations, lying spread-eagle on the chapel floor as he listened to the catalog of his faults and misdemeanors. Now and then he returned the favor.

Twenty-first-century people most often think of Kepler as a scientist, but that was not his intention when he arrived at Tübingen. More than anything else, he desired a pulpit and longed for the life of a Lutheran preacher. He was born a Lutheran and would die a Lutheran, and for all his later troubles with the church, when his people suffered, Kepler suffered with them. Eventually he would be chased from one town to the next by the Counter-Reformation. After his death, the Lutheran cemetery
in which he was buried became a battlefield; soldiers died on top of the dead, destroying Kepler's marker stone and losing his burial place forever. All in the name of God and a faith that justifies.