Kepler's Witch (11 page)
Authors: James A. Connor
Kepler's search of the heavens was a search for God. It was, he believed, God's will. God wanted us to find the plan of creation for ourselves and thereby share in the divine thoughts. The world did not come out as it had for no reason; distinctions like the curved and the straight were inherent in the universe from the beginning. The world as God intended it had to be the best and most beautiful possible, with perfect divine order underlying all the seeming chaos of sinful humans. On April 9, 1597, he wrote to Mästlin and argued, as Plato had done in the
Timaeus,
that just as the eye is apt to seeing light and the ear to hearing sound, so the intellect is apt to the knowledge of quantity.
Kepler finished the
Mysterium Cosmographicum
in 1596 and set about looking for a publisher. He wrote to Mästlin about this, sent him a copy of the manuscript, and asked for his opinion. Mästlin was deeply impressed with the book and offered to help get it published. He had only one criticism, that Kepler had not taken the epicycles into account, which led to problems about the thickness of the spheres, but Kepler pointed to Tycho Brahe's work on the comet of 1577, in which he showed that the spheres were not real at all, but mathematical fictions.
To get a book published, even a book on astronomy, perhaps especially a book on astronomy, it had to pass muster with the theologians, the guardians of tradition and orthodoxy. Just as Galileo would have trouble with the Inquisition a few decades later, Kepler would have trouble with the faculty at Tübingen, and for many of the same reasons. As a believing man, Kepler wrote a chapter in the book that tried to show that the Copernican universe was not in disagreement with Scripture, as Galileo would later do in his
Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina
. Hafenreffer and others gave Kepler the same advice that would be given to Galileoâkeep this theory, conjecture, hypothesis, not reality. Don't try to make overreaching claims for your ideas. Otherwise, you could get in trouble.
L
ETTER FROM
K
EPLER TO
M
ICHAEL
M
ÃSTLIN
F
EBRUARY
10, 1597
No mortal, I believe, is alive whose destiny is farther from foresight than mine. Already, I was hoping for happiness and believed in its enjoyment, when it got away from me. Contrarily, when I feared the worst and saw it coming, the good appeared. And the more my destiny is in my favor, the more I fear it will once more turn against me, as it is not constant, that it may stay that way for a long time. In the year 1596, I chose a wife and didn't think of anything else for a half year, since letters from exceedingly serious men encouraged me. Happily, I returned to Steiermark [Styria]. When no one congratulated me upon my arrival, I was taken aside and told that I had lost my bride. Since the hope for marriage had taken root over a half year, it took another half year to get over it and to convince myself entirely that it is nothing and embark on a new path of life. After all hope was gone and the outcome already reported to the authorities, another change occurred. The people [the bride, Barbara, and her father] were moved by the governing authority and by ridicule whenever they showed themselves. Then one [of my supporters] worked harder than the next for the disposition of the widow and her father; they were successful and thus prepared another marriage for me. Because of this turmoil, all my decisions for a change of path were canceled. That is how little control each man has over his future.
I
N THE ORIGINAL DEDICATION
of his
Mysterium Cosmographicum,
Kepler wrote a short defense of his science for the practical people of the world. Ever since the servant girl laughed at Thales of Miletus, who forgot his feet and fell into a ditch while gazing at the stars, practical people have scoffed at intellectuals, who spend their lives in pursuits far from the farm, the merchant ship, and the counting house. The patrons of the arts and the sciences, however, have generally been practical people themselves, but blessed with money, power, and the unexplainable itch for something more, so intellectuals have traditionally penned dedications in the fronts of their books to convince the powerful that their money was well spent.
“Do you want something bulky?” Kepler asks. “Nothing in the whole universe is greater or more ample than this. Do you require something
important? Nothing is more precious, nothing more splendid than this in the brilliant temple of God. Do you wish to know something secret? Nothing in the nature of things is or has been more closely concealed. The only thing in which it does not satisfy everybody is that its usefulness is not clear to the unreflecting.”
1
It was the unreflecting that Kepler had to convince. The dedication of his book reads: “To the Illustrious, Eminent, Most Noble and Energetic Lord Sigismund Frederick, Free Baron of Herberstein, Neuberg, and Güttenhaag, Lord of Lankowitz, Hereditary Chamberlain and Steward of Carinthia, Counselor to His Imperial Majesty; And to the Most Serene Archduke of Austria, Ferdinand, Captain of the Province of Styria; And to Their Lordships the Most Noble Five Commissioners of the Illustrious Orders of Styria, Most Generous of Men, My Kindly and Liberal Lords, Greetings and Homage.”
2
At least one of these men listed in the dedication would be responsible for his eventual exile from the province. Beyond its obsequiousness, which was the style then, the dedication set out in plain words what Kepler really thought about the book. Philosophers and scientists from the beginning of Greek civilization have sought the secret, the truth of everything, the one scheme that would encompass it all. Mathematicians call these solutions “elegant,” for they are composed of complicated threads laced together into a beautiful simplicity. Kepler believed that such a solution would enable him to read the Book of Nature, and that following that road was for him a new kind of ministry: he was
sacerdos libri naturae,
“a priest of the Book of Nature.” In his dedication he refers to St. Paul, who says that we should contemplate God like the sun in water or in a mirror. A little later he quotes Psalm 8:
When I see your heavens
The work of your fingers,
The moon and the stars that
You set in placeâ¦
While dressing himself in his room on Schmidgasse Street, while walking to and from the school, while in the classroom, while dining, while in
the latrine, while preparing himself for bed, Kepler contemplated the heavens. His mind dug through geometric forms, triangles and squares, hexagons and octagons, cubes and dodecahedrons, as if they were gilded treasures hidden away in an old chest. Without practical concerns to keep him anchored in this world, he would have abandoned himself to the sky and, like Thales, would have lost his footing and fallen into a ditch. Fear of poverty alone drew him back, for he knew that a poor man is only a step away from slavery. For most of his life, he would fret over practical things, over making money, over paying the bills; his letters show this. Yet God's glory in the heavens tickled his mind, whispered in his ear, pulled him back to his desk, away from little Graz and Austria into the wider universe once more. Therefore, his friends and associates in the Lutheran community, both in Württemberg and in Graz, were determined to find him a bride.
The day he left Tübingen, he carried the Uriah letter with him, probably from the church officials in Württemberg to the church officials in Graz asking that he be introduced to some likely young woman bent on marriage in order to quickly transform him into a proper, satisfied burgher. In December 1595, they introduced him to Barbara Müller, the daughter of Jobst Müller of Gössendorf, the mill owner, who also owned an estate called Mühleck, south of Graz.
3
Kepler was entirely smitten, for Barbara was young, round, and pretty in a country way. And the fact that she brought her own fortune along didn't hurt.
In January, two friends of his, Dr. Johannes Oberdorfer, an inspector at the
Stiftschule,
and Heinrich Osius, a former professor, now deacon at the college church, approached Barbara's father in the role of “gentlemen delegates” to recommend Kepler to him and to begin negotiations leading to an eventual marriage. Barbara and her father, however, were quintessentially practical people who thought little about the orbits of the planets and who had built a tidy fortune out of hard work, good business sense, and a touch of luck. They were on their way up and yearned for noble connections. The Kepler pedigree, with its long-dead knightly ancestors, was one reason the Müllers even considered Johannes, who was otherwise a low-level teacher of mathematics with no fortune of his own.
When they met, Barbara was merely twenty-three years old, but she had already been married twice to older men, both of whom had died. Her first husband was Wolf Lorenz, a cabinetmaker from Graz with a good career and a tidy sum. She bore him a daughter, Regina. Then, after only two years of marriage, he inconveniently died. Soon after, Barbara married Marx Müller, a district paymaster at a local estate, which was a solid, respectable position. Unfortunately, he brought several loutish children with him into the marriage and then involved Barbara in a touch of scandal. Marx had been light-fingered with the receipts, something that surfaced only after his death. Fortunately, he was along in years, sickly, and by 1595 he too had died. By the end of that year, Barbara had been introduced to young Kepler.
Her father, Jobst, unfortunately, was not convinced. Who was this young man to court his daughter? Everyone knows what an impoverished young man wants from a girl with a fortune of her own. This Kepler, this stargazer, this dreamer, this son of an adventurer, this young man who had reached for the ministry and ended up a mathematics teacher. Who was he? Jobst was a doer, not a dreamer. He was a man of means. Not content to be a mill owner, he kept his hand in several businesses at once and over the years watched his wealth grow. But as a man on his way up, the only thing left to acquire was nobility. The Keplers had that, vague and distant as it was. It was all right for Barbara to have married her previous husbands, because they too were men of means. They had added to the family fortune, and if they had, by the grace of God, died all too soon, Barbara's fortunes had not died with them. But this Kepler fellow, what could he offer his daughter? Only a noble name.
4
Kepler pressed his suit, but the suit was not well received. The arrangements floated in the airâthe church authorities, including the rector at the
Stiftschule,
were for the match; the father was not. But Jobst had help. One Stephan Speidel, the district secretary, egged Jobst on in his fears, because he had plans of his own for Barbara. Not for himself, of course, but for a friend, a friend who would owe him some political favor or other for securing a match for him with a wealthy bride.
Meanwhile, Kepler had finished his book and was looking for a pub
lisher. He was certain that he had discovered a singularly important truth, the blueprint of the universe, the most wondrous secret of all. The praise of God was his subject. What voice, he said, do the stars have to give praise as humans do? And if his little work,
The Secret of the Universe,
should clarify that voice, praising God in response to the majesty of the heavens, the moon, and the stars, who could charge him with vanity? Divine things should not be counted up like cash, like money paid for food or clothing. Therefore, sensible people should not abandon astronomy in spite of the fact that it will never feed their bellies. This statement alone would have set his prospective father-in-law's teeth on edge, had he read it. But artists give delight to the eye, Kepler went on to say, as if in retort, and musicians give delight to the ear. If astronomers give delight to the mind, is that of any less value? Would God, who does nothing without a plan, without foreknowledge of the future, leave the mind alone without delight? A shabby existence, indeed.
For Kepler, God had planted truth in nature to act as a kind of wordless Scripture, a companion to the Bible.
5
He saw himself, the priest of the Book of Nature, deciphering that book much as a minister of the church deciphers the book of Scripture. All his training at Tübingen taught him to interpret the original texts, to mine them for divine meaning, and the same divinity could be found in the world, just as it was found in the Bible. When he left the university, however, he felt his life changing, the sudden turn uncertain. The longer he stayed in Graz, the wider the rift between his new life and his old. With the completion of
Mysterium Cosmographicum,
he had realized a new vocation, a new way to serve God. Writing to Mästlin in 1595, he claimed that astronomy should be a practice done in the service of God, to give God glory and honor. Such thinking was not only in line with Mästlin's, but also with Philip Melanchthon's as well.
Following Melanchthon, Kepler argued that astronomy is natural to humanity, as natural as singing is to songbirds. We don't ask why birds sing other than to say that they delight in it, so we shouldn't ask why the human mind searches the heavens to plumb God's secrets. The study of the heavens is something we do for its own sake, because it is a part of us, natural to us. Ultimately, we study the sky to glorify God, the Creator of
the stars and the Source of all perfection, for that too is a part of us. Moreover, there are lessons to be learned. God teaches us how to live a moral life as we contemplate the perfect heavens. We see the angelic stars, the peace, the royal order, the noble predictability of the constellations, with only a wandering comet now and then to give us pause and to teach us humility. The skies, therefore, speak to us of God. This is because, for Kepler, there is a strong correlation between the way that the human mind thinks and the way that God thinks. The Scholastics, after Thomas Aquinas, called this “connaturality,” a resonance, an aptitude between the mind and the world, as if the knowing mind and the existing universe were made for each other. The human mind is apt to the world, and the world is apt to the mind.
More than anything else, it was this idea that was lost to us after the discoveries of quantum physics came to light, what with particles that can be in two places at once along a sliding scale of probable existence. The human imagination grows more alienated from the universe with each new day, while mathematical reasoning pieces together a wider landscape for the deep places that matter inhabits, a landscape that few can understand and none can completely imagine. Postmodernists chart this change by denying the one thing that made Kepler's universe what it wasâa cosmos. Kepler's secret of the universe, his geometric hypothesis of nested Platonic solids, was possible for him only because he believed in a divine order to things, a “theory of everything” that was a direct projection of the mind of God.
The sciences we know in the twenty-first century are the grandchildren of the cosmology of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, each a man of faith in his own way, who sought the stars for this cosmos, this photograph of God. Even as the West shuffled toward materialism, the yearning for mystical truth was burrowing into the mental fabric of scienceâfor what we find beautiful we must also find true. In the twentieth century, when James Watson and Francis Crick, who were galaxies away from Kepler's Lutheran faith, discovered the structure of DNA, they knew they were on the right track because the structure they had found was beauti
ful. It had to be the right one, they said. The Good, the True, and the Beautifulâthese are the deep properties of Plato's Ideas, and the yardstick by which Kepler measured the universe.
For Kepler, astronomy paralleled biblical studies because the heavens held a special position in creation. As for Aristotle, they were insusceptible to corruption and were therefore a cleaner revelation of God. The astronomer sees the truth because humans are created in the image of God, and perceiving the truth is how we share in God's mind, which created the truth. The bridges between the mind of God and the human mind are the archetypes, the geometrical absolutes, the perfect forms that built the cosmos out of infinite unformed, primal matter. It was out of the archetypes, the triangles and squares, the hexagons and octagons, the dodecahedrons and icosahedrons, that God made all things, for God is the ultimate mathematician.
When Kepler had first made his discovery in July 1595, he felt as if an oracular voice had spoken to him from heaven. He burst into fits of weeping. The thought that he, sinful as he was, should receive such a revelation astounded him. “Now I no longer bemoaned the lost time; I no longer became weary at work; I shunned no calculation, no matter how difficult. Days and nights I passed in calculating until I saw if the sentence formulated in words agreed with the orbits of Copernicus, or if the winds carried away my joy.” His discovery needed to be published, not for his own glory, but for God's, for he “vowed to God the Omnipotent and All-Merciful that at the first opportunity I would make public in print this wonderful example of His wisdom.”
6
Now the problem was getting the book published. Kepler wrote several times to Mästlin for advice. Mästlin was enthusiastic, with a touch of caution, but he agreed to help in whatever way he could. In February 1596, Kepler's negotiations with Barbara and her father were making progress. Work on his book had finished, for the time being, and Mästlin had offered his help both in editing the work and in getting it published. Things were coming together. Then word came that his two grandfathers, aged and sick, had taken a turn for the worse and were calling for him. They
wanted to see him again before they died. Kepler took leave from his teaching for two months and traveled back to Weil der Stadt and Eltingen. Old Sebald died soon after, and Melchior Guldenmann, Katharina's father, grew sicker by the day.
