Kepler's Witch (14 page)

Kepler, alert for trouble, was one of those who sniffed the air. It worried him greatly to watch his fellow Lutherans taunt the religion of their new ruler. One does not ridicule a Habsburg lightly any more than one teases a leopard. From April 22 to June 28, 1598, young Ferdinand traveled to Rome to meet with the pope and to pray at the shrine of Loreto. There, some say, in the midst of his prayers, he vowed to God to lead his divided people back to the arms of the true faith. Back in Austria meanwhile, while Ferdinand was still away, Graz and all the countryside prickled as on a hot day before a summer thunderstorm. Those like Kepler who paid attention heard stories of events along the young prince's journey, rumors and whispers, and found evil omens in them. “Everything trembles,” Kepler wrote to Mästlin, “in anticipation of the return of the prince. One says that he is at the head of Italian auxiliary troops. The city magistrate of our creed was dismissed. The task of watching the gates and arsenal was transferred to followers of the pope. Everywhere one hears threats.”
⁴

When he returned, Ferdinand was even more ardent than when he left. The rumors, at least the ones about the prince's new determination, were all too true, and the Lutheran church argued over what to do about him. Some of the more rash preachers circulated profane caricatures of the pope, infuriating Ferdinand. One, a certain Balthasar Fischer, punctuated his sermon on the cult of Mary with an obscene gesture, opening his robe and asking whether it was proper for women to crawl inside it. Ferdinand then called in the Lutheran chairman for church ministry, accusing the Lutherans of bad faith. “You would spurn peace even if I would give it to you,” he told him.
⁵
Things spun out of control from there. Ferdinand ordered arrests and levied a new, burdensome tax on Lutherans trying to bury their dead. Poor Protestants languished in hospitals untreated. Murmurs and angry whispers flowed around town—perhaps riot, some said, perhaps rebellion.

In the midst of this—joy. Kepler had married Barbara Müller on April 27, 1597, as the flowers bloomed and the farmers gathered for the
planting. Copies of his first book, the
Mysterium Cosmographicum,
had just arrived, and everyone fussed over the young author. Marriage and publication both, in just two short months! Kepler sent copies of the book to everyone who mattered. The archduke, of course, and the emperor, of course. Tycho Brahe in Denmark, certainly. And one obscure mathematics professor in Padua, Galileo Galilei. Galileo wrote back, ecstatic to find another Copernican. He too was a Copernican, he wrote Kepler in a letter, but he was afraid to tell anyone after the treatment that Copernicus himself had received. Kepler wrote back, encouraging him to come forward, but Galileo did not acknowledge his letter, and Kepler did not write again for another thirteen years.

Then on February 2, 1598, more joy, but joy short-lived. Just before young Ferdinand left on his pilgrimage to Rome, Barbara gave birth to a son, little Heinrich, named, perhaps unpropitiously, for Kepler's misbegotten father and misshapen brother. Kepler, typically, cast a horoscope. In his journal for that year, he wrote: “A son! Heinrich Kepler was born on February 2. The stars' constellation promises a noble disposition, a strong body, strong fingers, agile hands, with a capacity for the mathematical and mechanical arts.” Then he went on to explain why: “The moon in quadrant to Saturn promises a vivid imagination, diligence, though some mistrust and some stinginess. Both indicate compassion, deep thinking, piety, empathy, sadness, and grace. The ascendant in quadrant to the sun supports those attributes and with Libra full of light south in ascension indicates one who is stubborn, unruly, and also one who admires greatness.”
⁶
A proud father, certainly. He could have been describing himself.

With his stepdaughter, Regina, brought into the marriage by Barbara, and now little Heinrich, Kepler had become a family man, the one thing that he had feared most before his marriage—that he would be tied to Graz not only by Barbara's estates, but also by family obligations. By now he knew that it was less likely that he would return to Tübingen to finish his studies for the ministry. He had become the comfortable burgher everyone had wanted him to be.

Perhaps it was an omen, or would have seemed so to Kepler, but little Heinrich died, however, after only two months from what Kepler called
apostema capitis,
possibly meningitis. Kepler's joy was crushed. Unfairly, he blamed the boy's ill health on Barbara's diet, writing to Mästlin that the boy's deformed testicles looked like a cooked tortoise, which was one of Barbara's favorite foods. Even so, Kepler and Barbara tried again, and this time they had a little girl, Susanna, who also died after little more than a month of the same disease as her brother.

After Susanna's death, Kepler fell into a black depression, seeing omens of death everywhere. “No day can soothe my wife's yearning and the scripture is close to my heart: O vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.”
⁷
He reported that bloody crosses were appearing on the bodies of people all over Hungary, a sure omen of the pestilence, and that he himself had found a tiny cross the color of blood, which had then turned yellow, on his left foot. He was the first to have seen the omen in all of Graz, he said. His depression took him into dark places, as if death had entered somewhere deep in his soul, and for some months all he could see about him was death. Between Kepler's sighs and Barbara's epic weeping, the Kepler household teetered on the brink of despair.

Then the storm struck.

The first time it hit him personally was when the Counter-Reformation officials charged him ten taler to bury little Susanna, simply because he was a Lutheran. The fact that they reduced the tax in his case only halved the anger, but did not remove it. Still, Kepler tried to stay out of the fight. No one liked a good intellectual dustup as much as he did, and he would defend his position vigorously if put to it, but in his deepest heart he disliked war, and he hated wars of religion most of all. Sacred things, he believed, ought to be sacred—the things of God should be protected by godly means, by theological debate, by ministers and priests, not by soldiers. Kepler knew that one's conscience should be free to act, free to believe, and should never be subject to outside pressure, whether from the prince or even from the church. No one, he believed, should abuse the faith by slandering others for their beliefs.

In fact, for years he blamed his fellow Lutherans even more than Ferdinand for the troubles in Graz, especially the radical preachers such as Fischer and Kellin, who ridiculed the images of the archduke's religion. Ten
years later, he wrote to Margrave Georg Friedrich von Baden: “Some of the appointed teachers confuse the positions of teaching and ruling, want to be bishops and have an ill-timed zeal with which they tear everything down, defiantly relying on their prince's protection and power, which they often lead to dangerous precipices. This has long ago ruined us in Styria.”
⁸
In saying this, Kepler took a stab at his old teachers at Tübingen, who led the pope-baiting chorus. “Werewolf, whore of Babylon, Antichrist,” they called him, and Kepler, who was a peaceful man in his soul, could not abide it.

Then the hammer fell once more. The archpresbyter of Graz, Lorenz Sonnabenter, dug up an old medieval tradition, one that had been practiced in theory only, and used it against the Lutherans, effectively shutting them down. The tradition had been designed to protect the livelihood of the archpresbyter of a place, so that the fees he charged for his ministry could remain constant. He could, quite legally, forbid the practice of any competing ministry that would undercut his own, and he used this right to prohibit any kind of ministerial practice by Protestants.

In a letter to Herwart von Hohenberg dated December 9, 1598, Kepler wrote: “In the month of August the prelude to the tragedy took place. The archpriest officially prohibited our preachers from all practices of religion, the administration of the sacraments, and the consecration of marriages.” The Lutherans complained to the archduke, but he shrugged, saying that he had to protect his own Catholics as well as the Lutherans, and so, where his own devotion had led him before, now he would act because his people had requested it of him. On September 13, Ferdinand promulgated an order to dismiss the Lutheran preachers and to break the collegiate faculty, and that this had to be done in two weeks' time. On September 20, the archduke “decreed that all ordinations be canceled, and then let go all the servants of the church and school in Graz and Judenburg, and that within fourteen days they must leave his territories and stay away forever.”
⁹
On pain of death. The councilors of the city begged Ferdinand for a repeal of the banishment, but he refused, and on September 23 gave them only eight days to get out and never come back.

The town tried to call for the
Stände,
the assembly of representatives, but there were floods that year, and only a few of them could get to Graz
in time. Ferdinand then called out the troops. The city roiled, near riot, near rebellion, while the troops stood by silently, waiting, ready for slaughter. There was nothing else the Lutheran teachers and preachers could do, so they packed their bags and on the appointed day trickled out of the city, some to Hungary, some to Croatia. They left their wives and families behind, an act of vain hope, perhaps, trusting that because the archduke was young, he might be swayed by other voices and allow them to return. Kepler was among the banished and left with the others. In his letter to von Hohenberg, he wrote that somehow, in spite of all the persecution, he was still paid. As for the situation, there was not much anyone could do. The faculty at the school was told to hope for some change after the
Stände,
the council of representatives, met.
¹⁰

Only Kepler was allowed to return finally, which he did in October. “As for me,” he wrote, “I returned after a period of one month, called upon by officials of the archduke, who described me as exempt.” Apparently, Ferdinand liked him and was proud to have a scholar of Kepler's growing reputation working in his duchy. He could return, not as a teacher in the Lutheran school, but as the district mathematician. After all, the great Tycho Brahe of Denmark had read the
Mysterium Cosmographicum
and liked it. He had even written to Kepler, inviting him to come to visit him in Prague. That fellow Galileo, down in Padua, had also written a letter praising it, one Copernican to another. But as nice as Kepler's growing reputation was, it was more to the point that Kepler was a modest man and was known to be a modest man, a man who disapproved of the antics of his fellow Lutherans. “We see,” wrote Mästlin to Kepler, “with what raging fury the devil incites the enemies of the church of God, as though he wanted to devour it completely.”
¹¹
Kepler kept his own counsel on that point, writing in his diary: “I am just and fair toward the followers of the pope and recommend this fairness to everyone.”
¹²
Kepler then petitioned the archduke for his exemption and received it. “His Highness is herewith granting, out of special favor, that the petitioner, notwithstanding the General Dismissal, shall be allowed to remain here. But he shall maintain appropriate modesty everywhere, so that this exemption will not be subject to cancellation.”
¹³

Oddly enough, the Jesuits may have had something to do with this. Although Kepler was a committed Lutheran and could never have accepted the Roman Catholic faith, he was on good terms with some of the fathers at the Jesuit college, for Kepler knew that Father Clavius and a handful of other Jesuits were some of the best astronomers in Europe. In September 1597, a few months after Kepler's wedding, one of the fathers in Graz, Father Grienberger, came to Kepler at the behest of the Bavarian chancellor, Hans Georg Herwart von Hohenberg, an important man and one of the first of Kepler's important patrons. No doubt, there was some hope on the part of the good father, and on the part of the chancellor, of converting Kepler to Catholicism, but it was a vain hope. Not an irrational hope, though, becauce one of the archduke's teachers at Ingolstadt had been Johann Baptiste Fickler, a distant relative of Johannes Kepler's.

Fickler's mother, Benigna, born on the last breath of the Renaissance, was one of the great women figures of the time. Like Meg More, the daughter of St. Thomas More in England, Benigna was a well-educated woman. Her father, a wealthy merchant in Ulm, had insisted she read law and theology, so she could write contracts and dispute theological questions. She could read and write Latin, and some said she was the best lutenist in town. Wanting children, she married very young, buried her first two husbands, and finally married Michael Fickler, Johann Baptiste's father. Had she lived at a later time, she would most certainly have been accused of witchcraft, because one of her many accomplishments, like Katharina Kepler's, was the knowledge of herbs and the making of potions.

In his first letter to Herwart von Hohenberg, Kepler made a point of sending his greetings to his relative, which were passed on and returned with thanks. These letters were all sent by personal courier from Bavaria to the emperor's court in Prague, and from there back to Graz by way of the archduke's secretary, a Capuchin father named Peter Casal, and then back again along the same route. This set of events raised Kepler above the rest of the Lutherans quietly leaving the city and set up his later exemption and return.
¹⁴

But was Kepler right in assuming that if the Lutherans had only been less provocative, the archduke would have left them alone? Probably not.
The land was itching for war, and young Ferdinand itched along with it. He had determined to rid the land of heretics, and that determination would embrace an astronomer or two. Besides, he knew that the Lutherans weren't much better. Lutheran dukes and princes had merrily expelled Catholics from their territories, so why shouldn't he? People of all stations, all classes in Germany and Austria, from kings to peasants, were tripping over their own piety. In some secret, unlit room in the human soul, they all wanted war. And eventually, they got it.