Kepler's Witch

by James A. Connor

  Rudolf, now deposed and sickly, had asked Kepler to stay on in the city, and since Kepler was loyal to his emperor even when the emperor was an imperial shell, stripped of power, he stayed on. Finally, Rudolf died on January 20, 1612, and Kepler had nothing left to stay for, so he took his children and all his household goods and rode out of Prague. He left the children in Kunstadt, Moravia, under the care of a certain Frau Pauritsch, a widow. Traveling on alone, he arrived in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, in May.

  Linz was a provincial capital, and the people in Linz lived, worked, and fought like provincial people. Although that may have seemed comfortable in a way, Kepler’s own mind had been expanded far too much by life in Prague, and the spiritual freedom he had first established for himself by questioning the Formula of Concord had grown in him as well. Not that he had doubts about the faith. He simply had a mind of his own.

  His next few years in Linz were a lonely time for Kepler, for unlike Prague there were few people in the city who could match his erudition and his intelligence. Instead of welcoming him as the great man, the city resisted him as outlandish, even foreign. The problems he had experienced with the Württemberg Lutheran church had festered and become dangerous. In his forties, Kepler was no longer the inexperienced, brash young man, and by this time in his life, after being the imperial mathematician for twelve years, he knew who he was. He knew his place in the world and the shape of his own life. Because of this alone, he became “a sliver in the eye” of some of his fellow Lutherans.

  Instead of sending him into a depression, for once, this new isolation spurred him on. It called forth qualities in his personality: “the blind self-assurance, the demonstration of both piety and compassion, the grasping after fame, with surprising new plans and remarkable works, while the rest was a constant searching, interpreting, analyzing of the most of diverse causes, along with his tortured uncertainties about his salvation.”3 Intelligence carries its own torments. Perhaps Kepler would have been happier had he taken a position at a university such as Wittenberg or Bologna, rather than returning to the job of district mathematician and teaching in a district school, but no place in the world would have quieted his great yearning desire for God.

  He first started looking into the position in Linz to please Barbara, because she had never been happy in Prague and longed to return to Austria, to the small-city life she knew as a young woman. But now that Barbara was dead, the position chafed. He was responsible to a school administration, both civil and religious, once more, and no one among them could quite forget that he was the great man and that he had been brought to their city by other great men. Unlike in Graz, where his teaching position had become available by the death of another teacher, the position in Linz had been created for him, just to bring him to the city.

  But there were compensations. Within a short time, Kepler made new friends—Baron Erasmus von Starhemberg and Baron Erasmus von Tschernembl, two of the most important Protestants in the region. He also made friends with several of the local lords: Herr von Polheim, Helmhard Jörger, and Maximilian von Liechtenstein. These men were kindred spirits who offered him their protection and their fellowship. Moreover, Kepler retained his position as imperial mathematician, since Emperor Matthias had confirmed him in that job soon after Rudolf’s death with a salary of 300 gulden a year along with 60 gulden added on to pay for his housing and firewood. Kepler was therefore able to maintain his status in the world, though the emperor retained the right to choose where Kepler would live. But Matthias was not Rudolf. He did not suffer from depression, as Rudolf had, but then neither did he have his brother’s intelligence or his Renaissance love of learning. His need was for an imperial astrologer, not a man of science. He therefore permitted Kepler to live in Linz, far away from the court, and required his attendance only occasionally. This gave Kepler the time he needed to complete the Rudolphine Tables and to work on the composition of his masterwork, the Harmonice Mundi, Harmony of the World, which would include his third law of planetary orbits.

  Six years later, in 1618, the religious pressure cooker that was Europe finally exploded. The Second Defenestration of Prague (the first having taken place during the Hussite Rebellion), then the Battle of White Mountain, and the flight of Frederick IV, the Winter King, led to the worst religious war in European history. The religious air in Linz, as it had been in Graz, as it had been in Prague, was electric with war fever.

  The school in Linz where Kepler was teaching was about as old as the one in Graz, but it was smaller and less prestigious. It had been another Württemberg foundation, built in the latter half of the sixteenth century, but then it was closed by the Counter-Reformation in 1600 as part of Rudolf II’s new series of religious rules. The school opened once again in 1609, however, as part of Matthias’s concessions to the Protestant Estates. It had a rector, a co-rector, and only four full-time teachers on the faculty. Kepler’s presence there gave the school an extra shot of prestige. The degree of installation, promulgated on June 14, 1611, declared that he was hired because of his “celebrated ability and commendable virtues.” He was ordered to complete the Rudolphine Tables in order to give honor to the emperor and to Austria, and he was expected to continue his own astronomical work and to do anything he believed to be useful and appropriate in astronomy, physics, or history.

  In spite of his newfound freedom, Kepler was lonely in Linz. There is one quality that Johannes Kepler and his mother shared—neither of them fit in. Both of them were stubborn. Katharina did not want to leave Leonberg, even when the townspeople brought her to court, even when they threatened her life. During one phase of her trial, she lived in Linz with Johannes for nine months, where she was safe from accusations. But she was never happy there and longed to return to her little house in Leonberg, where everyone hated her and where the tiger of a corrupt magistrate was waiting for her in the grass. Even after her trial, when the town rejected her utterly and threatened to stone her to death, she left Leonberg with great sadness.

  Johannes, likewise, would not leave the Lutheran church in spite of its many rejections. He had been cast off by Tübingen; the theological beliefs he had developed as a young man had carried him further and further toward the frontiers of his own church, which, as his own fame grew, got the Tübingen faculty buzzing like a hive of bees. His own faith, his own reason, his own conscience taught him to think in ways about the ubiquity doctrine that differed from the Formula of Concord. The ultraorthodox church leaders at Tübingen accused him of being a hidden Calvinist, though he would never become one. Nor would he become a Catholic, in spite of all the pressure the Counter-Reformation brought to bear on him. He was a man caught between two iron orthodoxies, neither of which would bend, both of which required absolute obedience and conformity, and he could give neither.

  The Counter-Reformation papacy had long since lost its Renaissance openness and had once again become enamored of the Inquisition. To be Catholic meant an unquestioning obedience to the church, and this obedience had to stretch across one’s entire life into one’s actions and beliefs. This was part of the Tridentine reform preached by the Jesuits, who had themselves taken a special vow of obedience to the pope. On the other hand, the Tübingen consistory demanded an equal level of obedience, of complete acquiescence to the Formula of Concord, the document that was meant to bring peace to the diverse factions in Lutheranism. Instead, it became the means of excluding men such as Kepler who could not bring themselves to conform to it. This conflict came to a head in the first few weeks of Kepler’s life in Linz.

  The Württemberg Lutherans were really a very tight group. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, and they wrote letters back and forth across Germany about those suspected of heresy. In an informal way, they had invented their own inquisition, based on the village more than the city. Where the Catholic Holy Office had professional inquisitors, tribunals, and royal armies to back them up, the Lutheran inquisition had winks and nods and secret letters. In 1610, two years bef
ore Kepler himself arrived in Linz, Daniel Hitzler had become its chief pastor. He was a Württemberg-trained minister, another graduate of the duke’s stipend program who, five years after Kepler, had taken the same course of studies. He was about as different a man from Kepler as one could imagine. He was certain of his orthodoxy and of the need for absolute conformity within the body of the church. Kepler believed that a man’s conscience was inviolable, a matter between himself and God, and that one had a religious duty to reason through the complexities of the faith and to understand them. Hitzler believed that the individual conscience needed to submit to the church and that wild horses such as Johannes Kepler needed to be reined in.

  Soon after Kepler arrived in Linz, he met with pastor Hitzler and requested Communion. During the conversation, he set forth the entire contents of his faith, including where he agreed with the Formula of Concord, which was nearly all of it, and where he disagreed. After all, self-destructive honesty is always the best policy. However, unknown to Kepler, Pastor Hitzler had already received a communication from someone in Württemberg, possibly Hafenreffer, informing him of the consistory’s suspicions about the imperial mathematician, who had been a source of controversy from the time he entered Tübingen. Because Linz, like Graz, was a missionary colony of Württemberg, most of the people already knew about the suspicious nature of the imperial mathematician. Unlike with Galileo, whose struggles with the Inquisition had more to do with angry astronomers and philosophers and finally the proud intransigence of Pope Urban VIII, the persecution of Kepler, like his mother’s later witch trial, was a matter of gossip. The Lutheran consistory in Stuttgart and the faculty at Tübingen considered Kepler to be an “unhealthy sheep” who might infect the flock with his unorthodox ideas. This was not even close to the truth, for Kepler kept his concerns about the ubiquity doctrine within a narrow circle of friends. Ultimately, he believed that all Christians—Calvinists, Lutherans, and even Catholics—should respect one another as Christians, and that was the most heretical thing of all.

  Hitzler took the letter about Kepler he had received from Tübingen at face value and demanded that the astronomer sign a copy of the Formula of Concord and stipulate to all of its provisions without reservation. This was the price of receiving Communion. Kepler told him that he accepted the Formula of Concord in every way, except that he had one small reservation. The pastor told him in return that it was all or nothing, and he demanded absolute obedience—for Hitzler, Kepler’s personal faith was not as important as his compliance. In Kepler’s mind, this meant abandoning his own conscience, his own faith, the thing that Luther had taught was the only way to salvation. It was his most immediate connection to God. Did not the Lutherans rebel against the Catholic church on the same issues? To abandon his conscience would be to abandon his faith.

  Worse yet, Hitzler did not treat this affair in the way a wise spiritual leader should have. He broke all confidentiality and gossiped shamefully, spreading word of his dispute with Kepler out to the entire community. For most of the people in Linz, their minister had accused their mathematics teacher—that strange fellow from Prague—of being a heretic, and that was the end of the matter. Ignorance has its own kind of logic. “The chief pastor of the church and the inspector of the school have branded me publicly as a heretic.”4

  With amazing naïveté, Kepler wrote a letter to the Stuttgart consistory appealing his pastor’s decision. Either he did not know about the Tübingen communication, or he believed that his personal relationship with some of the members of the consistory, and with the duke himself, would counterbalance this. These were men he had spoken to, men who had congratulated him after he received the title of imperial mathematician. Some of them were men he had spent time with while staying at the duke’s palace. They were people he thought admired him, or at least respected him. But on September 25, the consistory wrote back, answering Kepler’s appeal and the mask was torn. They had sided completely with the pastor and joined him in the condemnation.

  In his appeal, Kepler had argued that Pastor Hitzler did not actually have the power to exclude him from Communion, because the dispute between them was over a question of conscience, and that any attempt to exclude him from Communion on the basis of his conscience would override Kepler’s faith. He presented the consistory with two choices—either he be admitted to Communion in spite of their concerns or he would receive Communion elsewhere.

  The consistory’s answer to Kepler’s first point was without exception—no true pastor of the church could accept anyone into Communion who outwardly pretended to be a follower of the true evangelical faith, but who could not follow that faith precisely, who followed his own path, wandering away from true doctrine, obscuring the faith with specious questions and even more outrageous speculations. No pastor could accept a man who was confused in his soul, for his confusion could spread to others like a contagion, nor could he accept a man who followed his own judgment on the faith and on matters of God. Nor could any pastor accept a man who could not commit himself strictly to clear statements of doctrine, by not ascribing to the entire Formula of Concord, without exception, for it was the symbol of the orthodox Lutheran church, founded in Scripture. Thus, they said, Pastor Hitzler was correct in refusing Communion to Kepler, who had placed himself outside the true religion by the things he had written and said. Kepler could not be admitted into Communion unless he abandoned his erroneous speculations and followed the true religion. They said that Kepler had shown that he was at odds with the orthodox doctrine of the faith on many occasions, dating back from the time when he was a student in Tübingen, and that he had denied the omnipresence of the body of Christ, that is the doctrine of ubiquity, and that he showed some sympathy, if not agreement, with the Calvinists. It did not matter that Kepler disagreed with the Calvinists in most things; it only mattered that he agreed with them in some things. This was a response worthy of the Holy Office in Rome.

  The heart of the dispute was that Kepler had actually taken a critical stance toward Lutheran orthodoxy, and the church could admit no such criticism. But it was Kepler’s personality to weigh and measure all things, to argue all things, and to come up with his own opinions. He could no more abandon that than he could abandon the Lutheran church.

  Finally the consistory said: “You want nothing to do with our confession: how then could you ask for admission to Communion?” As to the scandal, they laid that completely at Kepler’s door. If only Kepler would acknowledge the authority of the church, return to a complete observance of the faith, and thereby follow the will of Pastor Hitzler, the scandal could be avoided. And if Kepler tried to receive Communion outside the Linz community, then he would be furthering that scandal and would be carrying it into the heart of whatever Lutheran community would accept him. If this community opened its doors to Kepler and admitted him to Communion, it would then be as suspect of Calvinism as he was, as would the pastor who received him. Kepler should keep to his mathematical studies, they said, and not involve himself in theology, for this was not his profession. What’s more, he should not bother the consistory with any more useless appeals. “Don’t trust your own mind too much, and make sure that your faith rests not on human wisdom, but on God’s strength.”

  In its own way, the Lutheran church of Württemberg was undergoing a recapitulation of the Catholic experience. Catholics always believed that the faith was a matter of individual conscience, because one had to stand alone before God to be judged. But for the faith to be preserved through time and not dissolve into a battle of confusion, with each individual coming up with a personal interpretation of the Scripture, the church needed to establish some uniformity of doctrine. This meant a unified interpretation made by an exclusive group of official interpreters. This also meant that the church had to have authority, which included the power to compel its members to comply with its teachings, rather than their own consciences. In keeping with this line of reasoning, only three hundred years after the founding of Christianity, August
ine of Hippo encouraged the persecution of the Donatists, because they would not conform to the church’s teaching about baptism. They insisted that all those who had fallen away from the faith during the waning years of the Roman persecutions needed to be rebaptized. Augustine disagreed. Subtly, in any organization, religious or otherwise, solidarity becomes ossification, the faith becomes orthodoxy, and compliance becomes more important than conversion of spirit. By the time of the Reformation, Christianity had gotten to the point where authority itself had become the problem.

  To reform Christianity, Luther and his followers returned to the idea of individual conscience and individual faith, ideas that had been asleep in Christianity for a thousand years. Luther and his followers, and the pastors who followed them, took the title “Doctor” rather than “Father.” They wanted to be seen merely as educated men rather than men who possessed semidivine authority. Kepler was very much in line with this Reformation thinking. The Lutheran church of Württemberg, however, in order to survive intact in the noisy marketplace of religious ideas, had to begin to develop an orthodoxy. Without it, what Luther and his followers had taught would have disappeared, dissolving into thousands of smaller denominations, each one based upon some private interpretation of Scripture. Lutheranism would have dissolved into the religious landscape altogether.