Maximilian, the Duke of Bavaria, who had been rewarded with Friedrich V’s electoral privileges after supplying Ferdinand with the army he needed to crush the rebellious Bohemians after the Defenestration of Prague, was in secret contact with Richelieu. Jealous of Wallenstein’s many successes, he intrigued at the congress to form an anti-Wallenstein resistance. They refused to vote for young Ferdinand unless the emperor broke with his favorite general. The emperor had had his own difficulties with the general colonel and agreed. Wallenstein was out, and there was no one strong enough to fight Gustavus Adolphus.
In the middle of this, Kepler decided to travel to the congress, and from there to Linz. He owned several government bonds from there, one for 2,000 gulden and one for 1,500, and wanted to ensure that they paid the promised interest, which until that time they had avoided doing. After some negotiation, the representatives in Linz told him to appear before them on St. Martin’s day, which was November 11, and they would see what they could do about paying him.
Silesia was in the midst of battle at the time, as was much of the empire. Kepler left Sagan with little hope of his return. Whether he had a premonition or was suffering from depression once again is uncertain, but Bartsch later wrote that Kepler expected that his family would see the Day of Judgment before they would see him again. For the trip, he took a number of books, some clothes, and documents that contained “all his wealth.” Before he left, he wrote to his friend Johann Bernegger in Strasbourg, and gratefully accepted his invitation to bring his family to that city as a refuge from the endless war. “Hold tight with me to the only true anchor of the church—pray to God for our church and for me.”
On November 2, 1630, after a long, exhausting ride through winter weather, Kepler rode a half-dead horse into Regensburg across the stone bridge spanning the Danube. He came to a house, now Keplerstrasse 5, at that time owned by an acquaintance of Kepler’s, an innkeeper named Hildebrand Billj, who put him up. Kepler was there for only a few short days, exhausted, drained, and depressed, when he caught a cold that turned into a fever. Much of his life, he had suffered with fevers, agues, and bouts of fatigue, possibly from an array of recurring viruses that Kepler, in his often depleted state, had become vulnerable to. The medical arts being what they were at the time, Kepler believed that his fevers had come from fire pustules, sacer ignis, hidden in his body. Very quickly, however, the fever spiked, and Kepler’s life was in danger. Billj sent for a doctor, who bled Kepler to balance his humors.
Supposedly, as Emperor Ferdinand was about to leave on his ship, he heard of Kepler’s illness and sent a group of his retinue of gentlemen to visit him with the emperor’s prayers and good wishes, along with 25 Hungarian ducats for the doctor. Kepler became delirious after that and drifted in and out of consciousness. Several Lutheran pastors came to visit him in his last hours, though they would not share Communion with him. According to one report, Kepler told one of the pastors that all he wanted to do was bring peace between Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists, and the pastor responded that one might as well try to reconcile Christ with the devil. The last clergyman to come, Pastor Christoph Sigmund Donauer, sat by his bedside and asked Kepler, moments before he died, about how he hoped to claim salvation. Kepler said to him, his voice weak and trailing away, that “his hopes were solely in Christ, from whom comes all solace, welfare, and protection.” A few minutes later, his breath, ragged and weak, gave way, and Kepler died.
Three-quarters of a mile inland from the river and from the Billj house on what is now Keplerstrasse, there was the Protestant Cemetery of St. Peter, and on November 17, 1630, they buried in that place Johannes Kepler, the boy his own family did not want, the boy who had grown to become the great man who proved Copernicus and helped set the course of science. The funeral was crowded with great men, all come to the city for the congress, many who knew him, all who knew of him. Pastor Donauer preached the sermon: “Blessed are they who hear the Word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:28). They then carved on his tombstone, which was later lost, a short poem that Kepler himself had written only months before. Was it depression or premonition?
Mensus eram coelos,
nunc terrae metior umbras.
Mens coelistis erat,
corporis umbra jacet.
I used to measure the heavens,
But now I measure the shades of the earth.
Although my soul was from heaven,
The shade of my body lies here.
Some claimed that they saw balls of fire fall from heaven the night they buried Kepler. Perhaps earth’s war had touched heaven at last. Even dead and buried, Kepler could not escape the war. A few years later, Gustavus Adolphus attacked Regensburg. Many Protestants had come to that city as refugees, and they were caught between the forces of their emperor and the forces of their fellow Lutherans. A battle took place, in which cavalry overran the Cemetery of St. Peter, and destroyed Kepler’s gravestone. No one really knows where he is buried today, though there is a monument.
I HAVE BEEN TO THAT PLACE. After staying in Weil der Stadt, I traveled on to Prague, where I had words with the German student in the train and made peace with him while talking about Kepler. On the way back, I stayed over in Regensburg for a day, and after visiting Hildebrand Billj’s house and the room where Kepler died, I walked up to the park where the cemetery once stood. The memorial that reminds visitors of Kepler’s grave stands in an open glade sheltered by elm trees and Japanese pine. An old oak, gnarled and twisted at the base, as if the wood has melted over time, stands nearby. It looks as if it has a beer belly. Across the bicycle path is a fountain, and lovers sit on the orange-painted benches, nuzzling one another in the sunlight. Kepler is alone, however, for his memorial is off to one side, untended and partly forgotten. An old man stops by and we speak in the no-man’s-land between the languages. He asks me whose bust is on the pedestal, and I tell him Kepler’s. He says, “Ah, Kepler!” as if the two were old friends.
The bust is under a concrete cupola supported by eight columns. Someone has marked black dots on his eyes, making him look like a sorcerer. All around are beer bottles—Löwenbrau—crushed cans and cigarette butts, as if one more recent army has camped out nearby. Two graffiti written on one column, in German and English, are “Antipolitische Volkspartei, Freiburg” (“Antipolitical People’s Party, Freiburg”) and “Never Forget the White Rose of Resistance!”12
Somehow, this seems appropriate. I say a prayer and leave.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. I. Bernard Cohen, “Kepler’s Century,” in Kepler: Four Hundred Years, ed. Arthur Beer and Peter Beer (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1975), pp. 11–12.
CHAPTER 1
1. One of the most complete accounts in English of this trial and the events leading up to it can be found in Max Caspar, Kepler, trans. and ed. C. Doris Hellman (New York: Dover, 1993), pp. 240–58. This book is perhaps the best biography of Kepler.
2. “Terrorization by word” consisted of showing the accused the instruments of torture and explaining their function, accompanied by verbal abuse and accusation.
3. Berthold Sutter, Der Hexenprozess gegen Katharina Kepler, 2d rev. ed. (Weil der Stadt: Kepler Gesellschaft, Heimatverein Weil der Stadt, 1984), p. 37.
4. Sutter, Der Hexenprozess, p. 111.
CHAPTER 2
1. The German “Pfui Teufel” is a common expression when tasting or seeing something disgusting. Anyone would have used the expression, but it has ironic significance since the Kepler woman is accused of lending a hand to the devil’s trade.
2. Christian Frisch, Joannis Kepleris Astronomi Opera Omnia, 8:670–71.
3. Dave Gavine, “James Melvill Sees a Great Comet in 1577,” Astronomical Society of Edinburgh Journal 40.
4. Berthold Sutter, Der Hexenprozess gegen Katharina Kepler, 2d rev. ed. (Weil der Stadt: Kepler Gesellschaft, Heimatverein Weil der Stadt, 1984), p. 36.
CHAPTER 3
1. The affectation of writing in the third
person was merely the proper form for horoscopes, which were often anonymous. The astrologer was supposed to see what was to be seen in the stars without reference to outside sources of information. The subject of the horoscope was often, therefore, not named. Because Kepler is writing his own horoscope, he cannot help slipping back and forth between first and third person. In this case, Kepler’s horoscope is in fact a thoroughgoing self-criticism, a listing of his faults in the service of moral growth.
2. Johannes Kepler, Selbstzeugnisse, ed. Franz Hammer (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1971), p. 26.
3. Charlotte Methuen, Kepler’s Tübingen (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), p. 46.
4. The first thing that Ulrich did in his education reform in 1535 was to restructure the university in Tübingen, which meant weeding out those professors who were loyal to the pope and emperor rather than the duke himself and those who were even suspected of such loyalties. But the reform went too far, and many of the faculty left, even some the duke wanted to keep. Moreover, reforming the faculty did not build up the university in general; it did not attract more students, nor did it help fill the ranks of much needed Lutheran pastors. To solve this problem, Ulrich set up the Herzogliches Stipendium, or Stift, modeling it on a scholarship system already established in Hesse. On February 5, 1536, the duke instructed Tübingen’s town council, along with the councils of every town in Württemberg, to set aside 25 gulden to support three students at the university the next year, and 25 gulden for each year thereafter.
But Ulrich’s son Christoph knew that no reformation of the Stift in Tübingen could survive without a good system of feeder schools to select out those few with the right qualities to move on to service in the duchy, and so he set up the system of German and Latin schools. Through this system, Christoph wanted to offer education to “children of poor, pious people, of hard-working, Christian, God-fearing character and background, and suited for study.” Such children would then study to become Lutheran pastors or perhaps teachers or sometimes clerks. These children of the poor would then grow the ranks of the new middle management of Württemberg.
5. We must take care when bringing the words astrology and science together. Astrology was losing its scientific credibility at this precise moment in history. Few today would acknowledge astrology as a science, but nearly everyone did in the seventeenth century, and it was Kepler and Galileo who finally ended this.
6. The word “monastery” here is not to be read figuratively, for the schools were in fact monastic in structure and tradition. While there, Kepler was beginning his preparation to be a Lutheran pastor, and though he never landed in the ministry, he spent most of his youth studying for it. Modern prejudice would expect that Kepler was educated as a scientist, in the scientific method, in a laboratory or observatory somewhere, but there was no such thing as a “scientist” per se in Kepler’s day, for it was Galileo, Kepler himself, and later Newton who eventually set the pattern.
In Kepler’s time, then, the primary course of study for a young intellectual was either law or medicine or the church, and the oldest schools were the monasteries. In strict monastic order, during the summer prayers started at four in the morning, as the deep night thinned into the coming day. In winter, prayers started at five, not because the boys needed to sleep, but because the sun rose later and without electric lights the school hallways must have seemed like tunnels. The boys attended Communion at least six times a year and took turns reading aloud the daily lesson. After prayers, they marched off to lectio theologica, or theological study, largely the reading of biblical texts, stressing theological and grammatical analysis. Each boy sat upon a backless wooden bench at a tilted wooden desk. Paper was too precious for note taking, so most of the learning was by rote and recitation. Then, of course, the principal would preach to the entire school and give the boys the proper Lutheran interpretation of the text at hand. Often these sermons were contentious, handling one at a time the latest theological conflict between Protestant and Catholic or sometimes between Protestant and Protestant. In the 1580s, during the time Kepler studied at Adelberg, these sermons would have targeted the Calvinists’ doctrine of predestination and their doctrine on Holy Communion, a question that would later be the cause of Kepler’s excommunication from the Lutheran church.
7. Max Caspar, Kepler, trans. and ed. C. Doris Hellman (New York: Dover, 1993), p. 41.
8. Caspar, Kepler, pp. 38–39.
9. John Hudson Tiner, Johannes Kepler: Giant of Faith and Science (Fenton: Mott, 1999), p. 35.
10. Martha List, “Kepler as a Man,” in Kepler: Four Hundred Years, Vistas in Astronomy, vol. 18, ed. Arthur Beer and Peter Beer (Oxford: Pergamon, 1975), p. 97.
CHAPTER 4
1. Carolly Erickson, The First Elizabeth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 364–77.
2. The ritual was a prime source of money for the university library, so no one wanted to abandon the rite until it got just too silly, which happened around 1819. Walter Jens, Eine deutsche Universität (Munich, 1977).
3. Jürgen Sydow, “Kepler’s Homeland—Württemberg,” in Kepler: Four Hundred Years, ed. Arthur Beer and Peter Beer (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1975), pp. 136–37.
4. Goethe, Faust, part 1, lines 828–31.
5. Sydow, “Kepler’s Homeland—Württemberg,” pp. 136–37.
6. Peter Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), pp. 42–43.
7. This translation was taken from Robert E. Smith, who wrote it as part of Project Wittenberg. The versification is my own. http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/prayers/morning.txt.
8. John Hudson Tiner, Johannes Kepler: Giant of Faith and Science (Fenton: Mott, 1999), p. 47.
9. Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), p. 6.
10. Tiner, Johannes Kepler, p. 50.
11. Max Caspar, Kepler, trans. and ed. C. Doris Hellman (New York: Dover, 1993), p. 44.
12. Tiner, Johannes Kepler, p. 39.
13. Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum, GW i, 9:11–23; GW viii, 23:11–23.
14. Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 23.
15. Couliano, Eros and Magic, p. 24.
16. Couliano, Eros and Magic, p. 4.
17. Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Great Minds Series (Amherst: Prometheus, 1995), p. 3.
18. G. J. Toomer, Ptolemy’s Almagest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 41.
19. Tiner, Johannes Kepler, p. 45.
20. Ferguson, Kitty, Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens (New York: Walker, 2002), p. 64.
CHAPTER 5
1. Berthold Sutter, “Kepler in Graz,” in Arthur Beer and Peter Beer, eds., Kepler: Four Hundred Years (Oxford: Pergamon, 1975), p. 140.
2. Letter from Kepler to the school inspector in Graz, April 19, 1594. In Justus Schmidt, Johann Kepler: Sein Leben in Bildern und eigenen Berichten (Linz: Rudolf Trauner, 1970), p. 223.
3. Schmidt, Johann Kepler, p. 223.
4. Johannes Kepler, “Revolutio anni, 1594” in Christian Frisch, Joannis Kepleris Astronomi Opera Omnia, viii, 2. S. p. 677.
5. Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, Frommer’s Austria (New York: Hungry Minds, 2001), p. 438.
6. James R. Voelkel , Johannes Kepler and the New Astronomy (New York: Oxford, 1999), p. 25.
7. Kepler’s journal for 1595, in Frisch, Opera Omnia, viii, 2, nr. 683.
8. Voelkel, Johannes Kepler, p. 27.
9. Voelkel, Johannes Kepler, p. 27.
10. Letter to Michael Mästlin in Tübingen, Graz, October 30, 1595. In Schmidt, Johann Kepler, p. 223.
11. A Werkschuh was an ancient German linear measure somewhere between a foot and a yard long, which varied according to the use and was far from precise. Surprisingly, Kepler uses the uni
t here, even though he didn’t have much trust in it.
12. Schmidt, Johann Kepler, p. 224.
13. http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/prime/articles/platsol/index.asp.
14. Johannes Kepler , Mysterium Cosmographicum, trans. A. M. Duncan, intro. and comm. E. J. Aiton (Norwalk: Abaris, 1999).
CHAPTER 6
1. Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum, GW i, p. 53.
2. Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum, p. 53.
3. Cf. Max Caspar, Kepler, trans. and ed. C. Doris Hellman (New York: Dover, 1993), pp. 72–73. Caspar’s description of the marital arrangements is delicious, but he doubts that Jobst Müller insisted on proof of Kepler’s nobility. I tend to disagree, mainly because I think that, given the kind of man Müller was, there would have been little other reason for him to agree to the marriage and, frankly, little other reason for Barbara to have been interested in Kepler in the first place. The Müllers were largely clueless about Barbara’s suitor’s potential for greatness and never understood it even after he became the emperor’s mathematician.
4. Oddly enough, the Müllers achieved nobility on their own soon after Jobst died in 1601. In 1623, the emperor knighted Jobst’s son Michael for the many great deeds and services—mostly financial—that the Müller family had rendered to the empire and to the ruling house of Austria. From that time on, he was permitted to sign himself “von und zu Mühleck” and to use red wax to seal his letters. The title didn’t last long, however. Michael had no male heirs, and so nobility died with him.
5. J. Hübner, Die Theologie Johannes Keplers, pp. 165–75. In Charlotte Methuen, Kepler’s Tübingen (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 205–6.
6. Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum, GW viii, 9–20. In Caspar, Kepler, p. 63.
7. Quoted in Michael Walter Burke-Gaffney, S.J., Kepler and the Jesuits (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1944), pp. 3–4.
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