Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  “Why, sir, this is splendid news!”

  “Eh?”

  “How have you managed to persuade him? I may tell you, I have for years been urging him to publish, as have many others, and without the least success, but here you come from Wittenberg and win him round immediately. Splendid, I say, splendid!”

  He stepped back then, evidently realising that this shouting and back-slapping was not seemly behaviour for a Bishop, and smiled his little smile again, though somewhat sheepishly. I said:

  “It is good to find you so apparently pleased to hear this news.”

  He frowned at the coldness of my tone. “Indeed, I am very pleased. And I say again, you are to be congratulated.”

  “Many thanks.”

  “Pray, no thanks are due.”

  “Yet, I offer them.”

  “Well then, thanks also.”

  “Sir.”

  “Sir.”

  We disengaged, and shook our blades, but I, making a sudden advance, dealt him a bold blow.

  “I have been told, however, Bishop, that Rome would not be likely to greet with great enthusiasm the making public of this work. Have I been misinformed?”

  He looked at me, and gave a little laugh. He said:

  “Let us have some wine, my friend.”

  Thus ended the first round. I was not displeased with my performance so far; but when the wine arrived, like a fool I drank deep, and very soon I was thinking myself the greatest swordsman in the world. That wine, and the hubris it induced, I blame for my subsequent humiliation. Dantiscus said:

  “My dear von Lauchen, I begin to see why you have come to Heilsberg. Can it be, you think me less than honest when I say, hearing the news you bring with you today, that I am overjoyed? O, I well know the Canon thinks I hate him, and would, though God knows why, prevent him, if I could, from publishing his book. All this, I see, he has told you. But, my friend, believe me, he is mistaken, and does me grave injustice. To these his charges, I reply just this—come, let me fill your cup—has he forgot how I, this six years past, have ever sought to have him speak, and publicise his theory? Meinherr von Lauchen, truth to tell, I am weary of the man, and cannot help but feel rebuffed when you arrive here and reveal that winning his agreement took but a word from you!”

  I shrugged, and said:

  “But what, my Lord, about this Schillings woman, eh? It’s said you accuse him of taking her to bed—and she his cousin! I think, my friend, instead of love you bear him malice.”

  He hung his head.

  “Ah, that. Distasteful business, I agree. But, Meinherr, as Bishop of this See, it is my solemn duty to ensure that Mother Church’s clergy shall abjure all vice. What can I do? The man insists on keeping in his house this cousin-mistress. And anyway, the matter is deeper than you know, as I, if you will listen, shall quickly show. First, the times are bad; the Church, my friend, fears all that Luther wrought, and must defend her tarnished reputation. Second, it’s not the learned Doctor Nicolas at whom my shot is mainly aimed, but one Sculteti, Canon of Frauenburg also—a treacherous fellow, this one. Not only does he live in sin, but also he plots against the Church here, and puts out false reports. Besides, he’s involved with the Germans—ahem! More wine? But this is not germane to my intention, which is that you should know I love the learned Doctor, and would go to any lengths to spare him pain. And please! do not think evil of our Church. All these … these petty matters all are due to badness in the times. They are but passing madness, and will pass, while certain to endure is the Canon’s master-work, of this I’m sure. And now, my friend, a toast: to you! to us! and to De revolutionibus!”

  I drained my cup, and looked about me, and was vaguely surprised to find that we had left the tower, and were standing now in the open air, on a high balcony. Below us was the courtyard, filled with searing lemon-coloured light; odd foreshortened little people hurried hither and thither about their business in a most humorous fashion. Something seemed to have gone wrong with my legs, for I was leaning all off to one side. Dantiscus, looking more than ever like a besotted Italian-ate princeling, was still talking. Apparently I had stopped listening some time before, for I could not understand him now very well. He said:

  “Science! Progress! Rebirth! The New Age! What do you say, friend?”

  I said:

  “Yesh,Oyesh.”

  And then there was more wine, and more talk, and music and a deal of laughter, and I grew merrier and merrier, and thought what a capital fellow after all was this Dantiscus, so civilised, so enlightened; and later I was feasted amid a large noisy company, which I addressed on divers topics, such as Science! and Progress! and the New Age! and all in all made an utter fool of myself. At dawn I awoke in a strange room, with a blinding ache in my head, and longing for death. I crept away from the castle without seeing a soul, and fled Heilsberg, never to return.

  What was I to think now, in sickeningly sober daylight, of this Dantiscus, who had plied me with drink and flattery, who had feasted me in his hall, who had toasted the success of a publication for which, so Giese would have it, he wished in his heart nothing but abject failure? After much argument with myself, I decided that despite all he was a scoundrel—had he not ordered a burning of books? had he not threatened Lutherans with fire and the rack? had he not hounded without mercy my domine praeceptor? No amount of wine, nor flattery, nor talk of progress, could obliterate those crimes. O knave! O viper! O yesh.

  *

  Before I leave this part of my tale, there is something more I must mention. To this day I am uncertain whether or not what I am about to relate did in reality take place. On the following day, when I was well out on my flight from Heilsberg, and was wondering, in great trepidation, if Dantiscus, finding me gone without a word, might think to send after me, and drag me back to another round of drinking and carousing, suddenly, like some great thing swooping down on me out of a sky that a moment before had been empty, there came into my head the memory, I call it a memory, for convenience, of having seen Raphael yesterday at the castle—Raphael, that laughing lad from Löbau! He had been in the courtyard, surrounded by that lemon-coloured sunlight and the hither and thithering figures, mounted on a black horse. How clearly I remembered him!—or imagined that I did. He had grown a little since last I had seen him, for he was at that age when boys shoot up like saplings, and was very elegantly got up in cap and boots and cape, quite the little gentleman, but Raphael for all that, unmistakably, I would have known him anywhere, at any age. I see it still, that scene, the sunlight, and the rippling of the horse’s glossy blue-black flanks, the groom’s hand upon the bridle, and the slim, capped and crimson-caped, booted, beautiful boy, that scene, I see it, and wonder that such a frail tender thing survived so long, to bring me comfort now, and make me young again, here in this horrid place. Raphael. I write down the name, slowly, say it softly aloud, and hear aetherial echoes of seraphs singing. Raphaël. I have tears still. Why was he there, so far from home? The answer, of course, was simple, viz. the boy had brought my book from Löbau. Yet was there not more to it than that? I called his name, too late, for he was already at the gate, on his way home, and Dantiscus, taking me by the arm, said: friend, you should be careful, and gave me a strange look. What did he mean? Or did he speak, really? Did I imagine it, all of it? Was it a dream, which I am dreaming still? If that is so, if it was but a delusion spawned by a mind sodden with drink, then I say the imagining was prophetic, in a way, as I shall demonstrate, in its place.

  * * *

  I returned home then to Wittenberg, only to find to my dismay that it was no longer home. How to explain this strange sensation? You know it well, I’m sure. The university, my friends and teachers, my rooms, my books, all were just as when I had left them, and yet all were changed. It was as if some subtle blight had contaminated everything I knew, the heart of everything, the essential centre, while the surface remained sound. It took me some time to understand that it was not Wittenberg that was blighted, but myself
. The wizard of Frauenburg had put his spell on me, and one thing, one only thing, I knew, would set me free of that enchantment. After my ignominious flight from Heilsberg, all interest in Copernicus’s work had mysteriously abandoned me, despite the lie I had told Dantiscus regarding the imaginary triumph I had scored at Löbau; for I had now no intention of continuing my campaign to force Copernicus to publish. I say that interest in his work abandoned me, and not vice versa, for thus it happened. I had no hand in it: simply, all notion of returning to Frauenburg, and joining battle with him again, all that just departed, and was as though it had never been. Had some secret sense within me perceived the peril that awaited me in Prussia? If so, that warning sense was not strong enough, for I was hardly back in Wittenberg before I found myself in correspondence with Petreius the printer. O, I was vague, and wrote that he must understand that there was no question now of publishing the main work; but I was, I said, preparing a Narratio secunda (which I was not), and since it would contain many diagrams and tables and suchlike taken direct from De revolutionibus, it was necessary that I should know what his block-cutters and type-setters were capable of in the matter of detail et cetera. However, despite all my caution and circumlocutions, Petreius, with unintentional and uncanny good aim, ignored entirely all mention of a second Narratio, and replied huffily that, as I should know, his craftsmen were second to none where scientific works were concerned, and he would gladly and with confidence contract to put between boards Copernicus’s great treatise, of which he had heard so many reports.

  Although this pompous letter angered and disturbed me, I soon came to regard it as an omen, and began again to toy with the idea of returning to Frauenburg. Not, you understand, that I was ready to go rushing off northwards once more, with cap in hand, and panting with enthusiasm, to make a fool of myself as I had done before, O no; this time if I journeyed it would be for my own purposes that I would do so, to find my lost self, as it were, and rid myself of this spell, so as to come home to my beloved Wittenberg again, and find it whole, and be at peace. Therefore, as soon as I was free, I set out with a stout heart, by post-carriage, on horseback, sometimes on foot, and arrived at Frauenburg at summer’s end, 1540, and was relieved to find Copernicus not yet dead, and still in possession, more or less, of his faculties. He greeted me with a characteristic display of enthusiasm, viz. a start, an owlish stare, and then a hangman’s handshake. The Schillings was still with him, and Dantiscus, need I say it, was still howling for her to be gone. For a long time now he had been using Giese to transmit his threats. Sculteti, Copernicus’s ally in the affair of the focariae, whom Dantiscus had mentioned, had it seemed been expelled by the Chapter, and had flown to Italy. This departure, along with Dantiscus’s increasingly menacing behaviour, had forced Copernicus to make a last desperate effort to get rid of her, but in vain. There had been a furious argument (smashed crockery, screams, pisspots flying through windows and striking passers-by: the usual, I suppose), which had ended with the Mädchen packing up her belongings and sending them off, at great expense (the Canon’s), to Danzig, where some remnant of her tribe kept an inn, or a bawdyhouse, I forget which. However, it seems she considered this so to speak symbolic departure a sufficiently stern rebuke to Copernicus for his ill nature, and in reality had no intention of following after her chattels, which in due time returned, like some awful ineluctable curse. So we settled down, the three of us, in our tower, where life was barely, just barely, tolerable. I kept out of the way of the Schillings, not for fear of her, but for fear of throttling her; between the two of us the old man cowered, mumbling and sighing and trying his best to die. Soon, I could see, he would succeed in doing that. Death was slinking up behind him, with its black sack at the ready. I would have to work quickly, if I were to snatch his book from him before he took it with him into that suffocating darkness. Yet, if his body was weakening, his mind was still capable of withholding, in an iron grip, that for which I had come: the decision to publish.

  *

  I stayed with him for more than a year, tormented by boredom and frustration, and an unrelenting irritation at the impossible old fool and his ways. He agreed that I might make a copy of the manuscript, and that at least was some occupation; the work might even have calmed my restless spirit, had he not insisted on reminding me every day that I must not imagine, merely because he had relented thus far, that he would go farther, and allow me to take this copy to Petreius. So that there was little more for me in this scribbling than aching knuckles, and the occasional, malicious pleasure of correcting his slips (I crossed out that nonsensical line in which he speculated on the possibility of elliptical orbits—elliptical orbits, for God’s sake!). Various other small tasks which I performed, to relieve the tedium, included the completion of a map of Prussia, which the old man, in collaboration with the disgraced Sculteti, had begun at the request of the previous Bishop of Ermland. This, along with some other trivial things, I sent off to Albrecht, Duke of Prussia, who rewarded me with the princely sum of one ducat. So much for aristocratic patronage! However, it was not for money I had approached this Lutheran Duke, but rather in the hope that he might use on my behalf his considerable influence among German churchmen and nobles, who I feared might make trouble should I win Copernicus’s consent, and appear in their midst with a manuscript full of dangerous theories clutched under my arm. The Duke, I found, was more generous with paper and ink than he had been with his ducats; he sent letters to Johann Friedrich, Elector of Saxony, and also to the University of Wittenberg, mentioning how impressed he had been with the Narratio prima (clever old Giese!), and urging that I should be allowed to publish what he called this admirable book on astronomy, meaning De revolutionibus. There was some confusion, of course; there always is. Albrecht, like Petreius, apparently had found it inconceivable that I should be so eager to publish the work of another, and therefore he assumed that I was attempting some crafty ruse whereby I hoped to put out my own theories in disguise; did I think to fool the Duke of Prussia? thought haughty Albrecht, and put down in his letters what to him was obvious: that the work was all my own. The cretin. I had no end of trouble disentangling that mess, while at the same time keeping these manoeuvres hidden from the Canon, who was wont to spit at the mention of the name of Grand Master Albrecht, as he insisted on calling him.

  This was not the only little plot I had embarked upon in secret—and in trepidation, for I was mortally afraid that if he found out, Copernicus would burn the manuscript on the instant. Yet I had lapses, when ray caution, which I had learned from him, deserted me. One day, shortly after my return to Frauenburg, I told him in a rash moment of frankness of my visit to Dantiscus. It was one of the rare occasions when I witnessed colour invade the ghastly pallor of his face. He flew into a rage, and gibbered, spraying me copiously with spit, yelling that I had no right to do such a thing, that I had no right! I was, he said, as bad as Giese, that damned meddler, who had sent the Narratio prima to Heilsberg even after he had been expressly warned not even to consider doing such a thing. What was surprising about this outburst was not so much the fury as the fear which I could plainly see, skulking behind the bluster; true, he had cause to be wary of Dantiscus, but this show of veritable terror seemed wholly excessive. What he feared, of course, although I could not know it then, was that I might have said something to Dantiscus that would ruin the plot which the Canon and Giese had been working out against me for years in secret—but wait, I am impetuous; wait.

  There were other things that puzzled and surprised me. For instance, I discovered another aspect of his passion for secrecy: the Schillings knew so little of his affairs that she thought his astronomical work a mere pastime, a means of relaxing from the rigours of his true calling, which was, so she believed, medicine! And this woman shared his house, his bed!

  And yet, perhaps he did regard astronomy as merely a plaything; I do not know, I do not know, I could not understand the man, I admit it. I was then, and I am still, despite my loss of faith, one of
those who look to the future for redemption, I mean redemption from the world, which has nothing to do with Christ’s outlandish promises, but with the genius of Man. We can do anything, overcome anything. Am I not a living proof of this? They schemed against me, tried to ruin me, and yet I won, although even yet they will not acknowledge my victory. What was I saying …? Yes: I look to the future, live in the future, and so, when I speak of the present, I am as it were looking backward, into what is, for me, already the past. Do you follow that? Copernicus was different, very different. If he believed that Man could redeem himself, he saw in—how shall I say—in immobility the only possible means toward that end. His world moved in circles, endlessly, and each circuit was a repetition exactly of all others, past and future, to the extremities of time: which is no movement at all. How, then, could I be expected to understand one whose thinking was so firmly locked in the old worn-out frame? We spoke a different language—and I do not mean his Latin against my German, although that difference, now that I think about it, represents well enough the deeper thing. Once, when we were walking together on the little path within the cathedral wall, which he paced each day, gravely, at a fixed hour and a fixed pace, as though performing a penance rather than taking the air, I began to speak idly of Italy, and the blue south, where I spent my youth. He heard me out, nodding the while, and then he said:

  “Ah yes, Italy; I also spent some time there, before you were born. And what times they were! It seemed as though a new world was on the point of birth. All that was strong and youthful and vigorous revolted against the past. Never, perhaps, have the social authorities so unanimously supported the intellectual movement. It seemed as though there were no conservatives left among them. All were moving and straining in the same direction, authority, society, fashion, the politicians, the women, the artists, the umanista. There was a boundless confidence abroad, a feverish joy. The mind was liberated from authority, was free to wander under the heavens. The monopoly of knowledge was abolished, and it was now the possession of the whole community. Ah yes.”