Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  *

  Andreas Osiander, theologian and scholar, a leading Lutheran, friend of Melanchton, had for some time (despite his religious affiliations!) been in correspondence with Canon Nicolas—had been, indeed, one of those like myself who had urged him to publish. He was also, I might add, a cold, cautious, humourless grey creature, and it was, no doubt, the cast of his personality which recommended him to the Canon. O yes, they were two of a kind. At first, like a fool, I imagined that he had come to pay his respects to a great astronomer {me, that is), and congratulate me on winning consent to publish De revolutionibus, but Osiander soon dispelled these frivolous notions. I was ill when he arrived. A fever of the brain, brought on no doubt by the manner of my parting from Müller, had laid me low with a burning head and aching limbs, so that when he was shown into my humble room I fancied at first that he was an hallucination. The shutters were drawn against the harsh spring light. He planted himself at the foot of my bed, his head in the shadows and bands of light through the slats of the shutters striping his puffed-up chest, so that he looked for all the world like a giant wasp. I was frightened of him even before he spoke. He had that unmistakable smell of authority about him. He looked with distaste at my surroundings, and with even deeper distaste at me, and said in his pinched voice (a drone!) that when he had been told that I was lodging here he had hardly credited it, but now, it seemed, he must believe it. Did I not realise that I was, in a manner of speaking, an ambassador of Wittenberg in this city? And did I think it fitting that the name of the very centre of Protestant learning should be associated with this … this place} I began to explain how I had been thrown out on the street by a man to whom I had been recommended by Melanchton himself, but he was not interested in that, and cut me short by enquiring if I had anything to say in my defence. Defence? My hands began to shake, from fever or fear, I could not tell which. I tried to rise from the bed, but in vain. There was something of the inquisitor about Osiander. He said:

  “I have come this day from Wittenberg, whither I was summoned in connection with certain matters of which I think you are aware. Please, Herr von Lauchen, I would ask you: no protestations of injured innocence. That will only cause delay, and I wish, indeed I intend, to conclude this unfortunate business as swiftly as possible, to prevent the further spread of scandal. The fact is, that for a long time now, we— and I include in that others whose names I need not mention!—for a long time, I say, we have been watching your behaviour with increasing dismay. We do not expect that a man should be without blemish. However, we do expect, we demand, at the very least, discretion. And you, my friend, have been anything but discreet. The manner in which you comported yourself at the university was tolerated. I use the word advisedly: you were tolerated. But, that you should go to Prussia, to Ermland, that very bastion of popery, and there disgrace not only yourself, not only the reputation of your university, but your religion as well, that, that, Herr von Lauchen, we could not tolerate. We gave you every chance to mend your ways. When you returned from Frauenburg, we granted you one of the highest honours at our disposal, and created you Dean of your faculty; yet how did you repay us— how? You fled, sir, and abandoned behind you a living and speaking— I might say chattering—testimony of your pernicious indulgences! I mean, of course, the boy, whose presence fortunately was brought to our attention by the master he deserted, and we were able to silence him.”

  “Boy? What boy?” But of course I knew, I knew. Already light had begun to dawn upon me. Osiander sighed heavily. He said:

  “Very well, Herr von Lauchen, play the fool, if that is what you wish. You know who I mean—and I know you know. You think to win some manner of reprieve by playing on my discretion; you think that by pressing me to speak openly of these distasteful matters you will embarrass me, and force me to withdraw—is that it? You shall not succeed. The boy’s name is Raphael. He is, or was, a servant in the household of the Bishop of Kulm, Tiedemann Giese, at Löbau, where you stayed for some time, did you not, in the company of Canon Kop-pernigk? You behaviour there, and your … your connection with this boy, was reported to us by the Bishop himself, who, I might add, was charitable enough to defend you (as did Canon Koppernigk himself!), even while you were spreading scandal and corruption throughout his household. But what I want to ask you, for my own benefit, you understand, so that I shall know—what I want to ask you is: why, why did you have this boy follow you across the length of Germany?”

  “He did not follow me,” I said. “He was sent.” I saw it all, yes, yes, I saw it all.

  “Sent?” Osiander bellowed, and his wasp’s wings buzzed and boomed in the gloom. “What do you mean, sent? The boy arrived in Wittenberg in rags, with his feet bandaged. His horse had died under him. He said you told him to come to you, that you would put him to schooling, that you would make a gentleman of him. Sent? Can you not spare even a grain of compassion for this unfortunate creature whom you have destroyed, whom you could not face, and fled before he came; and do you think to save yourself by this wild and evil accusation? Sent? Who sent him, pray?”

  I turned my face to the wall. “It’s no matter. You would not believe me, if I told you. I shall say only this, that I am not a sodomite, that I have been slandered and vilified, that you have been fed a pack of lies.”

  He began a kind of enraged dance then, and shrieked:

  “I will not listen to this! I will not listen! Do you want me to tell you what the child said, do you want to hear, do you? These are his very words, his very words, I cannot forget them, never; he said: Every morning I brought him his food, and he made me wank him tho’ I cried, and begged him to release me. A child, sir, a child! and you put such words into his mouth, and made him do such things, and God knows what else besides. May God forgive you. Now, enough of this, enough; I have said more than I intended, more than I should. If we were in Rome no doubt you would have been poisoned by now, and spirited away, but here in Germany we are more civilised than that. There is a post at Leipzig University, the chair of mathematics. It has been arranged that you will fill it. You will pack your bags today, now, this instant, and be gone. You may—silence!—you may not protest, it is too late for that: Melanchton himself has ordered your removal. It was he, I might add, who decided that you should be sent to Leipzig, which is no punishment at all. Had I my way, sir, you would be driven out of Germany. And now, prepare to depart. Whatever work of yours there is unfinished here, I shall take charge of it. I am told you are engaged in the printing of an astronomical work from the pen of Canon Koppernigk? He has asked that I should oversee the final stages of this venture. For the rest, we shall put it about that, for reasons of health, you felt you must abandon the task to my care. Now go.”

  “The boy,” I said, “Raphaël: what has become of him?” I remembered him in the courtyard at Heilsberg, in his cap and cape, mounted on his black horse; just thus must he have looked as he set out from Löbau to come to me at Wittenberg.

  “He was sent back to Löbau Castle, of course,” said Osiander. “What did you expect?”

  Do you know what they do to runaway servants up there in Prussia? They nail them by the ear to a pillory, and give them a knife with which to cut themselves free. I wonder what punishment worse than that did Giese threaten the child with, to force him to follow me and tell those lies, so as to destroy me?

  *

  I could not at first understand why they, I mean Koppernigk and Giese, had done this to me, and I went off to exile in Leipzig thinking that surely some terrible mistake had been made. Only later, when I saw the preface which Osiander added to the book (which, when he was finished with it, was called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium), only then did I see how they had used me, poor shambling clown, to smuggle the work into the heart of Lutheran Germany, to the best Lutheran printer, with the precious Lutheran letters of recommendation in my fist, and how, when all that was done, they had simply got rid of me, to make way for Osiander and the imprimatur of his preface, which made the book s
afe from the hounds of Rome and Wittenberg alike. They did not trust me, you see, except to do the hackwork.

  *

  Did I in some way, I asked myself then, merit this betrayal? For it seemed to me inconceivable that all my labours should have been rewarded thus without some terrible sin on my part; but I could not, try as I might, find myself guilty of any sin heinous enough to bring down such judgment on my head. Throughout the book, there is not one mention of my name. Schönberg is mentioned, and Giese, but not I. This omission affected me strangely. It was as if, somehow, I had not existed at all during those past years. Had this been my crime, I mean some essential lack of presence; had I not been there vividly enough? That may be it, for all I know. Frauenburg had been a kind of death, for death is the absence of faith, I hardly know what I am saying, yet I feel I am making sense. Christ! I have waited patiently for this moment when I would have my revenge, and now I am ruining it. Why must I blame myself, search for some sin within myself, all this nonsense, why? No need of that, no need—it was all his doing, his his his Calm, Rheticus.

  Here is my revenge. Here it is, at last.

  The Book of revolutions is a pack of lies from start to finish … No, that will not do, it is too, too something, I don’t know. Besides, it is not true, not entirely, and truth is the only weapon I have left with which to blast his cursed memory.

  The Book of revolutions is an engine which destroys itself, yes yes, that’s better.

  The Book of revolutions is an engine which destroys itself, which is to say that by the time its creator had completed it, by the time he had, so to speak, hammered home the last bolt, the thing was in bits around him. I admit, it took me some time to recognise this fact, or at least to recognise the full significance of it. How I swore and sweated during those summer nights at Löbau, striving to make sense of a theory wherein each succeeding conclusion or hypothesis seemed to throw doubt on those that had gone before! Where, I asked, where is the beauty and simplicity, the celestial order so confidently promised in the Commentariolus, where is the pure, the pristine thing? The book which I held in my hands was a shambles, a crippled, hopeless mishmash. But let me be specific, let me give some examples of where it went so violently wrong. It was, so Koppernigk tells us, a profound dissatisfaction with the theory of the motions of the planets put forward by Ptolemy in the Almagest which first sent him in search of some new system, one that would be mathematically correct, would agree with the rules of cosmic physics, and that would, most importantly of all, save the phenomena. O, the phenomena were saved, indeed—but at what cost! For in his calculations, not 34 epicycles were required to account for the entire structure of the universe, as the Commentariolus claimed, but 48—which is 8 more at least than Ptolemy had employed! This little trick, however, is nothing, a mere somersault, compared with the one of which I am now about to speak. You imagine that Koppernigk set the Sun at the centre of the universe, don’t you? He did not. The centre of the universe according to his theory is not the Sun, but the centre of Earth’s orbit, which, as the great, the mighty, the all-explaining Book of revolutions admits, is situated at a point in space some three times the Sun’s diameter distant from the Sun! All the hypotheses, all the calculations, the star tables, charts and diagrams, the entire ragbag of lies and half truths and self-deceptions which is De revolutionibus orbium mundi (or coelestium, as I suppose I must call it now), was assembled simply in order to prove that at the centre of all there is nothing, that the world turns upon chaos.

  *

  Are you stirring in your grave, Koppernigk? Are you writhing in cold clay?

  *

  When at last, one black night at Löbau Castle, the nature of the absurdity which he was propounding was borne in upon me, I laughed until I could laugh no more, and then I wept. Copernicus, the greatest astronomer of his age, so they said, was a fraud whose only desire was to save appearances. I laughed, I say, and then wept, and something died within me. I do not willingly grant him even this much, but grant it I must: that if his book possessed some power, it was the power to destroy. It destroyed my faith, in God and Man—but not in the Devil. Lucifer sits at the centre of that book, smiling a familiar cold grey smile. You were evil, Koppernigk, and you filled the world with despair.

  He knew it, of course, knew well how he had failed, and knew that I knew it. That was why he had to destroy me, he and Giese, the Devil’s disciple.

  If I saw all this, his failure and so forth, even so early as the Löbau period, why then did I continue to press him so doggedly to publish? But you see, I wanted him to make known his theory simply so that I could refute it. O, an ignoble desire, certainly; I admit, I admit it freely, that I planned to make my reputation on the ruins of his. Poor fool that I was. The world cannot abide truth: men remember helio-centricity (they are already talking of the Copernican revolution!), but forget the defective theory on which the concept of heliocentricity is founded. It is his name that is remembered and honoured, while I am forgotten, and left to rot here in this dreadful place. What was it he said to me?—-first they will laugh, and then weep, seeing their Earth diminished, spinning upon the void … He knew, he knew. They are weeping now, bowed down under the burden of despair with which he loaded them. I am weeping. I believe in nothing. The mirror is shattered. The chaos

  Well I’ll be damned!

  -Freunde! What joy! The most extraordinary, the most extraordinary thing has happened: Otho has come! O God, I believe in You, I swear it. Forgive me for ever doubting You! A disciple, at last! He will spread my name throughout the world. Now I can return to that great work, which I planned so long ago: the formulation of a true system of the universe, based upon Ptolemaic principles. I shall not mention, I shall not even mention that other name. Or perhaps I shall? Perhaps I have been unjust to him? Did he not, in his own poor stumbling way, glimpse the majestic order of the universe which wheels and wheels in mysterious ways, bringing back the past again and again, as the past has been brought back here again today? Copernicus, Canon Nicolas, domine praeceptor, I forgive you: yes, even you I forgive. God, I believe: resurrection, redemption, the whole thing, I believe it all. Ah! The page shakes before my eyes. This joy!

  *

  Lucius Valentine Otho has this day come to me from Wittenberg, to be my amanuensis, my disciple. He fell to his knees before me. I behaved perfectly, as a great scientist should. I spoke to him kindly, enquiring how things stood at Wittenberg, and of his own work and ambitions. But behind my coolness and reserve, what a tangle of emotions! Of course, this joy I felt could not be contained, and when I had enquired his age, I could not keep myself from grasping him by the shoulders and shaking him until his teeth rattled in his head, for just at that same age did I, so many years ago, come to Copernicus at Frauenburg. The past comes back, transfigured. Shall I also send a Raphaël to destroy Otho?—but come now, Rheticus, come clean. The fact is, there never was a Raphaël. I know, I know, it was dreadful of me to invent all that, but I had to find something, you see, some terrible tangible thing, to represent the great wrongs done me by Copernicus. Not a mention of my name in his book! Not a word! He would have done more for a dog. Well, I have forgiven him, and I have admitted my little joke about Raphaël and so forth. Now a new age dawns. I am no longer the old Rheticus, banished to Cassovia and gnawing his own liver in spite and impotent rage, no: I am an altogether finer thing—I am Doctor Rheticus! I am a believer. Lift your head, then, strange new glorious crea ture, incandescent angel, and gaze upon the world. It is not diminished! Even in that he failed. The sky is blue, and shall be forever blue, and the earth shall blossom forever in spring, and this planet shall forever be the centre of all we know. I believe it, I think. Vale.

  II

  Magister Ludi

  Waterborne he comes, at dead of night, sliding sleek on the river’s gleaming back, snout lifted, sniffing, under the drawbridge, the portcullis, past the drowsing sentry. Brief scrabble of claws on the slimed steps below the wall, brief glint of a bar
ed tooth. In the darkness for an instant an intimation of agony and anguish, and the night flinches. Now he scales the wall, creeps under the window, grinning. In the shadow of the tower he squats, wrapt in a black cloak, waiting for dawn. Comes the knocking, the pinched voice, the sly light step on the stair, and how is it that I alone can hear the water dripping at his heels?

  One that would speak with you, Canon.

  No! No! Keep him hence! But he will not be denied. He drags himself into the corner where night’s gloom still clings, and there he hangs, watching. At times he laughs softly, at others lets fall a sob. His face is hidden in his cloak, all save the eyes, but I recognise him well enough, how would I not? He is the ineffable thing. He is ineluctable. He is the world’s worst. Let me be, can’t you!

  *

  Canon Koppernigk arrived at Heilsberg as night came on, bone-weary, wracked by fever, a black bundle slumped in the saddle of the starved nag that someone somewhere along the way had tricked him into buying. He had set out from Torun that morning, and travelled without pause all day, fearful of facing, prostrate in a rat-infested inn, the gross fancies conjured up by this sickness boiling in his blood. Now he could hardly understand that the journey was over, hardly knew where he was. It seemed to him that, borne thither on the surge and sway of waters, he had run aground on a strange dark shore. There were stars already, but no moon, and torches smoking high up on the walls. Off to the left a fire burned, tended by still figures, some squatting wrapt in cloaks and others with halberds leaning at watch. The river sucked and slopped, talking to itself as it ran. All this appeared disjointed and unreal. It was as if in his sickness he could apprehend only the weird underside of things, while the real, the significant world was beyond his fevered understanding. A rat, caught in a chance reflection of firelight from the river, scuttled up the slimed steps below the wall and vanished.