Kepler's Witch Read online

  Where Kepler enters Tübingen University and prepares for his calling as a priest of the Book of Nature.

  JOHANNES KEPLER STUDIED AT TÜBINGEN from 1588 to 1594. During that time, Elizabeth I was still queen of England and would remain so until the earliest days of the seventeenth century. On July 19, 1588, one month before Kepler arrived, the Most Fortunate Spanish Armada sailed within striking distance of the English coast. All that year, astrologers had been predicting disaster for Spain, but no one had listened, for who would dare speak against the Armada, with its hundred galleons, its thousands of brave soldiers, the hope and power of the nation? Soon after setting out from Cadiz, however, with horns blaring and banners flying, the Armada ran into trouble. Strong storms out of the North Sea pounded the Spanish ships one after another, decimating the fleet. Then the British sent a single fire ship out among the Spaniards who, seared by panic, cut their anchors and drifted away. When all this was over, only a few crippled, ragged-bone vessels from the Most Fortunate Armada returned home.1

  That year, Kepler’s future master Tycho Brahe, in Denmark, declared that, because of his observation of the comet in 1577, the comet that Kepler had watched with his mother, Katharina, he had concluded that the crystalline spheres of ether in the Aristotelian cosmology did not exist. A few years later, Shakespeare received his first review, a bad one, from Robert Greene, a rival playwright and pamphleteer. Pope Sixtus V presided over the Counter-Reformation in Rome, while Jesuit colleges sprouted up throughout Europe like overnight mushrooms. The Turks advanced into Austria close to Vienna. On the other side of the world, the Jamestown colony was still thirteen years away, while the landing at Plymouth Rock wouldn’t happen until 1620, the year of Katharina Kepler’s trial for witchcraft. Galileo was then teaching mathematics in Pisa, but would later move to Padua. In Prague, the young Habsburg prince Ferdinand II returned from his studies at a Jesuit college in Bavaria and, still full of fervor, prepared for a journey to Rome to see the pope. He had one purpose in mind—to bring the full weight of the Counter-Reformation to the empire. Almost invisibly, Europe inched toward the Thirty Years’ War.

  On October 4, 1587, Johannes Kepler registered at Tübingen University. The registration was called the depositio, because the students had to “deposit” their “horns,” or cornua. In essence, this was a leftover medieval university ritual, presided over by the older students, in which the incoming freshmen had to dress up as billy goats and prance around as a rite of initiation. Moreover, the freshmen had to pay for the honor of it all.2 In September 1588, Johannes took and passed his baccalaureate examination. Everyone agreed that he had done brilliantly, but because there were no spaces available at the Stift (the seminary), the university turned him back to Maulbronn for one more year. Finally, on September 17, 1589, he returned to Tübingen, possibly on foot, emerging from the wooded area of the Schönbuch and onto the twisted streets of the lower town.

  From the bridge across the Neckar, Tübingen rises like music, a crescendo swelling from the riverside up through the town to the obere Stadt, the upper town, to the Stiftkirche, the seminary church, and then winds back along the ridge to the Hohentübingen, the fortress on the crest. Tübingen is a tall city, cramped into the narrow space between the rivers, so that the buildings, even the meanest half-beam houses, seem to rise up and up like trees. The town was old even in Kepler’s day, starting with a few narrow streets and a few thatched houses built by the Alemanni, the proto-Germans who had lived there after the fall of Rome. Sometime in the eleventh century, the counts of Tübingen built themselves a fortress on the high hill overlooking the old town and then expanded the village into a city, with a new marketplace, a new parish church, and new city walls. Pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela, the great pilgrimage site dedicated to St. James, stopped at the church in Tübingen to rest and prepare for the push first into France and then into Spain. Across the pilgrim road from the church they built a hostel to house the pilgrims, which the city later used to warehouse victims of the Black Death.

  In 1342, the counts of Tübingen ran out of money and sold the city to the counts of Württemberg, making Tübingen part of a larger and more powerful political order. In 1477, Count Everhard the Bearded of Württemberg founded the university. An etching of him standing languid in full armor, holding an unsheathed sword beside him, its tip resting on the ground as a sign of peace, forms the centerpiece of the grisaille artwork on the Tübingen town-hall façade. Above his head, on the brick face of a wide dormer, the astronomical clock still ticks away the seasons and charts the motions of the skies.

  In the late sixteenth century, astronomical clocks, which tracked the position of the sun as it traveled through the zodiac, were more than pretty showpieces used to bolster civic pride. They were practical tools for farmers and merchants, charting not only the time of day, but also the phases of the moon, the seasons of the year, and the general comings and goings of the heavens. At the end of the sixteenth century, people throughout Europe ordered their world astrologically. The swirling motions of the planets, the sun, and the moon meant fortune or failure to both peasants and kings alike. Kepler spent much of his life writing horoscopes—it was a lucrative business—and in an age before psychology and economics, it was the main way in which people mapped the troubles of their lives. One can imagine Kepler, newly arrived in town, pack on his back, standing within a knot of farmers, merchants, and students, staring at the clock as if to read God’s plan for the day. Farmers planted and harvested according to the clock, while merchants bought and sold according to it. As a ministerial student, Kepler was deeply aware of the influence that the heavens had on earthly affairs, all of which was mapped out every day, every week, and every month by the clock. The clock was a window into God’s mind.

  Throughout the late sixteenth century, Tübingen’s population was relatively small. However, in all of southwest Germany, it was second only to Stuttgart. The town fluctuated between three thousand and thirty-five hundred inhabitants, but only a few of those were citizens. The university too was small, with four or five hundred students, a hundred of which belonged to the Stift.3 The university was the heart of the town’s social and cultural life. The students often staged plays in the marketplace and gave lectures to the townspeople. During the carnival of 1591, on Ash Wednesday, Kepler played Herodias, the wife of Herod Antipas, in a play entitled Ioannes Decollatus, concerning the beheading of John the Baptist. He was flush that year, because the town council of Weil der Stadt had voted him a scholarship, the Stipendium Ruffinum, out of a fund endowed by a priest named Rudolf Ruff in 1494. They gave it to him because of his “Fürtrefflich und herlich Ingenium,” his “extraordinary and glorious ingenuity.” This tripled his pocket money. He was suddenly so rich that he lost a quarter of a Reichstaler, otherwise known as a “taler” or “dollar,” while gambling with the boys.

  Most of the university students were the sons of wealthy merchants, landed gentry, and minor nobility, and they were a rowdy lot. The university had its own police force, its own magistrate, and even its own jail, although because the authorities expected the town’s magistrate to keep order, they gave him jurisdiction over the students. He could turn them over to the university magistrate for trial, but because most students were the sons of important men, the university rarely did anything. All too often, regular students meandered through town, drinking and brawling heroically, when they had a mind to. Not a few young women were raped in the streets, but there was little justice for them.

  Thunderbolt! How these drunken wenches march on

  My Lord brother, come. Let us escort them.

  A strong beer, a smarting pipe

  And a maid in her finery—that’s to my taste.4

  Goethe, Faust

  Meanwhile, the seminarians at the Stift scurried to class and busied themselves with study, a bright contrast to the rest of the students. Students at the university wore gowns with hems colored to indicate their field of study: medicine, law,
theology. The quality of the gowns varied widely, and the poorest were usually those of the seminary students—dark monastic robes. The seminarians were by all accounts the serious ones, because they attended by the duke’s good graces and studied at his command, and because they were the sons of obscure parents, who had no protection from the consequences of their misdeeds. Years before, when they first entered the monastery schools, they had sworn themselves to the duke’s service, promising lifelong fealty, to serve at his discretion and to leave at his discretion. They slept in unheated cells, rising in the predawn darkness at four or five to recite their morning prayers while the sunlight gathered in the stained-glass windows and suffused red-gold throughout the nave.5 After prayers, the rector of the seminary lectured on the theological point of the day. The sermons were often charged with sectarian politics, with hot brimstone against the pope and with sly warnings against the Calvinists. While the students listened, beneath their feet the long-dead Dukes of Württemberg slept on to resurrection day. Here Kepler listened to the Word of God proclaimed to the students. Here, his Lutheranism, held at some cost by his family, took seed, sent down roots, and blossomed.

  Sermons and lectures at the university were public entertainment then as much as public instruction, and people often walked miles to hear a good preacher. The Stiftkirche was a “hall church,” specifically designed without pillars so that everyone in the congregation could see the preacher. As with all things Lutheran, each lecture, each sermon was intensely scriptural. The boys gathering in the seminary church every morning, shivering from the cold, yawning, rubbing sleep from their eyes, attended as best they could as each preacher fought to make Scripture come alive. The great characters of the Old and New Testaments walked before them—Gideon, Samuel, David, Daniel, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, and all about them danced St. Paul, whose words permeated the writings of Dr. Luther like water permeates soil.6

  Lutheranism was more than just the religion of his parents and grandparents for Kepler. It was a religion that made sense to him. He saw it as a religion that never asked him to submit his reason to any other authority than God. In religion, one need not consult any other authority than the Scriptures and the fathers of the church. Even when princes commanded, they could not violate his conscience. Neither could Satan, the Prince of Darkness, or any other demon. For Kepler, God not only preserved the heavens above, but also the reasoning mind that contemplated them. Kepler would sit in the stone church, his breath floating visibly before him, reciting Luther’s Morning Prayer:

  My Heavenly Father,

  I thank You, through Jesus Christ, Your Beloved Son, that You kept me safe from all evil and danger last night. Save me, I pray, today as well, from every evil and sin, so that all I do and the way I live will please You. I put myself in Your care, body and soul and all that I have. Let Your holy Angels be with me, so that the evil enemy will not gain power over me.

  Amen.7

  A prayer for inner peace. A prayer for salvation. A prayer for freedom from evil. A vital prayer, a necessary prayer, for the intellectual environment in which the faculty preached was a turbulent one. Throughout his life, Kepler remained an Augsburg Lutheran because, he believed, it allowed him freedom of conscience. There was no church authority standing between him and the Scriptures or between him and the church fathers. He could follow his own path, think his own thoughts, and find God in his own way, without pope or bishops standing between him and his Redeemer.

  The Counter-Reformation, meanwhile, gathered like storm clouds in the distance. But for the Württemberg orthodoxy, the immediate threat came from the followers of other Reformers, from Calvin and Zwingli, who from the Lutheran point of view had taken the Reformation along paths that God had not intended and were therefore heretics. Lutheranism was the middle way between conservative Catholics and radical Anabaptists and Calvinists, those rebaptizers and predestinarians. Controversies that nearly came to blows within the Lutheran confession earlier in the century had finally settled themselves by the promulgation of the Book of Concord in 1580, eight years before Kepler’s arrival at Tübingen. While Catholics looked to the Council of Trent for guidance, Lutherans looked to the Book of Concord—and to the university theologians who preached it, men such as Jakob Heerbrand, who taught theology to Kepler, and Matthias Hafenreffer, who taught Scripture. After the heady years of the early Reformation and the subsequent years of turbulence with both Rome and Geneva, the first islands of Lutheran orthodoxy had appeared above the flood, thanks to the work of university theologians who were streamlining the faith for Lutheran unity and for the creation of a pure doctrine. But repression follows orthodoxy like a jackal. The Stift quickly developed a culture of denunciation, with students denouncing each other for minor infractions of the rules, suspicious talk, and potential heresy. Kepler received his share of denunciations, lying spread-eagle on the chapel floor as he listened to the catalog of his faults and misdemeanors. Now and then he returned the favor.

  Twenty-first-century people most often think of Kepler as a scientist, but that was not his intention when he arrived at Tübingen. More than anything else, he desired a pulpit and longed for the life of a Lutheran preacher. He was born a Lutheran and would die a Lutheran, and for all his later troubles with the church, when his people suffered, Kepler suffered with them. Eventually he would be chased from one town to the next by the Counter-Reformation. After his death, the Lutheran cemetery in which he was buried became a battlefield; soldiers died on top of the dead, destroying Kepler’s marker stone and losing his burial place forever. All in the name of God and a faith that justifies.

  Kepler’s studies began with two years in the Faculty of Arts in preparation for three years of study in theology. The faculty lectured in Latin, allowing Kepler to hone his Latin, to learn Greek and Hebrew, and to study dialectics, mathematics, and rhetoric. At the end, he received his master’s degree, coming in second out of fourteen. Because of his record, the chancellor of the university assigned him to study with Martin Crucius, the great classicist, and with Michael Mästlin, the great astronomer and mathematician.

  In a short time, he developed a reputation as a dutiful scholar and a good fellow, if a bit of an intense one. He took part in the school plays, where he sang in the chorus and once or twice, because of his slight build, played a woman. He was also a bit of a prankster. One student, Zimmerman, the son of a Lutheran pastor, didn’t like Kepler much, and Kepler didn’t like him. The two young men were the antitheses of each other. Kepler was intense, chewing on ideas like they were meat; he didn’t have much tact or patience for those who couldn’t keep up. Zimmerman, too inert for study, too undisciplined for scholarship, simply wanted to sail through the university. So Kepler and a few of his friends sewed the arms of Zimmerman’s gown shut, forcing Zimmerman to come to Matthias Hafenreffer’s class armless. Hafenreffer told Superintendent Gerlack, who called in the pranksters. Kepler admitted it, denounced himself, and took his punishment, but that didn’t stop the pranks.8

  The other reputation he had developed was as an astrologer. Astrology was for the seventeenth century what economics is for the twenty-first. Astrology tried to form predictions about an uncertain future based on strict mathematical calculation, just as economics does with the laws of the market. Both are wrong about as often as they are right. Astrologers assumed that the heavens were never mute, but full of meaning, and that their meaning could be read as a text. Oddly enough, postmodernists say something similar about the world, that all things have sign value, and that nothing merely exists: a cigar is never simply a cigar. Stars and planets in their complex relationships formed an alphabet. The fact that Mars was red, for example, said that it was hot and dry and warlike. Its place in the heavens meant that it had its allies and its enemies, and where it stood in the zodiac, in agreement with some planets and in opposition to others, had its effect on the world of human beings, an effect that could be read like a book.9

  Because his love for puzzles and acro
stics had started when he was a child, Kepler was particularly good at reading signs. He soon learned, however, that being a good astrologer required more than just math skills. One student, Rebstock, a fellow with a red face and beer breath, accosted Kepler in the hallway and demanded a horoscope. Kepler reluctantly agreed and, after obtaining the man’s birth date, set to calculating his chart. What Kepler learned that day, however, is how dangerous it is to read all the signs. Rebstock’s noisy drinking habits had to be taken into account, so Kepler predicted that the fellow would one day become a drunk, which wasn’t much of a stretch. The stars tell all, but so does beer breath. Rebstock didn’t like the report and forced his way into Kepler’s room, where the two duked it out. The next day, Kepler asked Mästlin for advice. What should he do? If he was going to be an astrologer, he had to read all the available signs, and that included a beer breath, because the stars were so often hard to read. Sometimes his predictions worked and sometimes they didn’t, so what could he do to make them more secure? Mästlin told him to just predict disaster. That would be bound to come true sooner or later.10

  In Lutheran education, the Bible was foremost, and the method of biblical exegesis, the close reading and interpretation of original texts, informed all other disciplines. The method stripped away layers of accumulated interpretation to arrive at the original texts in the original languages and then built a new interpretation out of that. Kepler read Aristotle in the same way, especially the Analytica Posteriora, which set out Aristotle’s logic, and the Physica and Meteorologica, which set out his ideas of motion and change in the world and sky inside the sphere of the moon. Oddly enough, Kepler says nothing about having read the Ethics or the Topics.11 His inclinations as a scientist may well have surfaced even at this time, in his reading choices in Aristotle. Early on, he was “taken by a forceful passion” for philosophy in general. He loved the fisticuffs of argument, the development of clear ideas, and the defense of them. In fact, this is the main way that Kepler complicated his life. The medieval tradition in education that Tübingen inherited included the staging of public disputations, debates in which students took opposite sides of an issue and argued it. Kepler learned to do this in Maulbronn and developed a liking for it that carried on into Tübingen. But Kepler could not take a position he didn’t believe in, and his mind, ever active, was always searching for a new angle to an old question, a new solution to an old problem.