THE LAST MAGICIAN: JOHANNES KEPLER (SIXTH RIVER CRUISE MISSIVE)

“The heavenly bodies are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceived by the intellect, not by the ear, a music which, through discordant tensions, through syncopations and cadenzas, as it were, progress toward certain predesignated six-voiced cadences, and thereby sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time. It is, therefore, no longer surprising that man, in imitation of his Creator, has at last discovered the art of figured song, which was unknown to the ancients. Man wanted to reproduce the continuity of cosmic time within a short hour, by artful symphony for several voices, to obtain a sample test of the delight of the Divine Creator in His works, and to partake of His joy by making music in the imitation of God.”

                                                            Johannes Kepler[1]

Regensburg, Germany, is one of Europe’s best preserved medieval cities and the oldest city along the Danube River. Today, the city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Regensburg boasts several stone towers and St. Peter’s Cathedral—Bavaria’s best-known example of Gothic architecture—as well as the city’s famous Old Stone Bridge, a masterpiece of medieval engineering with sixteen arches and a huge hump in the middle. (Our guide told us an interesting story about the historic bridge: the original architect, so the legend goes, made a deal with the devil himself. In exchange for help in designing and building the bridge, the architect promised the first three souls to cross the completed bridge would be given to the devil. On opening day, the architect—after considerable consternation—allowed three local pigs to cross the bridge in front of all the city’s dignitaries. The devil, furious that he had been outsmarted, crawled under the bridge to destroy it, but couldn’t; the hump was where the devil’s back finally gave out in the effort).

At any rate, during our river cruise visit to Regensburg, Ima, my sister Debbie, Jim, and I wandered about and traveled the town’s cobble streets in search of a chocolate shop. At one point during our quest, we strolled down a street with a house bearing this inscription on a nondescript sign: “Wohnhaus Keplers und seiner familie in den Jahren 1626 bis 1628.”

I couldn’t believe it!

For me, it was almost like a religious experience. We had accidently stumbled upon the house of Johannes Kepler himself!

This is the same Kepler, by the way, who discovered that the planets move in elliptical orbits and who has a planet, NASA mission, and a planet-hunting spacecraft named after him. 

I can guess some of you are less than excited!

But, you see, I have taught about Johannes Kepler in my Western Civilization history classes for years, especially his role as one of the pillars of the so-called “Scientific Revolution.” Kepler’s so-called three laws of planetary motion (published between 1609 and 1619)—the concept of attractive forces between heavenly bodies (usually absent Kepler’s quasi-spiritual motive)—combined with Cartesian inertia concepts, culminated in Issac Newton’s foundational Principia Mathematica (1687). In this work, Newton attributed Kepler’s laws of planetary motion to a force-based theory of universal gravitation (an elegant mathematical solution to the “Kepler problem).

Why is this important? One of Kepler’s many biographers, Alexandre Koyré, portrays Kepler as the central figure in the so-called “Scientific Revolution,” the pivot point in the intellectual transformation from ancient to a modern worldview, based on his “theorization” rather than his empirical work.[2]

 Still not convinced? The “Scientific Revolution” paved the way for European world dominance and the mathematics-scientific underpinning of our modern way of thinking. The event is one of the reasons we do not speak Chinese, Russian or Arabic. Even though Kepler died almost 400 years ago (November 15, 1630), his legacy of calculating elliptical planetary orbits in detail through careful observation and painstaking mathematical modeling—all seeking to glorify the Creation of God by putting mathematical relationships to the harmonies emitted by the planets—remains one of history’s greatest intellectual feats.

Kepler (1571-1630) was born in the Free Imperial City of Weil der Stadt, in the Holy Roman Empire. The world that was. He was born prematurely, was sickly during his childhood—a childhood bout of smallpox left him with weak vision and crippled hands—and his father (a mercenary soldier) left the family when Johannes was five years old.

Not exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

But even at an early age he showed glimmers of being one of the individuals that would shape the world that was to be. His lifelong passion for astronomy began when he was six and when his mother took him to see the Great Comet of 1577. (Three years later he would observe a total lunar eclipse).

We don’t teach about these things any longer. This comet, a non-periodical comet (now designated as C/1577 VI; today, it is believed to be about 324 AU or 48.5 billion km from the sun), marked an important turning point in how humans—especially in Europe—understood and viewed their place in the cosmos. Before the Comet’s arrival, the prevailing Ptolemaic-Aristotelian (geocentric view) explanation for the universe held that the heavenlies operated on one set of principles and earth another (believed to be motionless and in the center of the universe). Aristotle’s (384-322 B.C.) view of the cosmos would predominate for over 2,000 years in all ancient European civilizations, the Greeks, Romans and during the Islamic Golden Age. For these ancients, the universe, stars, planets, and sun all revolved around the earth (a gigantic system turned each day by the Prime Mover); with the known planets and observable stars made of perfect material and each embedded in 47 to 55 impenetrable gelatin-like (crystalline) spheres.

But then the 1577 Comet with its large tail cut straight through all this.

In my classes I used to illustrate the violent disruption to the mindset of the people in the 16th century this way. In my hometown of Springboro, Ohio, we used to have a summer festival on the high school grounds with a number of rides and attractions; ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds, and tossing rings on the bottles (sponsored by the local Lion’s Club). Do you remember those halcyon days before families had to spend hundreds of dollars to be entertained at Disney World or Kings Island-type theme parks? At any rate, there was this one ride when I was a kid called the “Silver Bullet,” a long metal arm with two canisters for riders at each end. You would climb into one of the canisters, buckle yourselves in, and the ride would start and gain speed. Each canister had a chain-driven device that would rotate the canister as well. Just at the point your senses and inner ear fluids got used to the rotation, the operator would suddenly stop the ride and reverse the entire process. It had the effect of crinkling your brain. Your senses were completely distorted. I suggest that on a far broader scale this is what happened with the Great Comet of 1577—it shocked and crinkled the minds of an entire population, with accompanying cultural, spiritual and social aftershocks.

But back to Kepler. By 1589, Kepler attended the University of Tübingen, later teaching mathematics where he learned the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. He became locally renowned as a mathematician, and a skillful astrologer (cast horoscopes for local students). At that time, there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology. Kepler was also denied ordination in the Lutheran Church because of beliefs contrary to the Formula of Concord (Lutheran statement of faith). By age of 22, Kepler accepted a position as teacher of mathematics and astronomy. Kepler was married in 1597 to a 23-year-old widow, and their first two children died in infancy. In early August 1600, after refusing to convert to Catholicism, the Kepler family left Graz for Prague, where the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe offered him a job.

One of the many interesting things about Kepler was his relationship with another giant of the “Scientific Revolution,” Tycho Brahe (who had made careful calculations on the 1577 Comet). Eventually Brahe would become an important patron of Kepler in Prague. After Brahe’s unexpected death in late October 1601,[3] Kepler took over his position as imperial mathematician (the next 11 years would be most productive of his life), as well as inheriting the voluminous and meticulous Brahe calculations of the positions of heavenly bodies.

In October 1604, a new supernova lit up the skies and Kepler tried to explain what had happened, the impact of the event on prophetic and astrological utterances, and even ventured ideas about the Star of Bethlehem as a supernova. 

The year 1611 was a turning point period for Kepler in several respects. Internal squabbles and religious tensions at the imperial court in Prague came to a head as Emperor Rudolf’s health deteriorated and he was forced to abdicate as King of Bohemia by his brother (Matthias); both sides in the controversy consulted Kepler for astrological advice. Nevertheless, it was clear to Kepler he had a limited future in a Matthias court.

Also in 1611, Kepler’s wife contracted Hungarian spotted fever and began to have seizures; at the same time, all three of the children fell sick with smallpox (a son died). Kepler left to pursue a position in the Austrian city of Linz (the same place Hitler would spend his most enjoyable times three centuries later—almost at the same time, interestingly enough, Adolf Eichmann lived there) to seek a position as teacher and district mathematician. Shortly after he returned to Prague, his wife relapsed and died.

Finally, in 1611, Kepler began circulating what many consider to be the Western world’s first science fiction novel—Somnium (the Dream)—although it was published posthumously. Part allegory, part autobiography, and part treatise on interplanetary travel (it describes a fantastic trip to the Moon—where the narrator’s mother consults a demon to learn the secrets of space travel).

The narrator’s mother in Kepler’s novel portends (perhaps) one of the strangest episodes in the life of one of earth’s greatest scientific minds. In 1615, Kepler’s mother Katharina, then in her 70s, was accused of witchcraft in the Protestant town of Leonberg resulting in a six-year criminal trial. (Some experts see this as part of a full-blown assault waged on Kepler by Lutherans). Kepler formally took over his mother’s legal defense—remember, at the time he was the Imperial mathematician—put his existence on hold, stored away his books and instruments, moved his family to Linz in southern Germany, and spent nearly a year trying to get his mother out of prison (Katharina was a tough nut; despite her age, she survived imprisonment and being chained to the floor for more than a year). Kepler’s year-long defense of an earlier verdict of witchcraft was a rhetorical masterpiece: he dismantled the inconsistencies in the prosecutor’s case, demonstrated that the “magical” illnesses for which his mother was blamed could be explained using medical knowledge and common sense. In the autumn of 1621—during the tumultuous early years of the Thirty Years War—Katharina Kepler was released.[4]  

In the interest of brevity, let me skip forward in time. Near the end of his life, Kepler would live in Regensburg. He moved back to the city in early October 1630 but within days became sick, a condition which progressively worsened. He died on 15 November, only a month after his final return. He was buried in a Protestant churchyard which, in turn, was destroyed during the Thirty Years War.[5]

 As an aside, my favorite biographer of Kepler is Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). Koestler, a Budapest-born prize-winning author, wrote The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959) [an account of changing scientific paradigms, with an extensive section on Kepler] and The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler (1960) [mostly excerpts from the previous work]. As a former history professor, I would talk in my college classes about Koestler as a former Communist party member who resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned with the excesses of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Koestler’s Darkness At Noon (1940) is must-reading for anyone seeking to understand that era and the totalitarian mindset.  

[1] Quote cited in Rossell, Joseph, “10 Quotes by Johannes Kepler Exalting the ‘Studendous Miracles of God,” Juicy Ecumenism, Nov. 15, 2016.

[2] See Jardine, Nick, “Koyré’s Kepler/Kepler’s Koyré,” History of Science, Vol. 38 (2000), pp. 367-372. For a detailed study of the reception of Kepler’s astronomy, see Wilbur Applebaum, “Keplerian Astronomy after Kepler: Researches and Problems,” History of Science, 34 (1996): 451-504.

[3] In 2004, a team of American journalists alleged that Kepler systematically poisoned the man he succeeded at the court of Rudolf II in Prague, Tycho Brahe. Gilder, Joshua and Gilder, Anne-Lee, Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History’s Greatest Scientific Discoveries, (Doubleday: 2004)

[4] I have used Professor Ulinka Rublack’s excellent treatment of this matter in my description. (see Rublack, Ulinka, “The astronomer and the witch—how Kepler saved his mother from the stake,” University of Cambridge Research, (nd). Katharina apparently was an ideal poster-child for the black arts in a culture obsessed with a witchcraze. Koestler would call her a “hideous little woman” with an evil tongue and a suspicious background; she is portrayed in much the same light in John Banville’s prize-winning historical novel Kepler, with boiling potions, meetings with old hags, bags of bat wings, dead rats and cat smells. 

[5] It is hard to overestimate the importance of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648)—a combination of Protestant-Catholic religious wars, civil wars, and international involvement—to the historical, political, economic and religious development of Germany (the Holy Roman Empire was at the time divided into some 290-348 independent entities, secular and ecclesiastical principalities, and free imperial cities)—not to mention the impact on individuals such as Kepler. The war, mostly fought in Germany, cost an estimated 4.5 million to 8 million soldiers and civilians from battle, famine and disease (parts of Germany reported population declines of 50 percent), and set back German unification for centuries. The war—usually divided into four phases—featured some of history’s most colorful characters (the Protestant champion Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, gifted Catholic general Wallenstein, and the influential Cardinal Richelieu, among others) and events (the defenestration of Prague). The war ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, which set the pattern for nation states in Europe for centuries.