The Sleepwalkers

  9. The Arrival of Rheticus

  Rheticus, like Giordano Bruno or Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus, was one of the knight errants of the Renaissance whose enthusiasm fanned borrowed sparks into flame; carrying their torches from one country to another, they acted as welcome incendiaries to the Republic of Letters. He was twenty-five when he arrived in Frauenburg "at the extreme outskirts of the Earth", with a determined purpose to get the Copernican Revolution going which Copernicus tried to suppress; an enfant terrible and inspired fool, a condottiere of science, an adoring disciple and, fortunately, either homo- or bi-sexual, after the fashion of the time. I say "fortunately" because the so afflicted have always proved to be the most devoted teachers and disciples, from Socrates to this day, and History owes them a debt. He was also a Protestant, a protegé of Melanchton, the Preceptor Germaniae, and held the most adventurous job a man could hold in the sixteenth century: that of a Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy.

  Born in 1514 as Georg Joachim von Lauchen in the Austrian Tyrol, the ancient Rhaetia, he had latinized his name into Rheticus. As a child he had travelled with his wealthy parents in Italy; as a young man he had studied at the Universities of Zurich, Wittenberg, Nuremberg, and Goettingen. At the age of twenty-two, on Melanchton's recommendation, he was given one of the two professorships of Mathematics and Astronomy at the equally young University of Wittenberg, centre and glory of Protestant learning. The other Chair was held by a man only three years his senior, Erasmus Reinhold.

  The two young Professors, Reinhold and Rheticus, were both converts to the sun-centred cosmology which they only knew by hearsay, and to which the great manitous of Wittenberg, Luther and Melanchton, were opposed. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1539, Rheticus was granted leave of absence for the express purpose of visiting, in Catholic Ermland, Canon Koppernigk, whom Luther had called "a fool who went against Holy Writ".

  Rheticus arrived in Frauenburg in the summer of 1539. He came laden with precious gifts: the first printed editions of Euclid and Ptolemy in the original Greek, and other mathematical books. He had planned to stay in Ermland for a few weeks – he stayed, with interruptions, for two years – which left their mark on human history. His arrival in Ermland was beautifully timed: it almost coincided with an edict by the new Bishop, Dantiscus, in which all Lutherans were ordered to leave Ermland within a month, and threatened to forfeit life and possessions if they returned. The edict was issued in March; three months later the Lutheran professor, arriving straight from the Capital of Heresy, paid his respects to the Chapter of Frauenburg, including Bishop Dantiscus, whom he described as "famous for his wisdom and eloquence". It all goes to show that Renaissance scholars were a species of sacred cow allowed to amble, ruminating and unmolested, through the turmoil of the bazaar.

  A year later, Bishop Dantiscus issued a second, even more ferocious "Edict Against Lutheranism" in which he ordered that "All books, pamphlets ... and whatever else came from the poisoned places of heresy should be burned in the presence of officials". At about the same time, the Professor who came from the most poisonous of all places of heresy wrote In Praise of Prussia:

  "So may the gods love me, ... it has not yet happened to me that I should enter the home of any distinguished man in this region – for the Prussians are a most hospitable people – without immediately seeing geometrical diagrams at the very threshhold or finding geometry present in their minds. Hence nearly all of them, being men of good will, bestow upon the students of these arts every possible benefit and service, since true knowledge and learning are never separated from goodness and kindness." 42

  It is a pity that Rheticus did not report, in his exuberant style, his first meeting with Canon Koppernigk. It was one of the great encounters of history, and ranks with the meetings of Aristotle and Alexander, Cortez and Montezuma, Kepler and Tycho, Marx and Engels. On the part of the overstrung and expectant Rheticus, it was obviously love at first sight for the Domine Praeceptor, "My Teacher", as he was always to call Copernicus, comparing him to Atlas who carries the earth on his back. On his side, the lonely and unloved old man was apparently swept off his feet by this onslaught, and prepared to tolerate the young fool. He was now sixty-six, and he felt his days drawing to a close. He had achieved a certain fame in the world of learning, but it was of the wrong kind – notoriety rather than repute, based on hearsay, not on evidence; for the manuscript of the Revolutions was still locked up in his tower and nobody knew what exactly its contents were. Only the Commentariolus was known to the handful who had seen it, and of whom few survived – for even that sketchy outline had been written and circulated a quarter-century before.

  The old Canon felt that what he really needed was a young disciple in the Pythagorean tradition, who would hand the teaching down to the select few without stirring up the dirt at the bottom of the well. His only friend, the gentle Giese, no longer lived in Frauenburg; he had been made Bishop of the neighbouring Prussian diocese, Kulm. Besides, Giese too was by now nearly sixty, and merely an amateur astronomer who did not qualify as a disciple. The young, enthusiastic Professor from Goettingen did. It seemed that Providence herself had sent him – even if it was a Lutheran Providence. From the Catholic side there was not much to fear, as Schoenberg's letter proved: young Rheticus, on the other hand, was a protegé of Melanchton's; he would secure the Lutheran flank and carry the message straight into their headquarters, into Wittenberg and Goettingen.

  Nevertheless, Copernicus hesitated. He could decide nothing without Giese. Besides, the presence of his Protestant guest in Frauenburg was an embarrassment, even if the guest was a sacred cow. A few weeks after Rheticus' arrival Canon Koppernigk packed him off, and they both went to stay with Bishop Giese at his residence in Loebau Castle.

  For some time, master and disciple were the Bishop's guests. The cosmological triumvirate in the mediaeval castle must have argued endlessly through the milky nights of the Baltic summer about the launching of the Copernican system: Rheticus and Giese pressing for publication, the old Canon maintaining his stubborn opposition, yet forced to yield, step by step. Rheticus describes a few phases of the struggle with a kind of embarrassed restraint, oddly in contrast with his usual flamboyance. He quotes long passages of dialogue between his domine praeceptor and Bishop Giese, passing with modest silence over his own participation in the debate:

  "Since my Teacher was social by nature and saw that the scientific world also stood in need of improvement ... he readily yielded to the entreaties of his friend, the reverend Prelate. He promised that he would draw up astronomical tables with new rules, and that if this work had any value he would not keep it from the world... But he had long been aware that [the theory on which the tables were based] would overturn the ideas concerning the order of the motions and spheres ... that were commonly accepted and believed to be true; moreover, the required hypotheses would contradict our senses.

  He therefore decided that he should ... compose tables with accurate rules but no proofs. In that way, he would provoke no dispute among philosophers ... and the Pythagorean principle would be observed that philosophy must be pursued in such a way that its inner secrets are reserved for learned men, trained in mathematics, etc.

  Then His Reverence pointed out that such a work would be an incomplete gift to the world unless my Teacher set forth the reasons for his tables and also included, following the example of Ptolemy, the system or theory and the foundations and proofs upon which he relied... There was no place in science, he asserted, for the practice frequently adopted in kingdoms, conferences and public affairs, where for a time plans are kept secret until the subjects see the fruitful results... As for the uneducated, whom the Greeks call 'those who do not know theory, music, philosophy and geometry', their shouting should be ignored..." 43

  In other words, the wily Canon, hard pressed by Rheticus and Giese, proposed to publish his planetary tables but to withhold the theory on which they were based; the motion of the earth was not to be mentioned.

/>   This manœuvre of evasion having failed, the struggle in the triumvirate was resumed. The next stage ended in an astonishing compromise, a triumph of Copernican obliqueness. Judging by the results, the terms of the agreement must have been as follows:

  Copernicus' Book of Revolutions was not to be printed. But Rheticus was to write an account of the contents of the unpublished manuscript, and publish this account – on condition that he nowhere mentioned Copernicus by name. Rheticus was to call the author of the unpublished manuscript simply domine praeceptor; and on the title page, where mentioning some name could not be avoided, he was to refer to Copernicus as "the learned Dr. Nicolas of Torun". 44

  In other words, Rheticus was to stick out his neck; and the Canon was to retract his into his tortoise shell.

  10. Narratio Prima

  Thus came into being Rheticus' Narratio prima – The First Account of the Copernican theory in printed form. It was written in the guise of a letter from Rheticus to his former teacher in astronomy and mathematics, Johannes Schoener in Nuremberg. It has seventy-six pages in small quarto, and bears the following cumbersome title:

  "To the most illustrious Dr. Johannes Schoener, a First Account of the Book of Revolutions by the most learned and most excellent mathematician, the Reverend Father, Dr. Nicolas of Torun, Canon of Ermland, from a young student of mathematics."

  Rheticus' own name is only mentioned in the caption leading into the text of the letter: "To the illustrious Johannes Schoener, as to his own revered Father, Georg Joachim Rheticus sends his greetings."

  After an apology for the delay in sending his report, Rheticus explains that so far he had only had ten weeks to study the manuscript of his Teacher; the manuscript embraces the whole realm of astronomy and is divided into six books, of which so far he has mastered three, understood the general idea of the fourth, but has only gained a sketchy notion of the last two. He then gives a skilful account of the Copernican system, showing his grasp of the subject and independence of mind by disregarding the sequence of chapters in Copernicus' manuscript and substituting for it a resumé of its essential contents. In between, Rheticus inserted an astrological digression in which the rise and fall of the Roman and Moslem Empires, and the second coming of Christ, are made directly dependent on changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit. He also gave his estimate of the total duration of the world as six thousand years, in conformity with a prophecy by Eliah.

  Copernicus himself did not seem to have believed in astrology, but Rheticus did, Melanchton and Schoener did, and so did most of the scholars of the age; and since the digression about Eliah and the second coming was calculated to please them, Copernicus apparently raised no objection.

  Interspersed in Rheticus' account are the usual quotations from Aristotle and Plato, eulogies on the divine wisdom of the ancients, and protestations that his Teacher never meant to go against their authority:

  "If I have said anything with youthful enthusiasm (we young men are always endowed, as he says, with high rather than useful spirits), or if I have inadvertently let fall any remark which may seem directed against venerable and sacred antiquity, more boldly perhaps than the importance and dignity of the subject demanded, you surely, I have no doubt, will put a kind construction on the matter and will bear in mind my feeling towards you rather than my fault. As for my learned Teacher, I should like you to know and be fully convinced that for him there is nothing better or more important than to walk in the footsteps of Ptolemy and to follow, as Ptolemy did, the ancients and those who were much earlier than himself. However, when the phenomena, which control the astronomer ... compelled him to make certain assumptions even against his wishes, it was enough, he thought, if he aimed his arrows by the same method to the same target as Ptolemy, even though he employed a bow and arrows of far different type of material from Ptolemy's." 45

  But then Rheticus continues with a delightful non sequitur: "At this point we should recall the saying: 'Free in mind must he be who desires to have understanding.'"

  The treatise is full of pious protestations that his Teacher "is far from thinking that he should rashly depart, in a lust for novelty, from the sound opinions of the ancients," followed by "... except for good reasons and when the facts themselves force him to do so." 46 These apologies were probably intended to reassure Copernicus rather than Melanchton and Luther, who, too shrewd to be fooled, persisted in their opposition to the Copernican theory, yet kept its young prophet in their favour.

  For, within a few weeks, the disciple had indeed grown into a prophet; the most moving passages in the narratio prima which crop up unexpectedly in the scientific text, sound like sermons to an as yet non-existent congregation:

  "Thus the astronomy of my Teacher may rightly be called eternal as the observations of past ages testify and the observations of posterity will doubtless confirm... 47 A boundless Kingdom in astronomy has God granted to my learned Teacher. May he rule, guard and increase it, to the restoration of astronomic truth. Amen." 48

  Rheticus had arrived in Frauenburg in the summer of 1539; by the end of September the narratio prima was completed and dispatched; a few months later it appeared in print. Rarely have ten weeks been better spent. In that span of time he had worked through the bulky manuscript of the Revolutions bristling with astronomical tables, rows of figures, involved diagrams, and a host of computing errors. He had distilled its essence, put it into writing, and in the evenings, supported by Giese, had carried on the interminable negotiations with the obstinate old man who always thought of new evasions. The combined effect of strain and frustration seems to have been too much even for the irascible young prophet, for it is reported that at a certain point – while he was struggling with the particularly intricate theory of the orbit of Mars – his mind became temporarily unhinged. Two generations later, when the events at Loebau Castle were already becoming a kind of Homeric saga among scholars, Johannes Kepler wrote in the Dedication of his New Astronomy to the Emperor Rudolph:

  "Concerning Georg Joachim Rheticus, the well-famed disciple of Copernicus in our forefathers' days ... the following story is told: when on one occasion he became perplexed and got stuck in the theory of Mars and could no longer see his way out, he appealed as a last resort to his guardian angel as an Oracle. The ungracious spirit thereupon seized Rheticus by the hair and alternately banged his head against the ceiling, then let his body down and crashed it against the floor; to which treatment he added the following oracular pronouncement: 'These are the motions of Mars.' Rumour has an evil tongue ... yet one can very well believe that Rheticus, his mind deranged by deadlocked speculation, rose in a rage and himself crashed his head against the wall." 49

  The episode must have been well known in Kepler's and Galileo's day, as the following passage in one of Kepler's letters to a colleague further shows: 50

  "You tease me with the example of Rheticus. I laugh with you. I have seen how miserably the Moon has tortured you and sometimes me too, I remember. If now things are going badly with my Mars, it would be fitting for you, who suffered similar vexations, to show pity for me."

  Rheticus himself described in the narratio prima his mental torment – the torment of a scientist at the junction of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, who intuitively feels that there must be a beautiful and luminous solution to the cosmic mystery, yet cannot escape the nightmare of the whirling epicycles:

  "The astronomer who studies the motion of the stars is surely like a blind man who, with only a staff [mathematics] to guide him, must make a great, endless, hazardous journey that winds through innumerable desolate places. What will be the result? Proceeding anxiously for a while and groping his way with his staff, he will at some time, leaning upon it, cry out in despair to Heaven, Earth and all the Gods to aid him in his misery." 51

  As an annex to the narratio, Rheticus wrote, according to a usage of the time, a eulogy on the country and people who had received him so hospitably: Encomium Borussiae. "In Praise of Prussia" is a gushi
ng effusion in the worst purple style of the humanists, teeming with Greek gods and far-fetched allegories. It starts with a flourish:

  "Pindar celebrates in an ode – which was reportedly written in golden letters on a tablet and exhibited in the Temple of Minerva – the prowess of Dyagoras of Rhodes who won the boxing competition at the Olympic Games. The ode calls the island of Rhodes a daughter of Venus, and the beloved wife of the Sun. Jupiter, it says, let much gold rain on Rhodes because its people worshipped his daughter Minerva. For the same reason Minerva herself made the Rhodeans famous for their wisdom and education to which they were devoted. I am not aware of any country in our days more suited to inherit the ancient fame of the Rhodeans than Prussia"

  – and so on. 52 The concoction is of interest only because of its description of Giese's struggles with Copernicus, and because of its revealing omissions. It includes a eulogy on Giese in which the Apostle Paul is invoked, and another eulogy on the Mayor of Danzig, who is compared to Achilles; also a description of Giese's astronomical instruments: an armillary sphere made of bronze, and "a truly princely gnomon [sundial] which he had brought from England and which I contemplated with the greatest delight." 53 But there is no mention of Copernicus' instruments. Nor of his observatory; nor where or how he lives; nor what he is like.

  To appreciate the paradox of this silence, it must be borne in mind that the book represents Rheticus' account of his pilgrimage to Copernicus, in a letter addressed to his former teacher in Nuremberg. One can hear the addressee's indignant exclamations: "But where does he live, this new master of yours? How old is he? What is he like? What instruments does he use? You say that this Bishop has a gnomon and an armillary sphere – but what has he got?" The reason for these glaring omissions was probably the same which compelled Rheticus to omit mentioning "my learned Master" by name: Copernicus' mania for secrecy. It cannot be explained by sensible caution, for if anybody wished to persecute the anonymous astronomer of Ermland, he would have had no difficulty in identifying Canon Nicolai of Torun.