The Sleepwalkers

  In space, the world was equally bounded by the ninth sphere, beyond which lay the heavenly Empyrean. It was not necessary for the sophisticated to believe strictly in all that was said about heaven and hell; but the existence of solid boundaries in time and space were a habit of thought as self-evident as the walls and ceiling of his room, as his own birth and death.

  Thirdly, there were equally firm limits to the progress of knowledge, technology, science, social organization; all of which had been completed long ago. There was a final truth regarding every subject, as finite and bounded as the universe itself. The truth about religion was revealed in the Scriptures; the truth about geometry in Euclid, the truth about physics in Aristotle. The science of the ancients was taken as Gospel truth, not because of any particular respect for the pagan Greeks, but because it was obvious that since they had come so much earlier they had harvested all there was to harvest in these fields, and left nothing but a few stray stalks to pick in the way of tidying up. Since there was only one answer to every question, and the ancients had filled in all the answers, the edifice of knowledge was completed. If the answer did not happen to fit the facts, the error was blamed on the scribes who copied the ancient manuscript. The authority of the ancients did not rest on idolatry, but on the belief in the finite nature of knowledge.

  From the thirteenth century onward, humanists, sceptics and reformers had started making holes in the walls of this stable and static universe. They chipped off bits of it here and there, letting in draughts and loosening the structure. But it still held. Donne's "little Mathematitian" did not ram his head against doors, he made no frontal attack, he was not even conscious of attacking at all. He was a conservative who felt quite at home in the medieval edifice, and yet he undermined its foundations more effectively than the thundering Luther. He let in the destructive notions of infinity and eternal change, which destroyed the familiar world like a dissolvent acid.

  He did not state that the universe is infinite in space. He preferred, with his usual caution, "to leave the question to the philosophers". 47 But unwittingly he altered an unconscious habit of thought by making the earth rotate instead of the sky. So long as the rotation was attributed to the sky, the mind automatically assumed it to be a solid and finite sphere – how else could it go round as a unit every twenty-four hours? But once the apparent daily round of the firmament was explained by the earth's rotation, the stars could recede to any distance; putting them on a solid sphere became now an arbitrary, unconvincing act. The sky no longer had a limit, infinity opened its gaping jaws, and Pascal's "libertin", seized by cosmic agoraphobia, was to cry out a century later: "Le silence éternel de ces éspaces infinis m'effraie!"

  Infinite space is not a part of the Copernican system. But it is implied in it; it irresistibly tended to push thought in that direction. This distinction between the explicit, and the unconsciously implied consequences becomes even more apparent in Copernicus' impact on the metaphysics of the universe. Aristotelian physics was, as we have seen, already discredited in parts, and Copernicus was one of its last orthodox defenders. But in one fundamental respect it still ruled the mind of man like a self-evident proposition or an act of faith: one may call this the grand topography of the universe. It was this fundamental pattern which Copernicus, the defender of Aristotle, unwittingly destroyed.

  The Aristotelian universe was centralized. It had one centre of gravity, one hard core, to which all movement referred. Everything that had weight fell towards the centre, everything buoyant, like fire and air, tried to get away from it; while the stars, neither heavy nor buoyant and of an altogether different nature, moved in circles around it. The details of the scheme might be right or wrong, but it was a simple, plausible, reassuringly orderly scheme.

  The Copernican universe is not only expanded towards the infinite, but at the same time decentralized, perplexing, anarchic. It has no natural centre of orientation to which everything else can be referred. The directions "up and down" are no longer absolute, nor are weight and buoyancy. The "weight" of a stone had meant, before, its tendency to fall towards the centre of the earth: that was the meaning of "gravity". Now the sun and the moon become centres of gravity of their own. There are no longer any absolute directions in space. The universe has lost its core. It no longer has a heart, but a thousand hearts.

  The reassuring feeling of stability, of rest and order are gone; the earth itself spins and wobbles and revolves in eight or nine simultaneous different motions. Moreover, if the earth is a planet, the distinction between the sub-lunary region of change and the ethereal heavens disappears. If the earth is made up of four elements, the planets and stars may be of the same earthy, watery, fiery and airy nature. They may even be inhabited by other kinds of men, as Cusa and Bruno asserted. Would in this case God have to become incarnate on every star? And could God have created this whole colossal multitude of worlds for the sake of the inhabitants of one single star among millions?

  None of these questions is posed in the Book of Revolutions. All of them are implicit in it. All of them, inescapably, were asked sooner or later by the Copernicans.

  From all pre-Copernican diagrams of the Universe there emerges, with minor variations, always the same reassuring, familiar picture: the earth at the centre, surrounded by the concentric shells of the hierarchy of spheres in space, and the hierarchy of values associated with it on the great Scale of Being. Here be tygers and here be seraphim: every item had its assigned place in the cosmic inventory. But in an unbounded universe without centre or circumference, no region or sphere ranked "higher" or "lower" than another, either in space or on the scale of values. That scale was no longer. The Golden Chain was torn, its links scattered throughout the world; homogenous space implied a cosmic democracy.

  The notion of limitlessness or infinity, which the Copernican system implied, was bound to devour the space reserved for God on the medieval astronomer's charts. They had taken it for granted that the realms of astronomy and theology were contiguous, separated only by the thickness of the ninth crystal sphere. Henceforth, the space-and-spirit continuum would be replaced by a space-time continuum. This meant, among other things, the end of intimacy between man and God. Homo sapiens had dwelt in a universe enveloped by divinity as by a womb; now he was being expelled from the womb. Hence Pascal's cry of horror.

  But that cry was uttered a hundred years later. Canon Koppernigk in his tower in Frauenburg would never have understood why the Reverend John Donne made him a pretender to the seat next to Lucifer's throne. With his blessed lack of humour he foresaw none of these consequences when he published his book with the motto: "For Mathematicians Only". Nor did his contemporaries. During the remainder of the sixteenth century, the new system of the universe went, like an infectious disease, through a period of incubation. Only at the beginning of the seventeenth did it burst into the open and cause the greatest revolution in human thought since the heroic age of Greece.

  A.D. 1600 is probably the most important turning point in human destiny after 600 B.C. Astride that milestone, born almost exactly a hundred years after Copernicus, with one foot in the sixteenth, the other in the seventeenth century, stands the founder of modern astronomy, a tortured genius in whom all the contradictions of his age seem to have become incarnate: Johannes Kepler.

  CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE TO PART THREE

  A.D. 1473

  19 February. Nicolas Koppernigk born at Torun, Royal Prussia

  1483

  Death of father. Family adopted by Lucas Waczelrode.

  1491-94

  Studies at Cracow University.

  1496

  Made a Canon of the Ermland Chapter.

  c. 1560

  Studies at Bologna and Padua.

  1503

  Promoted Doctor of Canon Law at University of Ferrara.

  1506-12

  Secretary to Bisho
p Lucas at Heilsberg castle.

  1509

  Publishes translation of Teophylactus Simocatta.

  c. 1510

  (1514 at the latest) Commentariolus circulated in manuscript.

  1512

  Joins Chapter of Frauenburg Cathedral.

  1517

  Beginning of Lutheran Reformation.

  1522

  Letter against Werner.

  1533

  Widmanstad's Lecture in the Vatican Gardens.

  1536

  Letter from Cardinal Schoenberg.

  1537

  Dantiscus elected Bishop of Ermland.

  1539

  Summer. Rheticus arrives in Frauenburg.

  September. Narratio prima completed.

  1540

  February. Narratio prima published in Danzig. Rheticus returns to Wittenberg.

  1 July. Copernicus writes to Osiander.

  1541

  20 April. Osiander's letters to Copernicus and Rheticus.

  1540-41

  Summer 1540 - September 1541. Rheticus' second sojourn in Frauenberg; manuscript of Revolutions copied out.

  1542

  May. Rheticus arrives in Nuremberg. Printing starts.

  June. Printing if first two sheets completed.

  June. Copernicus writes Dedication to Paul III, sends it to Rheticus.

  November. Rheticus leaves Nuremberg. Osiander takes over.

  1543

  24 May. Arrival of first printed copy of Revolutions. Death of Copernicus.

  1576

  Death of Rheticus.

  PART FOUR THE WATERSHED

  I THE YOUNG KEPLER

  1. Decline of a Family

  JOHANNES KEPLER, Keppler, Khepler, Kheppler or Keplerus was conceived on 16 May, A.D. 1571, at 4.37 a.m., and was born on 27 December at 2.30 p.m., after a pregnancy lasting 224 days, 9 hours and 53 minutes. The five different ways of spelling his name are all his own, and so are the figures relating to conception, pregnancy and birth, recorded in a horoscope which he cast for himself. 1 The contrast between his carelessness about his name and his extreme precision about dates reflects, from the very outset, a mind to whom all ultimate reality, the essence of religion, of truth and beauty, was contained in the language of numbers.

  He was born in the township of Weil in wine-happy Swabia, a blessed corner of south-west Germany between the Black Forest, the Neckar and the Rhine. Weil-der-Stadt – a freak name, meaning Weil-the-Town, but with the masculine "der" instead of the feminine "die" – has beautifully succeeded in preserving its medieval character to our day. * It stretches along the top of a mound, long and narrow like the hull of a battleship, surrounded by massive, crenelated, ochre-coloured walls, and slender watch-towers topped by spire and weathercock. The gabled houses, with their irregular patterns of small, square windows, are covered with scarab green, topaz blue and lemon yellow stucco on their cockeyed façades; where the stucco peels, the mud and lath peep through like weathered skin showing through a hole in a peasant's shirt. If, after fruitless knocking, you push open the door of a house, you are liable to be greeted by a calf or a goat, for the ground-floors of some old houses still serve as stables, with an inner staircase leading up to the family's living quarters. The warm smell of compost floats everywhere in the cobbled streets, but they are kept scrupulously, teutonically clean. The people speak a broad Swabian dialect and frequently address even the stranger with "thou"; they are rustic and gemuetlich, but also alert and bright. There are places outside the walls still called "God's Acre" and "Gallows Hill"; and the old family names, down from the mayor, Herr Oberdorfer, to the watchmaker, Herr Speidel, are the same which appear on documents from Kepler's time, when Weil had only two hundred citizens. Though it produced some other distinguished men – among them the phrenologist Gall, who traced each faculty of the mind to a bump on the skull – Johannes Kepler is the town's hero, venerated like a patron saint. 2

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  At least, to be precise, to the days of May 1955, when I visited Kepler's birthplace.

  One of the entries, dated 1554, in the municipal ledger, refers to the lease of a cabbage patch to Johannes' grandfather, Sebaldus Kepler:

  " Daniel Datter and Sebold Kepler, furrier, shall pay seventeen pennies at Martinmas out of their cabbage patch on the Klingelbrunner Lane between the fields of Joerg Rechten and those of Hans Rieger's children. Should they relinquish the cabbage patch, they shall cart six cartloads of compost into or onto it."

  From this bucolic prelude one would expect a happy childhood for the infant Johannes. It was a ghastly one.

  Grandfather Sebaldus, the furrier with the cabbage patch, was said to stem from a noble family, 3 and became mayor of Weil; but after him, the respectable Keplers went into decline. His offspring were mostly degenerates and psychopaths, who chose mates of the same ilk. Johannes Kepler's father was a mercenary adventurer who narrowly escaped the gallows. His mother, Katherine, an innkeeper's daughter, was brought up by an aunt who was burnt alive as a witch, and Katherine herself, accused in old age of consorting with the Devil, had as narrow an escape from the stake as the father had from the gallows.

  Grandfather Sebaldus' house (burnt down in 1648 but rebuilt later in the same style) stood on a corner of the market-place. Facing the house is a beautiful Renaissance fountain with four long, fluted copper spouts which issue from four human faces carved into the stone. Three of the faces are stylized masks; the fourth, turned towards the Town Hall and the Kepler house, looks like the realistic portrait of a bloated, coarse-featured man. There is a tradition in Weil according to which it is the likeness of old Sebaldus, the mayor. This may or may not be so, but it tallies with Kepler's own description of him:

  "My grandfather Sebald, mayor of the imperial city of Weil, born in the year 1521 about St. James's day ... is now 75 years of age... He is remarkably arrogant and proudly dressed ... short-tempered and obstinate, and his face betrays his licentious past. It is a red and fleshy face, and his beard gives it much authority. He was eloquent, at least as far as an ignorant man can be... From the year 1578 onward his reputation began to decline, together with his substance..." 4

  This thumbnail sketch, and the others which follow, are part of a kind of genealogical horoscope, embracing all members of his family (including himself) which Kepler drew up when he was twenty-six. It is not only a remarkable document, but also a precious contribution to the study of the hereditary background of genius, for it happens only rarely that the historian has such ample material at his disposal. *

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  As the document is a horoscope, events and character traits are derived from planetary constellations, which I have mostly left out.

  When Grandfather Sebald was twenty-nine, he married Katherine Mueller from the nearby village of Marbach. Kepler describes her as:

  "restless, clever and lying, but devoted to religion; slim and of a fiery nature; vivacious, an inveterate troublemaker; jealous, extreme in her hatreds, violent, a bearer of grudges... And all her children have something of this..." 5

  He also accuses his grandmother of pretending that she married at eighteen, when she was really twenty-two. However that may be, she bore Sebaldus twelve children in twenty-one years. The first three, named Sebaldus, Johan and Sebaldus, all died in infancy. The fourth was Kepler's father, Heinrich, whom we leave aside for a moment. Of numbers 5 to 9 among his aunts and uncles, Kepler records: 6

  "5. Kunigund, born 1549, 23 May. The moon c
ould not have been worse placed. She is dead, the mother of many children, poisoned they think, in the year 1581, 17 July" [Added later on: "Otherwise she was pious and wise"]. *

  "6. Katherine, born 1551, 30 July. She too is dead.

  "7. Sebaldus, born 1552, 13 November.† An astrologer and a Jesuit, he underwent the first and second ordinations for the priesthood; though a Catholic, he imitated the Lutherans and led a most impure life. Died in the end of dropsy after many earlier illnesses. Acquired a wife who was rich and nobly born, but one of many children. Contracted the French sickness. Was vicious and disliked by his fellow townsmen. In 1576, 16 August, he left Weil for Speyr where he arrived on the 18th; on the 22 December he left Speyr against the will of his superior and wandered in extreme poverty through France and Italy. [He was held to be kind and a good friend.]

  "8. Katherine, born 1554, 5 August. She was intelligent and skilful, but married most unfortunately, lived sumptuously, squandered her goods, now a beggar. [Died in 1619 or 1620.]

  "9. Maria, born 1556, 25 August. She too is dead."

  Of Nos. 10 and 11, he has nothing to say; No. 12, the last born of his uncles and aunts, also died in infancy.‡

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  In later years, Kepler added a few remarks to his text, which soften, and sometimes contradict, the trenchant characterizations of his youth. I have put these addenda into brackets.