The mountains of Lavania are much higher than those on earth; so are the plants and the creatures that inhabit it. "Growth is rapid; everything is short-lived because it develops to such an enormous bodily mass... Growth and decay takes place on a single day." The creatures are mostly like gigantic serpents. "The Prevolvans have no fixed and safe habitations; they traverse in hordes, in a single day, the whole of their world, following the receding waters either on legs that are longer than those of our camels, or on wings, or in ships." Some are divers, and breathe very slowly, so that they can take refuge from the scorching sun at the bottom of the deep waters. "Those that remain on the surface are boiled by the midday sun and serve as nourishment for the approaching nomadic hordes... Others who cannot live without breathing, retreat into caves which are supplied with water by narrow canals so that the water may gradually cool on its long way and they may drink it; but when the night approaches, they go out for prey." Their skin is spongy and porous; but when a creature is taken unawares by the heat of the day, the skin becomes hard and scorched, and falls off in the evening. And yet they have a strange love for basking in the sun at noon – but only close to their crevices, to be able to make a swift and safe retreat...
In a short appendix, the Subvolvans are allowed cities surrounded by circular walls – the craters of the moon; but Kepler is only interested in the engineering problems of their construction. The book ends with Duracotus being woken by a cloudburst from his dream – or rather, from his nightmare of prehistoric giant reptiles, of which Kepler had, of course, no knowledge whatsoever. No wonder that Henry More was inspired by the Somnium to a poem called Insomnium Philosophicum. But more amusing is Samuel Butler's paraphrase on Kepler in "The Elephant in the Moon":
Quoth he – Th' Inhabitants of the Moon,
Who when the Sun shines hot at Noon,
Do live in Cellars underground
Of eight Miles deep and eighty around
(In which at once they fortify
Against the Sun and th' Enemy)
Because their People's civiler
Than those rude Peasants, that are found
To live upon the upper Ground,
Call'd Privolvans, with whom they are
Perpetually at open War.
Although most of the Somnium was written much earlier, one readily understands why it was the last book on which he worked, and which he wished to see in print. All the dragons which had beset his life – from the witch Fiolxhilda and her vanished husband, down to the poor reptilian creatures in perpetual flight, shedding their diseased skin, and yet so anxious to bask under an inhuman sun – they are all there, projected into a cosmic scenery of scientific precision and rare, original beauty. All Kepler's work, and all his discoveries, were acts of catharsis; it was only fitting that the last one should end with a fantastic flourish.
5. The End
Wallenstein could not care less what Kepler did. The arrangement had been a mutual disappointment from the beginning. Unlike the aristocratic dilettantes who had patronized Tycho, Galileo and Kepler himself in the past, General Wallenstein took no genuine interest in science. He drew a certain snob-satisfaction from having a man of European renown as his court mathematicus, but what he really wanted from Kepler was astrological advice regarding the political and military decisions he had to take. Kepler's answers to such concrete questions were always elusive – owing to his honesty, or caution, or both. Wallenstein used Kepler mainly to obtain exact data on the planetary motions, which he then sent on to his more willing astrologers – like the notorious Seni – as a basis for their auguries. Kepler himself rarely spoke about his personal contacts with Wallenstein. Though he once calls him "a second Hercules", 15 his feelings were more honestly reflected in one of his last letters:
"I have returned recently from Gitschin [Wallenstein's residence], where my patron kept me in attendance for three weeks – it meant a considerable waste of time for both of us." 16
Three months later, the pressure of Wallenstein's rivals induced the Emperor to dismiss his Generalissimo. It was only a temporary set-back in Wallenstein's dramatic career, but Kepler believed that it was the end. Once again, and now for the last time, he took to the roads.
In October, he departed from Sagan. He left his family behind, but took with him cartloads of books and documents, which were dispatched ahead to Leipzig. His son-in-law wrote later on:
"Kepler left Sagan unexpectedly, and his condition was such that his widow, his children and friends expected to see the Last Judgment sooner than his return." 17
His purpose was to look out for another job, and to try to obtain some of the money owed to him by the Emperor and by the Austrian Estates. In his self-analysis, thirty-five years earlier, he had written that his constant worrying about money "was not prompted by the desire for riches, but by fear of poverty". This was still essentially true. He had money-deposits in various places, but he was unable to recover even the interests due to him. When he set out on that last journey across half of war-torn Europe, he took all the cash he had with him, leaving Susanna and the children penniless. Even so he had to borrow fifty florins from a merchant in Leipzig, where he stopped on the first lap of his journey.
He seems to have had one of his curious premonitions. All his life he had been in the habit of casting horoscopes for his birthdays. The horoscopes for the years preceding and following his sixtieth show merely the positions of the planets, without comment. The sixtieth, his last, is an exception; he noted on it that the positions of the planets were almost the same as at his birth. His last letter is dated from Leipzig, 31 October, and addressed to friend Bernegger in Strasburg. He had remembered Bernegger's earlier invitation, and suddenly decided to accept it; but he seems to have forgotten it again a moment later, for in the remainder of the letter he talks of his travelling plans without any reference to it:
"Your hospitality I gladly accept. May God preserve you, and take pity on the misery of my country. In the present general insecurity one ought not to refuse any offer of shelter, however distant its location... Farewell to you, your wife and children. Hold fast, with me, to our only anchor, the Church, pray to God for it and for me." 18
From Leipzig he rode on, on a miserable old horse to Nuernberg, where he visited a printer. Then on to Ratisbon, where the Diet was sitting, in full pomp, presided over by the Emperor who owed him twelve thousand florins.
He arrived in Ratisbon on 2 November. Three days later he took to bed with a fever. An eye-witness reported that "he did not talk, but pointed his index finger now at his head, now at the sky above him." 19 Another witness, the Lutheran preacher, Jacob Fischer, wrote in a letter to a friend: 20
"During the recent session of the Diet, our Kepler arrived in this town on an old jade (which he subsequently sold for two florins). He was only three days here when he was taken ill with a feverish ailment. At first he thought that he was suffering from sacer ignis, or fever pustules, and paid no attention to it. When his feverish condition worsened, they bled him, without any result. Soon his mind became clouded with ever-rising fever. He did not talk like one in possession of his faculties. Several preachers visited him and comforted him with the living waters of their sympathy. 21 In his last agony, as he gave up his ghost to God, a Protestant clergyman of Ratisbon, Sigismund Christopher Donavarus, a relative of mine, consoled him in a manly way, as behoves a servant of God. This happened on November 15, 1630. On the 19th he was buried in the cemetery of St. Peter, outside the town."
The cemetery was destroyed during the Thirty Years War, and Kepler's bones were scattered; but the epitaph which he wrote for himself is preserved:
Mensus eram coelos, nunc terrae metior umbras Mens coelestis erat, corporis umbra iacet.
I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure Skybound was the mind, earthbound the body rests.
There is also a paragraph in one of his late letters which lingers on in memory; it is dated:
"Sagan in Silesia, in my o
wn printing press, November 6, 1629:
"When the storm rages and the state is threatened by shipwreck, we can do nothing more noble than to lower the anchor of our peaceful studies into the ground of eternity." 22
PART FIVE THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
I THE BURDEN OF PROOF
1. Galileo's Triumph
ONCE again the climate and character of this narrative must change. Personalities, intrigues, points of legal procedure will dominate the scene as we turn to the tragic conflict between the new cosmology and the Church.
Few episodes in history have given rise to a literature as voluminous as the trial of Galileo. Most of it has, unavoidably, a partisan character, ranging from crude distortion, through gentle innuendo, to attempts at impartiality thwarted by unconscious bias. Objectivity is an abstract ideal in an age which has become "a divided house of faith and reason"; and more especially so when the episode to be treated is one of the historic causes of that division. Since it would be foolish to claim exemption from this rule, it may be as well to state my own bias before asking the reader to take on trust my brand of objectivity. Among my earliest and most vivid impressions of History was the wholesale roasting alive of heretics by the Spanish inquisition, which could hardly inspire tender feelings towards that establishment. On the other hand, I find the personality of Galileo equally unattractive, mainly on the grounds of his behaviour towards Kepler. His dealings with Urban VIII and the Holy Office can be judged in various ways, because the evidence on some vital points is based on hearsay and conjecture; but of his relationship with his German colleague, confined to a few letters, we have an unequivocal record. As a result, most of the biographers of Kepler show the same aversion towards Galileo, whereas the admirers of Galileo display towards Kepler a kind of guilty tenderness, which betrays their embarrassment.
It seems to me, then, that insofar as bias enters into this narrative, it is not based on affection for either party in the conflict, but on resentment that the conflict did occur at all. One of the points that I have laboured in this book is the unitary source of the mystical and scientific modes of experience; and the disastrous results of their separation. It is my conviction that the conflict between Church and Galileo (or Copernicus) was not inevitable; that it was not in the nature of a fatal collision between opposite philosophies of existence, which was bound to occur sooner or later, but rather a clash of individual temperaments aggravated by unlucky coincidences. In other words. I believe the idea that Galileo's trial was a kind of Greek tragedy, a showdown between "blind faith" and "enlightened reason", to be naively erroneous. It is this conviction – or bias – that informs the following narrative.
I shall take up the thread of Galileo's life at the point where his name suddenly burst into world fame through his discovery of the Jupiter planets. The Star Messenger was published in March 1610; in September, he took up his new post as "Chief Mathematician and Philosopher" to the Medicis in Florence; the following spring he spent in Rome.
The visit was a triumph. Cardinal del Monte wrote in a letter: "If we were still living under the ancient Republic of Rome, I verily believe that there would have been a column on the Capitol erected in Galileo's honour." 1 The select Accadèmia dei Lincei (the lynx-eyed), presided by Prince Federico Cesi, elected him a member and gave him a banquet; it was at this banquet that the word "telescope" was for the first time applied to the new invention. 2 Pope Paul V received him in friendly audience, and the Jesuit Roman College honoured him with various ceremonies which lasted a whole day. The chief mathematician and astronomer of the College, the venerable Father Clavius, principal author of the Gregorian Calendar reform, who at first had laughed at the Star Messenger, was now entirely converted; so were the other astronomers at the College, Fathers Grienberger, van Maelcote and Lembo. They not only accepted Galileo's discoveries, but improved on his observations, particularly of Saturn and the phases of Venus. When the head of the College, the Lord Cardinal Bellarmine, asked for their official opinion on the new discoveries, they unanimously confirmed them.
This was of utmost importance. The phases of Venus, confirmed by the doyen of Jesuit astronomers, were incontrovertible proof that at least that planet revolved round the sun, that the Ptolemaic system had become untenable, and that the choice now lay between Copernicus and Brahe. The Jesuit Order was the intellectual spearhead of the Catholic Church. Jesuit astronomers everywhere in Europe – particularly Scheiner in Ingoldstadt, Lanz in Munich, Kepler's friend Guldin in Vienna, and the Roman College in a body – began to support the Tychonic system as a half-way house to the Copernican. The Copernican system itself could be freely discussed and advocated as a working hypothesis, but it was unfavourably viewed to present it as established truth, because it seemed contrary to current interpretation of scripture – unless and until definite proof could be adduced in its favour. We shall have to return more than once to this crucial point.
Within a brief period, Jesuit astronomers also confirmed the "earthly" nature of the moon, the existence of sunspots, and the fact that comets moved in outer space, beyond the moon. This meant the abandonment of the Aristotelian doctrine of the perfect and unchangeable nature of the celestial spheres. Thus the intellectually most influential order within the Catholic Church was at that time in full retreat from Aristotle and Ptolemy, and had taken up an intermediary position regarding Copernicus. They praised and fêted Galileo, whom they knew to be a Copernican, and they kept Kepler, the foremost exponent of Copernicanism, under their protection throughout his life.
But there existed a powerful body of men whose hostility to Galileo never abated: the Aristotelians at the universities. The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass – which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught – but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries. It was this threat – not Bishop Dantiscus or Pope Paul III – which had cowed Canon Koppernigk into lifelong silence. In Galileo's case, the phalanx resembled more a rearguard – but a rearguard still firmly entrenched in academic chairs and preachers' pulpits.
"... There remain in opposition to my work some stern defenders of every minute argument of the Peripatetics. So far as I can see, their education consisted in being nourished from infancy on the opinion that philosophizing is and can be nothing but to make a comprehensive survey of the texts of Aristotle, that from divers passages they may quickly collect and throw together a great number of solutions to any proposed problem. They wish never to raise their eyes from those pages – as if this great book of the universe had been written to be read by nobody but Aristotle, and his eyes had been destined to see for all posterity." 3
After his return, in the summer of 1611, from his Roman triumph to Florence, Galileo became immediately involved in several disputes. He had published a treatise on "Things that Float on Water" – a title that sounds harmless enough. But in this pioneer work on modern hydrostatics Galileo had embraced Archimedes' view that bodies float or sink according to their specific gravity, against the Aristotelian view that this depends on their shape. The backwoodsmen were out at once in full cry, swinging their stone axes. They were the more irate as Galileo, instead of letting the facts speak for themselves, had employed his favourite trick of anticipating the peripatetics' arguments, building them up in a mock-serious manner, and then demolishing them with glee. Their leader was a certain Lodovico delle Colombe, meaning dove; hence the name "pigeon-league" by which Galileo and his friends called their opponents. The Aristotelians published four books in six months to refute the Discourse on Things
that Float on Water, and the controversy went on for nearly three years. It ended in a complete rout of the attackers, both spiritual and physical. Professors Palmerini and di Grazzia died while Galileo was preparing his riposte. Giorgio Coressio lost his chair at Pisa because he was discovered to adhere secretly to the Greek church, and went insane; the monk Francesco Sizzi, a young fanatic, who had attacked Galileo's telescopic discoveries but defended his Floating Bodies, was broken on the wheel in Paris for writing a pamphlet against the King of France.
Incidentally, the famous experiment of dropping cannon balls from the leaning Tower of Pisa was carried out not by Galileo but by his opponent, the aforementioned Coressio, and not in refutation, but in confirmation of the Aristotelian view that larger bodies must fall quicker than smaller ones. 4
2. The Sunspots
The next year ( 1612) brought a new controversy with more serious consequences. It concerned the sunspots.
The affair starts at Ingoldstadt in Bavaria, where Father Scheiner, a Jesuit astronomer of great repute, and his young assistant Cysat, profiting from a thick mist, turned their telescope directly at the sun. It was Cysat's turn first, who to his amazement discovered "several black drops" on the face of the sun. He exclaimed: "Either the sun sheddeth tears or she is blemished by spots." 5 Then he yielded the instrument to his teacher.
After continued observations, Father Scheiner reported on his sensational discovery in several letters to Marcus Welser in Augsburg, a Maecenas of science, who also patronized Kepler. Welser had the letter promptly printed, under the pseudonym "Apelles", as Scheiner had requested. Welser then sent the booklet to both Kepler and Galileo, for their opinions.
Kepler answered immediately. He recalled having himself observed a sunspot in 1607 "of the size of a meagre flea", which he had mistakenly assumed to be Mercury passing in front of the sun. 6 He laughed at his mistake, then quoted reports of similar observations dating back to the days of Charlemagne; then gave his opinion that the spots were a kind of dross, due to the cooling of the sun in patches.