A More Perfect Heaven

by Dava Sobel

  “To produce sleep so profound that the patient may be cut and will feel nothing, as though he were dead,” Arnaldus advised, “take of opium, mandragora bark, and henbane root equal parts, pound them together and mix with water. When you want to sew or cut a man, dip a rag in this and put it to his forehead and nostrils. He will soon sleep so deeply that you may do what you will. To wake him up, dip the rag in strong vinegar.”

  Copernicus cut short his medical studies after two of the required three years. Having never been graduated from any of the universities he attended, he traveled to Ferrara in May of 1503, sat for the exam in canon law, and took his doctoral degree. Some Copernicus scholars think he did this to avoid the hoopla of commencement rituals in the university courtyard at Padua, “Il Bo,” not to mention the cost of the fees paid to examiners and the dinner party that a new graduate was expected to throw. From Ferrara he returned to Poland—to Varmia—for good.

  The cathedral of Varmia stood, as it still stands today, on a hilltop overlooking the Vistula Bay. The great brick church rises in Gothic turrets and spires from a stone foundation laid in the fourteenth century. A few small buildings, a bell tower, and a covered well huddle around the church, surrounded in turn by high fortified walls, crowned with crenellations and arrow loops. The moat and barbican are gone, but the gateways retain the thick, grudging wooden doors and medieval grates that even now can fall with fatal weight.

  The presence of the cathedral dedicated to the Virgin Mary gave the name Frauenburg, or “the city of Our Lady,” to the adjacent community. Frauenburg (known today as Frombork), was one of several cities within the diocese of Varmia. The imposing bishop’s palace, where Doctor Copernicus first went to live and work for his uncle, lay fifty miles away, in Heilsberg (now Lidzbark Warmiński). The fifty-mile remove seems extremely inconvenient, given that it took days to travel such a distance at the pace of available transport, but Bishop Watzenrode was only occasionally required to appear at the cathedral. On January 11, 1510, for example, he arrived there leading an official procession, having carried the sacred relic said to be St. George’s head all the way from Heilsberg.

  As much a prince as a prelate, the Bishop of Varmia governed a province of more than four thousand square miles (most of which belonged to him personally) with tens of thousands of inhabitants. He reported directly to the King of Poland. Indeed, Watzenrode served as trusted counselor to three successive kings over the course of his episcopate, sharing with them his dreams of Polish glory and his hatred for the white-cloaked Knights of the Teutonic Order, whose lands engulfed Varmia. Although the military-religious order had been founded in the Holy Land by Crusaders late in the twelfth century, it removed after the fall of Acre to Old Prussia, where it grew dissolute and dangerous. Often the knights thundered out of their castle at Königsberg to raid the towns of Varmia—even attacking Frauenburg and its cathedral fortress.

  Bishop Watzenrode had fathered an illegitimate son in Torun, but he regarded his talented younger nephew as his heir apparent. Having nurtured Copernicus through Church ranks, he now positioned him as episcopal physician and personal secretary, poised on the brink of limitless advancement. Yet the youth seemed not nearly hungry enough. His mind strayed from the lanes of power, as suggested by the notes Copernicus kept from his years in the bishop’s employ. These describe the positions of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn during their Great Conjunction in the sign of Cancer in 1504, and the lunar eclipse that occurred on June 2, 1509.

  French polymath Pierre Gassendi, who wrote the first extant biography of Copernicus in 1654, more than a century after the astronomer’s death, said he treated the illnesses of the poor without charging them any fee. While it is easy and tempting to presume the goodness of his heart, the peasants of Varmia probably had no money to pay for his services, nor he any need of their pennies. In addition to the income from his canonry, Copernicus received a second livelihood from a sinecure at the Church of the Holy Cross in Wroclaw, which he retained for thirty-five years. Also, the Cathedral Chapter of Varmia paid him an annual bonus for tending to the bishop’s medical complaints. Records show that when Bishop Watzenrode took sick in 1507, his nephew successfully restored him to health.

  Copernicus made a public display of gratitude to his uncle by dedicating his first published work to him, hailing Watzenrode as “O right reverend ruler and father of our country.” The text thus offered was not the great Copernican theory but a translation, from Greek into Latin, of a collection of letters by a seventh-century moralist from Constantinople. Copernicus found the eighty-five moral, rustic, and amorous letters of Theophylactus Simocatta in the chapter library, in a volume called Epistolographers. The missives read more like fables and teachings than communiqués, but he liked them, he said, because “Theophylactus so interspersed the gay with the serious, and the playful with the austere, that every reader may pluck what pleases him most in these letters, like an assortment of flowers in a garden.”

  One of the letters dealt specifically with an uncle’s duty to a nephew: “Among mares there is a rule, and it seems to me quite wise. Indeed I praise their profound kindliness. But what is this rule? If they see a foal lacks a teat and the mother is far away, any one of them nurses the foal. For they do not forget their own species and, with a single purpose and no ill will, they do their nursing as though having to do with their own true descendant. …

  “Now I shall apply this discourse to you. You scorn your brother’s son as he roams from door to door, clad in most wretched rags. Your feelings are less sensible than the brutes’. You feed others’ hounds, for that is what I would quite properly call the flatterers around you. For they appear to be completely loyal as long as they are stuffed full of your food, you wretch! Yet they constantly bark at you even while they are still belching out the booze they just drank. For, flatterers constitute a breed that is mindful of harm and most forgetful of favors. Therefore … take care of your nephew at last. If you do not, you will have your conscience as your implacable foe, sharpening his sword with Nature’s tears.”

  Fortunately for Copernicus, his own Uncle Lukasz had needed no such admonition to extend a generous hand.

  Anxious about the reception of the erotic letters, Copernicus claimed to have cleaned them up for the bishop’s sake: “Just as physicians usually modify the bitterness of drugs by sweetening them to make them more palatable to patients,” he wrote in the dedication, “so these love letters have in like manner been rectified.” Even so, they make mention of lust, carnal desires, irrational passion, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, and infanticide.

  A friend of Copernicus, Wawrzyniec Korwin (pen name Laurentius Corvinus), took the manuscript of the little book to Krakow for printing in 1509. At that date, no press had yet been established anywhere in Varmia, or even in Torun. Korwin also wrote an introductory poem for the work. His verses provided a character assessment of the bishop—“conspicuous for his piety” and “revered for his grave demeanor”—suggesting that Watzenrode may have dispensed generosity without much personal warmth. As for “the scholar who translates this work,” Korwin knew him to be engaged in loftier pursuits: “He discusses the swift course of the Moon and the alternating movements of its brother as well as the stars together with the wandering planets—the Almighty’s marvelous creation—and he knows how to seek out the hidden causes of phenomena by the aid of wonderful principles.”

  Copernicus was already reconceiving the order of the heavenly spheres. In fact, the whole exercise of teaching himself Greek—and practicing his proficiency on the moral, rustic, and amorous letters of Theophylactus Simocatta—seems to have been a prerequisite for studying the works of Greek astronomers and consulting the ancient Greek/Egyptian calendar, in order to date correctly their observations from antiquity.

  In mid-1510, Copernicus somehow communicated to the reigning Bishop of Varmia that he did not aspire to become the future one, for he moved out of the palace. After relocating near the cathedral in Frauenburg, he
no longer accompanied his uncle on diplomatic missions—not even to Krakow in February 1512 for the wedding of King Sigismund and the coronation of his new queen, the young Hungarian noblewoman Barbara Zapolya. Bishop Watzenrode doubtless rued his nephew’s absence from these festivities, especially on the return journey, when he fell ill with a fever. He stopped at Torun, hoping to recuperate there before continuing on to Heilsberg, but his condition only grew worse. He died three days later, on March 29, at sixty-four years of age.

  The last of Theophylactus’s letters had touched on death and its lessons for the living. “Stroll through the tombstones,” it counseled those weighed down by their own sorrows. “You will behold man’s greatest joys as in the end they take on the lightness of dust.”

  Chapter 2

  The Brief Sketch

  The center of the earth is not the center of the universe, but only the center towards which heavy things move and the center of the lunar sphere.

  —FROM THE Commentariolus, OR Brief Sketch,

  BY COPERNICUS, CA. 1510

  In 1510, when Copernicus, at thirty-seven, assumed his position in residence as a canon of Varmia in Frauenburg, the Cathedral Chapter assigned him a house, or curia, outside the fortification walls, plus two servants and three horses as perquisites of office. The influential chapter governed the lives of its member canons, as well as the residents of hamlets for hundreds of miles around, not to mention the numerous peasants who worked the thousands of acres of Church-owned lands that yielded the canons’ livelihood. Copernicus also took possession of his own designated altar in the cathedral nave. It was the fourth from the chancel, on the right—the one dedicated to St. Wenceslaus. Lacking Holy Orders, Copernicus could not celebrate Mass there himself, but then, neither could his brother or the majority of the other canons, who were also political appointees, not priests.

  Copernicus encountered an ordained exception in Tiedemann Giese, a fellow canon seven years younger than he. Giese came from a well-known family in Danzig, where he had presided at the Church of Peter and Paul. He shared with Copernicus an abiding interest in astronomy, perhaps acquired when they befriended each other. Giese was almost certainly the first to hear Copernicus confess his secret knowledge of the cosmos. One imagines the priest’s initial reaction to those unorthodox ideas as skeptical at best, but in time he concurred, even encouraged Copernicus, and urged him to disseminate his theory.

  By 1510, Copernicus had leapt to his Sun-centered conclusion via intuition and mathematics. No astronomical observations were required. He wrote out a short overview of his new heavenly arrangement, also probably in 1510, and sent it off to at least one correspondent beyond Varmia. That person in turn copied the document for further circulation, and presumably the new recipients did, too, because by May of 1514, when the Krakow physician and medical professor called Matthew of Miechow inventoried his private library, it contained “A manuscript of six leaves containing a Theorica [astronomy essay] in which the author asserts that the Earth moves while the Sun stands still.”

  Copernicus had no idea that Aristarchus of Samos had proposed much the same thing in the third century B.C. The only work by Aristarchus known to Copernicus—a treatise called On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon—made no mention of a heliocentric plan. Copernicus stood alone, for the time being, on his moving Earth.

  Tiedemann Giese, canon of Varmia.

  The heavens challenge the astronomer, he noted in the opening paragraph of his Brief Sketch, to describe all the disparate motions of the divine bodies. His earliest predecessors in cosmology—here he saluted Calippus and Eudoxus from the fourth century B.C.—had embedded the Sun, Moon, and planets in a series of concentric spheres surrounding the Earth. The first astronomers envisioned these spheres as solid, invisible structures, each carrying a single planet. But these simple concentric spheres could not account for the planets’ periodic brightening in the sky, as though they were drawing nigh. Later sages favored eccentric spheres, with centers near but not at the Earth, to make up the difference in brightness, and they tipped each sphere’s axis at a slightly different angle, to allow the planets to bob up and down within the band of the zodiac. No single sphere, however, could embrace a planet’s periodic reversals in direction. Anyone who watched the wanderers night after night saw them now and again slow down, stop, then backtrack with respect to the background stars for weeks or months on end, only to stop and start up again the way they had gone before—fluctuating in brightness all the while. To accommodate this loop-the-loop behavior, some astronomers imagined the heavenly spheres as clearly defined lanes, within each of which a single planet reigned. Inside the sphere of Mars, for example, the planet rode around on one or more subsidiary spheres, called epicycles, whose combined motions accounted for its constantly changing position in the sky. The undisputed master of this balancing act, Claudius Ptolemy, flourished in Alexandria around A.D. 150.

  Ptolemy coped so effectively with heavenly complexity in the second century that he remained the reigning authority in the sixteenth. By following Ptolemy’s instructions and using his tables, an astronomer could approximate the position of any planet at any time, past or future. As though to commemorate Ptolemy’s magnificent achievement, his book came to be called by the first word of its title in Arabic translation, Almagest—“The Greatest”—instead of the more modest Greek name the author gave it, Mathematike syntaxis, or “Mathematical Treatise.”

  Copernicus revered Ptolemy as “that most outstanding of astronomers.” At the same time, he objected to the way Ptolemy violated the basic axiom of astronomy, which held that all planetary motions must be circular and uniform, or composed of circular and uniform parts. Ptolemy conformed his Earth-centered ideology with his accumulated data on planetary speeds and positions by allotting each heavenly sphere a so-called equant—in effect a second axis of rotation, off-center from the true axis. Although astronomers deemed it impossible for any sphere to rotate uniformly about an off-center axis, they overlooked the infelicity because Ptolemy’s technique worked on paper to give good predictive results. Copernicus’s mind, however, “shuddered” at the thought.

  Clinging to a purer ideal, as he explained in the Brief Sketch, Copernicus had sought a new route to Ptolemy’s results, without committing Ptolemy’s crime of violating the principle of perfect circular motion. Along the way to his new solution, for reasons Copernicus chose not to elaborate, he had nudged the Earth from its accustomed resting place at the hub of the universe, to put the Sun there in its stead. He could well have restored the heavens to uniform circular motion without this drastic reordering of the heavenly bodies, but once the new configuration occurred to him, the configuration itself became paramount.

  “All spheres surround the Sun as though it were in the middle of all of them, and therefore the center of the universe is near the Sun,” he wrote. “What appear to us as motions of the Sun arise not from its motion but from the motion of the Earth and our sphere, with which we revolve about the Sun like any other planet.”

  THE HEAVENLY SPHERES

  Each planet traveled in its own sphere, or region of the heavens. As depicted in this image from Theoricae novae planetarum, published in Nuremberg in the year of Copernicus’s birth, the sphere has a three-dimensional quality, high and wide enough to embrace a planet’s wanderings. Within the sphere, the principal path of the planet’s motion traces a thin circle centered on a point labeled c. deferentis. It is an eccentric circle, since the Earth (the center of the universe) is located at the point just below, c. mundi. The top label, c. aequantis, indicates the equant point, from which the planet’s motion appears uniform.

  With a wave of his hand, he had made the Earth a planet and set it spinning. In fact he saw it propelled in three ways, on three circular routes. The first spirited the planet around the Sun every year. The second twirled it daily, producing the heavenly fireworks of sunrise, sunset, and what he called the “headlong whirl” of stars through the night. The thir
d motion slowly wobbled the poles over the course of the year, to account for the direction of tilt for the Earth’s axis.

  “Whatever motion appears in the sphere of the fixed stars belongs not to it but to the Earth,” he continued. “Thus the entire Earth, along with the nearby elements”—meaning the oceans and the air—“rotates with a daily motion on its fixed poles, while the sphere of the fixed stars remains immovable and the outermost heaven.”

  Even Ptolemy had once conceded it might be easier in theory to let the Earth spin than to expect the whole firmament to wheel fully about every twenty-four hours—except that the idea of the Earth’s turning was “utterly ridiculous even to think of.”

  As soon as Copernicus called for the Sun and the Earth to swap places, the planets snapped into a logical new order. They arrayed themselves outward from the Sun according to their speed of revolution, so that Mercury, long observed to be the fastest, was also the closest, followed by Venus, then Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and finally Saturn, the slowest. In the Earth-centric view, neither observation nor theory had ever settled the question as to which planet lay just past the Moon—whether Venus or Mercury—or whether the Sun orbited before, between, or beyond those two. Now he knew. Everything fit. No wonder the beauty of the system prevailed over the absurdity of the Earth’s motion. He hoped his own conviction would convince others to see the spheres his way, but offered no proofs at this point. He had decided, he said, “for the sake of brevity to leave the mathematical demonstrations out of this treatise, as they are intended for a larger book.” Then he proceeded to count and clarify all the individual planetary motions, arriving, in the final paragraph of the Commentariolus, at the grand total: “Mercury runs on seven circles in all; Venus on five; the earth on three, and round it the moon on four; finally Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn on five each. Altogether, therefore, thirty-four circles suffice to explain the entire structure of the universe and the entire ballet of the planets.”