A More Perfect Heaven

by Dava Sobel

  At the time Copernicus concluded this dedication, in June 1542, the first few sections of typeset text—chapters 1 through 6 of Book I—arrived in Frauenburg for his inspection. They looked quite good. Petreius had chosen an attractive roman font, with large, elegantly decorated initial capital letters by the distinguished Nuremberg artist Hans Sebald Beham to inaugurate each chapter. The lone geometrical figure in these introductory passages appeared crisp and clear—evidence that the printer had commissioned skilled carvers to cut woodblocks for the 142 required diagrams. Petreius had volunteered to absorb this and all other production costs, including more than a hundred reams of P-watermarked paper to run off the several hundred intended copies of the book. Still, Copernicus could not help finding a few infelicities he wished to correct, and which he pointed out by return mail. Although Petreius could not halt progress to reprint every page that Copernicus amended, he noted many of the author’s changes on an errata leaf printed later.

  While drawing the several spheres of the planets with a pair of compasses, Copernicus inadvertently drilled a small hole in this page of his manuscript copy of On the Revolutions.

  Rheticus hovered over the press, proofreading. This might not have been a truly full-time job, since he read so much faster than the type could be set and inked in the large flat plate, the paper positioned and impressed, and the double-spread printed sheets hung up to dry on both sides. The slow pace of perhaps two pages per day, further retarded by the wait for woodcuts or other delays, allowed Rheticus a few weeks off that summer. Two visits to family and friends in and around Feldkirch, once in early June and again in September, barely diverted him from his duty to On the Revolutions. Nor did he shirk his primary responsibility when he prepared two of his own recent commencement orations for publication by Petreius in August.

  However, the time Rheticus devoted to negotiating a new teaching position—and his success on this score—abruptly ended his career as Copernicus’s proofreader. In mid-October, with less than half the book done, he left Nuremberg to accept the professorship of higher mathematics at the University of Leipzig, two hundred miles away from the print shop. Whereas before Rheticus had taught lower, or rudimentary, mathematics at Wittenberg, he would now lecture on advanced astronomy. He also realized a large financial gain over his former salary. Leipzig University’s records for 1542 state that when Rheticus refused the standard professorial pay of 100 florins per year, the authorities increased the offer to 140 in order to entice him.

  Although no correspondence between Rheticus and Copernicus survives from this (or any other) juncture, it seems likely the disciple would have informed his teacher that he had moved on and turned over the proofreading responsibility to someone else—to Andreas Osiander, in fact.

  Osiander had a history with Rheticus and Copernicus. His letters of the year before bespoke his great interest in their publishing venture, though his religious beliefs colored his opinion of all astronomical models and hypotheses. As he had told them, any number of competing sets of conjectures might account for the observed heavenly motions, but nothing short of divine revelation could determine which set, if any, truly corresponded to reality. And so, since it was impossible to know the truth, one astronomer should refrain from insulting another by insisting he had uncovered the actual workings of the celestial spheres.

  Osiander also had ties to On the Revolutions through Petreius, who was an acquaintance of several years’ standing. Petreius had published some of Osiander’s sermons, and occasionally called on his services as an editor as well as a proofreader. It is unclear whether Rheticus or Petreius chose Osiander to fill the vacant slot, though they might well have shared the same good opinion of his qualifications.

  Copernicus continued to receive batches of pages from the press all this while, although, after November 1542, he could no longer read and comment on them. In late autumn, at age sixty-nine, he suffered a stroke—a cerebral hemorrhage that raided his memory, robbed him of speech, and paralyzed the right side of his body. His friend Jerzy Donner, who had joined the chapter as a canon two years previously, alerted Giese.

  Andreas Osiander, Minister of St. Lorenz Church in Nuremberg.

  “I was shocked by what you wrote about the impaired health of the venerable old man, our Copernicus,” Giese replied on December 8, 1542. “Just as he loved privacy while his constitution was sound, so, I think, now that he is sick, there are few friends who are affected by his condition. I therefore ask you … please to watch over him and take care of the man whom you cherished at all times together with me. Let him not be deprived of brotherly help in this emergency.”

  At the end of December, when the news of Copernicus’s infirmity reached his relatives in Danzig, Jan Loitz’s father reminded Bishop Dantiscus that the boy stood ready to take possession of the fourteenth Varmia canonry—Copernicus’s canonry—as soon as Rome approved.

  Canon Fabian Emerich, the chapter’s replacement physician, judged the medical situation hopeless. Copernicus could do little but lie in bed, and he ate hardly anything. Attended by Donner through the winter and spring, Copernicus gradually declined, drifting in and out of consciousness until early May, when he no longer woke and slept but stayed asleep continuously. On May 24, 1543, the final pages of his book arrived from Nuremberg. Donner took them to the invalid’s bedside, put them in his hands, and the next moment saw the life go out of him—as though Copernicus had held on all those months just to see the thing complete, and now he could let go.

  They buried him, as was customary, in the sandy soil under the floor of the cathedral, somewhere near his own altar. No marker or epitaph designated his exact resting place, but that, too, was the custom.

  His will divided his cash reserve of five hundred marks among the children of his nieces—Katyryna’s daughters, long since married and mothers several times over. If he accumulated greater wealth through the years, he must have given it away before he fell ill. He left his medical texts to Emerich, and his other books to the chapter library. His own book, his only lasting legacy, was now an orphan.

  The final signatures of On the Revolutions to reach Copernicus contained the first few pages, including the title page, which identified the author without fanfare as “Nicolaus Copernicus of Torun.” After a lifetime spent in Varmia, he still belonged to his native city, while his work, Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, entered the world (as the bottom of the page attests) through the press of Johannes Petreius, Nuremberg, 1543. Above his own name the printer had placed a welcome—and a warning—to the potential audience.

  “You have in this recent work, studious reader,” Petreius announced, “the motion of both the fixed stars and the planets, restored on the basis of ancient as well as recent observations, and also outfitted with new and marvelous hypotheses. You also have most expeditious tables, from which you can compute those motions with the utmost ease for any time whatever. Therefore buy, read, profit.”

  The very next line sounded a caution in Greek: “Let no one untrained in geometry enter here.” This maxim, which reputedly appeared over the gate to Plato’s Academy, reiterated Copernicus’s own contention that mathematics was written for mathematicians.

  Turning over the title page, brave readers encountered yet another caveat, under the heading “To the Reader Concerning the Hypotheses of this Work.” This note anonymously acknowledged the clamor surrounding the publication of the book in hand:

  “There have already been widespread reports about the novel hypotheses of this work, which declares that the Earth moves whereas the Sun is at rest in the center of the universe. Hence certain scholars, I have no doubt, are deeply offended and believe that the liberal arts, which were established long ago on a sound basis, should not be thrown into confusion. But if these men are willing to examine the matter closely, they will find that the author of this work has done nothing blameworthy. For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and exp
ert study. Then he must conceive and devise the causes of these motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as for the past. The present author has performed both these duties excellently. For these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough.”

  There followed a familiar trope: “And if any causes are devised by the imagination, as indeed very many are, they are not put forward to convince anyone that they are true, but merely to provide a reliable basis for computation. However, since different hypotheses are sometimes offered for one and the same motion … the astronomer will take as his first choice that hypothesis which is the easiest to grasp. The philosopher will perhaps rather seek the semblance of the truth. But neither of them will understand or state anything certain, unless it has been divinely revealed to him.”

  Some readers assumed these words to be Copernicus’s own. Others recognized them as the voice of another, but were left to guess at its identity as they continued reading.

  “Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it. Farewell.”

  Although Copernicus himself had at last loosed his vision of “the composition of movements of the spheres of the world,” this anonymous preamble reduced his effort to the status of an interesting and worthy aid to calculation, wholly unrelated to reality.

  Chapter 9

  The Basel Edition

  Anyone can rightly wonder how, from such absurd hypotheses of Copernicus, which conflict with universal agreement and reason, such an accurate calculation can be produced.

  —ANONYMOUS HANDWRITTEN NOTE IN AN EARLY COPY OF On the Revolutions

  When Rheticus received his teacher’s finished book—when he realized that Osiander had won his way with it after all—he threatened to “so maul the fellow that he would mind his own business and not dare to mutilate astronomers any more in the future.” But he could neither prove Osiander’s complicity nor deny his own. Had he stayed at the print shop, he might have prevented this outcome. And so, with anger directed perhaps as much inward as outward, Rheticus defaced several copies of the book that came into his hands. First he crossed out part of the title with a red crayon, suggesting that “of the Heavenly Spheres” had been wrongly tacked on as an unauthorized addendum to the intended On the Revolutions—possibly to divert attention from the motion of the Earth. Then Rheticus put a big red X through the entirety of the anonymous note “To the Reader.” The crayon cross did not hide the demeaning message, however. Giese could still read it plainly in both copies of the book that Rheticus sent him, which he discovered waiting for him at Kulm, draped in the news of Copernicus’s death, when he arrived home from the marriage celebrations of Crown Prince Sigismund Augustus and Archduchess Elisabeth of Austria.

  “On my return from the royal wedding in Krakow I found the two copies, which you had sent, of the recently printed treatise of our Copernicus. I had not heard about his death before I reached Prussia. I could have balanced out my grief at the loss of that very great man, our brother, by reading his book, which seemed to bring him back to life for me. However, at the very threshold I perceived the bad faith and, as you correctly label it, the treachery of that printer, and my anger all but supplanted my previous sorrow.”

  Giese could not decide whether to blame Petreius or someone who worked under him—some “jealous person” who feared that Copernicus’s book would achieve the fame it deserved, thereby forcing mathematicians to abandon their previous theories. Still, Giese insisted that Petreius bear the guilt and be punished for his crime.

  “I have written to the Nuremberg Senate, indicating what I thought must be done to restore faith in the author. I am sending you the letter together with a copy of it, to enable you to decide how the affair should be managed. For I see nobody better equipped or more eager than you to take up this matter with the Senate. It was you who played the leading part in the enactment of the drama, so that now the author’s interest seems to be no greater than yours in the restoration of this work, which has been distorted.”

  Giese urged Rheticus to demand the opening pages be printed anew, and to include a new introduction by Rheticus, to “cleanse the stain of chicanery.”

  “I should like in the front matter also the biography of the author tastefully written by you, which I once read,” Giese said. “I believe that your narrative lacks nothing but his death on May 24. This was caused by a hemorrhage and subsequent paralysis of the right side, his memory and mental alertness having been lost long before. He saw his treatise only at his last breath on his dying day.”

  Giese suggested that Rheticus also incorporate in the new introduction “your little tract, in which you entirely correctly defended the Earth’s motion from being in conflict with the Holy Scriptures. In this way you will fill the volume out to a proper size and you will also repair the injury that your teacher failed to mention you in his Preface.”

  Rheticus inscribed this copy of On the Revolutions to Jerzy Donner, the Varmian canon who cared for Copernicus in his final days.

  Copernicus’s preface, addressed as it was to Pope Paul III, could hardly have acknowledged his Lutheran assistant. But Giese had just seen himself named in the preface as the friend who overcame Copernicus’s reluctance to publish, and he must have felt sheepish receiving the lion’s share of credit for what had truly been Rheticus’s doing. “I am not unaware,” he reminded Rheticus, “how much he used to value your activity and eagerness in helping him. … It is no secret how much we all owe you for this zeal.” It was no secret, and yet Rheticus remained anonymous while the preface touted Giese as “a man who loves me dearly, a close student of sacred letters as well as of all good literature,” who “repeatedly encouraged me and, sometimes adding reproaches, urgently requested me to publish this volume and finally permit it to appear.” The preface thanked only one other person by name—the now deceased Cardinal of Capua, Nicholas Schönberg, whose laudatory, signed letter of 1536 had been exhumed from Copernicus’s files and printed in full as part of the front matter. Alas, Rheticus, who had contributed the most, was lumped of necessity with “not a few other very eminent scholars” whom Copernicus acknowledged in a single nod. Giese stumbled over himself apologizing to Rheticus: “I explain this oversight not by his disrespect for you, but by a certain apathy and indifference (he was inattentive to everything which was nonscientific) especially when he began to grow weak.”

  In closing, Giese asked whether Rheticus or anyone else had sent the book to the pope, “for if this was not done, I would like to carry out this obligation for the deceased.”

  Rheticus followed all of Giese’s instructions. As a result, the Nuremberg Senate issued a formal complaint against Petreius, but the printer pled innocence. He insisted that the front matter had been given to him exactly as it appeared, and he had not tampered with it. Petreius used such heated language in his statement of self-defense that the Senate secretary suggested his “acerbities” be “omitted and sweetened” before forwarding his comments to the Bishop of Kulm. The Senate, taking Petreius at his word, decided not to prosecute him. And no revised edition of On the Revolutions ever emerged from his press.

  Johannes Petreius, citizen and printer of Nuremberg.

  Several times that summer of 1543, while Giese and Rheticus sought to defend their friend’s honor, Anna Schilling returned to Varmia. Although she had moved to Danzig after Bishop Dantiscus banished her f
rom the diocese, she still owned a house in Frauenburg. Perhaps, now that Copernicus had passed on, she expected no objection to her presence. Her visits each lasted a few days, allowing her time to remove her belongings and find a buyer. On September 9, she at last sold the property. The next day the officers of the chapter, who had been monitoring her movements all along, reported her to the bishop. They wanted to know whether she should continue to suffer exclusion from Varmia, given that the legal cause of her banishment had vanished at Copernicus’s death. It would seem she planned to leave and never return, having liquidated her last ties to the region, but still the canons posed the question, and Dantiscus rapidly replied.

  “She, who has been banned from our domain, has betaken herself to you, my brothers. I am not much in favor, whatever the reasons. For it must be feared that by the methods she used to derange him, who departed from the living a short while ago, she may take hold of another one of you. … I would consider it better to keep at a great distance, rather than to let in, the contagion of such a disease. How much she has harmed our church is not unknown to you.”

  From Leipzig, Rheticus sent personally inscribed, red-crayoned copies of On the Revolutions as gifts to his friends at Wittenberg. Their reaction to Copernicus differed markedly from the disciple’s own. Melanchthon, as intellectual leader of the faculty, followed Luther’s lead by spurning the new order of the planets on biblical grounds. One wonders whether Melanchthon ever read “the little tract” by Rheticus that Giese liked so much—the one in which Rheticus “entirely correctly defended the Earth’s motion from being in conflict with the Holy Scriptures.” If he did read it, he was not at all swayed by its arguments. At the same time, however, Melanchthon recognized the value of Copernicus’s contribution to planetary position finding, and commended Copernicus’s improved analysis of the Moon’s motion. The Wittenberg mathematicians—Rheticus’s former colleagues, Erasmus Reinhold and Caspar Peucer—echoed Melanchthon’s response. They skimmed over the heliocentric universe laid out in Book I of On the Revolutions, reserving their careful scrutiny for the technical sections that came afterward. They rejoiced in the way Copernicus righted Ptolemy’s wrongs by returning uniform circular motion to the heavenly bodies, but they rejected the Earth’s rotation and revolution. They ignored the reordering of the spheres, along with all the new idea’s implications for the distances to the planets and the overall size of the universe.