Kirsten and Tycho had found ways to adjust to the problems created by her status. She was mistress of the household at Uraniborg and probably enjoyed as much respect and deference from Tycho’s assistants and servants as any noble lady would have. However, when Tycho attended the weddings, christenings, and funerals of aristocrats, he always went without her. When noble and royal visitors, such as Queen Sophie herself, and James VI of Scotland, visited Uraniborg, Tycho’s sister Sophie served as hostess for the splendid banquets and festivities. Tycho’s relatives and Kirsten’s never mingled.
In June 1580 there had been an ominous new royal ordinance condemning common-law marriages as “an evil, scandalous life5 with mistresses and loose women, whom [men] keep in their houses and with whom they openly associate, brazenly and completely without shame, just as if they were their good wives.” The ordinance demanded that the clergy separate such couples and, if the couple resisted, deny them the sacraments and rites of the church.
Since all over Denmark pastors of parish churches owed their jobs to the lords of their manors, it was difficult to enforce the ordinance among the nobility. Tycho did stop going to Communion—perhaps so as to deny the church the opportunity of banning him, or to make things less awkward for the pastor of St. Ibb’s. But he and Kirsten went on living as before. Other noblemen married their non-noble “wives,” and this provoked yet another royal ordinance, in June 1582, which reinforced the ban on children of such marriages inheriting nobility, land, estate, coat of arms, or family name. The same ordinance, however, made it clear that a father could give money and personal property to these children while he was still alive, which they could keep on his death.
Even before the two royal ordinances, Tycho had begun to contrive a way to link the future of Uraniborg and the future of his children. Kirsten had given birth to a son at Uraniborg in 1581, and they had named him Tycho. A daughter, Cecilie, was born in 1582, and a second son, Georg, in 1583. In 1584 Tycho’s old preceptor, Anders Vedel, came for a visit, and the two men wrote a draft for a royal patent granting the island to Tycho and his male issue, provided they use it and its facilities for the pursuit of mathematical studies. To grant a fief in perpetuity was rare, to grant it to commoners was unheard of, but it was not unheard of for commoners to hold the position of university professor or head of a secularized monastery with an income derived from a landed benefice, in some ways the equivalent of a fief. Tycho and Vedel, in drafting the patent, implied that Uraniborg had more in common with a university than with a traditional fief, and that the directorship of Uraniborg was like a professorship or headship.
Tycho and Vedel had judged the situation well. When Tycho presented the proposal to Frederick, the king readily approved it, with the queen as witness. Unfortunately, nothing was written down, and no actual patent was issued.
King Frederick’s ill health had been a source of concern for more than a year, and he died on April 4, 1588, not long after he had given verbal approval to Tycho’s proposal. Frederick’s son Christian was still a child, and a regency council assumed the government of Denmark. In spite of the inevitable atmosphere of upheaval, Tycho had no reason for concern, for the new government was packed with his friends, relatives, and allies. In August 1588 he presented his plan for the future of Hven to the Regency Council, which not only issued the patent with a glowing statement of its desire to perpetuate the astronomical work on Hven far into the future, but also endowed Uraniborg with ecclesiastical incomes from canonries and other church offices, implying it could be headed by a commoner. Best of all, the patent laid down an order of succession for Uraniborg, giving preference to Tycho’s sons or sons-in-law. It referred to these descendants as “Tycho Brahe’s own”—the only official recognition that Tycho had children.
As favorable as this outcome was, Tycho did not allow matters to rest there. To avoid any confusion either in that time of political turmoil or later when the young king came of age, he obtained a patent signed by the entire Rigsraad and the Regency Council. He also persuaded Queen Sophie to put in writing that she could remember her late husband Frederick II stating his intention that one of Tycho Brahe’s own children would become head of the observatory. It seemed that Uraniborg would, as the inscription at Stjerneborg prophesied and Tycho had hoped for so long, become a permanent research institution under the directorship of his heirs.
fn1 Recall that the closer one holds a finger to one’s eyes, the larger the shift against the background appears to be.
fn2 Owen Gingerich and James Voelkel are two modern-day experts on the life and work of Tycho Brahe and the astronomy of his era. They have studied Tycho’s journals and laid out in all its paradoxical intricacy the chronology of Tycho’s campaign to find Mars’s parallax. The reconstruction of the activity that took place on the night of March 10 comes from their article “Tycho Brahe’s Copernican Campaign.”
10
THE UNDERMINING OF HUMAN ENDEAVOR
1589–1591
IN 1589 TYCHO Brahe was at the peak of his career, renowned in scholarly circles throughout Europe and approaching his forty-third birthday. Johannes Kepler was seventeen years old and waiting for an opening at the Stift in Tübingen. Finally, in September, space was available. Already in possession of a baccalaureate degree, he set off for university. Traveling through the forests of the Schönbuch, he carried with him only books and a few personal possessions, a stark contrast to the accoutrements that a wealthy young man like Tycho would have taken along.
The castle of Hohentübingen sat like a mother hen over the university town that huddled beneath it in the valley of the Neckar River. Narrow streets with closely packed high-gabled houses led from the riverbanks to the foot of the castle promontory. Kepler threaded his way through these streets and found the Stift, where he would study and have his lodging. The buildings were old, for this had been an Augustinian monastery before the Reformation. In Kepler’s time it was a seminary for scholars who were “children of poor,1 pious people, with an industrious, Christian and God-fearing character.” Somehow the question of Kepler’s father’s piety and industry had been overlooked, and Kepler had been accepted. His instruction, room, and board were free, and he had a scholarship of six gulden annually for other expenses. Katharina’s father had placed at his grandson’s disposal the yield of one meadow “for better and more dignified2 upbringing.” Thus Kepler was well provided for as he moved into the Stift with other young men in their teens from all over Swabia who, like him, aspired to careers of service to the duke or the church. In his second year, on the recommendation of the magistrate of his native city, Weil der Stadt, Kepler received a further stipend of twenty gulden. There were few periods in his life when he was so free of financial worries as during these university years.
Tübingen, like the University of Copenhagen, was steeped in the Philippist philosophy of university and seminary teaching. Though education at the Stift led to a specific goal and allowed students few choices about what they would learn, it was not a narrowly focused trade school. Theological studies didn’t even begin until the third year. Before that, in the Philippist tradition of broad education, Kepler had to complete two years of ethics, dialectics, rhetoric, Greek, Hebrew, astronomy, and physics. An exam in the spring of the second year marked the end of these studies in the arts faculty. After that came two or three years of theological work. Kepler was closely supervised and received grades every quarter. The Stift regulated student behavior almost as rigidly as the lower schools he had attended, and it expected its candidates in theology to avoid the disorderly student life enjoyed by others in the university.
Johannes Kepler was in his element amid all this knowledge to be had for the taking. Rarely has a young man been better equipped to make the most of an opportunity. Soon he had a reputation with teachers and students for being diligent, sedate, and pious, and also for being good at casting horoscopes—a highly valued skill, as Tycho Brahe’s experience attested. According to Kepler’s own report, he
managed to avoid conspicuous shortcomings except for a few outbursts of temper and a thoughtless prank or two, but he still had problems getting along with some of his fellow students. Particularly, he disliked one young man named Kölin, who wanted to be his friend. “Although [Kölin] once made friends3 with me he always argued with me,” wrote Kepler, and complained that an argument with Kölin was more like a “lovers’ spat,” though most of these arguments seem to have been about work. “With nobody else did I have a sharper and longer competition,” Kepler wrote.
Kepler’s work habits, though they were certainly productive, were (and would continue to be all his life) a source of some disquiet for him. He was in a state of “permanent repentance about lost time4 and permanent loss of time through my own fault.” He also admitted, “Although I am very industrious, I am the harshest hater of work. But I work for my thirst of knowledge. I am never lacking an object of my desire, my burning eagerness, to do research on difficult matters.” His enthusiasms often went beyond his capacity to carry through on them. “In my eagerness, I talked myself into a lot of things that looked easy, but that were difficult and time-consuming in the carrying-out, because the mind is finer, faster, and quicker than the hand.” His mind continued to leap quickly from one matter to another, sometimes among apparently unrelated subjects. “I talk well and I write well, as long as nothing is pushing me except what I have already thought of, but in reading and writing I continually start thinking about new things, words, figures of speech, arguments, new insights and understanding, what should be said and what should not be said.”
Among the activities that tempted him from his studies were the theatrical productions that the Stift students presented at Shrovetide. The subject was always either biblical or classical, and since there were no women at the Stift, students like Johannes who were slight of stature and not too loutish or clumsy played the female roles. Johannes had the part of Mariamne in a tragedy about John the Baptist. Unfortunately the play was performed in the open marketplace, and Shrovetide was in midwinter. That and the overexcitement caused him to contract a “feverish illness”—one of many bouts of bad health that threatened to hamper his studies.
Early in his university career, Kepler foresaw that theology and mathematics, including astronomy, were always going to be linked in his quest to discover for himself what was true and what was not. He was fortunate to have Michael Mästlin for his teacher of mathematics and astronomy. Mästlin had won Tycho Brahe’s admiration in 1578, when Tycho was collecting publications about the comet of 1577 through friends abroad. Mästlin’s report stood out from the others. Compared with Tycho’s sophisticated methods, Mästlin’s were primitive: He had observed the comet by holding up a taut string to line up reference stars and then looked up those stars in the Copernican Prutenic Tables to find their positions. The results were of great interest to Tycho, for both men had reached the same conclusion, with Mästlin’s observations being slightly more accurate. In a gracious letter written through a third party, Tycho suggested that they exchange observations and indicated that Tycho would be pleased to promote Mästlin’s career in any way possible. At that juncture, Tycho was willing to share his work and findings with other astronomers and engage in an exchange of ideas.
The University of Tübingen in Kepler’s day still officially taught Ptolemaic astronomy, and Mästlin gave his students a good grounding in it. However, though he was a cautious man and far from out-spoken on the subject, he was one of a mere handful of scholars in all Europe who believed that Copernicus’s system of the cosmos should be taken literally, that the planets, including Earth, did in fact orbit the Sun.
Kepler also encountered the writings of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who had insisted a century before Copernicus that Earth did not lie motionless in the center of the universe. Kepler reported, “I have by degrees5—partly out of Mästlin’s lectures, partly out of myself—collected all the mathematical advantages which Copernicus has over Ptolemy.” Kepler soon came to agree with Mästlin, and he added a religious spin of his own to Copernican astronomy that made it seem to him even more likely to be correct.
In a universe created in the image of God, it made sense that the Sun, the brightest and most splendid of all objects, the source of light and warmth, should symbolize its Creator and be the center of all things. This was not an original idea. As early as the fifth century B.C. some Pythagoreans, in a pagan society, had thought similarly, except that they made the center of the universe not Earth or the Sun but an invisible fire. Classically educated Kepler was not ignorant of the Pythagoreans.
Kepler’s idea went further. In both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems, the stars were in the outermost sphere. This sphere enclosed the universe and defined the extent of its space. To Kepler the sphere of the stars symbolized Christ,6 the Son of God. Kepler further reasoned that a sphere was generated by an infinite number of equal straight lines radiating from its center. Hence, the area between the symbol of God the Father, in the center, and the symbol of God the Son, encompassing the universe, represented the third member of the Christian Trinity, the Holy Spirit. In keeping with Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the three united in one. Neither in the spiritual universe nor in the physical universe could one of the three exist alone. Each required the others.
Kepler came openly to the defense of Copernican astronomy in two formal academic debates7 during his university years. He used his religious arguments along with others that sounded more like those of an astronomer. For instance, he argued that the time each planet takes to complete its orbit, and the planets’ distances from the Sun, made better sense in the Copernican arrangement. The Sun was the source of all change and motion, and therefore it would not be surprising to find that the closer a planet was to the Sun, the faster it traveled—a line of thought that would prove fruitful for Kepler in the years to come.
From the Pythagoreans and Plato, as well as from neo-Platonic thinkers of Kepler’s own era, he absorbed another idea that under-girded his preference for the Copernican system and guided his speculation and the course of his research from that time on. The philosophy that had impelled Copernicus to put the Sun in the center of the universe and had inspired the design of Tycho’s Uraniborg was the worldview insisting that a profound hidden harmony, simplicity, and symmetry must surely underlie all the apparent complication and complexity of nature. This notion set fire to the spiritual and scientific imagination of young Kepler. A universe created by God could not be other than the perfect expression of such underlying order. What the goal of transforming astronomy was for Tycho Brahe, the search for this harmony in nature became for Kepler: an obsession that would occupy him for a lifetime.
Although during his student years Kepler worked busily and happily on astronomical questions and even wrote an essay about how the movements of the heavens would look from the Moon, he apparently remained oblivious to the possibility of pursuing any career other than theology. He passed the examination that signaled the end of his education in the arts, placing second among fourteen candidates, and received his master’s degree in August 1591. He was nineteen. In a letter requesting that his scholarship be continued, the university senate paid him a tribute: “Young Kepler8 has such an extraordinary and splendid intellect that something special can be expected from him.”
Kepler began the course of theological studies as something of a rebel, at least privately, for his earlier religious scruples continued. He now entered the realm of powerful men who opposed Calvinist teaching as ferociously as they did Catholicism. On such questions Kepler wisely chose to keep his thoughts to himself, not even sharing them with those mentors who most cherished him as a pupil. But in the privacy of his own mind, doubts about some Lutheran doctrines so oppressed him that he had to, as he put it, push aside all these complicated matters and sweep them completely out of his heart when he received Communion.
Meanwhile, the theological infighting that he now witnessed more closely as a student of t
heology in one of the leading schools so repelled Kepler that he grew to despise the entire controversy. He felt that such behavior was completely at odds with Christ’s teaching, and he believed more strongly than ever that mutual tolerance between the divisions of the Reformation church was the only appropriate course. He was a devout Christian, and all his life this continued to mean that when it came to the intricacies of doctrine, he would not mindlessly accept the dicta of others.
However much Kepler’s professors guessed about his views or shook their heads at his occasional attempts to defend Copernican theory, they nevertheless continued to recognize his promise. Kepler, though inwardly nagged by doctrinal doubts, had good reason to envision a smooth road lying before him and to imagine himself in clerical robes in a pulpit. Meanwhile, immersed in his studies, he was spending one of the happiest periods of his life. He would later conclude that whatever other forces came into play—exceptional insight into his talents, unfavorable judgment about his unorthodox views, or simple bureaucratic irrationality—it was definitely the will of God that brought an end to his happiness and set in motion a sudden and staggering change of plans.
The third theological year9 at Tübingen was probably a “holding year” of sorts, during which students who had completed their studies sought and found jobs. Just short of the end of this year, Kepler received the devastating news that his time at his beloved university was to end abruptly, and not in the way he had intended. A Protestant seminary school in Graz, Styria, in southern Austria, needed a mathematics teacher who knew history and Greek. The school appealed to the University of Tübingen, and Tübingen chose Kepler.
Graz seemed impossibly remote, in an area that was completely foreign to him. He had no plan or desire to be a mathematics teacher: He loved the subject and thought he might have a talent for it, but he considered himself not at all accomplished yet as a mathematician. He had been certain of his calling to be a pastor and serve his church. Surely, he thought, the move to Graz could not be God’s will any more than it was his own.
Tycho and Kepler Page 15
