Kepler's Witch (40 page)

However, harmony is not created by the eyes or by the things themselves, but by the soul, which resonates with the interaction between sounds, colors, things, and ideas and builds a new beauty for itself. It resonates because God has planted even deeper harmonies, and the ability to recognize them, into each human person at birth. The structures of the mind are harmonious themselves, which, like the Ideas of Plato, are implanted inside us, and it is up to us to remember them. It is from the comparing of sensual experience that these deeper harmonies emerge, as the human person lives in the world, feels it, weighs it, and measures it, with each experience opening up to new experiences beyond that.

This is not a matter of bare imagination, however. The mind does not make things happen. The colors, sounds, and objects exist in the exterior world and will not disappear if the observing human person walks away. If a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound, but whatever sound it makes cannot form a harmony without someone to hear it. Thus, “harmony” is a primary category of existence.

Discovering harmonies is essential to discovering the world. In discovering harmonies, one makes comparisons between the two things that exist in the world—two sounds, two colors, two chairs, two people—in order to produce a harmony, and then goes on to compare that harmony and the internal prototype that exists inside the mind. This grand procession of harmonies has one ultimate function: “to reveal, to understand,
and to bring to light the resemblance of the proportion in matters of sense with that exact prototype of a true harmony, that prototype which abides inside the mind.”
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Such prototypes are the perfect harmonies, the Platonic ideas. These perfect harmonies are what the soul recognizes, and in that recognition are aroused the feelings of beauty and joy. I recognize them as I recognize the land of my birth, my neighborhood, my home. I am like an Alzheimer's patient who has been given a wonder drug and suddenly remembers everything. All education is a matter of remembrance, of bringing the harmonies to light. Mathematics is therefore the ultimate education, for it raises into the conscious mind those innate harmonies that we see projected into the world, in color, light, and joyful sound. And because these harmonies are innate, even the simplest people—the poor, the peasants, the barbarians, the uneducated—can recognize them, though they may do so unconsciously, for they emerge in the very act of perception.

Kepler rejects the idea that the human mind is an empty slate, a
tabula rasa,
and instead embraces Plato's notion that the harmonies are born in us, along with a secret storehouse of knowledge that is best expressed in mathematics. Our entire flesh, our bones, our eyes and ears are built for the discovery of this knowledge. The senses that we possess do not exist by themselves, but exist to serve the mind. The mind is not a sifting device, not a computer calculating numbers. The mind is the human soul listening to the universe and finding there a resonance with the mind of God: “If the mind had never benefited from an eye, then it would, in order to understand the world outside itself, demand an eye and invent its own laws for its creation.”
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All of this for Kepler the mathematician, as it did in its own way for Einstein, comes down to geometry. “Geometry, being part of the Divine mind from time beyond memory, from before the origin of things, has provided God with the models for creating the world, models that have been implanted in human beings, together with the image of God. Geometry did not arrive in the soul through the eyes.”

Kepler's reasoning, therefore, begins with the circle, which he accepts as fixed in the mind. One can inscribe a vast array of polygons inside a
circle. Those polygons, which can be constructed with a straight edge and compass, like triangles, squares, and octagons, Kepler says are entities and he considers them to actually exist. Those polygons that cannot be inscribed in a circle—those with seven, eleven, or thirteen sides—Kepler says are nonentities, for they do not exist at all. They do not exist in the mind except as words, for they cannot even be imagined. One could draw a seven-sided polygon, of course, but such a figure could not be inscribed inside a circle. For Kepler, therefore, the world is ordered between those things that are possible and those that are not.

All of this has metaphysical importance. His thinking here becomes more medieval than modern, for his geometric speculations take on emblematic significance within an Aristotelian hierarchy of perfection. If the circle is the perfect two-dimensional shape and a symbol of infinity, then the sphere is the perfect three-dimensional shape and is therefore the symbol of the most complete form of infinity. Kepler instantly identifies it with the Trinity. He places God the Father at the center of the sphere, for the Father is the center of all that lives and moves and has being. God the Son is the surface of the sphere—as the round, dimensionless center point explodes outward into space, so too the Son is the presence of the Father expanding out into the world. The Holy Spirit is the radii from the center to the surface, joining the center with the surface, Father to Son, Son to Father, and remaining constant at each point of the sphere. This is a strange bit of speculation to the modern mind, which does not work like this at all, but it made perfect sense to the intellectuals of the seventeenth century.
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Kepler further identifies the created mind of the human being with the two-dimensional circle, which expresses a two-dimensional level of infinity and projects onto a flat surface some of the very qualities of the sphere. Therefore the polygons that could be inscribed inside a circle Kepler said actually existed in the mind. The human mind is an image of God's divinity projected into bodily flesh.

Kepler finds three essential expressions of harmony in the world—in geometry, music, and astronomy. Geometry is the greatest of them, because it is the bridge between those harmonies found in the senses and those found innate in the soul. It is in music, however, that those perfect
harmonies best touch the senses. Here we feel them, see them, listen to them. In astronomy, finally, these harmonies express themselves in the structure of the universe. The motion of the stars is an expression of them, so that the human mind, which touches the shapes of circles, triangles, and the like, can also caress the universe itself. It is here that reason reaches its peak, for it is here that human beings shake hands with the Creator God. It is mathematics at its most profound, its most mystical. But like all mysticism, it requires a struggle, a dark night of the soul, a tramp through twisted jungles that clears the mind and prepares for those explosions of insight. In those moments when a person has wrestled with Reason itself, “then he awakens to the true light; he is taken by an astonishing rapture, and, rejoicing, he inspects the whole world and all its different parts, as though from a high tower.”
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K
EPLER RETURNED HOME
soon after his mother's trial had ended, in November 1621, but by then Linz had become a conquered city. Old Katharina had recently died, a broken woman, after all of Kepler's attempts to save her. And then he returned home to the flotsam of war. The Catholic League's success at White Mountain had crushed the Protestant revolt in eastern Europe and had left occupying armies all over the territory of the rebellious Estates. Bavarian troops still marched through the city as Kepler's river barge landed, a bit more than a year after the battle. As with all occupying armies, the Bavarians had made it clear who was in charge of the city, and Ferdinand, now firmly in power, had made sure that his rebellious subjects could see which way the religious world was turning. For a few years he waited, consolidating his power, but everyone knew that he intended to reestablish his program of Catholicization, begun in Graz twenty years before, that would sooner or later choke the Protestant schools and churches until they died. Pastor Hitzler, Kepler's old antagonist, was one of the first men thrown into prison.

Little happened for the next two or three years after Kepler returned to Linz. The city, like Kepler himself, was depressed. The Battle of White
Mountain had solved the problem of open rebellion by Protestants with a great iron boot, but from that time on all of Upper Austria held its collective breath. The Protestant Estates had participated in the rebellion, and some of their most prominent leaders, even a few friends and supporters of Kepler's, had been executed. Some were continuing the fight, but the fight was not going well. And so the presence of Bavarian troops was a running sore for the people of Linz, for these men were Germans, not Austrians, an occupying army intended by the emperor to send the people a message—the time of the “new doctrines” was coming to an end.

Still, the battle raged on in other parts of Germany. Friedrich V of the Palatinate began holding mock court in the Netherlands, but Christian von Braunschweig and Ernst von Mansfield, both followers of the former king of Bohemia, had swallowed their shame at Friedrich's cowardice and taken to the field to continue the fight. The emperor, who had eradicated all the new doctrines in Prague and in the rest of Bohemia, would soon turn his eye toward Upper Austria. Just as in Graz, Lutherans found it harder and harder to attend services. Protestant leaders, even some of the most prominent of the nobility, either converted or were exiled. Protestant ministers were either jailed like Pastor Hitzler or sent out of the region.

Generally, the people ground their teeth at the emperor's new restrictions, but what could they do? There were troops in the city. Foreign troops. Catholic troops. But surprisingly, nothing happened—no explosions, no outbursts, no demonstrations, no sudden reign of terror. In those two or three years, nothing much happened at all, except for subtle things. There were new restrictions on marriage and on burial, the old Graz story all over again, only this time it was unfolding more slowly. The gloom gathering over the city darkened bit by bit every day. The Lutherans waited for the terrible punch line, for the Counter-Reformation to arrive in force. They knew how it would begin: one edict, then another, coming faster and faster, until the Protestants would be surrounded by them. Then one day the emperor would simply tell them to convert or leave.

Reports of war filtered down to Kepler almost weekly: a bloody skirmish here, another battle there, someone denouncing the emperor, some
one being denounced. Kepler hated it, calling the whole warlike noise “barbaric neighing.” Worst of all for Kepler was the loss of intellectual freedom. No one could think honestly; no one could argue; no one could search for the truth in mutual fellowship. The slightest disagreement had become a cause for debate, and the slightest debate had then become the cause for denunciation. “What execrable stupidity forces these people to run into the middle of new fires when trying to escape old ones!”
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The world had become chaos all around him, with people running as if they were crazed from one battle to the next, and Christianity itself had become the cause for war.

Kepler's solution to this chaos was typically Platonic. Everyone should study mathematics and philosophy, he said, “so that the contemplation of these things would lead the mind away from desire and the other passions, out of which emerge wars and all other evils, to a love of tranquillity and temperance in all things.” This was a sweet idea, if a bit naïve. But it fit the rest of his mysticism—if one could not find peace on earth, one could find it in the contemplation of the heavens. But Kepler also understood that the world had gone beyond good advice. The people of his time had become beasts, driven mad by religion, which was a state of affairs that, in the long run, only God could cure. “The more anyone falls in love with mathematics, the more fervent will be his dedication to God, and the more he himself will make every effort to practice gratitude, the crown of virtues, so that he will join me in prayer to the merciful God that much more sincerely: let him crush the warlike confusion, eliminate devastation, snuff out hatred, and venture forth to discover that golden harmony once again.”
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Ultimately, Kepler was a man of hope. He believed that the war would end and that sooner or later Christian Europe would come to its senses. When that happened, he believed, God's grace would shine in the world, for those who committed the sin of war would repent in dust and ashes, and Europe would be reborn. But no one wanted to listen to such optimism. This was partly because of their stubbornness and partly because in this religious war Kepler was sitting out alone in no-man's-land. His own church, the church of his parents and grandparents, the church that had
raised him and had given him his education, the church of his own conscience, had rejected him. It had rejected him because, like his mother, he would not bend, he would not be the obedient believer that they demanded he be, because he would not believe in the authority of the consistory to overthrow his reason. It had rejected him, but he had not rejected it, for no matter what they thought, Kepler was a Lutheran—in his heart a member in good standing. The fact that they would not include him in Communion hurt him deeply, but in his own mind it did not place him outside the church. How the church leaders wanted to behave was their business.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Counter-Reformation was waiting to pluck Kepler like a pear. Because of his desire to treat all Christians with courtesy and to befriend anyone who shared his love of astronomy, Kepler had built many friendships among the Jesuits and often stayed in Jesuit houses as he traveled across Europe. Jesuits Johannes Deckers in Graz, Albert Curtius in Dillingen, and Paul Guldin in Vienna were all regular correspondents and often debated the fine points of theology with him. Each of these men was deeply interested in astronomy, and all harbored a not so secret desire to bring Kepler to the Catholic faith. They would fail. In his letters, Kepler repeatedly reminded his Catholic friends that it was their church that created laws to oppress their Protestant fellow Christians, laws that Kepler too had suffered from. They were the ones using the power of the state to silence opposition and in that were one of the worst offenders. Kepler reminded them that he was still a Lutheran and would remain so. He proved this when Pastor Hitzler, the Lutheran minister who had caused him so much trouble and done so much damage to him, was finally released from prison and exiled from Upper Austria. Kepler regularly wrote to him in Württemberg to send along his greetings and good wishes.
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