Heaven on Earth Read online

  HEAVEN

  ON

  EARTH

  How Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and

  Galileo Discovered the Modern World

  L. S. FAUBER

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Accurate scholarship can

  Unearth the whole offense

  From Luther until now

  That has driven a culture mad.

  —W. H. AUDEN,

  Another Time (1939)

  “No mathematician is believed to be worth anything unless they have first been in trouble with the police.”

  —JUVENAL,

  Satire VI (ca. 100)

  Contents

  Introducing the Stars

  NICOLAUS COPERNICUS

  Nicolaus in the Old World

  The Fall of the House of Watzenrode

  In Opposition

  The First Copernican

  The First Account

  The First Dissent

  The Second Account

  Postmortem

  TYCHO BRAHE

  New Stars

  A Burdensome Privilege

  Hven

  Urania Through the Years

  Treasures on the Broken Road

  The Parvenu

  Goodbye to All That

  The Outside World

  A Letter Received

  JOHANNES KEPLER

  Fathers, Sons, Ghosts

  The Theological Turn

  Judgment

  A Letter Sent

  The Need for Harmony

  The Eyes of the Bear

  Two Families

  Lunacy

  Reversals of Fortune

  The War on Astronomy

  Ascension

  GALILEO GALILEI

  Descent

  Upon Leaving the Top of the Arc

  Pupils

  Horky’s Odyssey

  Their Rekindled Friendship

  The Naming of Things

  The New Man

  Their Dying Friendship

  The Renaming of Things

  First Signs of Night

  The Animals

  Wine and Women

  Two Winters and a Spring

  The Other Side of the Door

  A Bad Memory

  A Dove

  A Tongue of Fire

  Death and the Garden

  The Changing Tides

  Works of His Golden Years

  A Family Man

  The Dialogue

  The Teacher

  Lacunae

  Life Inside a Box

  The Four Last Things in Cruel Disorder

  Appendix: Seven Vignettes From the New Astronomy

  Reader’s Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Introducing the Stars

  In Europe, all throughout the sixteenth century, that dreadful era of civil strife and bloody rebellion, there lived four men who loved to watch the sky. Though they differed in nation, age, religion, and class, they were all united by a single discovery, a wondrous discovery, a truly unbelievable discovery that became the herald of every other social change within their violent, paranoid era. This discovery pushed the spirits of all four men together with such force that, even when separated by the chasms of time and space, they became, to one another, “fathers,” “brothers,” and “sons.” When they made contact, in books, letters, or person, it was with all the possible intimacy of long-lost relatives. They offered one another the same much-needed community they learned from their siblings, parents, children, and wives. Like most families, there was much love between them, but also much error. Like all families, their drama was too immense for a single life to contain.

  In the following pages, I tell the story of this drama, from its genesis as a passing daydream in the head of a little Polish boy all the way up to the grand world stage, in the trial of the century, awaiting judgment before the greatest political power of its day. The characters of this drama are now so famous they may each be introduced with only one name: Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo discovered the modern Earth, a moving Earth, and in so doing, discovered the uneasy conditions of modern life itself. Theirs is not only a story of individual genius. To tell such a story would not be a lie, but a withholding of other, more essential truths. Theirs is an intergenerational epic, a family saga, of the most unusual sort.

  HEAVEN

  ON

  EARTH

  NICOLAUS COPERNICUS

  A life, in which a boy stumbles into manhood

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Lucas Watzenrode his uncle & Prince-Bishop

  George Joachim Rheticus his acolyte & friend

  Tiedemann Giese his dear friend & fellow canon

  Andreas Osiander Lutheran minster &

  dilettante stargazer

  Domenico Maria da Novara his favorite teacher

  Erasmus Reinhold his second acolyte

  Martin Luther reformer of legend

  The Teutonic Knights a war-making crew

  The Popes whose passings keep the time

  as the second hand of a clock

  MAJOR WORKS

  Little Commentary • First Account • On The Revolutions

  YEARS ENCOMPASSED

  1491–1551

  Nicolaus in the Old World

  When Nicolaus Kopernigk was a gangling, unattractive teenager, with no lofty ambitions, he did not mean to trouble anybody. He liked math. He was quiet. He did not like to cut his hair.

  In the fall of 1491, he was packing his bags, preparing for a sobering departure from his childhood home in Torun. Within his mind lay the seed of a troubling idea concerning his favorite subject, astronomy, and the possible movement of the Earth. Such a seed had not yet had any time to grow, but he was, at that moment, readying himself for college, one of the rare places in medieval Europe where an intellect could flourish. He did not look impressive. He looked rather silly, if his portraits are any guide, with a tiny mouth inherited from his mother’s side of the family and big white rings around his eyes, which made the whole rest of his face seem dirty. So unremarkable was he that no one made any note of his leaving for a two days’ ride south through the Polish countryside to begin his adult years at the University of Krakow.

  Time makes strangers of us more than distance ever could. The world Nicolaus journeyed through was an old one: small, wild, and weird. There were no narrow buildings. There were no giant cities. There were no factories coughing smoke into the air. There was no place named “America,” no light bulbs, no vaccines, no nationalism, no cheap steel, no secular state, no accurate clocks, no feminism, barely any guns, virtually no coffee, absolutely no democracy, and almost no books. A healthy town would, at least, have a new mechanized corn mill to serve its citizens, outside which urchins, lepers, and women of ill repute would loiter in the shade; here was the first hint of modernity rising.

  Traveling near the fertile Vistula River, the boy saw enough sprung-up shanty villages to form a sorry picture of his old world. Most people were peasants, and most peasants were dirt poor. They had almost nothing, he observed: a single cow, a lonely pig, one “she-goat,” a sack of grain, all providing a meager diet of homemade cheese and black bread. From this pittance, food-rent, worth one day of work a week, went straight into the thankless bellies of the noble elite. Sometimes a farming man, usually one inspirited by a lusty new bride, got it into his head to run away in quest of a better life; such couples always returned dejected, within six months, punished by reassignment onto untilled, hardscrabble land. They had nothing better.

  The poverty of their condition brought many to the point of rebellion, especially in countries more distant from Rome, seat of the Catholic Church, the organizing principle of medieva
l Europe. Excepting a handful of Jews demanded by authorities for their necessary sin of banking, every European was Catholic by default; every poor little town had built a poor little church of stone, standing room only, with no stained glass in the windows. There the common folk crowded in. For them, this church was not only a religious institution but the means by which they understood themselves as social beings. God was in the audience of their every public ceremony, from the sacrament of marriage to the coronation of kings to the baptism of children to the divine appointment of clergymen, who comforted them every Sunday with words from the wonderful Bible. The Church soothed the peasant spirit and led many through an honest, peaceful, happy life of religious devotion.

  In the poor country, a parish was lucky to get a priest who could read and write, but ideally, a clergyman was the locus of wisdom in the Catholic community, entrusted with knowledge, which confused and complicated the mores of simple faith. Nicolaus was already skilled in Latin, and those close to him were expecting his college venture to result in a successful career with the Church. At the age of eighteen, he was already full of knowledge denied to common people.

  Pythagoras, he knew, was the first ancient to propose that mathematics was the key to understanding nature. This idea had so excited the Greek mystic that he had even started a pagan cult about it. This cult told all its members to never eat beans, and supposedly drowned a man for proving that the square root of two was not a fraction, so people naturally started to assume that they were a bit crazy. But their doctrine that math could be used to understand nature turned out to be pretty sane. After them came Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle, whose surviving works span every genre and were read by every serious student of Latin and Greek. Aristotle’s philosophies had become so hopelessly interwoven with medieval biblical interpretation that only the sort of extensive study Nicolaus made could distinguish the two. Aristotle had divided the world into physics, the study of change, and metaphysics, the study of the unchanging, just as the Church served as the holy intermediary between the material world and their transcendent deity. Aristotle had even referred to metaphysics as “theology.” Physics concerned life here on Earth, he said, which was dirty and smelly and rotten, while metaphysics involved things above the Moon, which were perfect. While these things above the Moon may move, their movements were not subject to change; they moved in ways predetermined by a “first mover.” The Greeks called this first mover Logos, Reason, the Divine Word, but all good Catholics called it God.

  Aristotle also argued that the Sun orbited around the Earth, but he did not spend long on it, for this fact was plain to the merest child. Just look at it. The Sun is obviously moving.

  The Sun moved in its great arch above Nicolaus, as he continued his journey southward to Krakow. The light from auburn maple smeared out in reflection on the placid blue river Vistula. Farmers paced along their furrows, planting hops and barley for the fall. They, more than anyone, knew how the Sun apparently moved. Their working lives were limited by its daily motion, the giant circle they believed traversed around the Earth every twenty-four hours, causing day and night. They also believed that the Sun had an annual motion, around a second circle, making daylight in some days of the year shorter than in others. This annual orbit caused the seasons, their frigid snows, lively greens, humid nights, and ruby leaves. Astronomers, who often loved fancy names, called the path of this annual solar orbit the ecliptic, because it was only on this path that eclipses could occur. The ecliptic was also named the zodiac, or “circular zoo,” because it traveled in a circle through twelve animal constellations. A farmer who was not alert to the motion of the Sun and its changing seasons risked a weak crop, and therefore a dead family.

  All the signs of the city presented themselves to Nicolaus as he made his approach to Krakow; the churches grew fatter, the people grew richer, the roads became worn and the air ran thick with the noise of business. After a passage through the blooming suburbs, the red-capped fortifications of the north gate roared up before him, opposing his old home in Torun, swiping at the hallowed sky. The city of old Krakow was less than a mile across, but the idea of it, the idea of the city, was the limitless future. Nicolaus entered in and went to college, in search of a new way to live.

  In 1491, the University of Krakow ranked among the greatest universities in the whole of Europe; that is to say, it was nothing special, a few cramped buildings stuffed into the northwest corner of the city which taught a couple hundred students at most. The medieval college was born of the monastery, giving first place to the study of God and the preservation of culture. In second place was language and rhetoric, a prerequisite to biblical scholarship and the translation of ancient texts. The bottom rung in this ladder of respectability was science, then called “the philosophy of nature,” and mathematics, which had little cultural value. Regardless of this hierarchy, every discipline was respected, mixed together under the liberal arts, so called because they were taught only to free men. The aesthetic wonder of a church hymnal or religious icon was to them also contained within a shapely polygon; the forceful logic of analytic philosophy was also found in the thumping meter of poetic verse. Knowledge of the world had been fiercely divided into distinct categories, but experience of the world had not.

  Nicolaus embraced this interdisciplinary education as any early humanist would. “Variety gives greater pleasure than all else,” he liked to write. Can there be any doubt, in such an atmosphere, that he attended lectures on astronomy? The professor at Krakow was a scholar typical of his kind, a mouse of a man with a beard as big as his head. He taught an academic astronomy which affirmed the common belief in an unmoving Earth, explaining all the more formidable details that such a worldview implied. And the most formidable detail of them all, he explained, was the bewildering orbit of the planets—or, as romantic Christians would have it, “the divine revolutions.”

  To observe these divine revolutions, sky-watchers in the fifteenth century had not yet discovered the benefits of glass; the naked eye was all they had. By looking up, they could see, alongside the Sun, only six more wandering objects: planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and, of course, the Moon. But rather than orbiting in a perfect circle around the Earth each year like the Sun, these six planets made all sorts of nasty motions: crisscross, turn around, stop, get bigger, go farther away. These nasty motions are called retrogression, Latin for “a backwards step,” and they have plagued astronomers since, without exaggeration, the dawn of history. The ancient Egyptians must have thought the planets drunk.

  Observed retrogression of Mars in Virgo. Each point is exactly ten days’ time apart.

  To predict these nasty retrogressions was, Nicolaus learned, nearly the entire purpose of astronomy, since its inception up to his present day. Aristotle had provided the philosophy, but it was for a man named Claudius Ptolemy, born in Alexandria five hundred years later, to provide the predictions. For those who thought like Nicolaus, this was when the real fun began.

  Just as the Roman Empire entered its decline, Ptolemy wrote Almagest, the culmination of his civilization’s knowledge of astronomy. The impact of Almagest upon Nicolaus’s culture cannot be overstated; the Arabs provided its reverential name, which simply means “The Greatest,” and the Europeans agreed. So epic was its argumentation and mathematical skill that it planted in almost every scholar’s mind the truth of an unmoving Earth. Despite being a fiction, Almagest is brilliant science; it is a book full of beauty, pragmatism, and craft, containing the first plausible method of astronomical forecasting, using nothing but geometry and a clever, creative explanation of planetary motion.

  A diagram for the Ptolemaic system of a single planet orbiting the Earth.

  Ptolemy explained the ugly, backwards retrogression of a planet with one simple addition. Rather than orbiting around the Earth on a perfect circle each year like the Sun, he assumed a planet moved around on a different circle, called the epicycle, which was itself moving in a circle around t
he Earth. A planet on an epicycle moved like a wooden horse on a little merry-go-round, which was itself on the seat of second, enormous merry-go-round. This combination of circular motions produced a planetary orbit with balletic dips and loops, which often looked like petals of a flower. That no one pointed out that an orchid-shaped orbit was physically absurd is hardly a surprise, for no one thought orbits had a whit to do with physics.

  The Ptolemaic model, seen here with zero, one, and two epicycles. The trails of dots represent the orbit of a planet around the Earth.

  Nicolaus was delighted by the grace of this Ptolemaic system. It was fluid and flexible; “perfection,” he called it, “almost perfection.” Generations of astronomers would modify it, adding and removing epicycles, although just one per planet was already enough to offer consistent and respectable predictions.

  As Nicolaus learned more astronomy, a queer feeling overtook him. A successful member of the Catholic clergy was wise to spend some time growing acquainted with astronomy, but he was spending more time than did benefit to his career or religion. He was enjoying mathematics too much for its own sake. “All good arts draw us away from vice,” he wrote, “but this art also provides unbelievable pleasures for the mind.”

  Nicolaus loved his astronomy lessons more than any other subject, and he yearned to drink it straight from the source. Fluency in ancient Greek, he was sad to discover, was not acquired overnight. Copies of Ptolemy’s Almagest in Latin translation were rare, but he decided to drop by a bookstore downtown and see what he could find. There, he purchased the first Latin edition of the classic of Greek geometry, Euclid’s Elements and a copy of the Table of Directions by a man named Regiomontanus, with the baby Jesus impressed upon its cover.

  For Nicolaus, reading this work by Regiomontanus was not like reading a work by Euclid or Ptolemy or Aristotle. Regiomontanus was not some stuffy Greek; he was a pleasant German who had died less than twenty years back. His life, alongside that of his teacher Georg Peurbach, forged a fresh European myth, at once both allegorical and attainable, of the modern astronomers who dared strive amongst the ancients.