Heaven on Earth Page 2

  When young Georg became Professor Peurbach at the University of Vienna in 1453, student interest in astronomy had been so faint that he had to lecture on Latin poetry instead. But he was a hungry reader, devouring Ptolemy and the Arabs, and he managed to seat a classroom soon enough. By the end of August that year, the thirty-year-old gave the first major public lecture on planetary theory in Europe.

  In the half-awake crowd sat Regiomontanus, alert, carefully taking notes. He was an unheard-of specimen, the educated country boy, whose father’s lucrative milling business had sent him to college. His nickname, meaning “Mountainside,” was a send-up to this rural origin, but his birth name was John Muller, and he was Georg’s brightest student. Once he graduated and obtained parity with Georg as a teacher in Vienna, the two could hardly be separated. The bachelors lived side by side for the next four years. Their final collaboration was titled Summary of Almagest, in an effort to make Ptolemy’s difficult classic more accessible to Europeans. This Summary had many tricks up its spine, not only condensing Ptolemy but changing him, throwing out wrongful observations and tossing in elaborate mathematical proofs. Timid repetition was spiced by daredevil revision.

  At work on the sixth chapter, all this had so obsessed Professor Peurbach that he barely noticed he was dying. Regiomontanus recalled the scene in the preface to their Summary, which Nicolaus would soon read. “The memory is doleful and bitter,” he wrote.

  Shortly before his life had fled, squeezing my hand, with his head in my lap, he said, “Farewell, my sweet John. Farewell, and if the memory of your teacher might live beside you, the work of Ptolemy, which I leave incomplete, you must finish.”

  That all these math equations and abstract philosophies had blossomed into a friendship so rich and meaningful would surprise everyone except the mathematicians. Such seemingly austere things for them always carried a great emotional weight.

  Regiomontanus fulfilled Georg’s dying wish as best he could, completing their Summary of Almagest on his own. Then, facing life without his dearest friend, he traveled. He taught and wrote and studied, and though he never did find another friend to match, he left behind a host of students turned teachers. These teachers were German, Hungarian, and Italian; a cross-cultural community of scholars emerged through his effort.

  The wanderings of Regiomontanus served as an exemplar to Nicolaus, who dropped out from the University of Krakow to travel across Europe in 1496. This was supposedly for the sake of his career in the Church, as he reenrolled at the University of Bologna, in the Catholic heartland of Italy, to study for a doctorate in Canon Law. But working on his doctorate did not refocus his studies onto religion. On the contrary, it was in Bologna where he made his first friendship with an astronomer.

  Domenico Maria da Novara was himself a student of the legendary Regiomontanus, and this attracted Nicolaus to him immediately. One collaborator recalled Nicolaus as “not so much the pupil as the assistant and witness of observations,” but this hardly scratched the surface. Nicolaus rented a room in Novara’s house. The two had sleepovers, staying up at night in March, staring at the Moon. Decades later, Nicolaus would still source observations taken in Novara’s company. He listened to Novara intently, and though nothing remains of their conversations, Novara was known to be an adamant critic of Ptolemy.

  By the turn of the century, Nicolaus was reading professional astronomers, living with professional astronomers, and lecturing on professional astronomy, but as a profession, it was not for him. Astronomy was an uncomfortable science. The night sky did not contain, as far as any yet knew, money. Should the stargazing hopeful seek to earn their dinner, they had to convince patrons that the firmament was a matter of literal life and death. This was astrology, and all but the most flamboyant astronomers believed it the way admen believe their commercials: not a total fiction and great at moving product. The production of astrological horoscopes was so profitable that astronomers were often forced into it; Novara was legally obligated by his university post to create them. Nicolaus must have learned it, his own friends would adore it, yet nowhere in his writings does it figure. Astrology was a foundational part of the world in which he lived, but it would not be foundational to the world he orchestrated.

  So began Nicolaus Kopernigk’s seven years in Italy. He became more international than national, spoke more Latin than Polish, and even vacationed in Rome to celebrate the jubilee year of 1500. There, he Latinized his name such that he became, in title if not yet in spirit, Copernicus, Coppernicus, or Copernic. One might also name him canon; after his first year in Bologna, he accepted, by proxy, his first official employment in the Catholic Church, as an administrator back in the Polish province of Warmia. This post was a sinecure; it provided a tidy salary, did not require his presence, and demanded no work from him for the next fifteen years.

  Instead, Nicolaus put in a request with his Catholic chapter to allow him two further years of education at the University of Padua, which they granted, according to their letter of approval, “because Nicolaus promised to study medicine, and as a helpful doctor, he might one day advise our other members.” This promise was not a lie so much as a misdirection. Nicolaus continued lessons in Greek and even took up oil painting. As for astronomy, the university held a notable sect of Aristotelian philosophers, who spoke openly about the perceived failures of the Ptolemaic system.

  In Aristotle’s philosophy, uniform motion around a circle was said to belong to the perfect heavens, because this was the most perfect sort of motion. Perfection meant simplicity. But Ptolemy, having sullied his philosophy with applied mathematics, knew that planetary movements were anything but simple. To conveniently model the backwards retrogression of the planets, he was obliged to subvert Aristotle, with the final key part of his astronomical system, the equant.

  In Ptolemy’s astronomy, the equant was an imaginary point within a planet’s orbit. A planet ordinarily orbited the Earth with uniform motion, but with an equant, it moved in such a way that motion would appear uniform if you were standing at the equant point. The closer the epicycle got to the equant, the slower it actually moved.

  A diagram for the Ptolemaic system of a single planet orbiting the Earth, with its movement modified by an equant.

  Ptolemaic model of a planetary orbit with one equant and one epicycle. The epicycle slows as it approaches the equant, but its planet continues to rotate with the same speed.

  To every true follower of Aristotle, Ptolemy’s equant was an outrageous scandal. Aristotle’s heavens were aesthetic bliss, meant to contain perfect, uniform, circular motion, but motion with an equant was not perfect. It was nonuniform and ugly and had been catcalled as such for well over a thousand years by other Greeks, Arabs, and now, Europeans. Yet Ptolemy’s equant survived all its criticisms and was taught to Nicolaus, because it was so useful.

  Young Nicolaus had not been studying astronomy to be useful. He listened silently to the equant-based criticisms of Claudius Ptolemy and imagined different astronomies, for his own pleasure, unsuspecting of where such thoughts would lead.

  In 1503, Nicolaus concluded his additional studies in medicine and at last obtained his doctorate in canon law. He had just turned thirty, held good claim to be the most educated man in Europe, and had contributed absolutely nothing to society at large. Such ludicrous financial security and intellectual development had been possible only because of his family.

  Family was an unexpected dependence for Nicolaus to have, as he was an orphan. In 1483, when he was a mere ten years old, his parents had vanished: his father from a mysterious illness, his mother’s fate unknown. By a strange trick of life, the loss of both parents, which would have doomed most children to illiteracy, had steered him into the land of intellectual opportunity. He had been adopted by an uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, and Uncle Lucas was rich.

  A holy man, the Prince-Bishop of Warmia, Lucas’s nepotism had afforded Nicolaus his easy career in the Church. For all this guiding affection, though, Lucas was motivated by an old school of thought, which held that no relation was more binding than blood and no subject more appealing than Church doctrine. “Where there is justice, there is God,” he believed, “and our justice system forms the very foundation of a friendship.” When he finally beckoned Nicolaus to return to Poland with an offer of work as his private secretary, Nicolaus could hardly refuse; his uncle had supported him for twenty years. He set off back to his old home to return to the man who was father to him, to whom he owed everything.

  Before he left, he finished an oil painting of his face. Like so much of his life story, that painting would be burnt to a crisp in the fast-approaching fires of the seventeenth century, but if we are to trust a reproduction, it was a fitting testament to his education. Its style is refined, brushstrokes invisible, each colored object clearly delimited by its border, indicating an unhurried pace. Its subject, the painter Nicolaus himself, is smartly observed, yet his many features appear a little too disjointed, too inhibited to form a unified whole. His pursed lips are a scab on the flesh rock. His black hair is a mop on the head. His right eye wanders outside the skeleton. A better painting would have to be entirely different, possessed by the imaginative frenzy of medieval illustration, or the realist concerns of Renaissance formalism, but this quality of in-betweenness is its charm. A young man was crafting an art that was not yet his own. Much of the painting is obscured by a large off-yellow slab, on which is inscribed the words, “a true portrayal of Nicolaus Copernicus, made out of the self-portrait.”

  The Fall of the House of Watzenrode

  Uncle Lucas Watzenrode lived in a monumental castle, and he was a lion. He was a funny-looking lion, to be sure, with a tonsure and no mane. He had stalked authority, lain his traps, and captured it, lashing at any who scaven
ged the prey. The Teutonic Knights, a rotting leftover of the Crusades, had repeatedly made incursions onto his land. Each night, their junta prayed for his death; their grand master called him “the devil in human shape.” One of the burghers Lucas ruled over proclaimed that he was “a learned man, a pious man, skilled in many languages, leading an exemplary life, and yet . . . no one has ever seen him laugh.”

  He was the protector of the old guard, stern and sullen, with a crucifix round the neck. As an ordained, chaste bishop, he had a bastard, to whom he gave money freely and made sure received almost as fine an education as his adopted child Nicolaus. Family was, for him, if not an object of love, at least a badge of honor. To the millions he excluded from such a label, this was but a standard example of nepotism, corruption in the Church, a staple of medieval life somehow even more common than the Church itself. It drove the common people mad, but Nicolaus, as its foremost beneficiary, kept his thoughts apolitical and his mouth shut.

  Now that Nicolaus was officially a doctor, his Uncle Lucas requested him for a personal secretary, physician, and jack-of-all-trades; Lucas even convinced the Church to give his nephew a small boost in paygrade for the service. When the old tough fell miserably ill in 1507, his nephew loyally nursed him back to health. Nicolaus’s placebos were obsolete, saccharine stuff. He would take a few teaspoons of some light floral essence, black cardamom, violet, or rose, add a pinch of cinnamon and ginger for flavor, and then calmly fetch a bag of sugar and pile on half a pound. “Mix with distilled water,” he wrote with confidence, “Make pills in the shape of a pea.” A doctor’s genius he had not.

  Hidden by this quiet of daily life, there was a great violence coming. People could sense it. Nicolaus sat in on parliamentary proceedings, and witnessed his veteran uncle in peace negotiations with the Teutonic Knights, which were a spectacular failure. He was inducted into war planning and began to harden, if only a bit, in response to this new labor. In time, the unspoken purpose revealed itself. Nicolaus, the only male Watzenrode descendant with a good head on his shoulders, was being groomed for his uncle’s legacy, for the protection of their old province and old way of life. Prince-Bishop Lucas had offered Nicolaus everything he could, up to this final gift, his livelihood.

  His nephew looked away. Now over thirty, Nicolaus took the first useful independent observation of the skies in his life. It was an eclipse. He was unable to quit astronomy, unable to halt his artistic pursuits.

  While his uncle wanted him invested in church politics, he was dawdling with the ancient Greek he had been learning since college. This insensible hobby came to a head with the publication of his translation of an obscure poet, Theophylactus Simocatta, which was distributed by none other than his favorite old bookseller back in Krakow, and dedicated, with a most sincere and retrospective love, to Uncle Lucas.

  To you, Right Reverend Bishop, do I dedicate this modest gift which, however, can by no means be compared to your generosity. For everything of this sort which my meager talent attempts or produces may be rightly considered yours, as that which if true (as it surely is) Ovid once said to Germanicus Caesar:

  “In rapport with your mien, my inspiration stands or falls.”

  Often, academics of the age published collections like this, dispassionately, as proof of learning and a small contribution to the new culture of European scholarship. The translation likely began as a simple exercise in Greek. But perhaps some of the stanzas really did sneak their way into his heart. At least the beginning: “The cricket is a musical being,” Copernicus chirped, “At the break of dawn it starts to sing. But much louder and more vociferous, according to its nature, is it heard at the noon hour, intoxicated by the Sun’s rays.”

  In 1510, he declined to follow in his uncle’s footsteps. Sixty kilometers away, in the blanched coral brickwork of Frauenburg Cathedral, Nicolaus took up his post as canon of Warmia.

  On March 29, 1512, Uncle Lucas died. Three months prior, as morning light was breaking through the clouds, Copernicus observed Mars leaving occultation.

  From out behind the planet, he wrote, was revealed “in the Claws of the Scorpion . . . its first bright star.”

  He would always refer to his uncle as a “blessed memory,” but when pressed for comment on the passing of this man of last generation, a more vindictive young bishop spat out, “The noose has fallen. We are free.”

  In Opposition

  A rare privilege had been extended to Canon Copernicus by Pope Julius II just before he left for Frauenburg, allowing him to acquire multiple positions in the church hierarchy, but he never exercised it. The obvious next step in his career, his ordination, consecration, and acceptance of Holy Orders, he never trod. He already had an income. He had a horse and a page. At home there was a maid’s room and a working toilet. Most people had none of these things. He was comfortable enough and had other business to attend to.

  Frauenburg Cathedral became home to his starry passions. An entire room with a view was dedicated to his astronomical contraptions, all of ancient origin. His triquetrum, or Ptolemaic ruler, was a shafted triangle ten feet high, with appendages curling out like the fingers of a wooden giant; one joint could be directed out the window to take altitudes of a star. His quadrant, a trim square of wood a head or two above a grown man, was carved with a quarter circle and fixed with a small perpendicular block, whose shadow measured the appearance of the Sun throughout the year. Copernicus regretted not making it with stone, because it was warped by the cold. Old standards were present like the sundial and an armillary sphere, a handheld model of the solar system, its unlabeled orb hanging wanly in the center. All these instruments were glued together with Copernicus’s own sweat and blood, for no one could find him a worker more skilled in the art.

  Serious study demanded that he dirty his hands, but Copernicus was much more invested in beautiful theory. For a few inquiring friends, he wrote out a quick five-thousand-word treatise of his thoughts on astronomy. “The theories of Ptolemy,” he wrote, “seem very dubious, as they imagine certain equant circles, on account of which a planet never moves with uniform motion respective to its proper center.”

  A boy who learns to paint in childhood will grow into a man first motivated by aesthetic principles. Copernicus had been such a boy. It was his aesthetic principles, his quest for beauty, that turned the key in his mind, unlocking the shackles of tired philosophy. Sometimes these principles were archaic, even reactionary, and led his more obvious foundations into radical collapse.

  Copernicus agreed with, of all people, old man Aristotle. Uniform motion in a circle was, to them, more gorgeous than the nonuniform motion of Ptolemy’s equant. But in both Aristotle’s metaphysics and Ptolemy’s astronomy, planets were also held to orbit along the outside of spheres, all of which were perfectly centered about the unmoving Earth. In the manner befitting a mathematician, without any fanfare or further explanation, Copernicus wrote out a list of theses which he thought to be “more reasonable.”

  1. There is no center of all the celestial spheres.

  2. The Earth is not the center of the universe. It is the center towards which heavy things tend.

  3. All the spheres revolve about the Sun, as if the Sun were the center of the universe.

  This was heliocentrism: the Earth moves around the Sun. This idea, which would slowly infect the world like a righteous virus, began its ascent here, in this unremarkable, handwritten pamphlet, which Copernicus never thought to title or publish. Instead, he wrote out a few copies for fellow scholars, who wrote copies of their own, circulating it around like scientific contraband. Future generations would name it Little Commentary, as if to mock their humble origins.

  In this heliocentric system, the retrogression of Mars occurs between points 3 and 4, as can be seen by the intersection of Mars’s projections onto the night sky.