Kepler's Witch (30 page)

The folk tradition held tons of stories about people who had taken sick and afterward accused a local woman of witchcraft. In the stories, the sick person's family often beat the witch until she agreed to perform the magic rites. In some stories, the witch would tell them to lay a chicken on the sick person's chest to take away the illness. The chicken would soon die, but the sick relative would then live. Other times the witch refused, and they beat her to death. Things that night had gotten out of hand in just that fashion, for Kräutlin was drunk and angry enough to have run Katharina through.

Katharina, for her part, held to her story and, shaking all over with fear, denied any wrongdoing. She said that she had never made the Reinbold woman sick and could therefore not help her regain her health. Enraged by Katharina's stubbornness, Kräutlin grabbed his sister by the arm and threw her against Katharina, for everyone knew that witchcraft could be cured by “counter-witchcraft.” At this, Luther Einhorn sobered up enough to realize the legal danger he was facing. He warned Kräutlin against using force against the Kepler woman and then sent Katharina home.

As Johannes Kepler later pointed out in his letter to the Leonberg Senate, the entire affair was dodgy, for by forcing Katharina to perform this rite, Einhorn and the Reinbolds had solicited witchcraft. If the devil had actually appeared during the witchery, then everyone involved would have been in a lot of trouble, to the point of torture and death. Within a few days, the Kepler family filed a suit against the Reinbolds for slander. By the end of the year, Johannes learned of his mother's accusation, torment, and shameful treatment and immediately wrote the first of his letters to the duke.

Apparently the Kepler family's lawsuit was the first official legal action taken in this case. The Reinbolds had been gathering allies in the village, people such as the magistrate and the Haller woman, and orchestrating a whispering campaign, using gossip to poison Katharina's already shaky reputation. They had not yet made an official accusation of witchcraft, but complained about it only on the side to Einhorn, who then pressed the case forward.

 

F
OR ALL HIS DIFFICULTIES WITH MONEY
, Kepler had loved his time in Prague, for Prague was one of the great centers of the world, the home of emperors, and a meeting place of the greatest minds in Europe. After twelve years at the emperor's court, Kepler had been changed by the city, and he was no longer the provincial boy who had arrived in the city at death's door in 1600. After the deaths of his son and his wife, Barbara, he planned to leave the city to return to another provincial capital, where things were smaller than they had been in Prague, but he had remained in the city for a while after Barbara died. Barbara had not written a will, but she had made it clear that she would leave Kepler nothing. All her money went to the two surviving children and to the stepdaughter, Regina. Regina's husband caused trouble, for Kepler had charged the estate for Regina's upkeep and for her dowry. The husband, Philip Ehem, from a prominent Regensburg family, thought that Kepler had charged too much and wanted a larger share of the estate.

Rudolf, now deposed and sickly, had asked Kepler to stay on in the city, and since Kepler was loyal to his emperor even when the emperor was an imperial shell, stripped of power, he stayed on. Finally, Rudolf died on January 20, 1612, and Kepler had nothing left to stay for, so he took his children and all his household goods and rode out of Prague. He left the children in Kunstadt, Moravia, under the care of a certain Frau Pauritsch, a widow. Traveling on alone, he arrived in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, in May.

Linz was a provincial capital, and the people in Linz lived, worked, and fought like provincial people. Although that may have seemed comfortable in a way, Kepler's own mind had been expanded far too much by life in Prague, and the spiritual freedom he had first established for himself by questioning the Formula of Concord had grown in him as well. Not that he had doubts about the faith. He simply had a mind of his own.

His next few years in Linz were a lonely time for Kepler, for unlike Prague there were few people in the city who could match his erudition and his intelligence. Instead of welcoming him as the great man, the city
resisted him as outlandish, even foreign. The problems he had experienced with the Württemberg Lutheran church had festered and become dangerous. In his forties, Kepler was no longer the inexperienced, brash young man, and by this time in his life, after being the imperial mathematician for twelve years, he knew who he was. He knew his place in the world and the shape of his own life. Because of this alone, he became “a sliver in the eye” of some of his fellow Lutherans.

Instead of sending him into a depression, for once, this new isolation spurred him on. It called forth qualities in his personality: “the blind self-assurance, the demonstration of both piety and compassion, the grasping after fame, with surprising new plans and remarkable works, while the rest was a constant searching, interpreting, analyzing of the most of diverse causes, along with his tortured uncertainties about his salvation.”
³
Intelligence carries its own torments. Perhaps Kepler would have been happier had he taken a position at a university such as Wittenberg or Bologna, rather than returning to the job of district mathematician and teaching in a district school, but no place in the world would have quieted his great yearning desire for God.

He first started looking into the position in Linz to please Barbara, because she had never been happy in Prague and longed to return to Austria, to the small-city life she knew as a young woman. But now that Barbara was dead, the position chafed. He was responsible to a school administration, both civil and religious, once more, and no one among them could quite forget that he was the great man and that he had been brought to their city by other great men. Unlike in Graz, where his teaching position had become available by the death of another teacher, the position in Linz had been created for him, just to bring him to the city.

But there were compensations. Within a short time, Kepler made new friends—Baron Erasmus von Starhemberg and Baron Erasmus von Tschernembl, two of the most important Protestants in the region. He also made friends with several of the local lords: Herr von Polheim, Helmhard Jörger, and Maximilian von Liechtenstein. These men were kindred spirits who offered him their protection and their fellowship. Moreover, Kepler retained his position as imperial mathematician, since Emperor Matthias
had confirmed him in that job soon after Rudolf's death with a salary of 300 gulden a year along with 60 gulden added on to pay for his housing and firewood. Kepler was therefore able to maintain his status in the world, though the emperor retained the right to choose where Kepler would live. But Matthias was not Rudolf. He did not suffer from depression, as Rudolf had, but then neither did he have his brother's intelligence or his Renaissance love of learning. His need was for an imperial astrologer, not a man of science. He therefore permitted Kepler to live in Linz, far away from the court, and required his attendance only occasionally. This gave Kepler the time he needed to complete the
Rudolphine Tables
and to work on the composition of his masterwork, the
Harmonice Mundi, Harmony of the World,
which would include his third law of planetary orbits.

Six years later, in 1618, the religious pressure cooker that was Europe finally exploded. The Second Defenestration of Prague (the first having taken place during the Hussite Rebellion), then the Battle of White Mountain, and the flight of Frederick IV, the Winter King, led to the worst religious war in European history. The religious air in Linz, as it had been in Graz, as it had been in Prague, was electric with war fever.

The school in Linz where Kepler was teaching was about as old as the one in Graz, but it was smaller and less prestigious. It had been another Württemberg foundation, built in the latter half of the sixteenth century, but then it was closed by the Counter-Reformation in 1600 as part of Rudolf II's new series of religious rules. The school opened once again in 1609, however, as part of Matthias's concessions to the Protestant Estates. It had a rector, a co-rector, and only four full-time teachers on the faculty. Kepler's presence there gave the school an extra shot of prestige. The degree of installation, promulgated on June 14, 1611, declared that he was hired because of his “celebrated ability and commendable virtues.” He was ordered to complete the
Rudolphine Tables
in order to give honor to the emperor and to Austria, and he was expected to continue his own astronomical work and to do anything he believed to be useful and appropriate in astronomy, physics, or history.

In spite of his newfound freedom, Kepler was lonely in Linz. There is one quality that Johannes Kepler and his mother shared—neither of them
fit in. Both of them were stubborn. Katharina did not want to leave Leonberg, even when the townspeople brought her to court, even when they threatened her life. During one phase of her trial, she lived in Linz with Johannes for nine months, where she was safe from accusations. But she was never happy there and longed to return to her little house in Leonberg, where everyone hated her and where the tiger of a corrupt magistrate was waiting for her in the grass. Even after her trial, when the town rejected her utterly and threatened to stone her to death, she left Leonberg with great sadness.

Johannes, likewise, would not leave the Lutheran church in spite of its many rejections. He had been cast off by Tübingen; the theological beliefs he had developed as a young man had carried him further and further toward the frontiers of his own church, which, as his own fame grew, got the Tübingen faculty buzzing like a hive of bees. His own faith, his own reason, his own conscience taught him to think in ways about the ubiquity doctrine that differed from the Formula of Concord. The ultraorthodox church leaders at Tübingen accused him of being a hidden Calvinist, though he would never become one. Nor would he become a Catholic, in spite of all the pressure the Counter-Reformation brought to bear on him. He was a man caught between two iron orthodoxies, neither of which would bend, both of which required absolute obedience and conformity, and he could give neither.

The Counter-Reformation papacy had long since lost its Renaissance openness and had once again become enamored of the Inquisition. To be Catholic meant an unquestioning obedience to the church, and this obedience had to stretch across one's entire life into one's actions and beliefs. This was part of the Tridentine reform preached by the Jesuits, who had themselves taken a special vow of obedience to the pope. On the other hand, the Tübingen consistory demanded an equal level of obedience, of complete acquiescence to the Formula of Concord, the document that was meant to bring peace to the diverse factions in Lutheranism. Instead, it became the means of excluding men such as Kepler who could not bring themselves to conform to it. This conflict came to a head in the first few weeks of Kepler's life in Linz.

The Württemberg Lutherans were really a very tight group. Everyone knew everyone else's business, and they wrote letters back and forth across Germany about those suspected of heresy. In an informal way, they had invented their own inquisition, based on the village more than the city. Where the Catholic Holy Office had professional inquisitors, tribunals, and royal armies to back them up, the Lutheran inquisition had winks and nods and secret letters. In 1610, two years before Kepler himself arrived in Linz, Daniel Hitzler had become its chief pastor. He was a Württemberg-trained minister, another graduate of the duke's stipend program who, five years after Kepler, had taken the same course of studies. He was about as different a man from Kepler as one could imagine. He was certain of his orthodoxy and of the need for absolute conformity within the body of the church. Kepler believed that a man's conscience was inviolable, a matter between himself and God, and that one had a religious duty to reason through the complexities of the faith and to understand them. Hitzler believed that the individual conscience needed to submit to the church and that wild horses such as Johannes Kepler needed to be reined in.

Soon after Kepler arrived in Linz, he met with pastor Hitzler and requested Communion. During the conversation, he set forth the entire contents of his faith, including where he agreed with the Formula of Concord, which was nearly all of it, and where he disagreed. After all, self-destructive honesty is always the best policy. However, unknown to Kepler, Pastor Hitzler had already received a communication from someone in Württemberg, possibly Hafenreffer, informing him of the consistory's suspicions about the imperial mathematician, who had been a source of controversy from the time he entered Tübingen. Because Linz, like Graz, was a missionary colony of Württemberg, most of the people already knew about the suspicious nature of the imperial mathematician. Unlike with Galileo, whose struggles with the Inquisition had more to do with angry astronomers and philosophers and finally the proud intransigence of Pope Urban VIII, the persecution of Kepler, like his mother's later witch trial, was a matter of gossip. The Lutheran consistory in Stuttgart and the faculty at Tübingen considered Kepler to be an “unhealthy sheep”
who might infect the flock with his unorthodox ideas. This was not even close to the truth, for Kepler kept his concerns about the ubiquity doctrine within a narrow circle of friends. Ultimately, he believed that all Christians—Calvinists, Lutherans, and even Catholics—should respect one another as Christians, and that was the most heretical thing of all.

Hitzler took the letter about Kepler he had received from Tübingen at face value and demanded that the astronomer sign a copy of the Formula of Concord and stipulate to all of its provisions without reservation. This was the price of receiving Communion. Kepler told him that he accepted the Formula of Concord in every way, except that he had one small reservation. The pastor told him in return that it was all or nothing, and he demanded absolute obedience—for Hitzler, Kepler's personal faith was not as important as his compliance. In Kepler's mind, this meant abandoning his own conscience, his own faith, the thing that Luther had taught was the only way to salvation. It was his most immediate connection to God. Did not the Lutherans rebel against the Catholic church on the same issues? To abandon his conscience would be to abandon his faith.