Kepler's Witch (31 page)

Worse yet, Hitzler did not treat this affair in the way a wise spiritual leader should have. He broke all confidentiality and gossiped shamefully, spreading word of his dispute with Kepler out to the entire community. For most of the people in Linz, their minister had accused their mathematics teacher—that strange fellow from Prague—of being a heretic, and that was the end of the matter. Ignorance has its own kind of logic. “The chief pastor of the church and the inspector of the school have branded me publicly as a heretic.”
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With amazing naïveté, Kepler wrote a letter to the Stuttgart consistory appealing his pastor's decision. Either he did not know about the Tübingen communication, or he believed that his personal relationship with some of the members of the consistory, and with the duke himself, would counterbalance this. These were men he had spoken to, men who had congratulated him after he received the title of imperial mathematician. Some of them were men he had spent time with while staying at the duke's palace. They were people he thought admired him, or at least respected him. But on September 25, the consistory wrote back, answering Kepler's
appeal and the mask was torn. They had sided completely with the pastor and joined him in the condemnation.

In his appeal, Kepler had argued that Pastor Hitzler did not actually have the power to exclude him from Communion, because the dispute between them was over a question of conscience, and that any attempt to exclude him from Communion on the basis of his conscience would override Kepler's faith. He presented the consistory with two choices—either he be admitted to Communion in spite of their concerns or he would receive Communion elsewhere.

The consistory's answer to Kepler's first point was without exception—no true pastor of the church could accept anyone into Communion who outwardly pretended to be a follower of the true evangelical faith, but who could not follow that faith precisely, who followed his own path, wandering away from true doctrine, obscuring the faith with specious questions and even more outrageous speculations. No pastor could accept a man who was confused in his soul, for his confusion could spread to others like a contagion, nor could he accept a man who followed his own judgment on the faith and on matters of God. Nor could any pastor accept a man who could not commit himself strictly to clear statements of doctrine, by not ascribing to the entire Formula of Concord, without exception, for it was the symbol of the orthodox Lutheran church, founded in Scripture. Thus, they said, Pastor Hitzler was correct in refusing Communion to Kepler, who had placed himself outside the true religion by the things he had written and said. Kepler could not be admitted into Communion unless he abandoned his erroneous speculations and followed the true religion. They said that Kepler had shown that he was at odds with the orthodox doctrine of the faith on many occasions, dating back from the time when he was a student in Tübingen, and that he had denied the omnipresence of the body of Christ, that is the doctrine of ubiquity, and that he showed some sympathy, if not agreement, with the Calvinists. It did not matter that Kepler disagreed with the Calvinists in most things; it only mattered that he agreed with them in some things. This was a response worthy of the Holy Office in Rome.

The heart of the dispute was that Kepler had actually taken a critical stance toward Lutheran orthodoxy, and the church could admit no such criticism. But it was Kepler's personality to weigh and measure all things, to argue all things, and to come up with his own opinions. He could no more abandon that than he could abandon the Lutheran church.

Finally the consistory said: “You want nothing to do with our confession: how then could you ask for admission to Communion?” As to the scandal, they laid that completely at Kepler's door. If only Kepler would acknowledge the authority of the church, return to a complete observance of the faith, and thereby follow the will of Pastor Hitzler, the scandal could be avoided. And if Kepler tried to receive Communion outside the Linz community, then he would be furthering that scandal and would be carrying it into the heart of whatever Lutheran community would accept him. If this community opened its doors to Kepler and admitted him to Communion, it would then be as suspect of Calvinism as he was, as would the pastor who received him. Kepler should keep to his mathematical studies, they said, and not involve himself in theology, for this was not his profession. What's more, he should not bother the consistory with any more useless appeals. “Don't trust your own mind too much, and make sure that your faith rests not on human wisdom, but on God's strength.”

In its own way, the Lutheran church of Württemberg was undergoing a recapitulation of the Catholic experience. Catholics always believed that the faith was a matter of individual conscience, because one had to stand alone before God to be judged. But for the faith to be preserved through time and not dissolve into a battle of confusion, with each individual coming up with a personal interpretation of the Scripture, the church needed to establish some uniformity of doctrine. This meant a unified interpretation made by an exclusive group of official interpreters. This also meant that the church had to have authority, which included the power to compel its members to comply with its teachings, rather than their own consciences. In keeping with this line of reasoning, only three hundred years after the founding of Christianity, Augustine of Hippo encouraged the persecution of the Donatists, because they would not conform to the church's teaching about baptism. They insisted that all those who had
fallen away from the faith during the waning years of the Roman persecutions needed to be rebaptized. Augustine disagreed. Subtly, in any organization, religious or otherwise, solidarity becomes ossification, the faith becomes orthodoxy, and compliance becomes more important than conversion of spirit. By the time of the Reformation, Christianity had gotten to the point where authority itself had become the problem.

To reform Christianity, Luther and his followers returned to the idea of individual conscience and individual faith, ideas that had been asleep in Christianity for a thousand years. Luther and his followers, and the pastors who followed them, took the title “Doctor” rather than “Father.” They wanted to be seen merely as educated men rather than men who possessed semidivine authority. Kepler was very much in line with this Reformation thinking. The Lutheran church of Württemberg, however, in order to survive intact in the noisy marketplace of religious ideas, had to begin to develop an orthodoxy. Without it, what Luther and his followers had taught would have disappeared, dissolving into thousands of smaller denominations, each one based upon some private interpretation of Scripture. Lutheranism would have dissolved into the religious landscape altogether.

The very nature of human organizations creates orthodoxy, and orthodoxies, in turn, give birth to reformers and mavericks, men such as Luther and Kepler. Kepler, as a good Lutheran, found himself at odds with the Lutheran church, but as a thinking Lutheran he almost had to. He believed that to be a good Lutheran, he had to follow his faith, which meant attending to his own conscience, which also meant that if he did not agree with the Formula of Concord in every detail, then he must not sign it. This did not mean that he stood against his church; it meant that he participated in it more fully. For the Württemberg consistory, however, if anyone, especially a famous man such as Kepler, were to be allowed that kind of freedom of conscience, it could eventually spell the end of the church itself.

Kepler and his own church were at odds, and there was no solution in sight. But his position was not completely eccentric. He had searched the works of Christian antiquity, the writings of John of Damascus, Gregory Nazianzen, Fulgentius, Origen, Virgilius, and Cyril, and he could find no
trace of the ubiquity doctrine. It was, in his opinion, not part of the Christian heritage. Oddly enough, while the consistory condemned Kepler as a dangerous innovator, Kepler himself believed that the Formula of Concord, by including the ubiquity doctrine, was itself dangerously innovative.

Therefore, Kepler's fight with the consistory continued. He informed them in a return letter that he would avoid scandal and cause no further troubles for Pastor Hitzler. However, he would not abandon his request for admission to Communion, stating that he would return to it at a later date, perhaps in a different community. Neither the consistory nor Pastor Hitzler would let the matter rest, however. Much of Europe was heading blindly toward the Thirty Years' War, and the tensions between the Christian confessions drove the authorities in each church to demand rigorous compliance from all of their members. Kepler the famous mathematician could not be allowed to step out of line, which of course was the very attitude that led to the Thirty Years' War itself. Accusations against Kepler mounted daily:

Accusations grew up all around like fungus. Some people accused him of taking sides with the Catholics on specific points just to help his career. Others said he was a Calvinist because he believed in their ideas on Communion. He was like a weathervane turning in the wind—Calvinist in some things, Catholic in others. So he rejected the Calvinist doctrine of
predestination, calling it “barbarous.” This didn't make him a true Lutheran. He wouldn't accept Dr. Luther's great book on the captive will either. He even agreed with the Jesuits on the doctrine of ubiquity. So was he Catholic or Lutheran or a Calvinist? He wasn't any of these things, but a man alone, unchurched, a man who wanted to start his own confession, the Church of Kepler! He was a newcomer, and perhaps an atheist and a heretic. So much for the great mathematician.

Kepler was hurt to the quick by all these accusations. How little those who made them understood him. He struggled daily with his own conscience and could find no way out, for his conscience was the bellwether by which he made all his decisions:

Kepler could see what was coming down the road for Germany. This was not prescience, for just about anyone with an honest mind and open eyes could see that what he said was true. The true enemy of Christianity was sectarianism, and what Kepler wanted was peace and unity. He wanted the clouds of war then gathering to dissipate. “I bind myself to all simple Christians, whatever they call themselves, through the bond of Christian love; I am the enemy of misunderstanding, and I speak kindness
wherever I can.”
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In this, as in so many things, Kepler was a man out of time. “My conscience commands me to love an enemy and not harm him, to avoid adding new causes for separation; it tells me that I ought to be an example of moderation and mildness for my enemy; perhaps through my actions, I might encourage him to do the same, and then at last may God send us the dear desired peace.”
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For Kepler, it was the authorities of his own church who were beating the war drums, who had broken the peace. “My argument about religion is that the preachers are becoming too haughty in their pulpits. They do not live by the old simplicity. They arouse dispute; they bring up issues that hinder devotion, accuse one another wrongly, stir up the nobles and lords against each other, are too malicious in their interpretations of the actions of the pope, and cause many to fall away when a persecution begins.” In writing to Mästlin, he said “I could quiet the entire dispute by signing the Formula of Concord without reservations. Yet I cannot be hypocritical in questions of conscience. I would sign, if they accepted the reservations I have already presented. I want no part in the fury of the theologians. I shall not judge brothers; for even if they stand or they fall, they are still my brothers and brothers of the Lord. Since I am not a teacher of the church, I should pardon others, speak well of others and interpret favorably, rather than indict, vilify and distort.”
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But this did not end it. The war with his own church had begun and would not pass away that easily. The whispering campaign had had its effect. People glared at him in the streets. People warned one another against him. Those in authority tried to remove him from his teaching position, so that by the autumn of 1616 Kepler's position as a teacher was in question. The commissioners for the school suddenly discovered that they were paying too much for their mathematics teacher and that the money could be better spent elsewhere. The matter came before the representatives, and some of the members raised all their old objections to hiring Kepler in the first place. There were four groups in the body of representatives: the prelates, the lords, the knights, and the city officials. Old class resentments rose to the surface. The barons were for Kepler, and therefore the knights were against him. Baron von Starhemberg and Baron von
Tschernembl defended him once again, and their side won the day, but the matter stayed precarious.