Kepler's Witch (44 page)

Then the world collapsed once again. The emperor promulgated the Edict of Restitution, which commanded that all territories taken by the Reformation under the control of the Habsburg emperors should immediately introduce the Counter-Reformation into their territories. This meant that Württemberg, so long exempt from Ferdinand's program, had finally come under the ax, and what Kepler had long before written to Mästlin and Hafenreffer had finally came true. The Thirty Years' War, which seemed to have been winding down, suddenly caught fire once again, and as the fire burned on Württemberg burned along with it.

In response to some political encouragement by Richelieu, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden decided to weigh in on the side of the Protestants, and in June 1630 he invaded Germany at Pomerania. Wallenstein saw at once how much danger the empire was in and readied himself for war. Oddly enough, it was at this moment that Ferdinand removed him from command, the one moment when he needed Wallenstein the most. Ferdinand had become involved with his attempts to get his son Ferdinand set up to succeed him as emperor, and so he called a congress of imperial electors to meet in the traditional city of Regensburg. Young Ferdinand had already received the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia, and all that was left was his election as imperial heir. However, the electors balked. They were unhappy with Ferdinand, unhappy especially with Wallenstein, who levied outrageous taxes in his territories in order to support the war, and also because, well, he was simply too successful.

Maximilian, the Duke of Bavaria, who had been rewarded with Friedrich V's electoral privileges after supplying Ferdinand with the army he needed to crush the rebellious Bohemians after the Defenestration of Prague, was in secret contact with Richelieu. Jealous of Wallenstein's many successes, he intrigued at the congress to form an anti-Wallenstein resistance. They refused to vote for young Ferdinand unless the emperor broke with his favorite general. The emperor had had his own difficulties with the general colonel and agreed. Wallenstein was out, and there was no one strong enough to fight Gustavus Adolphus.

In the middle of this, Kepler decided to travel to the congress, and from there to Linz. He owned several government bonds from there, one for 2,000 gulden and one for 1,500, and wanted to ensure that they paid the promised interest, which until that time they had avoided doing. After some negotiation, the representatives in Linz told him to appear before them on St. Martin's day, which was November 11, and they would see what they could do about paying him.

Silesia was in the midst of battle at the time, as was much of the empire. Kepler left Sagan with little hope of his return. Whether he had a premonition or was suffering from depression once again is uncertain, but Bartsch later wrote that Kepler expected that his family would see the Day of Judgment before they would see him again. For the trip, he took a number of books, some clothes, and documents that contained “all his wealth.” Before he left, he wrote to his friend Johann Bernegger in Strasbourg, and gratefully accepted his invitation to bring his family to that city as a refuge from the endless war. “Hold tight with me to the only true anchor of the church—pray to God for our church and for me.”

On November 2, 1630, after a long, exhausting ride through winter weather, Kepler rode a half-dead horse into Regensburg across the stone bridge spanning the Danube. He came to a house, now Keplerstrasse 5, at that time owned by an acquaintance of Kepler's, an innkeeper named Hildebrand Billj, who put him up. Kepler was there for only a few short days, exhausted, drained, and depressed, when he caught a cold that turned into a fever. Much of his life, he had suffered with fevers, agues, and bouts of fatigue, possibly from an array of recurring viruses that Kepler, in his often depleted state, had become vulnerable to. The medical arts being what they were at the time, Kepler believed that his fevers had come from fire pustules,
sacer ignis,
hidden in his body. Very quickly, however, the fever spiked, and Kepler's life was in danger. Billj sent for a doctor, who bled Kepler to balance his humors.

Supposedly, as Emperor Ferdinand was about to leave on his ship, he heard of Kepler's illness and sent a group of his retinue of gentlemen to visit him with the emperor's prayers and good wishes, along with 25 Hun
garian ducats for the doctor. Kepler became delirious after that and drifted in and out of consciousness. Several Lutheran pastors came to visit him in his last hours, though they would not share Communion with him. According to one report, Kepler told one of the pastors that all he wanted to do was bring peace between Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists, and the pastor responded that one might as well try to reconcile Christ with the devil. The last clergyman to come, Pastor Christoph Sigmund Donauer, sat by his bedside and asked Kepler, moments before he died, about how he hoped to claim salvation. Kepler said to him, his voice weak and trailing away, that “his hopes were solely in Christ, from whom comes all solace, welfare, and protection.” A few minutes later, his breath, ragged and weak, gave way, and Kepler died.

Three-quarters of a mile inland from the river and from the Billj house on what is now Keplerstrasse, there was the Protestant Cemetery of St. Peter, and on November 17, 1630, they buried in that place Johannes Kepler, the boy his own family did not want, the boy who had grown to become the great man who proved Copernicus and helped set the course of science. The funeral was crowded with great men, all come to the city for the congress, many who knew him, all who knew of him. Pastor Donauer preached the sermon: “Blessed are they who hear the Word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:28). They then carved on his tombstone, which was later lost, a short poem that Kepler himself had written only months before. Was it depression or premonition?

Some claimed that they saw balls of fire fall from heaven the night they buried Kepler. Perhaps earth's war had touched heaven at last. Even dead and buried, Kepler could not escape the war. A few years later, Gustavus Adolphus attacked Regensburg. Many Protestants had come to that city as refugees, and they were caught between the forces of their emperor and the forces of their fellow Lutherans. A battle took place, in which cavalry overran the Cemetery of St. Peter, and destroyed Kepler's gravestone. No one really knows where he is buried today, though there is a monument.

 

I
HAVE BEEN TO THAT PLACE
. After staying in Weil der Stadt, I traveled on to Prague, where I had words with the German student in the train and made peace with him while talking about Kepler. On the way back, I stayed over in Regensburg for a day, and after visiting Hildebrand Billj's house and the room where Kepler died, I walked up to the park where the cemetery once stood. The memorial that reminds visitors of Kepler's grave stands in an open glade sheltered by elm trees and Japanese pine. An old oak, gnarled and twisted at the base, as if the wood has melted over time, stands nearby. It looks as if it has a beer belly. Across the bicycle path is a fountain, and lovers sit on the orange-painted benches, nuzzling one another in the sunlight. Kepler is alone, however, for his memorial is off to one side, untended and partly forgotten. An old man stops by and we speak in the no-man's-land between the languages. He asks me whose bust is on the pedestal, and I tell him Kepler's. He says, “Ah, Kepler!” as if the two were old friends.

The bust is under a concrete cupola supported by eight columns. Someone has marked black dots on his eyes, making him look like a sorcerer. All around are beer bottles—Löwenbrau—crushed cans and cigarette butts, as if one more recent army has camped out nearby. Two graffiti written on one column, in German and English, are
“Antipolitische Volkspartei, Freiburg”
(“Antipolitical People's Party, Freiburg”) and “Never Forget the White Rose of Resistance!”
¹²

Somehow, this seems appropriate. I say a prayer and leave.

But Ulrich's son Christoph knew that no reformation of the
Stift
in Tübingen could survive without a good system of feeder schools to select out those few with the right qualities to move on to service in the duchy, and so he set up the system of German and Latin schools. Through this system, Christoph wanted to offer education to “children of poor, pious people, of hard-working, Christian, God-fearing character and background, and suited for study.” Such children would then study to become Lutheran pastors or perhaps teachers or sometimes clerks. These children of the poor would then grow the ranks of the new middle management of Württemberg.

In Kepler's time, then, the primary course of study for a young intellectual was either law or medicine or the church, and the oldest schools were the monasteries. In strict monastic order, during the summer prayers started at four in the morning, as the deep night thinned into the coming day. In winter, prayers started at five, not because the boys needed to sleep, but because the sun rose later and without electric lights the school hallways must have seemed like tunnels. The boys attended Communion at least six times a year and took turns reading aloud the daily lesson. After prayers, they marched off to
lectio theologica,
or theological study, largely the reading of biblical texts, stressing theological and grammatical analysis. Each boy sat upon a backless wooden bench at a tilted wooden desk. Paper was too precious for note taking, so most of the learning was by rote and recitation. Then, of course, the principal would preach to the entire school and give the boys the proper Lutheran interpretation of the text at hand. Often these sermons were contentious, handling one at a time the latest theological conflict between Protestant and Catholic or sometimes between Protestant and Protestant. In the 1580s, during the time Kepler studied at Adelberg, these sermons would have targeted the Calvinists' doctrine of predestination and their doctrine on Holy Communion, a question that would later be the cause of Kepler's excommunication from the Lutheran church.