Cosmos - Carl Sagan [30]
Johannes Kepler was born in Germany in 1571 and sent as a boy to the Protestant seminary school in the provincial town of Maulbronn to be educated for the clergy. It was a kind of boot camp, training young minds in the use of theological weaponry against the fortress of Roman Catholicism. Kepler, stubborn, intelligent and fiercely independent, suffered two friendless years in bleak Maulbronn, becoming isolated and withdrawn, his thoughts devoted to his imagined unworthiness in the eyes of God. He repented a thousand sins no more wicked than another’s and despaired of ever attaining salvation.
But God became for him more than a divine wrath craving propitiation. Kepler’s God was the creative power of the Cosmos. The boy’s curiosity conquered his fear. He wished to learn the eschatology of the world; he dared to contemplate the Mind of God. These dangerous visions, at first insubstantial as a memory, became a lifelong obsession. The hubristic longings of a child seminarian were to carry Europe out of the cloister of medieval thought.
The sciences of classical antiquity had been silenced more than a thousand years before, but in the late Middle Ages some faint echoes of those voices, preserved by Arab scholars, began to insinuate themselves into the European educational curriculum. In Maulbronn, Kepler heard their reverberations, studying, besides theology, Greek and Latin, music and mathematics. In the geometry of Euclid he thought he glimpsed an image of perfection and cosmic glory. He was later to write: “Geometry existed before the Creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God … Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation … Geometry is God Himself.”
In the midst of Kepler’s mathematical raptures, and despite his sequestered life, the imperfections of the outside world must also have molded his character. Superstition was a widely available nostrum for people powerless against the miseries of famine, pestilence and deadly doctrinal conflict. For many, the only certainty was the stars, and the ancient astrological conceit prospered in the courtyards and taverns of fear-haunted Europe. Kepler, whose attitude toward astrology remained ambiguous all his life, wondered whether there might be hidden patterns underlying the apparent chaos of daily life. If the world was crafted by God, should it not be examined closely? Was not all of creation an expression of the harmonies in the mind of God? The book of Nature had waited more than a millennium for a reader.
In 1589, Kepler left Maulbronn to study for the clergy at the great university in Tübingen and found it a liberation. Confronted by the most vital intellectual currents of the time, his genius was immediately recognized by his teachers—one of whom introduced the young man to the dangerous mysteries of the Copernican hypothesis. A heliocentric universe resonated with Kepler’s religious sense, and he embraced it with fervor. The Sun was a metaphor for God, around Whom all else revolves. Before he was to be ordained, he was made an attractive offer of secular employment, which—perhaps because he felt himself indifferently suited to an ecclesiastical career—he found himself accepting. He was summoned to Graz, in