The Pursuit of Harmony: Kepler on Cosmos, Confession, and Community
336
The Pursuit of Harmony: Kepler on Cosmos, Confession, and Community
336eBook
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Overview
Harmony, Rothman shows, was both the intellectual bedrock for and the primary goal of Kepler’s disparate endeavors. But it was also an elusive goal amid the deteriorating conditions of his world, as the political order crumbled and religious war raged. In the face of that devastation, Kepler’s hopes for his theories changed: whereas he had originally looked for a unifying approach to truth, he began instead to emphasize harmony as the peaceful coexistence of different views, one that could be fueled by the fundamentally nonpartisan discipline of mathematics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226497020 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
"The Study of Divine Things": Kepler as Astronomer-Priest
In the town of Leonberg in 1581, the ten-year-old Johannes Kepler first dreamed of devoting his life to God. What he really wanted was to be a prophet. Even to this rather solitary dreamer, it was clear that the world desperately needed guidance, and as a prophet he would have direct access to God's plan for his wayward people. Yet he felt in his bones that he was too impure and knew that a life of prophecy was beyond him. If he could not speak to God, then, he would speak for him; he would become a Lutheran priest. Kepler pursued this dream for the next thirteen years, until, while he was completing his theology degree at the University of Tübingen, a letter arrived that was to change the course of his life. The Lutheran school in Graz required a new teacher of mathematics and requested that the faculty at Tübingen send along their best candidate. Kepler was their choice, and though he had no desire to teach mathematics (even though the subject was one of his great loves), he reluctantly agreed. After all, poor and dependent on the goodwill of his teachers, what else could he do?
In the years that followed, Kepler rose from his position as a lowly teacher and district mathematician to the post of imperial mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor himself. Though this no doubt comforted the man still continually plagued by fears of poverty, what comforted him still further was the way he recast the position of astronomer so that it enabled him to fulfill his earlier dream. "I truly believe," he wrote, "that as astronomers we are priests of the Lord Most High with respect to the Book of Nature." As an astronomer-priest, he believed that he could use his mathematical talents for the good of God and his church. And he ultimately claimed that as an astronomer-priest he had been able to fulfill the earlier dream of prophecy that had seemed impossibly elusive — he had been able to read the mind of God.
In this chapter, I focus on Kepler's early conception of the relationship between his mathematical and astronomical work (his science, in modern parlance) and his confessional identity (his religion). In particular, I consider the ways that Kepler hoped to use his mathematical astronomy in the service of his particular understanding of true religion. First, though, some contextualizing is necessary, for what place reason and philosophy (including both metaphysics and natural philosophy) should have in theology — indeed, whether they should have a place at all — was a contentious issue in the Lutheran Church of the seventeenth century. Delimiting the boundaries between various disciplines and choosing what metaphysics, if any, should inform one's theological views also formed a dividing line between confessions. Philosophy and science, that is, were often marshaled as weapons in the tense and volatile confessional battles of Kepler's day.
This was particularly true for the issue central to Kepler's own disagreement with the Lutheran doctrine of his age: the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. Varying understandings of Christ's Eucharistic presence formed one of the central dividing lines — and the harshest points of contention — between the three major confessions in the post-Reformation era. The debate revolved not just around Communion itself but also around the larger question of how Christ's two natures — divine and human — related to one another. When Christ had pointed to the bread at the Last Supper and proclaimed "this is my body," what did that mean? Was his presence in the bread and wine at each and every subsequent Communion real or symbolic, human or divine? Catholics traditionally relied upon the Aristotelian distinction between substance (or essence) and accident to explain the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. According to this perspective, known as transubstantiation, at the moment of the Mass the substance of the bread and the wine transformed into Christ's body and blood, while their accidents — their external appearance — remained the same.
Like his Catholic predecessors, Luther agreed that Christ's statement "hoc est corpus meum" implied his real presence in the Eucharist, though he took issue with the Aristotelian categories with which Catholics framed the debate. Christ's body and blood were, according to Luther, actually present in the bread and the wine, even if attempting to parse that presence in philosophical terms was a hopeless task. Luther did insist, however, that the presence of Christ's body and blood was not restricted to the bread and the wine at the moment of Mass alone. According to Luther: "Because we believe that Christ is God and man, and the two natures are one person, so that this person cannot be divided in two ... it must follow that he ... is and can be wherever God is, and that everything is full of Christ through and through, also according to his humanity — not according to the first, corporeal, limited manner, but according to the supernatural, divine manner." On the basis of the doctrine of communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties, Luther argued that all the consequences of Christ's divine nature applied equally to his human nature, since the two were one. As a result of this belief, Luther arrived at the doctrine known as ubiquity, referring to the omnipresence of Christ in both his divine and his human forms. This doctrine maintained that as God was omnipresent, so too was Christ's physical body to be found everywhere throughout the universe.
By extension, Luther did not assert a miraculous change of the substance of the bread and the wine into the body and blood, for Christ's body and blood were already there, as they were everywhere. The Mass was a powerful testament that Christ left behind for his followers, not a particular, localized miracle or transformation. Moreover, Luther argued that believers needed to refine their understanding of Christ's body and what its presence actually implied. Rather than a kind of pantheism, to which it steered dangerously close, Luther's doctrine of ubiquity maintained that Christ's body was not corporeal in the usual sense of the term, as it was not subject to any physical or natural limitations. Christ's body, according to Luther, was really present everywhere, but not locally so. The Eucharist did not link the body of Christ directly to the physical world, for the presence of Christ's body in the Eucharist could be understood in only a nonmaterial and nonlocal sense, as could the presence of Christ's body in the world more generally.
The Formula of Concord reinforced the Lutheran understanding of communicatio idiomatum and all its consequences for the doctrine of ubiquity. According to the Lutheran consensus articulated in the Formula,
because of the fact that it has been personally united with the divine nature in Christ, the human nature in Christ ... did receive in addition to and above its natural, essential, permanent properties also special, high, great, supernatural, inscrutable, ineffable, heavenly prerogatives and advantages in majesty, glory, power, and might ... and accordingly, in the operations of the office of Christ, the human nature in Christ, in its measure and mode, is equally employed from and according to its natural, essential attributes ... but chiefly from and according to the majesty, glory, power, and might which it has received through the personal union, glorification, and exaltation.
The Formula further emphasized the omnipresence of Christ's body by quoting Luther's words about the ubiquitous presence of Christ and asserting that this was true "even according to His human nature."
Calvinists sharply disagreed with the Lutheran understanding of the Eucharist, and much of their dispute centered on the Lutheran doctrine of communicatio idiomatum and the omnipresence of the body of Christ. While the Calvinists believed that there was a real presence of Christ in the bread and the wine at the moment of the Mass, they argued that this presence was not physical but spiritual — it was the presence of Christ's spirit, descending to the Mass in order to elevate those partaking of it. Christ's body, by contrast, was in heaven; the moment of ascension, according to Calvin, was the moment when Christ's body was physically removed from earth. Calvinists argued that the doctrine of ubiquity was rationally unintelligible — what did it mean for a body to be everywhere and illocal, when to be a body meant to be bound in time and space? Calvinist theologians adhered to the general maxim that "finitum non est capax infiniti," the finite cannot contain the infinite, in order to argue that the Lutheran idea of Christ's body and of the omnipresence of Christ simply made no sense. Theodore Beza famously summed up the Calvinist position at the Colloquy of Poissy when he argued that in the Eucharist, Christ's body was "as far removed from the bread and wine as is heaven from earth."
As should be clear from the Calvinist objection on the basis of rational intelligibility, reason — and by extension metaphysics and natural philosophy — became inextricably embroiled in post-Reformation Eucharistic debates. This was true even within the Catholic Church itself, as the Aristotelian physical system, with its distinction between substance and accident, was slowly replaced by the mechanical worldview and its emphasis on matter and motion alone, and the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation became newly open to debate and reinterpretation. And it was particularly true in the debates between Lutherans and Calvinists, as Calvinists increasingly turned to reason to support their own confessional stance against Luther's claim that the finite could and did contain the infinite when it came to the physical body of Christ. Indeed, Luther had asserted that the very idea of rational intelligibility could not and should not be applied to the divine. He argued that "nothing is so small ... that God is not still smaller. Nothing is so large that God is not still larger. Nothing is so short that God is not still shorter. Nothing is so long that God is not still longer. Nothing is so wide that God is not still wider. Nothing is so narrow that God is not still narrower." The realm of God existed above and beyond the realm of reason, according to Luther.
In the face of Calvinist arguments against the Lutheran position of communicatio idiomatum and consubstantiation, Lutherans had two possible strategies. The first, adopted predominantly at the start of the movement, was to do as Luther had done: to deny the validity of the Calvinist critiques by denying the relevance of reason and metaphysics to the discussion in the first place. In his "Disputation against Scholastic Theology," Luther argued that scholastic theology represented the inappropriate use of reason; God and his work could be understood only through faith, with the scriptures as the only guide. "No syllogistic form holds for divine terms," Luther wrote. Faith that relied on logic was not true faith but its opposite. True, Philip Melanchthon had found a place for natural philosophy within Luther's vision, but this was natural philosophy expressly concerned only with the discernment of God's presence and providence in the natural world, not a larger metaphysics that specifically bore on the nature of God's being. Following Luther's rejection of Aristotelian scholasticism, Lutheran scholars and the universities that housed them rejected the discipline of metaphysics, along with any attempts to reconcile reason and faith, or philosophy and theology. Christian mysteries were just that — mysteries, inaccessible via reason — and logic was not the method by which salvation was to be achieved. Lutheran universities in the sixteenth century slowly excluded metaphysics in favor of an emphasis on rhetoric, ethics, natural law, biblical exegesis, and natural sciences that were decoupled from any larger metaphysical considerations.
The second possible strategy in light of the Calvinist rational critique of Lutheran theology was to do exactly the opposite: to embrace metaphysics retroactively and to develop a Lutheran metaphysics that might refute the objections of the Calvinists. This strategy was adopted with increasingly frequency in the seventeenth century, a phenomenon that helps to explain, as Ian Hunter has, the reappearance of metaphysics and the new linkages between metaphysics, theology, and natural philosophy in seventeenth-century Lutheran universities. Lutheran Salomon Gessner, as Hunter notes, is just one example of this phenomenon. Gessner began his edition of a metaphysics textbook with the concern that since Calvinists were attacking the Lutheran conception of communicatio idiomatum, Lutherans needed to have actual tools to fight back, instead of just ignoring the attack. If his coreligionists might be taught to speak with greater subtlety and sophistication on questions of metaphysics, Gessner believed, they might have a better chance of defending their theological positions — key among them the doctrine of ubiquity — that the Calvinists attacked so disdainfully. Walter Sparn has likewise argued that the impetus behind studies of metaphysics in the seventeenth century was primarily theological and confessional; in Sparn's analysis, both the Lutheran and the Calvinist turns to philosophical inquiry were guided by theological beliefs and driven by confessional concerns. As a consequence, the different confessions developed very different philosophies of God, nature, and being to uphold their particular doctrinal positions.
As a young man at the start of his career, Kepler, too, sought to harness metaphysics — in particular, the geometrical worldview that underpinned his personal metaphysics — to confessional theology, but the direction of the linkage he envisioned differed markedly from that of many of his contemporaries. As I will argue in this chapter, Kepler's personal metaphysics was itself theological from the start, as it began with a particular conception of God and proceeded to link God, man, and nature via the idea of geometry. Moreover, it was absolutely clear and certain; it could be derived a priori via reason; and it could be grasped as true instinctively even without reason. Instead of beginning with the truths of Lutheranism, then, and developing a metaphysics that might uphold those truths, Kepler began with the truths of geometry and considered what those truths revealed about the doctrinal positions of his own church. In doing so, Kepler came to argue, much as the Calvinists did, that the Lutheran notion of ubiquity was rationally incomprehensible. In fact, Kepler believed that his Mysterium Cosmographicum, which demonstrated just how clearly the world was modeled on geometry, had made the theological objections of the Calvinists stronger and more convincing.
Naïve idealist that he was, Kepler believed that he could convince others of this too, and in so doing help bring a little more unity to a Christian world that seemed to fracture more every day. Kepler hoped, that is, to use his work as an astronomer-priest — especially his very first book, the Mysterium Cosmographicum — to help resolve the theological disputes that divided the world of Christendom. And it was that larger Christian world, and not the more limited world of the Lutheran confession, that mattered most to Kepler. Though Kepler continued to identify as a Lutheran to the end of his days, he fought for a conception of the church that was far broader than the rigid confessional allegiances of many of his contemporaries. God's church, Kepler argued, could not be identified with any one confession alone. Though Kepler believed Lutheranism to be the confession that approached the truth most closely, he insisted that each confession contained elements of truth and that the idea of confession itself was problematic, as it implied a body of Christendom that was already broken. The true purpose of those who served the church, in Kepler's view, ought to be to guide it toward greater unity, not to tear it apart still further. At the start of his career, Kepler hoped to use his mathematical prowess in the service of this unity; geometry, he felt, might be the means by which disputing parties could come to agreement.
The Mysterium Cosmographicum and the Idea of Quantity
In October 1595 Johannes Kepler, teacher of mathematics and district mathematician in the Styrian city of Graz, wrote a jubilant letter to Michael Maestlin, his former professor of mathematics at the university in Tübingen. Kepler had just made a remarkable cosmological discovery, one that did much to brighten the drudgery of the previous months away from his place of greatest comfort, the university, and his preferred subject of study, theology. He documented his discovery and sent a copy of the manuscript to Maestlin, which he titled Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum continens Mysterium Cosmographicum. "I truly desire," Kepler wrote to Maestlin, "that these things are published as quickly as possible for the glory of God, who wants to be known from the Book of Nature. ... I wanted to be a theologian; for a long time I was distressed: behold, God is now celebrated too in my astronomical work." Unable to devote himself to the Book of Scripture directly, Kepler had turned his focus to God's other book — the Book of Nature — which, he believed, also revealed God's providential plan. The astronomer who unfolded and clarified this plan, argued Kepler, performed a task analogous to that of the theologian — one illuminated God's words, while the other illuminated God's things.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
On Kepler’s Works and TranslationsIntroduction: Kepler and the Harmonic Ideal
1 “The Study of Divine Things”: Kepler as Astronomer-Priest
2 “Matters of Conscience”: Kepler and the Lutheran Church
3 “Of God and His Community”: Kepler and the Catholic Church
4 “An Ally in the Search for Truth”: Kepler and Galileo
5 “Political Digression(s)”: Kepler and the Harmony of the State
6 “The Christian Resolution of the Calendar”: Kepler as Impartial Mathematician
Conclusion: Perspective, Perception, and Pluralism
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index