Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother, James A. Connor, HarperCollins, 402 pages.
By Gene Callahan. Reprinted with permission from The American Conservative, October 11, 2004.

James A. Connor, formerly a Jesuit priest and currently a professor of English at Kean University, has written an engaging account of the life and times of astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, who lived from 1571 to 1630. Kepler is most famous for his three laws of planetary motion, the first of which advanced the revolutionary idea that the orbits of the planets are elliptical. Before him, all prominent theorists, including Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo, assumed that they must be circular.

While Connor does offer an overview of Kepler's scientific work, that is not the focus of Kepler's Witch. The author devotes much more attention to how the waves of conflict battering 17th-century Europe engulfed Kepler despite his lack of interest in politics and his devotion to the idea of Christian unity. Kepler's life was spent within the Holy Roman Empire, in places that today would be in Germany, Austria, or the Czech Republic. That put him at the confluence of the great currents of Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism competed for the souls of central Europe, each of them claiming to be the one true Christian faith. The result was decades of war, purges, persecution, and forced migration. Although Kepler disdained Christian factionalism, his scientific fame condemned him to embroilment in the general strife. The various sects were not of a mind to accept neutrality as a valid stance; one was either with them or against them.

The title of Connor's book refers to the trial of Kepler's mother, Katharina, on charges of witchcraft. The author treats her tribulations as an emblem of how ordinary people could be swept up by the larger tides of the time despite their efforts to avoid the deeps. As described by Connor, Katharina was "stubborn, cranky... and simply couldn't keep her nose out of other people's business." But other than her dabbling in herbal remedies, there is no evidence of her practicing witchcraft. The case against her seems to have sprung from personal malice and survived on political ill will.

It began when Katharina quarreled with a well-connected neighbor, who then claimed she had been cursed by Frau Kepler. This neighbor used her contacts to make sure that the case was pursued. Johannes's unpopular insistence on the sovereignty of the individual conscience then entered the picture. As Connor writes, to some of the locals, "as suspect as Katharina was... her son Johannes was far worse. He must have been crazy, and a witch himself, a follower of Copernicus and a heretic." Indeed, a small fable the astronomer had composed, about "a man whose mother introduced him to the demons of the air, who carried him to the moon," was introduced at his mother's trial, "as evidence of both Katharina's and Johannes's odious associations with the devil." Johannes, however, internationally famous and the Holy Roman Emperor's official mathematician, was not a target that a provincial official could hope to strike. Perhaps prosecuting his mother seemed like the next best thing.

The case against Katharina dragged on for seven years, from 1613 to 1620. Johannes did his best to aid her, writing most of her defense brief, petitioning noblemen he had met during his career on her behalf, and finally leaving his home in Austria to be with his mother for the close of her trial. She was declared guilty, but, since the evidence against her was circumstantial, she was not sentenced to death. Instead, she was subjected to the territio verbalis, in which the convicted party is brought to a place of torture. There, a torturer offers dire warnings of the consequences of not confessing her evil and renouncing the devil, while showing her the instruments of his trade. Katharina, despite the grim circumstances, con- firmed her reputation for stubbornness by refusing to admit any guilt.

Johannes Kepler's inability to rescue his mother from what were patently corrupt judicial proceedings, despite his fame and position, stemmed chiefly from his refusal to subordinate his own understanding of scripture and knowledge of God to any received dogma. That refusal denied him a secure home in any of the established churches, and, as a consequence, there was no powerful organization behind him in the legal or political struggle.

Kepler was born into the Lutheran Church. One of Luther's central ideas was that individuals could interpret scripture for themselves. But, faced with increasing dissension between Lutheran factions, its founder long dead, the church devised its own official dogma, the Formula of Concord. Kepler did not accept one of its crucial tenets, the "ubiquity doctrine," which held that Christ is present in the Eucharistic bread and wine because, being God, he is present everywhere. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, asserted that the substance of the sacramental offerings was physically transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Kepler leaned toward a third, Calvinist doctrine: the communicant received special help from Christ when receiving the sacra- ment.) Johannes was eventually excommunicated from the Lutheran Church for his deviant view. Nevertheless, he always considered himself a faithful Lutheran.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, aware of Kepler's uneasy relationship with the religion of his birth, made repeated attempts to convert him. Doing so would have been a public relations coup, as Kepler was not only respected for his scientific achievements, but also known to be intellectually honest and apolitical. Since the emperor was Catholic, conversion would also have benefited Kepler's career and improved the security of his family. Several Jesuit priests discussed the idea with him at various times. The Jesuits were the Catholic Church's intellectual advance guard, and, as such, they were quite familiar with Kepler and his scientific work. Indeed, Johannes was close to many members of the order, even staying at the homes of several while traveling. Their efforts had enough effect that Kepler said he was willing to declare himself a Catholic, but only on his own terms. In response to one friend's suggestion that he convert, Kepler wrote: "Just as I entered my life my parents initiated me into the Catholic church, sprinkled me with the holy water of baptism... Since that time until now, I have never left the Catholic church." But Kepler did not regard Catholics as only those who acknowledged papal authority (which he did not). He was willing to call himself Catholic, attend Catholic services, and even keep his differences of opinion with church doctrine to himself. But he would never profess belief in ideas with which he disagreed. The church would not accept such a conditional Catholic.

A second, related theme running through Kepler's Witch is that Kepler's scientific quest was motivated and guided by his faith. His philosophical views are probably best categorized as Christian Neoplatonism. He pursued mathematics and astronomy because he believed they could reveal God's harmonious presence in His creation. Kepler believed such chords resonated with humans because, to quote Connor, "God has planted even deeper harmonies, and the ability to recognize them, into each person at birth." Science served both to praise God and to bring the human soul into closer contact with Him. As Connor puts it, "all his science was at heart a prayer."

Although it has many virtues, Kepler's Witch suffers from a few serious flaws. For one thing, Connor's writing is fairly sloppy at times, which is especially surprisingly since he teaches English. For example, the fact that Kepler was friendly with many Jesuits is mentioned at least three times, two of them only ten pages apart, in each instance as though the fact had not been previously introduced. Perhaps Connor's target audience suffers from short-term memory loss. He describes Prague before the Counter Reformation as "a glorious hodgepodge of Catholic and Protestant and Jew," but says that afterwards Prague was "Catholic to the core." Then he notes "the Jews were still there." So did two-thirds of the "hodgepodge" remain, or was the city "Catholic to the core"?

In a passage addressing the execution in Prague of a number of Protestant rebels on the order of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, Connor first notes that there were 27 condemned men. Then he mentions that there were 27 coffins. Finally, as if presenting us with a great surprise, he adds that there was "one victim for each coffin." Did he worry that readers might suspect that some of the coffins had three or four bodies jammed into them while others remained empty?

Another problem is that Connor doesn't always seem to have a firm grasp on the theoretical points he describes. For instance, he says that since Kepler "identifies the created mind of the human being with the two-dimensional circle... therefore the polygons that could be inscribed inside a circle Kepler said actually existed in the mind." I must confess that I am completely at a loss as to how the first idea implies the second.

The author also seems to have the notion of "accounting for the appearances," which was the Catholic Church's model of astronomical research, precisely backwards. As I understand it, it meant that astronomical theories should be regarded as attempts to predict the movements of celestial bodies, rather than efforts to describe the true nature of the heavens. But Connor's version of the idea is that "not only was the model true. It was righteously true." A bit later, he says that the 17th-century belief in witches "was not a superstition, as some Enlightenment writers would claim -- it was a worldview." But are the two categories mutually exclusive? Couldn't one have a superstitious worldview?

A minor flaw, but one that I found frustrating, is that the book lacks of a map of 17th-century central Europe. The story deals frequently with Kepler's movements and a map would have made those passages much easier to follow for those of us not intimate with the location of Moravia, Swabia, Silesia, or Lusatia.

While Kepler's Witch would be a much better book if not for such lapses, Connor has still done an admirable job of conveying both Kepler's ideas and the historical context of his life. As noted in a jacket blurb by writer Larry Witham, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton have all had their day in the sun. Connor makes a fair bid to grant Kepler's his own, while also depicting his life as a paradigm of the challenge that genius presents to orthodoxy.