We have evidence that they talked about Kepler’s latest discoveries. But perhaps the most curious thing about this meeting is what they did not talk about.
Astronomy at this time was at its most controversial. Kepler was among those whose work called into question the orthodox view that the universe was a fixed and perfect creation. He demonstrated that planets move in ellipses, not circles, and he wrote about his observations of the creation of new stars (supernovas).
Meanwhile, Galileo’s pioneering use of telescopes was gathering evidence that supported Copernicus’ theory that the sun, and not the earth, was at the centre of the known universe. But in 1615, the Inquisition pronounced the Copernican theory heretical, and books that favoured it, including Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, were banned.
Donne knew about Kepler and had read his book De Stella Nova (Of New Stars), published in 1606. We know this because two years later Donne mentions it in Biathanatos, a tract arguing that committing suicide is not necessarily a sin. Donne used Kepler’s description of supernovas as evidence that medieval and classical authorities, such as Aristotle who had said that stars were immutable, could be wrong.
Now, knowing of King James I’s interest in astronomy (James had visited Kepler’s predecessor as Imperial Mathematician, Tycho Brahe, in Denmark thirty years earlier), Kepler was keen to meet the English delegation that had appeared on his doorstep. He wanted their help promoting his new book to the King. This latest work, Harmonia Mundi (Harmony of the World) mentions his discovery of a connection between the length of time it takes a planet to complete an orbit and its average distance from the sun.
Donne by this time was at a turning point in his life. His wife, whom he’d married for love and at great social disadvantage, had recently died, and now as a priest he was reluctantly accompanying James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, in a delicate diplomatic mission to Bavaria.
Passing through Linz, he had an unmissable opportunity to exchange some ideas with the famous astronomer. But what did they talk about?
Donne and Kepler were very different characters. Kepler, a man of empirical rigour, was physically frail and not the man of the world that Donne had been in his youth; a Lutheran, he refused to convert to Catholicism when that would have been advantageous, while Donne famously abandoned his Catholic upbringing. And one way of looking at their meeting could be as a clash of faith vs reason, because Donne did express disquiet with new science. In An Anatomy of the World, he wrote that "new philosophy calls all in doubt… Freely men confess that this world's spent When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new... Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone". And yet this is too neat. Donne loved nothing more than playing with ideas and metaphor, ingeniously adopting scientific ideas in his poetry.
Perhaps Donne’s speculative nature was brought down to earth, as it were, by Kepler’s academic scruples. But the only surviving evidence that the meeting took place at all shows only that they talked about Kepler’s book and his desire to promote it.
This is a letter written by Kepler to a relation in England, asking for help in this task. The letter says: “I have talked with a Doctor of Theology named Donne, who was travelling with His Royal Majesty's envoy, Mr. Doncastre [sic], -and appeared here on October 23… I told him that I had ordered the dedication copies [presumably of Harmonia Mundi dedicated to King James], and added that, because I had seen the envoy here, I wanted to ask his Grace to convey and commend the work.”
That’s it. It’s all we know about their conversation, except that it’s likely to have been undertaken in Latin, the usual lingua franca. But we can be sure they did not talk about an odd way in which their intellectual paths had crossed already.
This concerned Kepler’s Somnium (The Dream), a work featuring an imagined voyage to the Moon, which was circulating in manuscript. In the book, the mother of the narrator summons a demon, and Kepler became very upset that gossip began to spread identifying this character with Kepler’s own mother, who was in fact accused of witchcraft.
Kepler was so sensitive to this that he took offence at even slight provocations. One instance is in a later revised version of Somnium, in which he wrote: "If I am not mistaken, the author of that insolent satire called Ignatius, His Conclave, got hold of a copy of this little work of mine; for he stings me by name at the very beginning”.
The remark in Ignatius in question is a sceptical jibe at scholars’ employment of reason without faith. It refers first to Galileo “who of late hath summoned the other worlds, the Stars to come neerer to him, and give him an account of themselves" and then Kepler “who (as himselfe testifies of himself)…that no new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge”.
What Kepler can’t have known, was that Donne was the author. Ignatius, His Conclave was published anonymously in 1611 and Donne’s authorship not recognised until after his death.
As it was, Donne sailed on to Vienna, arriving in early November. Doncaster’s mission to help negotiate peace between Catholic and Protestant factions on the continent was unsuccessful, and Donne never took part in anything similar again, becoming Dean of St Paul’s in 1621. But it’s interesting that in the meantime, in 1620, Donne’s friend Sir Henry Wotton visited Kepler, to try to persuade him to move to England.
Kepler’s mother died in 1621, shortly after an official accusation of witchcraft, which she continued to deny. Kepler and Donne died within a few months of each other in 1630/31.
References
- Katherine Rundell: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Faber, 2022.
- Jeremy Bernstein: ‘Heaven’s Net: The Meeting of John Donne and Johannes Kepler’. The American Scholar, vol. 66, no. 2, 1997 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41212614.
- R. Chris Hassel, Jr: ‘Donne's "Ignatius His Conclave" and the New Astronomy’. Modern Philology. Vol. 68, No. 4 (May, 1971), https://www.jstor.org/stable/436567
