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336 12 Kepler’s Early Audiences, 1596–1600 The mysTerium cosmograPhicum The spaCe of reCepTion Kepler’s early representation of the heavens embodied an unprecedented convergence of elements in the political space of the Tübingen theological orthodoxy. The Mysterium Cosmographicum aimed for a rigorous justification of the loose aesthetic standard that Copernicus had used to warrant a strong sense of world system, one that involved an interdependency of elements. This mathematical aesthetic never quite shook off all traces of its origins in classical literary theory (Horace), architecture (vitruvius), music (Boethius), and art (Alberti), but Kepler tried the new tack of wedding it to a theological physics and a metaphysics of geometrical archetypes. His arguing of a rich and assertive Neopythagorean Platonism against Liebler’s Melanchthonian natural philosophy and his pushing of a Platonic reading of Genesis in the house of the theologians underlines the radical boldness of Kepler’s vision. He was as yet uncertain how to construct the physics (or metaphysics) of a Copernican astrology.1 But he had managed to join a somewhat robust, even if idiosyncratic, physics to the Copernican astronomical premises that pushed not only the planets but also the limits of what Maestlin, Kepler’s strongest advocate, regarded as the domain of the thinkable. The fertility of Kepler’s conception, joined to its transgressive audacity, made it very hot to handle. Without Maestlin’s support, Kepler’s book would almost certainly have failed to navigate intact past the shoals of the Tübingen academic senate, for Maestlin well understood how to manage the theologians’ sensitivities. yet, ironically, the very strategies that Kepler and Maestlin had used to establish the credibility of a Copernican defense also proved to be their greatest liability. Conceived within the knowledge structures and constraints of the local Tübingen constituency, a problematic that Kepler carried with him to Graz, the polyhedral representation looked strange even to many contemporaries. The oddness of Kepler’s new proposals raises the question of their discursive possibilities in other forums of reception. It hardly needs to be said that there were none of the institutional mechanisms of evaluation that would emerge later in the seventeenth century: neither societies devoted to natural philosophy nor anything resembling journals. Furthermore, as is already evident from our consideration of the quite varied usages and readings of De Revolutionibus in the 1580s, this was no age of modesty in public controversy. Of course there was an important literature of courtesy, which articulated idealized rules of mannered behavior for the upper classes, including the conduct of decorous conversation.2 But, in the same period, conventions of invective in religious-political disputes had reached unprecedented levels of ingenuity and aggression. The same Bellarmine who in the early 1570s lectured soberly on Genesis and fluid heavens at Louvain published a series of lectures on virtually every topic of religious and political contro- Kepler’s early audienCes 337 obscurity” took on a new and unexpected meaning . In October Maestlin reported an increasingly tense atmosphere: Time and again Dr. Hafenreffer has assailed me (jokingly, to be sure, although serious tones too seem to be intermingled with the jests). He wants to debate with me, while defending his Bible, etc. By the same token, not long ago in a public evening sermon he expounded Genesis, chapter 1: “God did not hang the sun up in the middle of the universe, like a lantern in the middle of a room,” etc. However , I usually reply humorously to those jokes as long as they remain jokes. If the matter were to be treated seriously, I too would respond differently. Dr. Hafenreffer acknowledges your discovery to be wonderfully imaginative and learned, but he regards it as completely and unqualifiedly in conflict with Holy Writ and truth itself. yet with these men, who are otherwise fine and very scholarly, but have no adequate grasp of the fundamentals of these subjects, in like manner, it is better to act jokingly while they accept jokes.8 Maestlin and Kepler had crossed a political and disciplinary boundary with the Tübingen theologians . Hafenreffer gave “brotherly advice” to Kepler : he should remain a “pure mathematician,” stay away from making true claims about the universe , and avoid provoking schisms in the Church. To Hafenreffer, who was by no means unfriendly to Kepler, the threat of schism reflected the sorts of anxieties that were all too prevalent at that moment in the reforming movement. But Hafenreffer and his colleagues did not move...

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