Free Kepler's Witch by James A. Connor

my taste. 4
    Goethe, Faust
    Meanwhile, the seminarians at the Stift scurried to class and busied themselves with study, a bright contrast to the rest of the students. Students at the university wore gowns with hems colored to indicate their field of study: medicine, law, theology. The quality of the gowns varied widely, and the poorest were usually those of the seminary students—dark monastic robes. The seminarians were by all accounts the serious ones, because they attended by the duke’s good graces and studied at his command, and because they were the sons of obscure parents, who had no protection from the consequences of their misdeeds. Years before, when they first entered the monastery schools, they had sworn themselves to the duke’s service, promising lifelong fealty, to serve at his discretion and to leave at his discretion. They slept in unheated cells, rising in the predawn darkness at four or five to recite their morning prayers while the sunlight gathered in the stained-glass windows and suffused red-gold throughout the nave. 5 After prayers, the rector of the seminary lectured on the theological point of the day. The sermons were often charged with sectarian politics, with hot brimstone against the pope and with sly warnings against the Calvinists. While the students listened, beneath their feet the long-dead Dukes of Württemberg slept on to resurrection day. Here Kepler listened to the Word of God proclaimed to the students. Here, his Lutheranism, held at some cost by his family, took seed, sent down roots, and blossomed.
    Sermons and lectures at the university were public entertainment then as much as public instruction, and people often walked miles to hear a good preacher. The Stiftkirche was a “hall church,” specifically designed without pillars so that everyone in the congregation could see the preacher. As with all things Lutheran, each lecture, each sermon was intensely scriptural. The boys gathering in the seminary church every morning, shivering from the cold, yawning, rubbing sleep from their eyes,attended as best they could as each preacher fought to make Scripture come alive. The great characters of the Old and New Testaments walked before them—Gideon, Samuel, David, Daniel, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, and all about them danced St. Paul, whose words permeated the writings of Dr. Luther like water permeates soil. 6
    Lutheranism was more than just the religion of his parents and grandparents for Kepler. It was a religion that made sense to him. He saw it as a religion that never asked him to submit his reason to any other authority than God. In religion, one need not consult any other authority than the Scriptures and the fathers of the church. Even when princes commanded, they could not violate his conscience. Neither could Satan, the Prince of Darkness, or any other demon. For Kepler, God not only preserved the heavens above, but also the reasoning mind that contemplated them. Kepler would sit in the stone church, his breath floating visibly before him, reciting Luther’s Morning Prayer:
    My Heavenly Father,
    I thank You, through Jesus Christ, Your Beloved Son, that You kept me safe from all evil and danger last night. Save me, I pray, today as well, from every evil and sin, so that all I do and the way I live will please You. I put myself in Your care, body and soul and all that I have. Let Your holy Angels be with me, so that the evil enemy will not gain power over me.
    Amen. 7
    A prayer for inner peace. A prayer for salvation. A prayer for freedom from evil. A vital prayer, a necessary prayer, for the intellectual environment in which the faculty preached was a turbulent one. Throughout his life, Kepler remained an Augsburg Lutheran because, he believed, it allowed him freedom of conscience. There was no church authority standing between him and the Scriptures or between him and the church fathers. He could follow his own path, think his own thoughts, and