299 with the Pursuit of Harmony, Aviva Rothman Has Had The

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Book Reviews Early Science and Medicine 24 (2019) 299-303 299

Aviva Rothman, The Pursuit of Harmony: Kepler on Cosmos, Confession, and Community, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 336, 18 halftones, $55.00, €48.00, ISBN 978 0 226 49697 9.

With The Pursuit of Harmony, Aviva Rothman has had the courage to add a new book about Johannes Kepler’s seventeenth-century reception of the Py- thagorean concepts of world harmony to a considerable number of existing publications on the topic. Was it really necessary to shed new light on Kepler’s belief in a cosmos ordered by the same proportions that also produce musical harmonies, however fascinating this creative restatement of the doctrine is in itself? The answer to this question is a wholehearted ‘yes!’ By focusing on how Kepler used his reinvented concept of world harmony to legitimize both his pioneering scientific practices and his religious and political thought, Roth- man has chosen an approach that is highly original, and which goes far beyond the boundaries of what has already been written on the subject. Influential books and articles on the subject to date have often focused exclusively on in- terests either in the ﬁelds of the history of science, intellectual history, or mu- sicology, but this book ignores these modern disciplinary boundaries to highlight the parallels between Kepler’s ideas on music and its connection with cosmos, confession, and community. Rothman’s book tells the story of Kepler’s unremitting efforts to bring different, even opposing ideas and circumstances into harmony. She portrays the German founding father of modern astronomy as a complex and idealistic fig- ure: not only was he a Copernican in a world where the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmos was still the dominant world view, but also a layman who saw himself as a “priest of God,” a Lutheran excommunicated from his own church with ecumenical ambitions to unite his church with those of the Catholics and Cal- vinists. Moreover, in the realms of religion and politics, he was a man who ar- gued at the same time for the superiority of a single truth and the need for many truths to coexist. This seemingly paradoxical point of view, as Rothman convincingly argues throughout her book, had its roots in the tradition of the harmony of the spheres, in which ‘harmony’ stands for a specific combination or juxtaposition of dissimilar or contrasting elements, for example, a higher and a lower note in music. By combining these disparate or conflicting elements, a unity or harmony arises (discordia concors, i.e., harmonious discord). Along the lines of the Greek science of harmonics, which is an extensively de- veloped system of rules that govern relations between musical elements, Ke- pler aspired to develop a system of rules to control dissonance in the cosmology, religion and politics of his time.

As is well known, Kepler used Plato’s cosmogonic myth from the Timaeus in his own Mysterium Cosmographicum (Cosmographic Mystery, 1596) and his Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World, 1619) to explain unity and relation- ships in all kinds of natural and cultural phenomena by analogy with musical consonances and their geometric proportions. But, as Rothman explains in chapter 5 of her book, the myth of Er from the Republic, the other Platonic myth about world harmony, played an equally significant role in the formula- tion of his view of world harmony. In this myth Plato described the universe as a set of planetary orbits on the surface of each of which a Siren sits singing; together they form a harmonious sound, which after Plato was often interpret- ed literally as the music of the spheres – audible to, yet unperceived by, human beings who hear it from birth. In line with Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio), which itself is derived from the myth of Er, Kepler wrote his own Somnium (Dream, 1634), to formulate what he saw as the ethical implications of a cosmos organised by the principle of harmony. When the disembodied soul of the protagonist of Kepler’s Somnium makes a journey to the realm of the planetary spheres, he realizes that the place he comes from is an insignifi- cant part of the Earth, which in turn is dwarfed by the stars. Consequently, man should live his life on Earth from a cosmic perspective in the awareness that this life is only a tiny fragment of the life of his soul in the hereafter. In Rothman’s interpretation, Kepler wanted to demonstrate that “much of what we take for granted as natural and necessary, was actually only happenstance, or a result of our personal and limited perspectives. By moving from the earth to the moon, Kepler forces his narrator, and his reader, to see the world dif ferently, to challenge their preconceptions, and to recognize the inherent subjectivity of much of their situation” (p. 264); viewed from the moon, seventeenth-century people could put their earthly perspective and belief in a geocentric cosmos into the correct (heliocentric) perspective. Inspired by scholar such as Cicero and by biblical ethics, which Rothman discusses in the Conclu- sion of her book (pp. 276-277), Kepler positioned himself as an advocate of a Christian kind of cosmopolitanism in the midst of religious war and political and scientific conflicts. In line with Leviticus 19:17-18 and Cicero’s De Officiis (On Moral Duties), Kepler wished that, just like the elements of the cosmos, people were in friendship and dreamt of societies and states based on basic family and social bonds: when each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many (e pluribus unum). By analysing Kepler’s creative restatement of these two Platonic myths, Rothman shows that harmony was both the intellectual foundation and the primary utopian goal of Kepler’s various projects in different contexts. But at times this goal seemed to be nothing more than a fata morgana amid

Early Science and Medicine 24 (2019) 299-303