I remember Tycho’s astonishment when he heard from the king’s envoy that he was to leave Uraniborg. It was a hard truth that none of us there wished to believe, but it was true. One must accept the truth. When news came to me that Tycho had been murdered in Prague, I could not at first believe it. It was horrible, vile news. Yet it was true.
I have gone with anatomists to witness dissections of corpses. Some men gaze upon the inner organs and hidden places beneath our skin and see a beautiful puzzle, but the dead meat and jellied guts I saw on the dissection table were obscene and horrible in my eyes. Had I some magic, I might be tempted to erase those bloody images from my memory and unlearn whatever lessons I had from them, but that would be the act of a primitive, of a cave dweller. If a man seeks the truth, he must be prepared to discover that the cosmos is both beauty and ugliness, both birth and corruption.
It took me nearly an hour to light a fire in the room upstairs at Uraniborg. I used a few blank sheets of paper I had with me for tinder and carefully stewarded the flames, feeding the stove with sticks of kindling Voltemont and Cornelius had made until the fire lived on its own and took the chair legs and other wood piled by the stove. I had time to think, time to consider what was true.
No great man is infallible. Ptolemy the Greek imagined a cosmos centered around the Earth, with heavenly wanderers swimming about us, all rotating beneath the glorious roof of Heaven. The entire universe traced a majestic course that encircled us with the glory of God. Ptolemy believed in a universe of great beauty and complexity, and what he believed was not true.
Copernicus the Pole saw that the Earth doth move, orbiting the sun with the five planets. This was heretical speech, and indeed remains a heresy. It is the truth no priest will hear, but it is true: the sun is the center of the universe.
Our Danish hero Tycho Brahe imagined a cosmos of spectacular intricacy, with sun, moon, and planets wheeling about the Earth in eccentric spiral orbits, an inelegant and drunken dance over the face of the sky. When I first encountered Tycho’s cosmology I grew dizzy trying to picture it. There was so much motion, so many worlds spinning through Tycho’s vision, and all of it was so much fantasy.
I am not a gifted mathematician. I did not reason this out on my own. The Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic cosmologies have been explained to me by patient men with gifts far greater than any I possess. The proofs make momentary sense when they are laid out before me, and I believe them. Tycho’s cosmos was a clever and desperate argument against Copernicus, but there Tycho was a man making excuses, not a man inquiring into the truth of things. Brahe cast his gaze backward into the past, into the ages of barbarism. The greatest man I have known is also the greatest failure I have known. That is a truth.
It is also true that no great man is universally loved. Even Christ was reviled to His face by educated Jews and Romans. Is a great man still great when he is alone or hid away, or is it the worship of others which makes a man great? Is Christ our Lord if no man knows Him? Is a king without a kingdom in any meaningful sense noble? Was Tycho Brahe a great man because we worshipped him, or was he merely an egoist with deep but narrow talents and an audience? Surely his genius for observation and instrument design is undeniable. But as I warmed my hands at the stove, I looked around and saw how his castle, intended to last centuries, crumbled into rubble after a handful of years. Brahe’s other ruin, the paper mill on the western slope of the island, had collapsed and killed my father. Tycho had been no master builder. If I believed all I heard of Tycho in my visit to the island, he was no great man at all, but an indifferent knave like so many others. If this was true, it was not a truth I desired to know. To believe this, to deny Tycho, was to deny myself.
I had loved Tycho as a second—better—father. Imperious and