Kepler's Trinitarian Cosmology

The theological framework for Kepler's cosmos is based on a metaphorical Trinitarian symbolism, with the sun as God the Father, the firmament as Jesus Christ, and the intervening space as the Holy Spirit. In his heliocentric cosmology the sun becomes the source of planetary movement just as in the Aristotelian geocentric universe God's love beyond the starry realm was seen as the source of the eternal motion of the spheres. Searching for a divinely rooted physical explanation of planetary orbital motion, Kepler began with his solar-oriented distance law, which miraculously led to his law of areas. Finally he chose the ellipse from competing curves because its focus (“hearth”) coincided with the sun, the source of God-given motion.     

The German Reformation and the Mathematization of the Created World

This article explores the emergence of mathematics and mathematical method as a means of defining authoritative truth in the thought of some scholars in the German Reformation. Against the background of Martin Luther's critique of Aristotelian philosophy, Philip Melanchthon presented mathematics as an ideal discipline for preparing the mind to understand God. His approach drew on the work of humanist mathematicians such as Regiomontanus. It finds resonances in the work of the Basel humanist Simon Grynaeus, and (in a less mathematically informed way) in the thought of Peter Ramus. These discussions about the divine nature and certainty of mathematical truth formed the context within which Johannes Kepler's Platonist astronomy emerged.