Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (21 page)

Moreover, there was no need to accommodate lower forms of animals such as mice, frogs, and lizards because those animals arise on their own—they are “
born from rot, that is, from the semen of the same animal left somewhere, or from the rotting parts of them.” (An exception was made for snakes; they were assigned to the bilge, where they would absorb the putrescent vapors that could lead to disease.) And so the story of Noah's ark, which was not in question, gave credibility to the notion of spontaneous generation. How else to account for all these creatures roaming the earth now? They certainly couldn't have
fit
on the ark.

Kircher was unsure, or unsure for the sake of a boy, about certain legendary animals. No genuine unicorn had ever been located, for example, but to Kircher it was no less improbable than a rhinoceros or a certain horned fish, now known as the narwhal. About the griffin, which was supposed to have the body of a lion and the head of a falcon, he was dubious, though recent reports from China suggested that sometimes eagles or vultures reached a frightening size. Sirens, on the other hand, if not mermaids, were real enough; the siren's “
upper part has the sex and appearance of a woman, but its lower portion ends in the tail of a fish,” he explained. “There can be no doubt that such a creature exists, for in our museum we have its tail and bones.”

20

Immune and Exempt

I
n 1674, from somewhere in the Palazzo Pitti, and from somewhere under his courtier's wig, Francesco Redi began exchanging letters with an intelligent young mathematics professor at the Collegio Romano, a fellow Florentine named Antonio Baldigiani. It was only natural for Redi to be interested in news of Kircher, whose gullibility about the snake stone he'd sought to expose a few years before. Baldigiani, an admirer of Redi and of the modern approach in general, was happy to oblige.

Kircher “
by now is old,” he reported to Redi in April of 1675, about a month before Kircher turned seventy-three, “and because of his age, his background, and his history of hard work and in-depth study, he is not always able to be as rational as he would like.”

In fact, Baldigiani thought that it would be easy to “
play a grand joke on Kircher, who is a perfect target and often comes up against various pranks,” though he made a point of not speaking to Kircher about matters of substance. “I am afraid to find myself cited someday in one of his books, as a protagonist or witness to some grand quackery.”

Baldigiani told Redi that Kircher had “
written a long, rather questionable response” to the public letter Redi had published about the snake stone a few years before. But when he moved to print this counterattack, other scholars at the Collegio Romano intervened, presumably to save Kircher, and the Jesuits as a whole, from the embarrassment of arguing against such overwhelming experimental evidence. Kircher was asked to submit his treatise for a reworking by a venerable colleague: Daniello Bartoli, the author of books on tension and pressure, harmonics, and coagulation, as well as a six-volume history of the Society. But Kircher refused to allow his defense to be revised. “
Prof. Kircher is as obstinate as ever in his apprehensions,” Baldigiani wrote, “and of the thirty-six books he has printed, from the majority of pages he believes he cannot take out a single line.”

Then Kircher became very ill, and for a while it looked as if the matter would resolve itself on account of his death. (“
Yesterday morning he had his last communion, and yesterday evening they offered him last rites,” Baldigiani wrote later that year. “I, however, do not think him such a desperate case even though his angina is taking him over completely.”) But evidently he wasn't ready to die, or, after his recovery, to give up the fight to preserve his legacy. He decided to secure the services of a lawyer, or rather an assistant with legal training, who would be willing to put his own name on a defense against Redi's charges.

This particular disciple, Gioseffo Petrucci, was secular and therefore could operate free of Jesuit authority. He could even publish in vernacular Italian rather than Latin. He'd already participated in a highly visible effort to demonstrate Kircher's greatness: Petrucci was the young student who sent the limited transcription of the Minervan obelisk to Kircher at Mentorella and who was later “thunderstruck” by his interpretation of all four sides.

Since that display several years before, Kircher's reputation as an interpreter of ancient Egyptian wisdom had apparently dwindled within the Collegio Romano to the point where Petrucci was his only student in hieroglyphics. Petrucci was “
a solitary and little-known man, dependent in everything on Prof. Kircher,” wrote Baldigiani, who was not impressed with him. They had studied philosophy together, and Petrucci had “
never shown himself to be even a mediocre scholar.” But that may not have mattered much to Kircher, who was essentially going to tell Petrucci what to write anyway.

About two years passed before the product of this collaboration,
Prodomo Apologetico alli Studi Chircheriani
(
Apologetic Forerunner to Kircherian Studies
), saw the light of day. Baldigiani wrote that in Amsterdam even Jansson, Kircher's otherwise enthusiastic publisher, didn't want to print it: “
First they pardoned themselves from the work because it was written in Italian and they couldn't read it; then they said that the work was too small and not appropriate for their book-bindings; then they claimed to be too busy with the works of Kircher himself. . . . Finally they agreed to print it after months of correspondence.”

In his defense of Kircher, Petrucci backed up the stories that Redi had shrugged off as anecdotal evidence with even more anecdotal evidence: since the experiment with the dog in 1663, he said, Kircher had used the stone to heal another dog, a preacher in Tivoli with an insect bite, and an assistant with an infected arm. On top of this, news of seventeen instances of success with the snake stone had been relayed from the court of Emperor Leopold in Vienna. (The occult-minded Leopold, one of Kircher's greatest patrons, was hardly an objective party. It also happened that Vienna was in the midst of a kind of snake-stone mania that had driven prices for the little stones to absurd levels.) Given all these reports of success, Petrucci wondered whether Redi, rather than Kircher, had been the gullible one: maybe Redi only
believed
he was in possession of genuine snake stones when in fact they were fakes.
And wasn't it possible, Petrucci argued, that the hens and other birds that had failed to be healed in Redi's trials were particularly feeble?

As the title of the book suggested, its arguments were meant to apply not just to the snake-stone matter but to “Kircherian studies” in general. In his opening paragraphs, Petrucci described how he'd been stirred to defend his master from the totality of attacks against him—defend him from all the “
reckless and impudent slanderers” who had breathed “the pestiferous breath of poisoned invectives” and otherwise made “malignant accusations . . . meant to hinder the perpetual studies of Father Athanasius Kircher, the deserved winner of Glory.”

Petrucci conceded that to some extent, after a lifetime confronting the cynicism and the envy of others, Kircher had “by now been made immune and exempt from the stings of zealous Critics, and the bites of malignant detractors, thanks to his great merit, recognized forever, and deserving of inestimable esteem by the most well-known Wise Men of the Universe.”

Nevertheless, on the grounds that the truth itself would never consent to the satiric and unfair shaming of his master—to these attempts to “bring down the statue erected to the glory of Father Athanasius Kircher, my most esteemed teacher”—Petrucci intended to clear away the “fumes from the muddy cesspool of ignorance” so that Kircher could live “in the memory of virtuous men,” for “all Celebrated future centuries.”

As portrayed by Petrucci, Kircher was not a credulous fool but more like a modern skeptic. In the case of the snake stones, even though various priests in India and other parts of the East “
constantly insisted on the marvelous virtues of these Stones, and each one of them had their own sensory experience with them,” Kircher did not simply believe them. “
He did not go according to the sentiments and testimonials he collected, blindly and obediently ceding his will to odd stories,” Petrucci wrote. “He did not permit this intellectual fraud through passionate opinions, but kept his mind uncontaminated and unalterable in the quest for truth until a more appropriate moment, in which he would be able to learn from experiment and see for himself.”

It was in the face of evidence,
The Apologetic Forerunner
argued, that Kircher distinguished himself from Redi, who Petrucci claimed was too narrow-minded to accept anything but his own preconceived notions about the natural world. “
The works of nature are prodigious,” Petrucci wrote, “and whoever does not penetrate her reasons imagines these prodigies impossible and does not believe them.” For Kircher's willingness to be open to new and surprising discoveries, Petrucci went so far as to compare him to Galileo. Or, since Kircher was behind Petrucci's argument, it was Kircher himself who made the case for the comparison, and who probably believed it. The book quoted many passages from
The Assayer
of 1623, in which Galileo described the experience of coming under constant criticism, an experience Kircher must have recognized as his own. “
I have never understood . . .” Galileo wrote, “why it is that every one of the studies I have published in order to please or to serve other people has aroused in some men a certain perverse urge to detract, steal, or deprecate that modicum of merit which I thought I had earned.”

Not many others saw the similarity. Once copies of
The Apologetic Forerunner
finally reached the bookshop of the Collegio Romano in 1677, for example,
only two were sold: one to a certain Monsignor Slusio for the archbishop of Prague, to whom the book was dedicated, and one to another patron, at Kircher's request.

21

Mentorella

D
espite increasing trouble with his heart and with his hearing, difficulty remembering things, pain from kidney stones, and other frailties and infirmities, Kircher struggled to publish more books before he died. If people wanted experiments, he seemed to decide, then that's what he would give them. A student named Johann Kestler helped cull everything from Kircher's books that could conceivably be called an experiment, and compiled a total of 337 observations and trials into one Latin volume that would be published under Kestler's name:
Experimental Kircherian Physiology in which by the greatest multitude and variety of arguments knowledge of the natural universe is investigated and confirmed
by experiments in Physics, Mathematics, Medicine, Chemistry, Music, Magnetics and Mechanics
. It wasn't a coincidence that Kestler's written protestations on behalf of Kircher (“the prodigious miracle of our age”) echoed those of Petrucci in substance and in style; Kircher wrote or edited Kestler's remarks as well.

As with all of Kircher's work, the scientific value of each of these individual “experiments,” on subjects ranging from the projection of visual images to electrical attraction, varied enormously. Many observations and claims that had been called into question through the years were given elaborate defenses that were themselves unconvincing. But this relatively straightforward selection of Kircher's physical studies—removed from the labyrinthine rhetoric, the utter speculation, and the exhaustive erudition that surrounded them—has caused more than one reader to imagine how much Kircher would have benefited from a good editor all along.

Another assistant worked to prepare a catalog of Kircher's museum to preserve the memory of the collection and the place for which he'd become so famous. An elegant engraving was commissioned for the frontispiece of the book, and it has since become one of the most recognizable images from all of Kircher's printed works. It shows Kircher greeting a pair of visitors within a great, decorated hall. A sunlit array of specimens, skeletons, devices, paintings, and sculptures extends beyond the point where the eye can see. Obelisks, or replicas of obelisks, reach up perhaps four times the height of a man toward cathedral-like ceilings. But the scale represented in the engraving bears little resemblance to the scale of the actual museum in either of its locations within the Collegio Romano. The gallery space the collection occupied until 1672, when it was moved, was nowhere near as vast. And the impressive-looking obelisks were in reality only three or four feet high without their bases. (The obelisks were assumed to have been lost for good before being rediscovered in 1988 in the attic space of the building; the Collegio Romano is now home to a high school.) Maybe what Kircher said about the engravings of ancient sites in
Latium
also applied to this engraving: it showed the museum “not as it was, but as it could and must have been.”

Other projects stalled. Publication of one manuscript, a tour through Tuscany, something like
Latium
, had already been bogged down for many years because of its inaccuracies, and because of sensitivities about how the intellectual history of the region was to be rendered—all the experimentalist studies supported by the Medici, for example, and particularly the contributions of Galileo. At this point the manuscript was passing through various Jesuit hands, being subjected to negotiations behind Kircher's back and revised in places against his will. “
These days, because of age,” Baldigiani wrote about Kircher, “he has become very difficult to deal with, and also he is very easily bothered and has a tendency to be suspicious.”

The volume on Tuscany never saw the light of day, and the manuscript has gone missing. Other books that Kircher had promised or that Jansson had announced on advertising pages bound into his publications—books on such things as Egyptian art and various translations—would never be written. “
Many others,” a disciple wrote, were “preserved in his mind.”

Kircher devoted his last energies to mathematics, a subject that he'd largely overlooked through the years, but that he must have understood was increasingly important to many of the most respected minds of the time as a way of getting at the truth—objective, certain, not debatable. “
Philosophy is written in the mighty book that lies forever open before our eyes (I mean the universe), but you cannot understand it unless you first learn the language and the script in which it is written,” Galileo had pronounced. “It is written in the language of mathematics.” And since then, within a short space of time, people such as Wallis, Napier, Cavalieri, Fermat, Pascal, Mersenne, Huygens, Barrow, Collins, and Roberval had taken the language to a new level.

In devising the coordinate system for plotting curves and other figures on a plane, Descartes brought geometry and algebra together into what is now called analytic geometry. Pretty soon, three-dimensional as well as two-dimensional shapes could be represented by algebraic functions. “
A shape in space has given way to an analytic formula,” twenty-first-century mathematician David Berlinski has explained. “And with this insight, the first step has been taken in a vast, far-reaching project that will in the end bring all forms of continuous motion, the cannonball
and
rotation of the planets in the night sky, under the control of a numerical apparatus.”

Although a professor of “mathematics,” Kircher was never a great mathematician.
The Englishman John Evelyn had seen him “expound” on “a part of Euclid” in 1644, but when in
The Great Art of Light and Shadow
Kircher claimed to have cracked the age-old mathematical problem of
how to square the circle, his naive solution was ridiculed by Mersenne and others. It was perhaps because Kircher was aware of so much activity in mathematics that he thought to publish
Arithmologia
, his 1665 book on the subject of numbers, or rather on the subject of numerology. Somewhat counterintuitively, he seems to have intended that volume to show that he wasn't quite as innocent and foolish as these new mathematicians might believe. He spent a great deal of time laying out the numerological beliefs of “
the Cabalists, Arabs, Gnostics and others” in order, he said, to debunk them. And yet for Kircher numbers weren't mere quantities. He believed in the “genuine and licit mystical signification of numbers”—in the Hermetic “
Mystic Monad or, if you will, Oneness” that was associated with God and indivisibility, the source and the entirety of all things, and in “the divisions of substance from the divine mind” represented by all other numbers, fractions of the whole.

“There must be no doubt but that within numbers lies hidden a certain proximity to divine nature,” he proclaimed. After all, “all creatures breathe numbers: Sky, Earth, Elements and whatever exists in harmony and concinnity with the Angelic, Human, Sidereal and Elemental Universe, all . . . are subjected to the reckonings of numbers.”

Now in his late seventies, Kircher began a manuscript composed chiefly of trigonometry computations. If the project represented an attempt to make a real contribution to mathematics, it was a weak one. Just about the time that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz began quarreling in print over which one of them had been the first to conceive of the calculus, a conception that Berlinski says caused “
a reverberating sonic
boom!
in the history of thought,” Kircher grew too tired to keep going. He handed the manuscript over to another priest.

—

IN NOVEMBER OF
1678, Kircher wrote to a colleague: “
You must know that now, bowed down by my seventy-seven years of age, I give my time to nothing besides spiritual exercises, nor do I occupy myself with any other studies . . . I am fully occupied in penetrating the science of the Saints, which is to be found in Christ crucified, so that when death comes it will not find me occupied in empty studies.” At the bottom of the letter there's a postscript: “Please excuse my trembling hand.”

The frontispiece of Kircher's
Arithmologia

Sometime later Baldigiani sent a report to Redi. “
Decrepit and old, Professor Kircher is deteriorating at an alarming rate. For more than a year he has been deaf, his vision is failing, he has lost a good part of his memory and he rarely leaves his room, unless to go to the pharmacy or the porter. In short, we have already given him up for lost, though he may live many more years.”

Kircher's autobiography, which no one would bother to set into type for more than two centuries after his death, let alone publish in a lavishly illustrated edition, contains some insight into his thoughts in old age. There's a section at the end in which he reflects on the course of his life.
It was God, he wrote, who “wished that I expend my small talent . . . for the glory of His divine name and for the benefit of the common weal.”

“It was surely God who had destined me from the womb of my mother to pursue this matter in ways marvelous and manifold, first through the efficacy of innate instinct, and then through marvelous and fortuitous happenings, and finally through perils of life endured on land and sea.”

And it was surely “He who, although I was ordered to travel to Vienna by the command of my Superiors to serve as professor of Mathematics, led me to Rome in order that indisputably in this theater of the shared universe I devote myself to the explication of the obelisks, a thing finally revealed as my talent, meager as it was.”

But it was not possible for Kircher to pretend that he had nothing to do with the trajectory of his life and work, or with the waning of his reputation.

“If only I had accomplished this with such perfection and so great a zeal for the glory of God as my gratitude toward the supreme Father of men was demanding . . .” he wrote. “Yea indeed I sometimes strayed from my deserved end, and drew something to myself from the applause of men that was owed to God alone.

“And so, the subject matter of my studies to which God and obedience have destined me were varied and manifold, and, in the end, hidden and unattainable, indeed an ill-matched task for Herculean shoulders, much less my own, to bear.”

—

IN AUGUST OF
1679, Kircher grew so unwell that he was given the last sacrament again, then regained his strength. Months later a Jesuit professor sent a letter with a question about the telescope. An assistant wrote back with an apology that Kircher couldn't look into it himself; an astronomer at the Collegio Romano would reply.

By March of 1680, Kircher had begun what a fellow priest called his “
second childhood,” which lasted months. His condition began to worsen in November, about the time the seventy-nine-year-old Bernini suffered what must have been a stroke: his whole right side became paralyzed and he lost the ability to speak.

Kircher died on November 27. Bernini died the very next day. The result was that funeral services for Kircher were overshadowed by the tremendous outpouring of tribute to the baroque master.

—

KIRCHER'S BODY WAS
to be entombed in the great Jesuit church of Il Gesù, just a few narrow streets away from the Collegio Romano, but he left instructions for his heart to be taken to Mentorella and buried at the foot of the altar there.

Preparation for burial in the seventeenth century began by cutting open the chest for the removal of internal organs. The cranium was also sawed open, and once it was embalmed, Kircher's brain, the source of all of his ideas and all his trouble, was packed in a barrel with his intestines, eyes, tongue, lungs, liver, and other organs. His heart was set aside. Deep incisions were made all along the limbs, the back, and the buttocks to drain the blood from the veins and arteries. After all the viscera, layers of fat, and tendrils of membrane were removed, the open cavities were scrubbed with spirits of wine, turpentine, and aromatic oils. Then they were filled with untwisted cotton or tow and large quantities of embalming powder, which was like finely ground potpourri. One recipe alone included rosemary, laurel, hyssop, absynth, mint, rue, sage, wild thyme, pennyroyal, oregano, germander, lavender, chamomile, fennel, rosewood, spikenard, caraway, angelica, cloves, valerian, aloe, mastic, incense, myrrh, styrax, labdanum, canella, mace, and saffron.

The body was sewn up, bathed in spirits and liquid balm, and anointed. Before being placed in a casket, it was bandaged, dressed in vestments, and wrapped in a linen sheet, which was tied with ribbon at the head and feet. When the time came, Kircher's wooden coffin was plastered into a lengthwise space in the rough wall of the crypt beneath Il Gesù, the place where aboveground the body of Ignatius of Loyola and the right arm of Francis Xavier are opulently interred.

Kircher's heart was removed from its fibrous sac, soaked in spirits, and thoroughly cleaned. The ventricles were filled with embalming powder. Then the heart was anointed with oil, essence of nutmeg, or tincture of musk. It was set in perfumed cotton, powdered, and placed inside a little waxed bag. The bag was put in a small box. The box was wrapped in violet taffeta.