Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (24 page)

—

PEIRESC PUT IT
very mildly when he said that Kircher's ambitions were “a little grander than the ordinary goals of his colleagues.” This led to a lack of restraint as well as other problems, including a certain flexibility with the truth. But for Kircher there were greater truths and lesser ones; there were different measures of truth, metaphors, and multiple meanings, things for which fact-based modern science has no place. Progress required another kind of split, between the literal and the literary. But that was not a split Kircher ever would have been able to abide. And it makes sense that as his scientific reputation diminished, his work continued to capture and to fuel the creative imagination.

The baroque poetry of the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was inspired by the Hermetic language in Kircher's books. As a librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève between 1913 and 1915, Marcel Duchamp examined the optical devices in Kircher's
Great Art of Light and Shadow
. Giorgio de Chirico's illustrations for Jean Cocteau's
Mythologie
owe a debt to the engravings of the Great Flood in Kircher's
Noah's Ark
. Even the Eye of Providence on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, the one above the pyramid on the dollar bill, appears to have been drawn from the frontispieces of books such as
The Magnet, The Great Art of Knowing, Universal Music-making
, and
The Tower of Babel
. Whether Kircher first found it in a book by Robert Fludd or in an ancient or apparently ancient or another source, millions of people now carry this all-seeing eye around with them in their pockets.

In Edgar Allan Poe's story “A Descent into the Maelström,” the narrator comes face-to-face with a mile-wide vortex in a northern sea, and is understandably awestruck. “
Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the Maelström is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part,” Poe says. “This opinion . . . was the one to which, as I gazed, my imagination most readily assented.”

Jules Verne's
Voyage au Centre de la Terre (A Journey to the Center of the Earth)
, first published in 1864, had many influences. But the German professor, a “
learned egoist,” who takes the famous subterranean trip, along with his nephew and a guide, bears a striking resemblance to the author of
Underground World
. The story begins when this linguist, mineralogist, mathematician, and museum curator deciphers a coded message found within a runic manuscript. Actually, his nephew deciphers it; as in the story of a trick played on Kircher, it turns out merely to be Latin written backward. The message reveals a volcanic crater on Iceland as the entryway to the realm below—for which they leave the very next day, and into which they descend, hiking through passageways, traveling by raft on underground rivers and a hot ocean, meeting with adventure and discussing the geological theories of the day, for more than two months, until they are lifted on a gigantic wave and forced out through a venthole onto the sunny volcanic slopes of Stromboli, in view of Sicily.

Roberto della Griva, the main character of Umberto Eco's novel
The Island of the Day Before
, isn't sure what to make of Father Caspar Wanderdrossel, the German Jesuit professor he meets aboard the ship on which he finds himself marooned.
Was he “a sage? That, certainly, or at least a scholar, a man curious about both natural and divine science. An eccentric? To be sure.” Roberto had learned, in Paris and Provence, from Pierre Gassendi among others, to be skeptical about the kind of miraculous stories Wanderdrossel told. But he'd also learned “to concede only half of his spirit to the things he believed (or believed he believed), keeping the other half open in case the contrary was true.” Almost everything the Father said was “most uncommon,” Roberto admits. “But why consider it false?”

The truth does have a way of shifting over time. Kircher wrote in the preface of
Ecstatic Journey
that there has scarcely been an age of human beings that hasn't “
gladdened the World to the extreme . . . with the spectacle of its own new divine power.” After all, “venerable antiquity never knew anything about the existence of the new World; it knew nothing about the diffusion of Oceans around the Orb of lands; it had discovered nothing about . . . a great variety of exotic things.” And “if anyone had told these things to the ancients . . . they would hesitate even to imagine them.” The achievements of each generation have led it into “love and admiration for itself.” This phenomenon had “occurred most powerfully” in own his time, “with the great amazement of mortals,” and he understood it would continue to occur, again and again.

In the same way that many of Kircher's misconceptions are really misconceptions only from a modern point of view, at least some of our own greatest certainties will be seen as laughingly obvious errors by people, if people are still around, three or four hundred years from now.

In the meantime, it's clear that the modern perspective is simply not the right one to take when it comes to Kircher and to the entire, incredible Kircherian enterprise. There's something to be said for his effort to know everything and to share everything he knew, for asking a thousand questions about the world around him, and for getting so many others to ask questions about his answers; for stimulating, as well as confounding and inadvertently amusing, so many minds; for having been a source of so many ideas—right, wrong, half right, half-baked, ridiculous, beautiful, and all-encompassing.

—

GIOVANNI BATTISTA RICCIOLI,
the Jesuit astronomer in Bologna to whom Kircher forwarded celestial readings for many years, thought Kircher deserved to be remembered. In 1651, within a book-length argument against the Copernican system (a book that was itself otherwise bound to be forgotten), Riccioli published an important set of maps of the moon. They introduced what eventually became the accepted scheme of names for major features of lunar topography. The surface of the moon was not even remotely pristine; it had mountains and valleys and “seas,” as he decided to call them, and many, many pockmarks. Riccioli gave names to almost two hundred fifty craters and other sites. He named them for saints, ancient philosophers, Greek gods, and Roman emperors, but also for major astronomers, intellectual figures, and Jesuit scholars of his own time. Kircher was on the list.

The crater named after him can be seen in an area of the moon called the Southern Highlands, near the ones named after Christopher Clavius, the first great Jesuit mathematician, and Christopher Scheiner, who was sent to the court of Vienna in 1633 so that Kircher could stay in Rome.

It's not one of the biggest lunar features, but it is big. The crater floor, a smooth, empty plain, stretches forty-five miles across. Kircher the crater has been called “
remarkable” for its “very lofty rampart,” and though its walls are “
somewhat deformed,” on the south side they rise up nearly fifteen thousand feet.

These things . . . have been communicated for the serious reader. Many other things could have been brought forth and many other things have already been well described, which I thought I should not repeat. . . . Goodbye, reader, please excuse any errors.

—
China Illustrated
, 1667

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Researching and writing one little book about the author of seven million Latin words has a way of putting things in perspective. Like all (self-absorbed) writers, I sometimes imagined I was alone, but in fact I've relied on so many people.

I have endless admiration for the professional scholarship on Kircher, and I'm indebted to the historians behind it. Some have devoted years to a single aspect of his work. I'm especially grateful to those who have written in English, including Martha Baldwin, Paula Findlen, the late John Fletcher, Joscelyn Godwin, Michael John Gorman, the late P. Conor Reilly, S.J., Ingrid D. Rowland, and Daniel Stolzenberg. Their publications, cited in the following pages, are strongly recommended for more in-depth reading.

This book couldn't have been written without access to the resources of many human-being-run entities, including the Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome through the Athanasius Kircher Correspondence Project; the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence; the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership; the European Cultural Heritage Online project; Google Books; the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel; the Internet Archive; the Kircher project at the University of Lucerne; the Museo Galileo; the New York Public Library and its Science, Industry and Business Library; the Royal Society; and the Stanford University Libraries.

Many thanks are owed to Martha Ambrosino, Kathleen Archer, Andreas Armann, Julia Bauerlein, Katherine Bouton, Sarah Bowlin, Daniel D'Addario, Joshua Foer, Max Glassie, Howard Gray, S.J., Yvonne Hicks, Rob Hoerburger, Susannah Jacob, Dr. Berthold Jäger, Bret Anthony Johnston, Meredith Kaffel, Sophie Lvoff, Gerry Marzorati, Giuseppe Mimmo, Alessandro Orlandi, Tom Reiss and Julie Just, Wilhelm Ritz, Rosario Salamone, Sarah Smith, Roberto Tronchin, Sarah Danziger Valentino, and Kornelia Wagner.

The incomparable Laura Bauerlein sent me research and translations from Rome over a long period. The outstanding Camille Silberman sent me translations from Florence and other places. Carey Smith, chair of the classics department at Georgetown Prep, my Jesuit high school, took on the translation of Kircher's autobiography, and kept doing a brilliant job on everything I threw at him. Rachel Nolan provided the finest kind of editorial expertise. Michael John Gorman and Alex Star were kind enough to give me their very valuable comments on the manuscript.

Any errors are mine, but because he asked me to write about Kircher in the first place—for an annual called
The Ganzfeld
, now, sadly, defunct—Dan Nadel is to blame for the entire thing. Violaine Huisman was somehow able to see this book from the start, and can take any credit. Charlotte Sheedy got me through it with uncommon wisdom and generosity. Jake Morrissey guided me with exceptional intelligence and wit. Geoff Kloske bestowed enthusiasm, patience, and more patience on the project. Alexandra Cardia, Anna Jardine, and others at Riverhead have done a truly great job. Thank you.

I'm very grateful to family and friends for their tolerance, love, and support over the years, especially Marian Brown, Claire and Gene Carlin, Liz and Paul Doucette, Max and Renée Drake, Jeff Glassie and Julie Littell, Tom Glassie, Nancy Green and Steve Saraisky, Scott Hensley, Laurence Master, Yalda Nikoomanesh, Elise Pettus, Ted Pewett, John Taft, and my late great brother Don. My daughter, Natalie, made the sun come out.

Deepest appreciation is reserved for my mother, Claire Buhr Glassie Scrivener, who has done so much, and for the memory of my father, Donelson Caffery Glassie, who once actually stood on the top of the Washington Monument (a great obelisk), and in whose workshop (or cubiculum) I learned so many fascinating things.

NOTES

Apologetic Forerunner to This Kircherian Study

Kircher's account of his early life
: Athanasius Kircher,
Vita Admodum Reverendi P. Athanasii Kircheri, Societ. Jesu: Viri Toto Orbe Celebratissimi
, in Hieronymus Ambrosius Langenmantel,
Fasciculus Epistolarum Adm. RP Athanasii Kircheri
(Augsburg: Utzschneider, 1684), hereafter
Vita
. On the likely year of composition, see Nikolaus Seng, trans.,
Selbstbiographie des P. Athanasius Kircher aus der Gesellschaft Jesu
(Fulda, Germany: Verlag der Fuldaer Aktiendruckerei, 1901), p. 48.

“It is not the writer's intention”
: Rene Taylor, “Hermetism and Mystical Architecture in the Society of Jesus,” in Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffe, eds.,
Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1972), p. 82; cited in Joscelyn Godwin,
Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), p. 5.

“Europe's mind was blown”
: Lawrence Weschler,
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder
(New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 80.

“his works in number, bulk, and uselessness”
: John Ferguson,
Bibliotheca Chemica: A Catalogue of the Alchemical, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Books in the Collection of the Late James Young of Kelly and Durris
(Glasgow: J. Maclehose and Sons, 1906), vol. 1, p. 468, in José Alfredo Bach, “Athanasius Kircher and His Method: A Study in the Relations of the Arts and Sciences in the Seventeenth Century,” Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1985, pp. 47–48, n. 75.

Chapter 1. Incapable of Resisting the Force

Kircher's parents, the circumstances of his birth and youth
:
Vita
, pp. 1–6.

Balthasar von Dernbach and the witch trials
: Marc R. Forster, “Review of Gerrit Walther,
Abt Balthasars Mission: Politische Mentalitäten, Gegenreformation und eine Adelsverschwörung im Hochstift Fulda
,” H-German, H-Net Reviews, March 2004, http://www.h-net.org/reviews; Berthold Jäger, “Zur Geschichte der Hexenprozesse im Stift Fulda,”
Fuldaer Geschichtsblätter
73 (1997), pp. 7–64.

The birth of the ninth
: In his autobiography, Kircher gives 1602 as the year of his birth, but in a few other instances gives it as 1601. See Paula Findlen, “The Last Man Who Knew Everything . . . Or Did He?” in Paula Findlen, ed.,
Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything
(New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 43, n. 2.

“Westerners at this time”
: Raffaella Sarti,
Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800
, trans. Allan Cameron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 113.

Description of a typical seventeenth-century home
: Ibid., pp. 97, 99–101.

“not ordinary aptitude”
:
Vita
, p. 7.

“a wonderful intellect”
: Andrea Nicoletti,
Della Vita di Papa Urbano VIII e Historia del Suo Pontificato
, in Leopold von Ranke,
The History of the Popes: Their Church and State, and Especially of Their Conflicts with Protestantism in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries
, trans. E. Foster (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848), vol. 3, Appendix No. 120, p. 405.

“thousands of books”
:
Vita
, p. 2.

“entered orders of various religions”
: Ibid., p. 4.

“the world according to its divisions”
: Ibid., p. 7.

Mill wheel story
: Ibid., pp. 11–12.

Horse race story
: Ibid., pp. 13–14.

“Very many who want to be counted”
: In Robert Schwickerath, S.J.,
Jesuit Education: Its History and Principles Viewed in Light of Modern Educational Problems
(St. Louis: B. Herder, 1903), p. 147.

“propagation of the faith”
: Ibid., p. 77.

Growth of Jesuit schools and seminaries
: Allan P. Farrell, S.J., introduction to
The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599
(Washington, D.C.: Conference of Major Superiors of Jesuits, 1970), p. iii; see also Jonathan Wright,
God's Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue, and Power—A History of the Jesuits
(New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 60.

Ignatius of Loyola and humanism
: George W. Traub, S.J.,
An Ignatian Spirituality Reader
(Chicago: Loyola Press, 2008), pp. 11–14.

“cosmopolitan, nonconformist, elitist”
: Forster, “Review of Gerrit Walther.”

“anoint their pupils”
: In Schwickerath,
Jesuit Education
, pp. 147–148.

“concerned himself with this one thing”
:
Vita
, p. 9.

“spurn all those things”
: Ibid., p. 10.

“I had heard that a tragedy was being staged”
: Ibid., p. 16.

“are racked and tortured”
: John Taylor,
Taylor His Travels: From the Citty of London in England, to the Citty of Prague in Bohemia
(London: Nicholas Okes, 1620), p. [B4] verso.

Spessart Forest story
:
Vita
, pp. 17–18.

“a spirit unrelentingly devoted”
: Ibid., p. 8.

“exceptional joy”
: Ibid., p. 18.

Ice-skating story
: Ibid., pp. 19–21.

Scabies versus chilblains
: P. Conor Reilly, S.J.,
Athanasius Kircher, S.J.: Master of a Hundred Arts, 1602–1680
(Rome: Edizioni del Mondo, 1974), p. 27.

“ardent pleas”
:
Vita
, p. 18.

“stomach trouble or headache trouble”
: In Wright,
God's Soldiers
, p. 48.

“lest the diseases become known to my superiors”
:
Vita
, p. 21.

“carried day and night in waggons” . . . “Gudgeons newly taken”
: Taylor,
Taylor His Travels
, pp. B–[B4], [C4]–D. When Taylor asked about the excessive salting, he was told that the beer was so bad it could not be consumed “except if their meat were salted extraordinarily.”

“Only He who knows the hearts of all” . . . “spread about and stir up”
:
Vita
, pp. 22–24.

Chapter 2. Inevitable Obstacles

“gravity and malice” . . . “how those in hell are licked around”
: Ignatius of Loyola,
Personal Writings
, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 296–299.

“The most practical and safest”
: Ibid., p. 301.

“practiced by the evil leader”
: Ibid., p. 311.

“under the appearance of good”
: Ibid., p. 285.

“disordered attachments”
: Ibid., p. 283.

“I have it if I find myself at a point”
: Ibid., p. 315.

“I did not dare to reveal my talent”
:
Vita
, p. 27.

“This silence and masking of my ability”
: Ibid., pp. 28–29.

Aristotle
: Aristotle,
Physics
, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye ([1930] The Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.html); Michael Fowler, “Aristotle,” lecture, University of Virginia, September 3, 2008, http://Galileo.phys.Virginia.EDU/classes/109N/lectures/aristot2.html; Tom Sorell,
Descartes: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 40–41.

“shall not depart from Aristotle”
:
The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599
, trans. Allan P. Farrell, S.J. (Washington, D.C.: Conference of Major Superiors of Jesuits, 1970), p. 40.

“It be a matter of daily observation”
: Francesco Redi,
Experiments on the Generation of Insects
(1668), trans. Mab Bigelow (Chicago: Open Court, 1909), p. 27.

“without any union of parents”
: In Harry Beal Torrey, “Athanasius Kircher and the Progress of Medicine,”
Osiris
5 (1938), p. 263.

Public debate on Aristotle
: Sorell,
Descartes
, p. 26.

“a new crisis arose”
:
Vita
, p. 29.

“Gottes Freund, der Pfaffen Feind”
: Ludwig Pastor,
The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages: Drawn from the Secret Archives of the Vatican and Other Original Sources
, trans. Frederick Ignatius Antrobus, Ralph Francis Kerr, and Ernest Graf (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1938), vol. 27, p. 240.

“He possessed little qualification” . . . “the most famous of them”
: C. V. Wedgwood,
The Thirty Years War
(New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2005 [1938]), pp. 145–146.

“He issued startling letters”
: Ibid., pp. 147–148.

“lest there be a violent attack”
: For Kircher's telling of the story, see
Vita
, p. 30.

Soon a crowd of Paderborn's Protestants
: Reilly,
Athanasius Kircher, S.J.
, pp. 29–30.

“And since the enemy was beginning”
:
Vita
, p. 30.

“The winter at that time”
: On Kircher's escape and journey, see ibid., pp. 31–34, 38, 39.

“took subjects prisoner”
: “Letter of Archbishop Ferdinand of Cologne (July 6, 1622),” in Tryntje Helfferich, ed.,
The Thirty Years War: A Documentary History
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), pp. 61–62.

“young Dukes of Brunswick”
: Wedgwood,
Thirty Years War
, p. 151.

“wandered in the most dense forest and fields”
:
Vita
, p. 31.

Washington Crossing the Delaware
: Dr. Bernard J. Cigrand, “Washington Crossing Rhine, Not Delaware; Leutze's Famous Painting Really Represents the German River, and German Soldiers Were Used as Models—American Pupil Aided Artist to Get Proper Uniforms,”
The New York Times Magazine
, February 17, 1918, p. 69.

“Two altogether inevitable obstacles”
:
Vita
, pp. 41–43.

“stiffened by the vehemence”
:
Vita
, p. 44.

Chapter 3. A Source of Great Fear

“received and restored”
:
Vita
, p. 45.

“superficial quantitative properties”
: Peter Dear,
Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 66.

“most rapidly and easily destroyed”
: In Michael J. Gorman,
The Scientific Counter-Revolution: Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Experimentalism in Jesuit Culture 1580–c1670
(Florence: European University Institute, 1998), p. 34.

“outstandingly erudite”
: Ibid., p. 36.

“distributed in various nations and kingdoms”
: Ibid.

“nearly one thousand times larger”
: Galileo Galilei,
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
, trans. Stillman Drake (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), p. 29.

“the moon is not robed in a smooth and polished surface”
: Ibid., p. 28.

“troublesome to operate”
: In Gorman,
The Scientific Counter-Revolution
, p. 66.

“not sufficiently certain”
: Ibid., p. 68.

“The time came”
:
Vita
, p. 46.

“See! How the shadow flies”
: In Bach, “Athanasius Kircher and His Method,” p. 43, n. 43; on Kircher's sundials, see also John Fletcher, “Astronomy in the Life and Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher,”
Isis
61 (1970), p. 53.

“huge illusion of their vast antiquity”
: Frances A. Yates,
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 21.

Ficino's translations of Hermes in twenty editions
: Erik Iversen,
The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993 [1961]), p. 61.

“In the middle of all these things sits the sun”
: The Latin is in Yates,
Giordano Bruno
, p. 154.

“long before the sages”
: Ibid., p. 11.

“the first author of theology”
: Ibid., p. 14.

“foresaw the ruin of the antique religion”
: In Brian A. Curran, “The Renaissance Afterlife of Ancient Egypt (1400–1650),” in Tim Champion and John Tait, eds.,
Encounters with Ancient Egypt: The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions Through the Ages
(London: UCL Press, 2003), p. 109.

“as though he were himself a god”
: In Yates,
Giordano Bruno
, p. 35.

“If rational”
: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” trans. E. L. Forbes, in Ernst Cassirer, Paul O. Kristeller, and John H. Randall, eds.,
The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Selections in Translation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 225.

“[Seventy-two] Cabalistic Conclusions”
: The English translation of Pico della Mirandola is from S. A. Farmer,
Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems
(Tempe, Ariz.: MRTS, 1998), p. 517.

“believe that nothing is impossible”
: In Yates,
Giordano Bruno
, p. 32.

“Scarcely any mortal”
: In Michael John Gorman, “Between the Demonic and the Miraculous: Athanasius Kircher and the Baroque Culture of Machines,” unabridged essay published in abridged form in Daniel Stolzenberg, ed.,
The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Libraries, 2001), http://hotgates.stanford.edu/Eyes/machines/index.htm.