Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (3 page)

Kircher's own favorite Jesuit teacher through several years at Fulda “
concerned himself with this one thing, that to my passion for books I add a passion for piety.” He also tried to prevent Kircher from being “misled by consort with depraved students.” Boys like him were “privately summoned” by this priest, and encouraged “with all of his skills” to follow the lifestyle of the saints. “For these values then to such a degree did he inflame us in private conversations,” Kircher recalled, “that for no other thing beyond the divine did we seem able to long.”

Although Kircher later claimed to “
spurn all those things that older boys are accustomed to do,” he continued to be prone to misadventure as a teenager. “
I had heard that a tragedy was being staged in a town two days' journey from Fulda,” he remembered, “and, as I was curious and eager to see these sorts of things, together with my friends I entrusted myself to the journey.” After the performance, Kircher began the trip back by himself. The route led through part of the dense and damp Spessart Forest, which he described as “altogether horrible and infamous not only for its thieves but also for its host of dangerous wild beasts.”

The danger was real enough in this and other wooded tracts of Europe. Robbers were said to kill their victims first and to check their pockets later. One man who traveled through German lands reported that, when caught, the criminals “
are racked and tortured to make them confess, and afterwards their executions are very terrible.” He saw many “gallows and wheels where thieves were hanged, some fresh and some half rotten, and the carcasses of murderers, broken limb after limb on the wheels.” The infamy of the Spessart Forest in particular carries over into the twenty-first century, though today travelers through the region are more likely than anything to stop and enjoy a “Spessart Robber Buffet” along with a little Oktoberfest music.

“As soon as I had entered this forest, confused by the multitude of ways,” Kircher wrote, in language that increasingly evokes spiritual searching, “behold, the more I progressed, the more I noticed that I was wandering from the true path, until, ensnared by brambles and thorn-bushes, I had no idea where in the world I was.” The sun was going down, increasing his anxiety, and he began to lose hope of finding his way. His solution was first to entrust himself to God and to the Virgin Mary—and then to climb the highest tree. He spent the entire night in its branches, “safe from the wild animals” but nevertheless “in constant prayer.” When morning came, after climbing down, he passed many hours in confusion and frustration. “Although I was not able to proceed because I was exhausted by the desperation of my soul and still more by hunger and by thirst, with new prayers addressed to God, I continued.” Finally he came across a large meadow where some reapers were working; it turned out that after two days of wandering he was just as far away from home as when he'd started.

To Kircher, this incident—which ended with the reapers leading him through the region in exchange for an “exceedingly satisfactory recompense”—was yet another sign of God's “divine goodwill” toward him. It was not lost on him that, including the incidents with the mill wheel and the running horses, he had been saved a trinity of times. And so in return, he wrote, he “became wholly devoted to attaining a purpose in life and forfeiting things worldly.”

It makes for an appropriate beginning to the official life of a devout Jesuit priest. To the extent that he believed he'd been the recipient of divine mercy, however, Kircher nurtured rather than forfeited the feeling that he was meant for something great.

—

BY THE TIME
Kircher completed his secondary studies, at about the age of sixteen, he yearned to begin the two years of novitiate training, the three years of philosophy, the five years of teaching and practice, and the four final years of theology required to become a Jesuit priest. In fact, like his brothers, who had all joined religious orders, Kircher had limited freedom, economic or otherwise, to choose a different, or better, path. The Jesuits gave him an outlet for his religious zeal and his intellectual curiosity. Because they valued learning, they could accommodate what Kircher described as “
a spirit unrelentingly devoted to acquiring knowledge” like his, though it was probably the prospect of traveling to some impossibly exotic and recently discovered part of the world as a missionary that appealed to him most. Convincing a Calvinist of the truth of transubstantiation was nothing compared with dying a martyr's death in a place like Japan or New France.

Kircher was studying at the Jesuit college in the old city of Mainz, where the Main River meets the Rhine, when he finally got news of his acceptance as a candidate for the priesthood. But his “
exceptional joy” didn't last long: “Barely had I received permission to enter the Society from the Chief Provincial when, behold, most merciful God wished to exercise his devoted servant with new tribulations.”

In the winter of 1618, as he recalled, “all the rivers seemed frozen with ice,” and the broad Main provided a place for would-be Jesuits with an inflated sense of self to put their ice-skating skills on display. One day, Kircher remembered, with his usual lack of brevity, “I set out with my friends in order to frequent the games which were accustomed to take place on the ice at that time of year, with the intention of showing my agility. And as I was rather desirous of glory, with my agility and swiftness I was skating circles around the others, burning by all means in boyish vanity to snatch the palm of victory. It happened that after various displays of my skill I was striving to surpass one of my friends who was more agile than I. But when, for all of my exertion, I was not able to control myself, with legs splayed and spread asunder, I struck the ice.”

The result: a severe hernia.

And that wasn't his only health problem. “Added to this,” he wrote, “was a dangerous scabies of the legs which I had incurred at nearly the same time from the chill and the sleepless nights that I was spending at my studies.” As a Jesuit historian has suggested, these “scabies” don't sound like actual scabies, which are caused by the burrowing of the itch mite under the skin to lay her eggs. More likely, Kircher had a case of chilblains: ulcers of the skin from exposure to the cold. Either way, he worried that permission to enter the order, the object of so many “
ardent pleas,” might be withdrawn if these medical conditions were found out. It was well known that the Jesuits weren't just looking for pious, well-spoken, naturally talented young men; they were looking for physically robust candidates without, according to Ignatius, “
stomach trouble or headache trouble or trouble from some other bodily malfunction.” A “lack of bodily integrity, illness or weakness” could disqualify a candidate, as could “notable ugliness,” since it did “not help towards the edification of neighbors.”

“And thus,” Kircher explained, “
lest the diseases become known to my superiors, I resolved to conceal each with utmost silence.” He lived with these maladies for some months without getting treatment or discussing them with anyone—except God, “to whom alone my sufferings were known.”

Over the course of these months, Kircher must have heard the news from Bohemia: Protestants had thrown two representatives of the Catholic Hapsburg emperor out a window of Prague's
Castle. A pile of garbage broke their fall. Since this “defenestration of Prague,” as it became known, the Bohemian estates had organized in official rebellion against their own king, Ferdinand, who was next in line to become Holy Roman Emperor. By the time Kircher was supposed to begin his novitiate at the Jesuit college of Paderborn in Westphalia, preparations were being made for the Thirty Years War, though it would be thirty long years before anyone would think to call it that. “Meanwhile,” Kircher recalled, “with every passing day the hernia was growing, and the scabies were worsening at a spectacular rate.”

Paderborn sat 170 miles north of Mainz, on the other side of a mountainous region called the Hochsauerland. It would take more than a week to cover that distance under the best of circumstances, and a trip through the German provinces during the early seventeenth century could be challenging, to say the least. One Englishman and his brother traveling from Hamburg to Prague were “
carried day and night in waggons” to a town called Hildesheim, then walked 130 miles or so to Leipzig, where the coachmen were too afraid to travel into Bohemia because of the war, so they hired “a fellow with a wheelebarrow” to carry their things (“our cloakes, swords, guns, pistolls, and other apparell and luggage”) on a two-day trip to Penig, from which they traveled by cart, then wagon, then foot again to reach their destination. Otherwise, as this traveler facetiously described it, the journey was all “excellent cookery” and “sweete lodging.” They usually slept “well littered” in the straw of a stable, and when taverns didn't serve “pickl'd herring broth” or “dirty pudding” or a raw cabbage “with the fat of rusty bacon poured upon it,” they might offer “Gudgeons, newly taken perhaps, yet as salty as if they had beene three yeares pickled, or twice at the East Indies, boyled with scales, guts and all, and buried in Ginger like sawdust.”

Whatever the details of Kircher's own trip—“
Only He who knows the hearts of all knows how many difficulties I, afflicted by so much suffering, endured on that journey”—it worsened the problem with his legs. After finally arriving at Paderborn, he remembered, “since I tottered in my gait from the enormous pain in my feet, I was compelled to uncover my disease to my superiors, who noticed it.” A surgeon was called to examine his legs. Gangrene had set in, and the doctor “immediately declared it incurable.”

Still concealing his hernia “with the utmost silence, lest there be a fuss over me when two incurable diseases had been discovered,” Kircher was informed that he would be dismissed from the Society if he wasn't better in a month. “Nothing remained except the Virgin Mary, the sole refuge of my health,” he wrote. “And thus, in the dead of night at the foot of an exposed statue of this very Virgin, I lay prostrate on the ground with tears, as though She were the sole curatrix of the human race; and by such means and passions that I leave to the conjecture of the reader, I, her most downcast son, entreated the Great Mother with vehement prayers.”

When Kircher woke up the next morning he discovered that his legs were “completely healed.” And that wasn't all: “I also noticed that my hernia had vanished.” The surgeon “proclaimed it a miracle,” and Kircher's superiors “praised God and the Holy Mother Herself, by whose beneficence and intercession so marvelous a cure had occurred.”

There is no satisfaction for the skeptical in Kircher's autobiography. “By confessing these things in this place,” he wrote, he intended only to “spread about and stir up the honor and worship of God and the Blessed Virgin within my fellow men.”

The Virgin Mary may have taken a more laissez-faire position on other matters, like this teenager's subsequent transition to daily life at the seminary in Paderborn.

2

Inevitable Obstacles

K
ircher's real initiation into the Society of Jesus began in the middle of one night that autumn, when he was stirred from sleep and the warmth of whatever coarse blanket the seventeenth-century Jesuits of Paderborn could provide. In candle or lamplight, a priest explained the meditation Kircher was about to make, the first of many over the next four weeks. All novices were (and still are) led through the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, but he wouldn't have been told exactly what to expect. Refined by Ignatius over years of rigorous contemplation, the exercises were meant to clear away the complicated layers of self-interest that normally motivate life choices, as well as the interests of evil, in order to discern the interests of God. For these young religious soldiers, it functioned like a spiritual boot camp; the process involved tearing down mental habits and assumptions and building up a desire to “freely choose” devotion and obedience in their place.

The first meditation began at midnight, according to Ignatius's written directions, when novices were to consider the “
gravity and malice” of sin and to ask God for the “personal shame and confusion” appropriate to sinners. Through the day they cataloged and contemplated the “intrinsic foulness” of each and every sin they had ever committed, and an hour before supper they were instructed to imagine hell with all the senses: to see “the great fires” and the “souls appearing to be in burning bodies”; to hear “with one's ears the wailings, cries, howls, blasphemies”; to “smell the smoke, the burning sulphur, the cesspit and the rotting matter”; to taste “bitter things, such as tears, sadness and the pangs of conscience”; to feel “how those in hell are licked around and burned by the fires.”

Novices repeated the meditations, prayers, and colloquies of the first day each day for the first week. The time was spent in silence and solitude, except for recitations and talks with the priest giving the exercises. Eyes were covered and the doors and shutters were closed to keep out the light. Having conjured such graphic scenes of the hell that awaited them, novices often wanted to do penance for their sins—depriving themselves of heat, food, or sleep, and “chastising” their bodies by wearing haircloths or striking themselves with cords or chains. “
The most practical and safest in regard to penance seems to be that the pain should be felt in the flesh and not penetrate to the bone,” Ignatius advised. “Therefore, the most appropriate seems to be to strike oneself with thin cords.”

In the second week, novices spent hours a day applying their minds and their senses to the story of Christ's life and good works. In the third week, to the blood and tears of his passion. And in the last week, finally, with joy and gratitude, unshuttered windows and sunshine, to his resurrection. As meditations progressed, novices were urged to compare their own previous choices and actions with those of Jesus, and to contemplate the kind of life that God intended for them—they were to try to sort away all other voices, influences, and impulses. Discerning God's call from the deceptive call “
practiced by the evil leader,” otherwise known as the devil, was difficult, especially since the evil leader often tempted people “
under the appearance of good.”

The key was to get rid of what Ignatius called “
disordered attachments” to such things as comfort, success, and praise. Losing these attachments required a special kind of humility: “
I have it,” he explained, “if I find myself at a point where I do not desire, nor even prefer, to be rich rather than poor, to seek fame rather than disgrace, to desire a long rather than a short life, provided it is the same for the service of God and the good of my soul.” And yet the most perfect humility is achieved when you actually “want and choose poverty with Christ rather than wealth, and ignominy with Christ in great ignominy rather than fame,” and when you “desire more to be thought a fool and an idiot for Christ, who was first taken to be such, rather than to be thought wise and prudent in this world.”

It can't be said whether Kircher, still a teenager, actually discerned God's call, or whether he believed that he had, or whether these intensive days of meditation and fasting brought on any of the psychological or physical symptoms—euphoria, light-headedness—that might be mistaken for the effects of spiritual revelation. But these exercises had a profound influence on him. In order to achieve salvation in heaven—his ultimate desire, and a preference or self-interest that no one, not even Ignatius, had chosen to give up—he understood that he was going to have to develop some humility here on earth. And soon, it seems, he took pride in showing more humility than any of his peers. Kircher devoted himself to the ecclesiastical and communal life, and after making his first vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience at the end of the two-year novitiate, he began the three-year program in philosophy. “
I did not dare to reveal my talent of intellect,” he wrote in his memoir, “fearing lest, from the complacency arising from some degree of vainglory, I would diminish the flow of divine gifts into me.” The decision had the added benefit of bringing on the kind of scorn that, as described by Saint Ignatius, made him seem even
more
like Christ. “
This silence and masking of my ability caused both the instructors and the students to consider me stupid,” Kircher remembered. In fact, they “all judged me to be foolish and stupid in my rejoicing in and exultation of the love of Christ.”

In Kircher's retelling, he not only took his spiritual life more seriously than the other novices did, but actually had something significant—“the great gift of my intellect”—to be humble about. But if one of the most verbal men in history really kept silent, as he claimed, throughout his course in logic, an entire year of disputation and oral argument, it was in fact a profound act of self-restraint. And if he continued “in this manner” the next year, when studies turned to “physics,” or natural philosophy, now called physical or natural science, he must nevertheless have been paying attention; he devoted many of the next sixty years to it.

—

FOR THE HUMANIST JESUITS
, there was no conflict between religion and knowledge of the natural world. A greater understanding of the physical cosmos made for a greater appreciation of God's beautiful, complex creation, and a greater love for God, especially since, as the long-held belief went, everything in the earthly realm was connected through a great chain of being—through graduated correspondences and affinities—to the celestial realm above.

The Catholic authority on theology was Thomas Aquinas, for whom the authority on “physics” was
Aristotle, for whom the universe was perfect and finite. All things not only had substance and form but a “sake,” or final cause, or nature. The final cause, or nature, of an acorn, as the well-known example went, was to be an oak tree. It was the nature of things that were composed of earth, such as stones, to fall down toward the center of the earth. Water sought its place at the earth's surface, air sought its place above the earth, and fire sought its place above the air. Anything that didn't behave according to its form, or substance, or its presumed nature, was given either a different underlying nature or a hidden virtue.

Earth itself was fixed at the center of the cosmos, and beyond the realm of the earth everything was made of a fifth element, or “quintessence,” called ether. The perfect spheres of the sun, moon, and the
five
planets, as well as the fixed stars, were contained within their own perfect celestial spheres, which, with the help of certain “intelligences,” were moved around Earth in perfect circles. The final cause of these spheres: to be moved by the divine intelligences as objects of love.

According to Aristotle, nature abhorred a vacuum. The speed at which a thing fell was inversely proportional to the density of the medium it fell through—the lesser the density, the faster the thing fell—so a void or vacuum could not exist without having everything fall through it at infinite speed. Infinity itself was also not something that could exist‚ in part because anything infinite would have to be composed of things that were themselves finite, sensible, and therefore measurable.

As the old story of the dawn of the modern age goes, Aristotle was the figure who had to be toppled by the new men of science and reason. But it wasn't that established Aristotelian ideas sounded strange; nothing felt more intuitively right, for example, than the idea that the ground you stood on was immobile and at the center of things, and that it was the sun that moved across the sky. Although published by Copernicus in 1543,
De Revolutionibus
(
On the Revolutions
) had been condemned only recently by the Church.

The Jesuit professor of philosophy “
shall not depart from Aristotle in matters of importance,” instructed the order's plan of studies. “He shall be very careful in what he reads or quotes in class from commentators on Aristotle who are objectionable from the standpoint of faith.” But adhering to Aristotle wasn't as straightforward as it sounded. Over the centuries, hundreds of commentaries on Aristotle's dozens of works had been produced. The eight-volume effort by Jesuits of the university at Coimbra in Portugal, published in many official and unofficial and fraudulent editions, was used to consider philosophical complexities related to, say, astrological influence on Earth.

Although the use of astrological study for divinatory purposes (forecasting) had been condemned by the pope in 1586, it was otherwise an integral feature of astronomical study. Almost no one imagined a world in which some kind of astral influence wasn't exerting itself. If not, what were the planets and the stars for? And why bother banning a futile endeavor? Any number of assumptions went unchallenged. No one thought, for example, to doubt the concept of spontaneous generation; it was simply assumed that small creatures such as worms, flies, ants, and even frogs and snakes, grew from nonliving matter, particularly if swampy or putrescent or excremental. Who could deny that maggots appeared on rotting flesh? “
It be a matter of daily observation,” as one seventeenth-century writer characterized it, “that infinite numbers of worms are produced in dead bodies and decayed plants.” And plenty of the old authorities, including Aristotle, agreed. (Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation from
living
matter too, contending that cabbages engendered caterpillars.) Augustine surmised that
semina occulta
(hidden seeds) were responsible for things that sprang up from the earth “
without any union of parents.” Pliny held that insects originated from rotten food and milk and flesh, as well as from fruit, dew, and rain. Ovid, Plutarch, Virgil, and Democritus all apparently believed that bees were born from the dung of bulls.

Aristotle didn't stand in the way of modern science all by himself. And it wasn't impossible or uncommon, especially outside the Church, to disagree with Aristotelian ideas. But natural philosophy was philosophy: it was more through reason than observation that the natural world was known; through erudition, as opposed to experimentation, that the “truth” of a matter was usually determined. Ancient authorities held sway; the more ancient they were, the more sway they held. Knowledge increased by adding authorities, arguments, and commentaries onto the pile, rather than by ruling out ideas through trial.

—

KIRCHER DIDN'T GET
very far in physics in Paderborn. Barely two months had been spent in the course when, as he put it, “
a new crisis arose which presented to me the ultimate occasion to endure suffering and grief on behalf of Christ.”

The crisis came in the form of Prince Christian of Brunswick, also known as Christian the Younger, the Insane Bishop, the Mad Bishop, and the Mad Halberstadter. This Protestant military leader sometimes referred to himself as
“
Gottes Freund, der Pfaffen Feind”
(God's friend, the priests' foe), other times simply as “the supreme hater of Jesuits.” Rallying to the increasingly complicated cause against the Catholic Hapsburg emperor, Christian had levied an army of ten thousand and was advancing through Westphalia, in the direction of Paderborn.

Christian had been made bishop of Halberstadt just a few years before, at the age of seventeen, after the death of his older bishop brother. “
He possessed little qualification for this office,” wrote twentieth-century historian C. V. Wedgwood, “save an unreasonable dislike of the Catholics.” Christian wore a sparse mustache and an early modern mullet, and he was preceded in Paderborn by his well-cultivated reputation for committing unspeakable atrocities. “The most famous of them, namely that he forced the nuns of a plundered convent to wait, naked, on him and his officers, was invented by a journalist in Cologne.” Nevertheless, he had torn through Westphalia in his own particular way. “
He issued startling letters, suggestively burnt at the four corners, and bearing the words ‘Fire! Fire! Blood! Blood!' to every sizable village he passed. This method seldom failed to extract a ransom in hard cash from the people.”

As Christian's army approached, the Jesuit superiors acted to close the college—“
lest there be a violent attack on the city and all be cut down to a man,” Kircher explained.
Soon a crowd of Paderborn's Protestants formed outside its doors; Christian's proximity apparently freed them to manifest their own hatred toward the Jesuits. When the rector went out to speak to the mob, a burning torch was thrown at him. He was beaten and dragged away. Inside the school, a plan was made for the priests and novices to leave that night in small groups. They were to change out of their robes and into secular clothes. “
And since the enemy was beginning to encircle the city little by little,” recalled Kircher, “and since the orderly was not able to offer provisions necessary for a journey, given the very sudden state of confusion,” the priests and novices were “sent away whither Divine providence and fate might lead them. I together with three of my friends was among these.”