Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (7 page)

Around this time, a Jesuit named Friedrich Spee, long believed to have been a confessor to the condemned in Würzburg, wrote anonymously against the persecutions and described the “
wretched plight” of someone who had been tortured into confessing her guilt. “Not only is there in general no door for her escape,” he wrote, “but she is also compelled to accuse others, of whom she knows no ill, and whose names are not seldom suggested to her by her examiners or by the executioner. . . . These in their turn are forced to accuse others, and these still others, and so it goes on: who can help seeing that it must go on without end?”

Kircher doesn't mention the witch hunts in his memoir. Against this dark backdrop he is known to have taught mathematics, philosophy, Hebrew, and Syriac, and to have built two new sundials, on the south and the east sides of the university's central tower. He also developed a very close friendship with a younger, awestruck student named Kaspar Schott, with whom he apparently composed music. Neither Kircher nor Schott could have foreseen how they would be separated and reunited and separated again in the years to come.

Kircher wrote his first book manuscript in Würzburg, although at only sixty-three pages
Ars Magnesia
(
The Magnetic Art
) was more like a pamphlet, and since modern scholars see it as “
highly derivative” of Gilbert's already famous work on the subject, perhaps it wasn't entirely
his
. Kircher steered clear of Gilbert's heliocentric ideas but echoed his views on magnetic attraction, describing it as “
a primary and radical vigor.” And he agreed that the earth behaved somewhat like a magnet: things are drawn down toward the earth, he suggested, putting his Aristotle on display, like the natural attraction of something to that which is good for it. The entire second part of the book, however, was given over to practical and recreational uses of the lodestone, something Gilbert hadn't really bothered with, including instructions for the trick in which Christ rescues Saint Peter from drowning.

But the “high peace” that Kircher described, such as it was, wasn't meant to last. The Thirty Years War was only in its twelfth or thirteenth year, and soon “
new and sudden whirlwinds of wars rendered all things topsy-turvy.” The king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, had taken up the Protestant cause, defeating the Catholic general, the count of Tilly, at a place called Breitenfield. Now he was marching his armies rapidly through central Germany and headed in their direction.

At Würzburg, “
the entire College was dissolved within twenty-four hours of unbelievable confusion,” Kircher remembered. “All were shaken by terror as the enemy was now arriving at the city; for they had heard that they would spare not one of the Jesuits. I, too, rolled in this communal whirlwind.” He left the city with others for Mainz, abandoning the pages of a new manuscript.

After four days of siege in mid-October, Gustavus took Würzburg. He took the city of Hanau a few weeks later, Aschaffenburg a number of days after that, Frankfurt less than a week after that, and Mainz five days before Christmas. Kircher was separated from his friend Schott somewhere along the way, and fled again—back to Speyer, and then out of Germany altogether, leaving behind an entire region (for good) like a devastated home.

“
At Bamberg the bodies lay unburied in the streets, and on both sides of the Rhine there was famine,” C. V. Wedgwood wrote about the eventual aftermath of the Gustavus campaign. “In Bavaria there was neither corn left to grind nor seed to sow for the year to come; plague and famine wiped out whole villages, mad dogs attacked their masters, and the authorities posted men with guns to shoot the raving victims before they could contaminate their fellows; hungry wolves abandoned the woods and mountains to roam through the deserted hamlets, devouring the dying and the dead.”

6

Beautiful Reports

S
ince all things in Germany had been turned upside down, and since there shone no hope either of remaining or of returning,” Kircher and others were sent to France. They traveled down the Rhône valley to Lyon, where there was a Jesuit school—but also unfortunately where there had been another outbreak of the plague. So he was sent farther south, to Avignon, which must have seemed like a different world.

France's own wars of religion were over, for the time being. Although Louis XIII had secretly and then not so secretly allied himself with the Protestants against his Hapsburg enemies in Germany, he and his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, had pretty well driven out the heresy of the French Protestants, the Huguenots, within his own territories. France was Catholic and Avignon itself, where a number of French popes lived during the fourteenth century, was still a papal territory. There were so many bells in so many steeples in Avignon that it was known as
la ville sonnante
, “the ringing town,” and it's easy to imagine that for Kircher a feeling of security, rather than alarm, began to accompany the sound of their pealing. A new Jesuit college was being built there out of white sandstone, around a large square and gardens, with tall portico archways and large windows above. Many of the buildings in Avignon—the Palais des Papes, Notre Dame des Doms, the Pont d'Avignon—were made out of the same stone, which has a way of taking on the color of the day. During parts of the year the infamous mistral winds blow cold down the Rhône valley on Avignon, but also blow the cloud covering away, leaving crisp air, the warmth of the sun, and the blue, as Kircher described it, of “
an Egyptian sky.”

It's hard to say how well this twenty-nine-year-old priest from war-torn Germany was received in the south of France. As records from the college at Avignon show, Kircher's superiors thought his “
talent” was “good,” that his “accomplishment in letters” was “great,” and that his “ministry” should be “teaching”—but that he had only “some” “discretion,” and that his “experience of things,” by which they seem to mean his level of maturity, was “not great.” Despite this less than enthusiastic assessment, Kircher went on with what has been called his “
strange combination of mathematics and biblical languages.” When he wasn't teaching or studying, he was up in the college tower, working on a project inspired by the Avignon light.

Kircher set up mirrors at the windows that reflected the sunlight onto the tower's arched ceiling and walls, where it traced a path across marked astronomical points, constellations, and astrological signs. It was a little like a planetarium, or upside-down sundial, that also indicated the time of day in different locations around the world and helped chart horoscopes. The project became the basis for Kircher's next book, which was printed a few years later.

He took up direct observation of the sky as well. All over Europe, educated men (because, again, not many women were given educations) with a sense of curiosity and the money or craftsmanship required to own a telescope were trying to see for themselves what all the fuss was about—why their entire understanding of the universe might have to change. The south of France in particular was already known as a good place to use the astronomical tube. While he was there, Kircher had contact with, and tried to convert, an astronomer and Hebrew scholar named Rabbi Salomon Azubins de Tarascon. He made celestial readings with a traveling student from Danzig named Johannes Hevelius, who was more interested in telescopes than in his family's brewing business. And while traveling near Aix-en-Provence in the fall of 1632, as Kircher put it, he “
fell in with”—or made a point of falling in with—someone who was not merely an astronomer but “the most celebrated man, the greatest patron of letters in all of Europe, a Senator in the Parliament there, Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc.”

Kircher's assessment of Peiresc's status was not far off. The son of a wealthy magistrate with connections to the royal court, Peiresc did occupy his family's seat in the parliament of Provence, and he was an enthusiastic champion of talented scholars. As a young man, after studying with the Jesuits and training as a lawyer, he traveled around for a while, making associations within Europe's intellectual and cultural circles. Then he went home to fulfill his political duty, live out the ideals of the Renaissance humanist, and support the general advancement of learning. Dividing his time between his home in Aix and his family's country estate in Belgentier, near Toulon, Peiresc studied old manuscripts and collected coins, paintings, antiquities, natural curiosities, and zoological specimens. He observed the moons of Jupiter for himself not long after Galileo discovered them, and recorded with precise notation the first sighting of the Orion Nebula. At Belgentier, in addition to growing malvoisie grapes for the bottling of his own wine, he cultivated sixty types of apple, twenty varieties of citron, a dozen sorts of orange, and all kinds of melons, apricots, and olives.

But Peiresc spent most of his time writing letters. According to his protégé, the mathematician and philosopher Pierre Gassendi, “
On those dayes on which the Posts did set forth towards Paris or Rome, he was wont to defer his Supper, till ten or eleven a Clock, and very often, till after mid-night; that he might write more, and larger letters.” After his death, a niece is alleged to have burned some portion of Peiresc's hand-copied correspondence for heat; even so,
ten thousand
of his letters have survived.

Peiresc functioned like a hub in a virtual network that came to be called the Republic of Letters, continually exchanging intellectual news and information with a wide circle of scholars, philosophers, and artists across Europe and beyond. His elite status meant that he could be in frequent correspondence with people such as the painter Peter Paul Rubens, the cultural patron and bibliophile Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and Francesco's uncle Maffeo, who in 1623 became Pope Urban VIII. Anything interesting that he sent to his friend Marin Mersenne—a Minim friar in Paris who wrote about theology, math, and music—might be forwarded to, say, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, or the lawyer and amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat, who might send it off to someone else.

As a modern scholar has described it, the first meeting between Peiresc and Kircher “
could not have been very intimate,” since in subsequent letters to others, Peiresc referred to his new acquaintance variously as Balthazar Kilner, Balthazard Kyrner, and Athanase Kirser. But Peiresc was intrigued. Kircher told him that he'd been working on a Latin translation of a rare Arabic manuscript that he had saved from the prince-elector's library at Mainz before the heretic armies came through. As Peiresc later reported, the document was supposedly written by “
Rabbi Barachias Nephi of Babylon” and offered insight into “interpreting and deciphering the hieroglyphic letters” of the ancient Egyptians.

Like Kircher and many others, Peiresc was fascinated by the notion that the hieroglyphic texts represented very early learning. According to Gassendi, Peiresc's most prized library possession was a papyrus scroll “
all written with Hieroglyphick Letters” that had been “found in a Box at the feet of a certain Mumie.” Peiresc theorized that Coptic, the language of the early Egyptian Christians, might shed light on the workings of the hieroglyphic system. He'd been corresponding with a pair of Capuchin monks in Egypt and working through agents in Cairo to purchase anything he could that was in Coptic or about Coptic.

Several months after he and Peiresc first met, Kircher sent him a sample from his translation of the mysterious Arabic text. Peiresc wrote that it “
made me more hopeful than I used to be of the discovery of things that have been so unknown to Christianity for close to two thousand years.” When the next sample came, he wasn't
quite
as effusive, but urged Kircher to come for an extended visit and to bring the manuscript with him for Peiresc to see. Kircher was uncharacteristically slow to accept the invitation of such an important person, but finally went to stay for four or five days in the spring of 1633.

—

ALTHOUGH THIN
and prone to sickness, fifty-two-year-old Peiresc was a man of “
rare courtesie and affability.” During Kircher's visit Peiresc wrote that he and Gassendi were having “
great pleasure in taking him around.” It wasn't just the three of them: Peiresc kept dozens of cats “
by reason of mice,” and when he went outdoors, a servant “
waited upon him with an Hand-Canopy, to keep off the Sun-beams.” In his gardens and sunrooms he grew black locust from America, jasmine from Persia, ginger from India, rare vines from Damascus, and one China rose. He owned five telescopes and a large treasure of books, with which Kircher demonstrated his facility with languages.

There was plenty to discuss (they probably spoke Latin), and these French were sophisticated: They took an empirical, mathematical approach to the study of nature and had pretty much given up on Aristotle. They were generally skeptical, especially when it came to fantastic explanations for physical phenomena. Peiresc had withheld judgment some years before, for example, when
the bones of a giant were discovered in an ancient tomb; many years later he was able to determine that they actually belonged to an elephant.

Gassendi and Mersenne had recently been involved in a public feud with a physician, alchemist, astrologist, cosmologist, and Kabbalist named Robert Fludd. Fludd believed in the idea of a “world soul,” invisible harmony between microcosm and macrocosm, the divinity of Hermes Trismegistus, and the ability of the weapon salve to heal wounds from a distance. Mersenne, remembered today for the prime numbers named after him, wrote that Fludd was “
an evil magician, a doctor and propagator of foul and horrendous magic.” Gassendi had been a little more gracious. A devoutly pious priest, he happened to believe that everything was composed of basic units of matter called atoms—a material theory he got from his own ancient sources, Epicurus and Lucretius.

On some of these topics, Kircher kept his mouth shut—on others, not as much. Fludd's ideas were closer to his own than he might have been willing to admit. But after more than a decade of rigorous scholarship, Kircher could impress with his erudition, and his storytelling had a disarming effect on people. In the end, the skeptics were taken with him. “
He has beautiful reports and beautiful secrets of nature,” Peiresc said in a letter. Kircher told them about his sunflower-seed clock, and it sounded “very marvelous” to Peiresc, who added: “He promises to show us proof.”

As Kircher described it, the clock told time because the sunflower seed always turned toward the sun, the way the flowers do, by virtue of magnetic attraction. “And he says he has shown proof of it in good company at the dinner table, in the presence of the Elector of Mainz,” Peiresc wrote, “and even if one was in the house and out of the sunlight or if the sky was covered with clouds, the clock would never stop showing the most precise time, as much as is possible in the arc that the sun makes in our horizon. Even if it weren't so exactly precise, and if it showed no other change than turning successively at sunrise or at noon or at sunset, more or less, I would still hold it as a great miracle of nature and one that well deserves to be seen.”

Kircher may have intended the clock to suggest the degree to which invisible forces—of the kind that Fludd endorsed—were natural enough. But other implications weren't lost on Peiresc. That same month, Galileo was standing trial in Rome. (His
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
had not only espoused the Copernican model but also made some fun of arguments for an Earth-centered universe and, at least it appeared, of the pope.) Peiresc understood that evidence of the sun's magnetic action or attraction could help make the case for Earth's rotation and revolution. After Kircher's visit, Peiresc wrote about the sunflower-seed clock to Marin Mersenne in Paris, who wrote about it to, among others, René Descartes.

“
If the experiment that you describe to me of a clock without sun is certain, it is quite curious, and I thank you for having written to me about it,” Descartes replied from Deventer in the Netherlands. “But I still have doubts about the effect; even so, I don't judge it impossible.”

Strangely, the original purpose of Kircher's visit had to be postponed. When the time came to begin a discussion about hieroglyphics, it turned out that Kircher had failed to bring along the Barachias Nephi manuscript. This is probably because, to one degree or another, he'd exaggerated its very being. As historian Daniel Stolzenberg writes in his doctoral dissertation on Kircher's Egyptological efforts, “
No such author or text is known to exist.” Kircher didn't make it up entirely—perhaps there was a compilation of old writings—but it wasn't quite what he said it was.

Kircher left with a trunk-load of books Peiresc had given him to help with his translation. In return, he promised to come back again to demonstrate the clock and to be sure to bring the manuscript with him when he did.

—

SOON AFTER RETURNING
to Avignon, Kircher received a letter from the superior general of the Jesuits containing news about another reassignment. In his memoir, Kircher rendered it as if taking it in for the first time: “
I am called to Vienna, Austria, where I have been designated Mathematician of Caesar.”

The statement sounds almost delusional. But it seemed that “Caesar,” by whom he meant Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was looking for a replacement for Johannes Kepler, who had died a couple of years before. (Kepler had his share of early-modern-age trouble. His mother had been accused of witchcraft—he'd used his influence to have her released. Six out of the eleven children from his two marriages died in infancy or childhood. Now, just a few years after his death, his bones were said to be lost; the churchyard in which he was buried was blasted and trampled into nothingness during the Swedish siege of Regensberg.)