2
Inevitable Obstacles
Kircher’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 t
he 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.”
Kircher and his companions made it out through the town gates. Avoiding the roads and making their way slowly, they hoped to reach the small city of Münster, home to another not always well-appreciated Jesuit community. It was located about fifty miles west, through thickly wooded lowlands. “The winter at that time was harsh and the snow was very deep, and, what was worst of all, we were poorly clothed and were lacking the necessary provisions,” he remembered. “But the driving fear of the pursuing soldiers furnished wings to us in our flight.”
A dozen or more of Kircher’s fellow Jesuits were in fact captured. As a Catholic official later described it, Christian “took subjects prisoner, bound them, beat them, martyred some of them to death” and “similarly maltreated others.” He seized all of the town’s supplies, livestock, and grain, as well as its “cannons, munitions and silver plate.” Christian himself later boasted that during the rape and pillage of Paderborn he’d probably fathered enough “young Dukes of Brunswick” to keep the priests in line there for a generation to come.
Kircher’s group “wandered in the most dense forest and fields” all through the night and into the next day. “Though immersed up to the knee in thick clods of snow, we were progressing as much as we were able on our journey through this harshest wilderness,” he recalled. He was so hungry, he claimed, that he gladly would have experienced “the degree of pleasure afforded by roots and grass, were the depth of the snow and the earth packed with ice not begrudging us this joy!” Finally, “frozen head to toe with trembling cheeks and faces turned completely blue,” they found their way out of the forest and came across a cottage, where they were given some crude bread to eat. “It was of the worst type . . . made from straw and bran,” he remembered. “Nonetheless it was as sweet to my famished palate as nothing that I can recall eating during my entire life.”
Sometime that evening, in a place with poor dwellings and a fire burning in the dark, Kircher and his friends met up with “a certain man” who gave them warm food and a bed for the night. By the end of the next day they passed through the gates of Münster, which had seen its share of religious conflict. (Iron cages that were used decades before to display the corpses of executed Anabaptists still hung from the steeple of St. Lambert’s church, and still do.) They recuperated there for about a week, until they heard Christian was moving in their direction, and then set off again, heading west (farther and farther from Paderborn, Fulda, Geisa, and home), toward
the Rhine, about sixty miles away. There was yet another Jesuit college in the town of Neuss, not far on the opposite side. From Neuss, the more permanent safety of Cologne could be reached in about a day of travel south along the river.
After two more days of hiking, they came to the Rhine’s east bank near Düsseldorf. The river, which runs all the way from the Alps to the North Sea, appeared to be frozen over. As Kircher later learned, the locals were usually willing to pay someone to find out if the ice was “solid enough to bear the weight of men and livestock.” But with one look at Kircher’s group, they recognized an opportunity to save some money: “Since they saw that we were poorly clothed (for we were dressed in secular garb), and since they strongly sensed that we desired to cross the river that very day, and since they speculated that we were men of little value, or fugitive soldiers, they believed that it would be of little consequence if they persuaded us, though we might die from it, to test the way.”
Whoever these people were, they “happily and with the utmost mendacity” took the young men to the best place from which to cross. Kircher went first, treading carefully. His companions trailed behind in single file, some paces apart. “I then, as the leader of all, tested the way,” he recounted, but “when now I reached the middle of the river, behold, I saw the entire Rhine exposed before me.” His frightened companions began making their way back to shore, but he had “progressed farther than the solidness of the ice was bearing.” Trying to follow his friends to the riverbank, Kircher saw that the ice was breaking up where they stepped, leaving him “in the middle of an island, as it were.” Once his friends reached the bank, they dropped down on their knees to pray for his safety. As they prayed, they watched him being carried down the river, alone on his floating island of ice.
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 3
