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

by Glassie, John

  Kircher fled to God with his tears. As for his heart, “it held faith in God” and “it even knew that God . . . would never fail his own.” Finally his ice floe was caught against “enormous heaps” of others building up into a jam of unsteady masses. “It was as dangerous as it was difficult to climb over this huge pile of ice fragments,” he recalled. “Still, unless I preferred to die, it had to be attempted.”

  As it happens, most people now are familiar with an image of an icy Rhine near this spot: the nineteenth-century painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emmanuel Leutze, who used the Rhine, not the Delaware River, as the basis for the scene. To judge from the way Kircher told the rest of the story in his memoir, however, his crossing was perhaps even more heroic than Washington’s:

  Two altogether inevitable obstacles to passing over this heap presented themselves, the first of which was the slipperiness of the ice, which offered aid in climbing to neither feet nor hands. The other was the cracks, which had come into the fragments straight through to the surface of the water and into which, should I fall, there would be no human hope of escaping.

  What spirit I would possess in the face of so many unavoidable dangers, God alone knows. With fear nevertheless adding diligence to my nature, I went by the manifest aid of God through the smaller bits to the other part of the Rhine, where the river was drawn together by the more solid ice. While I continued thus on my way straight to a point somewhere near to the far shore, behold, I see the Rhine utterly opened. What I should do I was barely able to consider. Retreat was impossible, progress forward was difficult; however, that I remain there, exposed as I was to the harsh cold in the deep winter, completely exhausted by my sufferings, fear and anxiety of spirit, and, furthermore, wounded on my hands and feet by the sharp bits of ice, was nothing more than awaiting death itself. So, no other recourse remained for me but that I reach the opposite shore, which stood only about twenty-four feet away, by swimming (for as a boy I had learned to swim). The undertaking transpired thus: since amidst my swimming I was weighed down by my clothes, I tested for the bottom, and when I had found it, emerging now to my neck, a little after to my breast, and now finally to my knees, I covered with ease the remaining distance.

  Once on the far shore, although his limbs were “stiffened by the vehemence of the cold,” Kircher fell to his knees and thanked God “for so clear a manifestation of divine protection.” Slowly he began the three-hour journey to Neuss by himself. “With the assistance of divine grace I finally reached that town,” he remembered, “where in the college I had already been announced by my comrades, who had crossed another part of the river, as dead and drowned.”

  3

  A Source of Great Fear

  Kircher was “received and restored” in Neuss “to the tremendous joy of all.” After three days of rest, and another several hours of hiking on rutted, frozen roads, the young men finally walked wide-eyed through the gates of Cologne, a center of trade along the Rhine that had once rivaled Paris in size, sophistication, culture, and learning. A sovereign and heavily fortified “free city” within the Holy Roman Empire, Cologne laid claim to forty thousand citizens, an entire army of its own, one hundred fifty churches, and the world’s largest incomplete cathedral: building had begun almost four hundred years before Kircher’s arrival, but no work had been done for almost a century. Construction wouldn’t resume for another two hundred years. A couple of streets away from the site of this unfinished Gothic mountain, as many as fifteen hundred students took classes at the Jesuit college.

  Within this more urban setting, Kircher went on with his course in philosophy. Now he was the country boy in worn-out shoes, known or whispered to have barely escaped martyrdom at the hands of the Insane Bishop. He was still extremely pious, and still pretending to be a dimwit, but he wouldn’t be able to pass himself off that way much longer.

  Kircher and other Jesuit scholastics read Aristotle’s works in Greek and discussed them in Latin. They also took general instruction in mathematics, a strange part, on the face of it, of a philosophy program meant to prepare them for theology and the priesthood—especially since mathematics had traditionally been viewed with condescension by natural philosophers and theologians alike. Mathematics could be used to measure and describe, and it had many practical applications, but it couldn’t explain, in the opinion of natural philosophers, the way natural philosophy could. It had nothing to say about the causes or the natures or the essences of things, only about, as one historian put it, the “superficial quantitative properties” of things, properties regarded by philosophers as incidental. Mathematicians were bean counters, and their instruments (astrolabes, quadrants, protractors, plumb levels, calipers, magnetic compasses) just made for better bean counting.

  But the reputation of mathematics as a field of study had improved a great deal in the sixteenth century. New translations of works by Archimedes of Syracuse on floating bodies and mechanics gave engineering its own seemingly infallible ancient authority. Mathematics included four traditional academic subjects: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (basically the study of harmonics). But it also encompassed mechanics, engineering, optics, surveyorship, and astrology. People in positions of power cared more and more about math as applied to architecture and construction, shipbuilding and navigation, mapmaking, fortification, armament, ballistics, and so on. And one Jesuit in particular had exerted himself to elevate the role of mathematics within the order. He was born Christoph Klau, in Bamberg, but his Latinized name was Christopher Clavius, and many of his contemporaries referred to him as the Euclid of his time.

  Based at the prestigious Collegio Romano, the Jesuit college in Rome, from early in his priesthood until he died in 1612 (when Kircher was about ten), Clavius published works on astronomy, geometry, the construction of sundials, and algebra, a relatively new field in the West. He was among the first to use a dot or point as a decimal separator, parentheses to enclose calculations within an expression, and an x for variables. Most memorably, he recalculated the calendar year at the request of Pope Gregory XIII. The Julian calendar, put into use by Julius Caesar more than fifteen hundred years before, had been slipping to the point where it seemed that Easter would soon be celebrated in February. In order to start fresh with the new calendar, ten days had to be skipped outright. People in Catholic lands who went to bed on October 4, 1582, woke up the next morning on October 15. (Protestant countries resisted the switch for more than a century. Japan and Korea started using the calendar in the nineteenth century, and it took the Bolsheviks to make the change in Russia, which they did after coming to power in 1917. The Gregorian calendar is good until the year 4317, when a single extra day will have to be added.)

  After suffering attacks by dubious Protestants who refused to adopt the new calendar—was this some kind of Catholic trick to steal time?—Clavius presented a plan to the Jesuit hierarchy by which the general intellectual reputation of those heretics could be, as he wrote, “most rapidly and easily destroyed.” He urged the Society to identify and nurture those men who might become “outstandingly erudite” in what had previously been deemed the “minor studies of mathematics, rhetoric, and language.” Clavius envisioned an elite corps of mathematician priests “distributed in various nations and kingdoms like sparkling gems,” serving as “a source of great fear to all enemies” and as “an incredible incitement to make young people flock to us from all the parts of the world.” Many of his proposals were put in place. And so while he was rigorously and rather inflexibly educated in Aristotelian and Thomist doctrines, Kircher also received private instruction in the very discipline that was beginning to undermine them.

  In 1610, twelve years before Kircher arrived in Cologne, Galileo Galilei, a mathematics professor in Padua, published a slim volume, Starry Messenger, about the observations he’d made with a new instrument he called the perspicillum, or the telescope. It was a very much improved-upon version of the sp
yglasses that had recently begun to appear in Europe. The configuration (a concave lens at one end of a tube, and a convex lens at the other) was fairly simple, but Galileo’s handcrafted device made things appear, as he wrote, “nearly one thousand times larger and over thirty times closer” than they would with the naked eye. Among other discoveries, he observed four moons revolving around Jupiter. The most basic implication of this was clear to any student of natural philosophy willing to admit it. (At the Jesuit school of La Flèche in Anjou, a student named René Descartes is said to have written a sonnet celebrating the news.) If moons revolved around Jupiter, maybe Earth wasn’t really the center of the universe, around which everything revolved. Galileo also reported that “the moon is not robed in a smooth and polished surface,” as Aristotelian doctrine had it, “but is in fact rough and uneven, covered everywhere, just like the Earth’s surface, with huge prominences, deep valleys, and chasms.”

  The Church seemed willing at first to consider these findings. Clavius and other Jesuit astronomers held a reception for Galileo in Rome, and while Clavius declared telescopes “troublesome to operate,” he confirmed the existence of moons around Jupiter. On the question of the rough surface of the moon, however, the seventy-one-year-old astronomer couldn’t bring himself to believe his eyes. Perhaps the moon was just unevenly dense, he suggested. In a letter to the Church’s chief theologian, a group of Jesuit astronomers wrote together that they were “not sufficiently certain” about the matter. In other words, preconceived notions were such that Clavius couldn’t see through a telescope what modern people, who know the truth, can recognize with the naked eye.

  When Galileo was offered a new job in the Medici court in Florence around this time, he insisted on a double title: “mathematician and philosopher.” Since then he’d gotten into a dispute with Christopher Scheiner, another Jesuit in Rome, over who had been the first to observe spots on the sun, and what they were. Galileo argued that he had, that they were imperfections in another supposedly perfect sphere, and that their apparent movement was due to Earth’s orbit around the sun. In 1616, after certain Dominicans added their own complaints against him, Galileo was admonished by the Church for his Copernican views. By the time Kircher arrived in Cologne, Galileo was in yet another public dispute with yet another Jesuit astronomer, over the nature of comets.

  During this same period, Johannes Kepler, a brilliant astronomer born near Stuttgart, had been arguing his own mystical as well as mathematical case for a sun-centered cosmology. Kepler spent years working with reams of astronomical data he’d inherited, some say purloined, from the estate of astronomer Tycho Brahe, his former employer. He believed the planets were drawn around a living sun, in ellipses, not circles, by a spiritual, magnetic force. (Although a devout Lutheran, Kepler was currently in the service of the new Catholic Hapsburg emperor, perhaps not actually doing astrological predictions for his military leaders but supplying the astronomical readings for the astrologers who were.)

  In this kind of environment, the Jesuits needed all the new mathematicians they could get. And despite Kircher’s efforts to conceal his intellect, his professors in Cologne saw that he had a bent for mathematics. Humility was important, and generally it was better to want to live with Christ in ignominy rather than fame, to be thought a fool and an idiot with Christ rather than to be thought wise and prudent without him. But nothing was more important than to discern God’s call properly. Some were meant to achieve great things, ad majorem Dei gloriam, as the Jesuit motto went, for the greater glory of God.

  —

  A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, twenty-two-year-old Kircher left Cologne and traveled down the Rhine to the small city of Koblenz. Going south along this route, the riverbanks grow higher and higher until they become tall promontories on top of which sit castles and ancient fortifications. Koblenz itself, whose name comes from the Latin for “confluence,” takes up a triangle of land at the point where the Rhine and the Mosel rivers meet. Yet another Jesuit college and a brand-new church were situated in the middle of the town, helping to form a public square.

  Koblenz, where the Rhine and Mosel rivers meet

  It seems that while in the midst of his philosophy studies (in its third year, the program turned to metaphysics) and his special mathematics training in Cologne, Kircher had also shown enough proficiency with languages to be given a professorship in Greek. “The time came,” he explained in his memoir, “when I was compelled out of obligation to reveal those talents that up until then had remained hidden.” And this, he didn’t seem to mind adding, was greeted with extreme surprise and envy: “People were unable to grasp how a man, for whom up to this point they had held no regard, and in whom no vestige of any inborn intellectual skill had been manifest, was able to evince those points which barely fell within the ken of the greatest masters of languages, mathematics and recondite wisdom.”

  People of Koblenz may have had trouble grasping other things, like what Kircher was doing up on a platform on the side of the Society’s church. They would have seen soon enough that this student of the works of Clavius was installing a sundial he’d designed for the location, complete with a Latin inscription that read, “See! How the shadow flies, so flies both the year and the age like a silent army.”

  —

  THERE WERE MANY influences at work in Kircher’s early life, and many that had to do with the cultural rebirth for which the Renaissance is named. That revival was of course fueled by the rediscovery of ancient Latin and Greek texts, which helped to put a new emphasis on the individual, the worldly life, the civic life, and the appreciation of beauty as an important aspect of God’s creation. But there was also a mystical component to it that might have had something to do with Kircher’s new attitude.

  In fifteenth-century Florence, in addition to commissioning work from the great Italian painters, the Medicis commissioned many translations of recovered Greek manuscripts from Italian scholars such as Marsilio Ficino. Ficino gave Europe access to the works of Plato for the first time in a thousand years, as well as to those of the so-called Neoplatonists of the second and third centuries.

  More important to Ficino and to his patron, he translated a whole set of newly discovered manuscripts that were thought to be much, much older, and to have been written by an ancient Egyptian named Hermes Trismegistus. What Ficino didn’t know, and what no one else knew at the time, was that they were not really the work of an ancient Egyptian, or any single person. Hermes was a purely mythological figure. His dialogues were really Neoplatonic tracts written by various authors in the first few centuries after Christ. But what historian Frances Yates called the “huge illusion of their vast antiquity” had a major influence on the thinking of the time.

  Ficino’s translations of Hermes were published in as many as twenty editions by the time Kircher got to them, which he undoubtedly did (perhaps even while he was in Cologne). Even Copernicus helped to back up his arguments for a sun-centered universe with a reference to this fictional authority. “In the middle of all these things sits the sun,” Copernicus explained, referring to the planets and the stars. After all, how could you “place such a lantern in a more suitable place, where it can illuminate everything at the same time? Certain men not foolishly call this the light of the world, others the mind, and still others the director of the universe. Trismegistus says it is God made manifest.”

  He was called “Trismegistus” because as a great priest, philosopher, and king, he was “thrice great.” Other texts attributed to him had been known since the days of the early Church; concerned largely with astral energies and hidden sympathies between natural phenomena, they were also thought to contain prophetic statements about the coming of Christianity. Hermes—Mercurius to the Romans, or Mercury—was said, despite his pagan status, to have had access to a secret tradition of original wisdom, and to have lived around the time of Moses.

  The exact chronology was unclear, to say the
least. Saint Augustine wrote, for instance, that Hermes lived “long before the sages and philosophers of Greece, but after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, yea, and Moses also: for at the time when Moses was born, was Atlas, Prometheus’s brother, a great astronomer, living, and he was grandfather by the mother’s side to the elder Mercury, who begat the father of this Trismegistus.”

  For his part, Ficino sometimes said Hermes was the same person as Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, known today as a prophet of Persia, and sometimes said that Zoroaster had been his predecessor. Either way, in his preface to the translations he called Hermes “the first author of theology” and traced a line of teaching that went almost directly from Hermes to Orpheus to Pythagoras to Plato. That is, according to Ficino, Plato based his philosophy on the wisdom of Hermes, who based his on even earlier knowledge. “Hence there is one ancient theology,” Ficino wrote, one original theology to which the one true Christian religion was an entirely compatible heir. Hermes “foresaw the ruin of the antique religion, the rise of the new faith, the coming of Christ, the judgment to come, the resurrection of the world, the glory of the blessed, and the torments of the damned.”

  The dialogues attributed to Hermes are a conglomeration of mystical philosophy and poetic religiosity. But along the lines of the actual works of Plato and the Neoplatonists, they asserted that matter, the physical world, the body, was a kind of unreality. Reality, truth itself, was in the immaterial essence of things, and existed as an emanation or divine force from God. On one hand, each physical thing or phenomenon was a limited, more or less vulgar incarnation of an unlimited, pure idea. On the other hand, this immaterial truth was in all things; all matter had the immaterial energy of God within it. And though human beings lived in physical bodies, they were at least partly divine, because they had immaterial intellect. As stated by the nonexistent Hermes, this godly intellect allowed man to move through the material world “as though he were himself a god,” tapping into the subtle energies that continually streamed down from above, and engaging with the invisible interconnections among stars, plants, stones, and animals.