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

by Glassie, John

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  DURING TWO YEARS of teaching in Mainz to complete what is known as the Jesuit regency period, Kircher did what he could to satisfy his now impossible curiosity and to make headway in his ongoing pursuit of the divine mind. He began to make his own nighttime observations with a telescope, or a “celestial tube,” as he called it. And in order to observe the sun without staring directly at it, he used a device called a helioscope, an innovation of the Jesuit Christopher Scheiner that combined telescopic lenses with mirrors to project the image of the sun onto paper or a screen. Whether Kircher built his own isn’t clear, but he claimed that on a certain day in April of 1625 he witnessed for himself what Scheiner and Galileo were arguing about, observing twelve major and thirty-eight minor sunspots. It was “not without wonderment,” he wrote later, that he saw “the whole heterogeneous surface of the solar hemisphere, appearing composed out of shadows and little lights.”

  When the Society decided to keep Kircher in Mainz for his three-year course in theology, probably because of the war, he made the most of it. “I was utterly occupied with this one endeavor,” he remembered, “namely that I link to my theological studies the study of oriental languages, and that I pore equally over each at all times.” In his search for the earliest Christian scripture and the ancient, divinatory theology of Hermes, Orpheus, Maimonides, Zoroaster, and others, Kircher expanded his study of languages beyond Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to Arabic and two forms of what is now called Aramaic: “biblical,” or Chaldean, written in Hebrew characters, and “Christian” written in the Syriac alphabet.

  But by 1629, after being kept about five years in Mainz, Kircher grew dispirited, as would any melancholic with ambitions of grandeur. (The city had been a site of frustration for inventive, ambitious sorts before; it was where Johannes Gutenberg first employed movable type, printing one hundred eighty copies of the forty-two-line Bible before being sued by his creditor and forced to stop.) Although the war had temporarily subsided, it had dragged on for a decade, politics across the Continent had grown more intricate, and almost all the nation-states of Europe had gotten involved in one way or another. Towns and villages throughout the so-called empire had been made vulnerable to the desperate brutality, not to mention the smallpox and typhus, of ill-fed armies. The plague had spread through that part of Europe as well; at its worst, in Prague, it wiped out sixteen thousand people. Harvests, years of them, had been ruined. Peasants had revolted by the thousands. The only piece of good news, from Kircher’s point of view, was that after defeat in battle and illness from the campaign, Christian of Brunswick, the Insane Bishop, had died a few years before. He was twenty-six. People said that his insides had been eaten away by a huge worm.

  The prospects across the German provinces were generally bleak. In January of that year, Kircher brazenly addressed a letter to the superior general of the Jesuits in Rome, making a vehement plea to be sent somewhere as a missionary. He was finally about to be ordained into the priesthood, and he was willing to go to just about any corner of the world to propagate the faith—“Arabia, Palestine, Constantinople, Persia, India, China, Japan, America.” But he expressed a clear preference for the Holy Lands and North Africa, places where in his off-hours from saving souls he might dig up ancient scrolls and texts containing early mystical wisdom. “For the love of God, and the holy Virgin Mother,” he wrote, “I resolutely implore and beseech you to grant my extremely great desire to follow the apostolic pursuit. May my prayers and supplications not be made in vain, I pray—do not permit my soul to waste away cramped among the confines of this barren Germany. Stretch forth my soul, heretofore enchained, now entirely in the service of extending the divine majesty.”

  “Life is short,” Kircher reminded the superior general, and he certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of his in Mainz.

  This wasn’t exactly the humility and indifference that Ignatius of Loyola had in mind for his soldiers of God, the kind that meant you “do not desire, nor even prefer” one circumstance over another as long as they served God equally. The Jesuit authorities did not grant his request. Instead, after Kircher’s ordination they reassigned him to another old city on the Rhine. This time Speyer, where he spent a customary period of spiritual probation before saying his final vows.

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  ONE DAY IN SPEYER, Kircher was asked by a superior to find a book in the library. While looking among the stacks—“Was it by chance or by the arrangement of divine providence?” he later wondered—he came across a volume depicting several ancient Egyptian obelisks. These particular obelisks, now in Rome, were thought to have been brought back from Egypt by conquering generals as many as fifteen or sixteen hundred years prior. Fallen into ruins over the centuries, they were restored and re-erected by a recent pope in the decade or two before Kircher was born.

  “Instantly carried away with curiosity,” Kircher assumed for a moment that the hieroglyphic markings on these structures were artistic decorations. But “when from the attached history of obelisks I learned that these figures were the chronicles of ancient Egyptian Wisdom, inscribed from time immemorial . . .” he recalled, “the desire befell me and I was goaded by the greatest hidden impulse to discover whether it was possible to attain the acquisition of knowledge of this type.”

  After all, an explanation of these markings “had been offered by no one since their meaning had been destroyed over the passage of so much time.” Many believed that Hermes Trismegistus himself had devised the hieroglyphs as a way of preserving and protecting the old wisdom, encoding it in symbolic language that was universal but also indecipherable to everyone but the truly wise. “It was the opinion of the ancient theologians,” wrote Pico della Mirandola, “that one should not rashly make public the secret mysteries of theology.” The obelisks were thought to contain some of the earliest and most sacred ideas of all: possibly this was a strain of knowledge that originated in the time of Adam, a strain that had survived the Flood and the confusion of tongues.

  “From that very moment I never turned my mind from deciphering these figures,” Kircher claimed. “For I was reasoning thus: imprinted characters of the ancient Egyptians have survived, indeed even genuine ones at that; therefore, the meanings of these characters will still somewhere lie hidden, scattered among the chronicles of ancient authors, and perhaps not in Latin and Greek texts but in those exotic works of the Orient.”

  Later that year, about a decade after arriving on gangrenous feet for his novitiate in Paderborn, Kircher made his final vows as a Jesuit priest—retaking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as “perpetual solemn vows,” and making an additional vow of obedience to the pope. For his first assignment as a fully professed priest, Kircher headed back up the Rhine, past Mainz, back up the Main, past Aschaffenburg, into a region of centuries-old vineyards, to a university town called Würzburg.

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  BY THE TIME Kircher arrived in 1630, Catholic victories against Danish Protestants in the war had resulted in a peace treaty. For the time being anyway, at least according to Kircher, “high peace resided over the Catholics.” On the other hand, the witch hunt that had been going on for the last several years in the archbishopric of Würzburg wasn’t quite over. From his fortress on a high slope across the river from the city, the prince-bishop had overseen an investigation in which as many as nine hundred people were executed, including members of the clergy, many young children, and his own nephew.

  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

  Since 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.