A Man of Misconceptions
THE LIFE OF AN ECCENTRIC IN AN AGE OF CHANGE
John Glassie
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York
2012
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2012 by John Glassie
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Illustration Credits constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Glassie, John.
A man of misconceptions : the life of an eccentric in an age of change / John Glassie.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-101-59703-3
1. Kircher, Athanasius, 1602–1680. 2. Scientists—Germany—Biography. 3. Intellectuals—Germany—Biography. 4. Eccentrics and eccentricities— Germany—Biography. 5. Germany—History—1618–1648—Biography. 6. Germany—History—1648–1740—Biography. 7. Science—Germany—History—17th century. 8. Germany—Intellectual life—17th century. I. Title.
CT1098.K46G53 2012 2012026023
943'.041092—dc23
[B]
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
For Natalie
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Apologetic Forerunner to This Kircherian Study
PART ONE
1. Incapable of Resisting the Force
2. Inevitable Obstacles
3. A Source of Great Fear
4. Scenic Proceedings
5. Chief Inciter of Action
6. Beautiful Reports
PART TWO
7. Secret Exotic Matters
8. Habitation of Hell
9. The Magnet
10. An Innumerable Multitude of Catoptric Cats
11. Four Rivers
12. Egyptian Oedipus
13. The Admiration of the Ignorant
14. Little Worms
15. Philosophical Transactions
16. Underground World
17. Fombom
18. Everything
PART THREE
19. Not As It Was
20. Immune and Exempt
21. Mentorella
22. Closest of All to the Truth
23. The Strangest Development
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Sources
Index
Illustration Credits
Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. . . . He is but a superficial thinker who would despise and refuse to hear of them merely because they are absurd.
—Charles MacKay,
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852 edition
APOLOGETIC FORERUNNER TO THIS KIRCHERIAN STUDY
Sometime in the early 1670s an old Jesuit priest named Athanasius Kircher began to write a remarkable account of his early life. It told how, by virtue of divine intervention and his own bright mind, he’d come out of nowhere (a small town in the forested region of what is now central Germany) and survived stampeding horses, a painful hernia, and the armies of an insane bishop, among other things, to take his place as one of the intellectual celebrities of the seventeenth century.
As a general rule Kircher never ruined a good story with facts. Although well-known for more than thirty seat-cushion-size books on almost as many subjects, and for an apparent knowledge of almost everything, he was also known for a tendency to embellish on his own behalf. (The other frequent complaint against him was more like the opposite: people said he was inclined to believe any spectacular story he heard.) His uncharacteristically slim autobiography, written either in his bedchamber off a college courtyard in Rome or at a mountainside retreat called Mentorella, certainly included as many exaggerations and omissions as great escapes and miraculous recoveries, but the main story he told was true.
In many cases the truth is even more remarkable than Kircher was willing to let on. He doesn’t come out and say, for example, that he first gained the attention of the learned elite in the early 1630s, at least in part, by claiming to own a clock that was powered by a sunflower seed and a mystery-solving manuscript written by an Arab rabbi. Unfortunately for Kircher, by the time he died in 1680, his stature was fading. After his death, for the most part, until a recent revival of interest in this baroque polymath, the custom was to either scoff or avoid discussing him altogether. “It is not the writer’s intention to enter into the vast and terrifying subject of Athanasius Kircher,” one art historian assured his readers when, in the middle of a 1972 paper on Jesuit architecture, he found himself in the vicinity.
“Vast” is an appropriate word because Kircher’s curiosity and intellectual pursuits were almost unfathomably widespread. He was genuinely and insatiably curious about the world around him, and from his established place at the Collegio Romano, the flagship institution of his order in Rome, he threw himself into the study of everything from light to language to medicine to mathematics. In his museum at the Collegio he not only displayed antiquities, artifacts, and curiosities from around the world (amassed with the help of Jesuit missionaries), but also demonstrated his own magic lanterns, speaking statues, vomiting devices, and, as legend has it, a single “cat piano.”
Kircher’s museum at the Collegio Romano
This was the kind of man who pursued his interest in geological matters by lowering himself down into the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius. He spent decades trying to decipher the hieroglyphic texts of ancient Egypt because he believed, along with many o
thers, that they contained mystical wisdom passed down from the time of Adam. He examined all aspects of music and acoustics, and experimented with an algorithmic approach to songwriting. He was among the first to publish a description of what could be seen through a microscope.
Kircher was so prolific and so ingenious that he might have been remembered as a kind of seventeenth-century Leonardo. The problem was that he got so many things wrong, and this is also where the “terrifying” part comes in. Many of Kircher’s actual ideas today seem wildly off base, if not simply bizarre. Contrary to Kircher’s thinking, for instance, there is nothing occult or divine about magnetism. There is no such thing as universal sperm. And there is no network of fires and oceans leading to the center of the Earth. It’s fair to say that from the viewpoint of modern science Kircher has been something of a joke.
Of course, modern science didn’t exist in 1602, when Kircher was born, but he lived right through the age in which it began. The story of the so-called scientific revolution, a term that was coined only in the twentieth century, is already a cliché, in which magic and superstition were subdued by rational minds and the experimental method. For people who lived then, it was a lot more complicated than that. But there does seem to be a consensus that what transpired during the seventeenth century, give or take a few decades, somehow explains how we became modern, how we became who we are.
When Kircher was born, to pick the easiest example, almost everyone assumed the Earth was at the center of the universe; at the time of his death almost every educated man willing to be honest with himself understood that it wasn’t. (There wasn’t much opportunity to become an educated woman, and most of Europe’s forty million peasants were not aware of the debate.) At the very least, as the cultural critic Lawrence Weschler once put it, “Europe’s mind was blown.”
Athanasius Kircher—an apparently silly man, a somewhat untrustworthy priest, an egomaniac, and an author who inspired one American historian to write in 1906 that “his works in number, bulk, and uselessness are not surpassed in the whole field of learning”—is perhaps not the most likely subject for a biography. Then again, he can just as easily be characterized as an extremely devout person, a champion of wonder, a man of awe-inspiring erudition and inventiveness, who, one way or another, helped advance the cause of humankind. His “useless” books were read in the royal courts of London and Paris and in the settlements of New Spain, later called Mexico. They were read, and often funded, by popes and Holy Roman Emperors. And they were read, if not always respected, by the smartest minds of the time. A secret Jesuit adherent of the Copernican system in the aftermath of the Galileo affair, a debunker of alchemy at the time Isaac Newton became obsessed with the practice, a collaborator with the artist Gianlorenzo Bernini on two of his most recognizable works, and an influence on Gottfried Leibniz’s thinking about the binary system, Kircher, or rather the story of his life, might provide some insight into how we got here after all. One of the biggest characters of all time, he was also surprisingly representative of his own.
Kircher wanted the world to be magical, and yet to make sense, and he believed in his special ability to make sense of it. He also wanted to be famous (not to die), and he began writing his memoir in his seventies as part of a larger effort to shore up his legacy; he understood that his reputation was in decline. Around the same time he published another book, not under his own name but under the name of a student, titled Apologetic Forerunner to Kircherian Studies, in which he defended himself from his detractors and reaffirmed his belief in the magnetic healing power of something called the snake stone. He was also engaged in a dispute with an English gentleman over who could truly claim to have invented the megaphone. It wasn’t possible for him to know how it would all turn out: the question wasn’t whether he would be remembered, since he couldn’t have imagined obscurity for himself, but how well.
PART ONE
1
Incapable of Resisting the Force
According to the memoir of Athanasius Kircher, even the circumstances of his birth were auspicious. And in a sense they were, if you choose, as he did, to leave out the witch hunt.
Kircher’s mother was “the daughter of an upright citizen,” his father a learned man with “expertise in expounding complicated matters.” They lived in a hilltop town called Geisa, part of the old principality of Fulda, in a valley of the gentle and green Rhön Mountains. (Fulda was also the name of the small city at the center of the principality; the trip there from Geisa took about three hours on foot.) For a long time before Kircher was born in 1602, his parents were caught up in the conflict that had disrupted northern Europe since 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Catholics and the new Lutherans felt the special kind of hatred for each other that comes from a split within the same religion, as did the Catholics and the Calvinists, the followers of John Calvin.
The effects of the Reformation were especially ugly in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, as Voltaire would later say. It was more like an agglomeration, to use his word, of three hundred more or less autonomous entities loosely organized under the auspices of the Hapsburgs in Vienna, relatives of the king who controlled Spain, Portugal, the kingdom of Naples, the duchy of Milan, and a great deal of the new world. The Holy Roman Empire, such as it was, included feudal lands, secular territories, free cities, Catholic abbeys, and prince-bishoprics with many overlapping interests and internal faith-based animosities.
Kircher’s father worked as a magistrate under the ruling Catholic prince of Fulda, a man named Balthasar von Dernbach. In 1576, as Kircher described it, the prince was “driven out by the persecution of heretics into exile.” The “heretics” who threw him out of office and drove him all of three miles away were mainly Lutherans fed up with von Dernbach’s effort to re-Catholicize the region, which included throwing Lutherans out of office and installing people like Kircher’s father in their place. Although Kircher’s father “favored Balthasar’s most just cause and defended him with all his might against the attacking heretics,” he too was “vexed by the persecution of the heretics,” to say nothing of “the insolence of the heretics,” and was forced to leave his post.
Von Dernbach and his lawyers spent twenty-six years building the case for his reinstatement, which finally occurred in 1602, near the feast day of Saint Athanasius, who himself had been forced into exile for staunchly defending orthodox Christianity against a powerful heretical sect. The birth of the ninth Kircher child on this feast day, so close to such an important occasion, meant that the child would get an important-sounding name: Athanasius comes from the Greek word for “immortal”; Kircher is a variation on the German for “church.”
Soon after von Dernbach regained power, he began to cleanse the principality not only of heresy but of the influence of the devil. Inquiries turned up a woman in her late thirties named Merga Bien, who, among other suspicious things, such as being the wife of von Dernbach’s political opponent, had recently become pregnant for the first time in her fourteen-year marriage. In jail she was locked in a dog kennel for some time and forced to confess that her pregnancy resulted from sexual relations with Satan. After more than twelve weeks of detention, she and her unborn baby were burned alive in Fulda’s courthouse square.
Many people from the surrounding countryside were subsequently taken from their homes or fields to be put on trial for witchcraft in the name of the one true religion. Every couple of months, as many as thirteen women and girls at a time were burned alive, sometimes at the stake, sometimes all together on a huge pyre after having been stuck through with red-hot skewers. More than two hundred people were executed before von Dernbach died and his administration was finally dissolved, around Kircher’s fourth birthday.
The hope is that young Kircher was not exposed to these scenes, to the screaming or to the reek in the air. But from
a modern point of view, daily life in Geisa had a harshness and a reek about it regardless. Although Kircher’s family probably lived in the kind of half-timbered house that now evokes Old World charm, they also lived within short range of their animals and their own waste. Unsanitary conditions were exacerbated by the fact that, as one historian has put it, “Westerners at this time looked on water with great suspicion,” though, given the number of waterborne diseases, they were probably right to.
Even in the house of someone of relative status, such as Kircher’s father, who at one point also served a few years as Geisa’s mayor, the first floor was often used to keep chickens and pigs, to slaughter and butcher animals for meat, as well as to wash clothes and stock provisions. The walls of the house were made by filling its frame with a mix of clay and straw, and the roof was thatched. On the second floor there was probably a kitchen that was filled with smoke, because in these houses typically there were stoves but no chimneys, and a main room, a Stube, with hard benches, where family members would sit, eat, sew, mend, study, pray, hang and shelve household items, and perhaps sometimes sleep. Candles stank because they were made of molded tallow, rendered from beef or mutton suet. Any lamps also burned animal fat. In the cold rooms on the floor above the kitchen and the Stube, for two adults and nine children there were perhaps three straw or wool beds, though the numbers changed over time: two of Kircher’s older brothers died in childhood.
The family’s house was steps away from Geisa’s market square, at the top of the long hill that led to the center of the town. The variety of available goods must have been fairly limited. People lived chiefly on soups, porridges, hard brown bread, and some meat, though Catholics ate fish and vegetables on fast days, particularly during Lent. When Kircher was a boy, potatoes, coffee, tea, tobacco, chocolate, and corn, not to mention the fork, were very likely unknown to him. (By the time he died, he had become an advocate of tea from China as treatment for kidney stones and hangovers.)
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 1