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

by Glassie, John

  Despite the difficulties inherent in the way of life, the hilltop town of Geisa, overlooking the valley of the Ulster River, would have been a pleasant place to grow up. And from an early age, as might be expected of a boy who would later call himself “master of a hundred arts,” Kircher displayed a “not ordinary aptitude” for learning. This was thought to go along with his somewhat earthy complexion, his dark skin and dark hair, coloring believed to indicate an excess of black bile, called melancholia. Melancholic types were said to be pensive, dreamy, and intellectual, suited to deep study and the attainment of knowledge, even capable of genius. Moreover, Kircher’s head was large, generally agreed to suggest, as one seventeenth-century writer put it, “a wonderful intellect and a most tenacious memory.” Kircher’s father, a scholar of philosophy, theology, and rhetoric, who kept “thousands of books,” apparently took an aging parent’s interest in his youngest, most promising child. As his older sons “entered orders of various religions and daughters were joined in matrimony,” old Kircher taught the boy music, Latin, and the fundamentals of geography—or as Kircher later described it, the study of “the world according to its divisions.”

  When not receiving lessons from his father, or from a rabbi his father hired to teach him Hebrew, he seems to have received attention from above. Young Kircher was athletic but accident-prone, a bit of an absentminded professor even as a boy, and sometimes he got into the kind of trouble that, he claimed, only the Virgin Mary could get him out of.

  One hot summer day, he and some friends walked down to the bottom of the hill to cool off in the river. “It happened that in the midst of a certain mill house, the course of the river, in the manner of a lofty waterfall, was flowing with a more swift current because of the colossal trough of the mill wheel,” he recalled. “Carried to this trough by boyish ignorance and snatched up with the current, I was completely incapable of resisting the force, and now closer and closer to the wheel, with the name of Jesus and the customary prayer to Mary, I trembled at the danger of death and the grinding of my entire body.”

  The friends who saw him being “snatched beneath the wheel headlong” all gave up on his survival, “especially since the wheel missed the bottom of the channel by so little that my body would scarcely be able to sustain itself without the pulverizing of all my limbs.” When they finally found him downstream they were hardly able to believe their eyes: “By the singular protection of God and the Virgin Mary I emerged safe from the other side in such a way that no sign of harm was apparent on me.” Having been “restored thus by divine mercy” to them, Kircher rejoiced with his friends and they all “acknowledged the apparent miracle.”

  Another apparent miracle occurred during an annual horse race one Pentecost Sunday. After a procession to bless the fields “against the storms brought in by screech owls and Satan,” a crowd of people packed in tight to watch the event. “Upon the start of the race, individuals in the commotion were pressing one another more and more vehemently in their desire to see,” Kircher remembered. “But I, merely a boy, stood in the front of the crowd, since I was not able to withstand the force of those pressing; and violently shaken from my spot into the stadium, I was rolled into the very whirlwind of the horses running with all their might.”

  The crowd all shouted for the horses to stop. But as Kircher later asked, “Who can stop galloping horses?” There was nothing to do but curl himself into a ball and entrust himself again to God and the Virgin Mary. “And since I had been lost in the cloud of stirred-up dust, everyone was sure that I had been ground to pieces by the stamping of the horses. But in reality, after the horses had run by I stood up unharmed and safe by the singular gift of God.”

  Many people gathered around him to wonder how “amidst so great a whirlwind” he had managed to preserve himself from danger. “To these I responded that not small was the power of the one who rescued Jonah from the belly of the whale, and Tobias from the devouring of the fish, and Daniel from the lions, and who kept me safe from the stamping of the horses.”

  There was something special about this boy, as everyone around and even the boy himself—or especially the boy himself—could see.

  —

  SOME YEARS BEFORE Kircher was enrolled in the Jesuit school at Fulda, at around age ten, a Protestant professor from Heidelberg complained about the relatively new religious order. “Very many who want to be counted as Christians send their children to the schools of the Jesuits,” he explained. “This is a most dangerous thing, as the Jesuits are excellent and subtle philosophers, above everything intent on applying all their learning to the education of youth.”

  To Protestants, the growth of the Jesuits made for a threatening counterinsurgency, one all the more insidious for targeting the hearts and minds of young people. The Catholic order hadn’t been created to combat the heresy of Protestantism but seemed particularly well suited to that task. Its founder, Ignatius of Loyola, a previously vain and self-absorbed mercenary from the Basque region of Spain, had discerned his calling after his leg was shattered by cannon fire at the battle of Pamplona in 1521. He employed military terminology when establishing what he called the regiment or the company of Jesus, whose members served as “soldiers of God” doing “battle with evil.” (Later, more decorously, they were called the Society of Jesus.) Their official mission: “propagation of the faith”—“particularly the instruction of youth and ignorant persons in the Christian religion.” And like young men signing up to fight an apparently righteous war, thousands of young Catholic men responded to the call to defeat the heretics, wielding a form of intellectual as well as spiritual vigor. In little more than sixty years since the first Jesuit school was started in the Sicilian city of Messina, more than five hundred schools and almost fifty seminaries had been established across Europe. There were about sixteen thousand members of the order by 1600 and Jesuit missionaries all over the world in such places as India, China, the Philippines, Congo, Ethiopia, Morocco, Brazil, Paraguay, and Canada.

  Fulda as it looked in the seventeenth century

  All of this martial energy notwithstanding, the Jesuits exuded culture and sophistication. After his conversion, Ignatius had studied at the University of Paris, where he’d been exposed to the humanist values of the Renaissance. In the presence of natural beauty, he sometimes found himself in reverie. God existed in all things, according to Ignatius, and there was no reason to be cloistered away from the full realm of his creation. With a style that one modern historian has called “cosmopolitan, nonconformist, elitist,” the Jesuits engaged young men in Roman and Greek classics, history, literature, and theater. They were so good at connecting with their students that one Protestant preacher believed they must “anoint their pupils with secret salves of the devil, by which they so attract the children to themselves that they can only with difficulty be separated from these wizards.” And “therefore, the Jesuits ought not only to be expelled but to be burnt, otherwise they can never be gotten rid of.”

  Kircher’s own favorite Jesuit teacher through several years at Fulda “concerned himself with this one thing, that to my passion for books I add a passion for piety.” He also tried to prevent Kircher from being “misled by consort with depraved students.” Boys like him were “privately summoned” by this priest, and encouraged “with all of his skills” to follow the lifestyle of the saints. “For these values then to such a degree did he inflame us in private conversations,” Kircher recalled, “that for no other thing beyond the divine did we seem able to long.”

  Although Kircher later claimed to “spurn all those things that older boys are accustomed to do,” he continued to be prone to misadventure as a teenager. “I had heard that a tragedy was being staged in a town two days’ journey from Fulda,” he remembered, “and, as I was curious and eager to see these sorts of things, together with my friends I entrusted myself to the journey.” After the performance, Kircher began the trip back by himself. Th
e route led through part of the dense and damp Spessart Forest, which he described as “altogether horrible and infamous not only for its thieves but also for its host of dangerous wild beasts.”

  The danger was real enough in this and other wooded tracts of Europe. Robbers were said to kill their victims first and to check their pockets later. One man who traveled through German lands reported that, when caught, the criminals “are racked and tortured to make them confess, and afterwards their executions are very terrible.” He saw many “gallows and wheels where thieves were hanged, some fresh and some half rotten, and the carcasses of murderers, broken limb after limb on the wheels.” The infamy of the Spessart Forest in particular carries over into the twenty-first century, though today travelers through the region are more likely than anything to stop and enjoy a “Spessart Robber Buffet” along with a little Oktoberfest music.

  “As soon as I had entered this forest, confused by the multitude of ways,” Kircher wrote, in language that increasingly evokes spiritual searching, “behold, the more I progressed, the more I noticed that I was wandering from the true path, until, ensnared by brambles and thorn-bushes, I had no idea where in the world I was.” The sun was going down, increasing his anxiety, and he began to lose hope of finding his way. His solution was first to entrust himself to God and to the Virgin Mary—and then to climb the highest tree. He spent the entire night in its branches, “safe from the wild animals” but nevertheless “in constant prayer.” When morning came, after climbing down, he passed many hours in confusion and frustration. “Although I was not able to proceed because I was exhausted by the desperation of my soul and still more by hunger and by thirst, with new prayers addressed to God, I continued.” Finally he came across a large meadow where some reapers were working; it turned out that after two days of wandering he was just as far away from home as when he’d started.

  To Kircher, this incident—which ended with the reapers leading him through the region in exchange for an “exceedingly satisfactory recompense”—was yet another sign of God’s “divine goodwill” toward him. It was not lost on him that, including the incidents with the mill wheel and the running horses, he had been saved a trinity of times. And so in return, he wrote, he “became wholly devoted to attaining a purpose in life and forfeiting things worldly.”

  It makes for an appropriate beginning to the official life of a devout Jesuit priest. To the extent that he believed he’d been the recipient of divine mercy, however, Kircher nurtured rather than forfeited the feeling that he was meant for something great.

  —

  BY THE TIME Kircher completed his secondary studies, at about the age of sixteen, he yearned to begin the two years of novitiate training, the three years of philosophy, the five years of teaching and practice, and the four final years of theology required to become a Jesuit priest. In fact, like his brothers, who had all joined religious orders, Kircher had limited freedom, economic or otherwise, to choose a different, or better, path. The Jesuits gave him an outlet for his religious zeal and his intellectual curiosity. Because they valued learning, they could accommodate what Kircher described as “a spirit unrelentingly devoted to acquiring knowledge” like his, though it was probably the prospect of traveling to some impossibly exotic and recently discovered part of the world as a missionary that appealed to him most. Convincing a Calvinist of the truth of transubstantiation was nothing compared with dying a martyr’s death in a place like Japan or New France.

  Kircher was studying at the Jesuit college in the old city of Mainz, where the Main River meets the Rhine, when he finally got news of his acceptance as a candidate for the priesthood. But his “exceptional joy” didn’t last long: “Barely had I received permission to enter the Society from the Chief Provincial when, behold, most merciful God wished to exercise his devoted servant with new tribulations.”

  In the winter of 1618, as he recalled, “all the rivers seemed frozen with ice,” and the broad Main provided a place for would-be Jesuits with an inflated sense of self to put their ice-skating skills on display. One day, Kircher remembered, with his usual lack of brevity, “I set out with my friends in order to frequent the games which were accustomed to take place on the ice at that time of year, with the intention of showing my agility. And as I was rather desirous of glory, with my agility and swiftness I was skating circles around the others, burning by all means in boyish vanity to snatch the palm of victory. It happened that after various displays of my skill I was striving to surpass one of my friends who was more agile than I. But when, for all of my exertion, I was not able to control myself, with legs splayed and spread asunder, I struck the ice.”

  The result: a severe hernia.

  And that wasn’t his only health problem. “Added to this,” he wrote, “was a dangerous scabies of the legs which I had incurred at nearly the same time from the chill and the sleepless nights that I was spending at my studies.” As a Jesuit historian has suggested, these “scabies” don’t sound like actual scabies, which are caused by the burrowing of the itch mite under the skin to lay her eggs. More likely, Kircher had a case of chilblains: ulcers of the skin from exposure to the cold. Either way, he worried that permission to enter the order, the object of so many “ardent pleas,” might be withdrawn if these medical conditions were found out. It was well known that the Jesuits weren’t just looking for pious, well-spoken, naturally talented young men; they were looking for physically robust candidates without, according to Ignatius, “stomach trouble or headache trouble or trouble from some other bodily malfunction.” A “lack of bodily integrity, illness or weakness” could disqualify a candidate, as could “notable ugliness,” since it did “not help towards the edification of neighbors.”

  “And thus,” Kircher explained, “lest the diseases become known to my superiors, I resolved to conceal each with utmost silence.” He lived with these maladies for some months without getting treatment or discussing them with anyone—except God, “to whom alone my sufferings were known.”

  Over the course of these months, Kircher must have heard the news from Bohemia: Protestants had thrown two representatives of the Catholic Hapsburg emperor out a window of Prague’s Castle. A pile of garbage broke their fall. Since this “defenestration of Prague,” as it became known, the Bohemian estates had organized in official rebellion against their own king, Ferdinand, who was next in line to become Holy Roman Emperor. By the time Kircher was supposed to begin his novitiate at the Jesuit college of Paderborn in Westphalia, preparations were being made for the Thirty Years War, though it would be thirty long years before anyone would think to call it that. “Meanwhile,” Kircher recalled, “with every passing day the hernia was growing, and the scabies were worsening at a spectacular rate.”

  Paderborn sat 170 miles north of Mainz, on the other side of a mountainous region called the Hochsauerland. It would take more than a week to cover that distance under the best of circumstances, and a trip through the German provinces during the early seventeenth century could be challenging, to say the least. One Englishman and his brother traveling from Hamburg to Prague were “carried day and night in waggons” to a town called Hildesheim, then walked 130 miles or so to Leipzig, where the coachmen were too afraid to travel into Bohemia because of the war, so they hired “a fellow with a wheelebarrow” to carry their things (“our cloakes, swords, guns, pistolls, and other apparell and luggage”) on a two-day trip to Penig, from which they traveled by cart, then wagon, then foot again to reach their destination. Otherwise, as this traveler facetiously described it, the journey was all “excellent cookery” and “sweete lodging.” They usually slept “well littered” in the straw of a stable, and when taverns didn’t serve “pickl’d herring broth” or “dirty pudding” or a raw cabbage “with the fat of rusty bacon poured upon it,” they might offer “Gudgeons, newly taken perhaps, yet as salty as if they had beene three yeares pickled, or twice at the East Indies, boyled with scales, guts and all, and bur
ied in Ginger like sawdust.”

  Whatever the details of Kircher’s own trip—“Only He who knows the hearts of all knows how many difficulties I, afflicted by so much suffering, endured on that journey”—it worsened the problem with his legs. After finally arriving at Paderborn, he remembered, “since I tottered in my gait from the enormous pain in my feet, I was compelled to uncover my disease to my superiors, who noticed it.” A surgeon was called to examine his legs. Gangrene had set in, and the doctor “immediately declared it incurable.”

  Still concealing his hernia “with the utmost silence, lest there be a fuss over me when two incurable diseases had been discovered,” Kircher was informed that he would be dismissed from the Society if he wasn’t better in a month. “Nothing remained except the Virgin Mary, the sole refuge of my health,” he wrote. “And thus, in the dead of night at the foot of an exposed statue of this very Virgin, I lay prostrate on the ground with tears, as though She were the sole curatrix of the human race; and by such means and passions that I leave to the conjecture of the reader, I, her most downcast son, entreated the Great Mother with vehement prayers.”

  When Kircher woke up the next morning he discovered that his legs were “completely healed.” And that wasn’t all: “I also noticed that my hernia had vanished.” The surgeon “proclaimed it a miracle,” and Kircher’s superiors “praised God and the Holy Mother Herself, by whose beneficence and intercession so marvelous a cure had occurred.”

  There is no satisfaction for the skeptical in Kircher’s autobiography. “By confessing these things in this place,” he wrote, he intended only to “spread about and stir up the honor and worship of God and the Blessed Virgin within my fellow men.”

  The Virgin Mary may have taken a more laissez-faire position on other matters, like this teenager’s subsequent transition to daily life at the seminary in Paderborn.