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

by Glassie, John

  Kircher knew Fabio Chigi from their time together on Malta, when he served as apostolic delegate. Since then, they’d kept up a correspondence based on shared interest in such things as sundials and recondite learning. Chigi, who took the name Alexander VII, had risen to become the Vatican’s highest-ranking diplomat, and was somewhat meekly involved in the negotiations that led to the Peace of Westphalia. As Kircher described it, Chigi was “finally exalted to the supreme tip of the apostolic peak by his altogether deserving and in no way ill-matched heap of merit.” In reality, he was a compromise candidate whose election ended an eighty-day enclave.

  Alexander VII was a strange little man who did “not enjoy what one would call perfect health,” wrote a Venetian ambassador. “He is left with so few teeth that if he did not compensate the loss with false ones he would mumble.” Slight and somewhat elfin in appearance, with an upturned mustache and a chin beard, he instituted his own particular brand of Vatican reform, renouncing papal nepotism and, at first, keeping his relatives away from Rome. Alexander “had so taken upon him the profession of an evangelical life,” recalled a canon of Canterbury assigned to Rome, “that he was wont to season his meat with ashes, to sleep upon a hard couch, to hate riches, glory, and pomp, taking a great pleasure to give audience to ambassadors in a chamber full of dead men’s sculls, and in the sight of his coffin, which stood there to put him in mind of his death.”

  The new pope wasn’t very interested in affairs of state, but he cared about aesthetics. Although austere, he “liked his company to be gay in reason, and he enjoyed his intercourse.” In frequent pain from kidney stones, Alexander would “speak quietly upon literature, ecclesiastical history . . . and upon the sacred sciences” such as Kabbalah and astrology and presumably also the new sciences. He spent afternoons in his apartments in such “literary meetings” with Kircher and others, and he “wished to have Bernini with him every day” to discuss architecture and urban-planning projects. Among other things, their conversations produced Bernini’s design for the monumental colonnades that now form St. Peter’s Square.

  Alexander kept his favorites close, and it’s possible to imagine that, for one reason or another, he was irked by Kircher’s relationship with the less sophisticated, German-speaking Schott. There’s no point in speculating further, but within months of Alexander’s election, the Society of Jesus sent Schott all the way back to Germany—first Mainz, and then Würzburg. It was an “abrupt and unanticipated departure,” says one historian, and was known to have caused both Kircher and Schott deep disappointment.

  Whatever was said in the pope’s apartments about Copernican theory, it was also within months of Alexander’s election that Kircher moved forward with a book on the structure of the universe. But Kircher was under no illusions that he could simply ignore the sensitivities of the subject. Moreover, a new Jesuit ordinance included a prohibition on the discussion of magnetism (“action at a distance”) with respect to cosmology. So he wrote it as a work of the imagination—the story of a cosmic dream in which an angel named Cosmiel leads Kircher’s fictional stand-in, a priest named Theodidactus (“taught by God”), on an edifying flight through the heavens.

  This wasn’t the world’s first space travel story. More than seventeen hundred years before, for example, Cicero had described a voyage among the stars in Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of Scipio). And Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (The Dream), published a year after his death, in 1634, had taken readers on a dream visit to the moon. In Kepler’s imagination, it was populated by “Privolvans,” nocturnal creatures with legs like a camel’s, skin like a serpent’s, and “no established domicile.” But Kircher’s Ecstatic Journey, published in 1656, represented another step toward modern science fiction.

  The book officially, ostensibly, argued for the system of Tycho Brahe, but it debunked many old Aristotelian notions. “You are mistaken, and greatly so, if you persuade yourself that Aristotle has entirely told the truth about the nature of the supreme bodies,” Cosmiel explained. “It is impossible that the philosophers, who insist upon their ideas alone and repudiate experiments, can conclude anything about the natural constitution of the solid world, for we observe that human thoughts, unless they are based on experiments, often wander as far from the truth as the earth is distant from the moon.”

  The angel and the priest fly to the moon, which turns out to be cratered and mountainous and half covered by dark seas, and then to the sun, which is anything but a perfect sphere. (Cosmiel protects Theodidactus from the impossible heat by pouring “a vessel full of celestial dew” over his head. Later, in order to explore the sun’s “immense Ocean, boiling with fervor,” Cosmiel paddles him around in a rowboat made of asbestos.) Mars is “harsh with bulges, and blunt, and formidable with violent discharge of vapor.” Jupiter is encircled by its recently discovered moons, and Saturn has “horrendous form.”

  As they head toward the stars, Theodidactus expects a collision with the crystalline celestial sphere . . . that never comes. Contrary to Aristotle, the stars turn out not to be fixed, and the universe appears to be boundless. But Cosmiel assures Theodidactus that it only seems infinite. (Giordano Bruno’s belief in an infinite universe helped lead to his execution in the Campo de’ Fiori in 1600.) It was all within God’s realm. According to Scripture, God alone could count the stars.

  —

  THERE ISN’T MUCH DOUBT that Kircher privately believed in the Copernican model, but his opinion wasn’t based solely on the astronomical evidence. A sun-centered universe also made much more mystical sense. In lieu of emphasizing magnetism in Ecstatic Journey, Kircher chose to emphasize something he called panspermia, or universal sperm. But the effect was the same: “The whole mass of this solar globe is imbued . . . with a certain universal seminal power,” Cosmiel explains about the sun. It “touches things below by radiant diffusion.”

  When the Dutch astronomer and polymath Christiaan Huygens read Ecstatic Journey, he found it “for the most part inane and devoid of reason.” But to other readers, in Europe and around the world, the book was “the offspring of consummate scholarship,” as a Jesuit missionary in New Spain put it. In his view, Kircher was—forget Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens—“easily the Phoenix amongst the learned men of this century.”

  The Jesuit censors, for their part, were again displeased. “To be sure, Kircher on occasion reproves the condemned opinion of Copernicus about the motion of the Earth,” said a report filed with Society authorities. “Nonetheless, throughout his entire book he carefully constructs all the evidence that Copernicus first brought in to establish and defend the motion of the Earth, and he weakens all the arguments by which that error is usually refuted.”

  “He may reject the motion of the Earth . . . and impugn it,” the censors added, “but he does it so poorly.”

  —

  MORE ATTENTION MIGHT have been paid to the censors’ concerns if the court of Rome hadn’t been so distracted, caught up with talk about the impending arrival of Christina of Sweden. But Rome was distracted and caught up. The Protestant queen had abdicated her crown and converted to the faith of her defeated enemies. She was also rumored to be a hermaphrodite, or a lesbian, and to have killed off René Descartes.

  Christina worked out the details of her conversion and her move to Rome in letters to the Vatican that were written in codes she herself had devised. For some time she had intended to abdicate, partly to be relieved of the pressure to marry and produce an heir. (She said she couldn’t imagine being used by a man “the way a peasant uses his fields.”) Given that she’d previously described religion as “a political invention for the restriction of common people,” her reasons for converting were somewhat cynical. After her abdication ceremony in 1654, she rode out of Sweden on horseback, cutting off her hair and changing into trousers and boots before entering Denmark. Now, after a year and a half of ersatz royal residencies in Antwerp, Brussels, and Innsbruck,
she was finally about to make her arrival in Rome.

  The pope in particular obsessed over the details of her welcome. In his former role as chief papal diplomat he’d played some part in her momentous decision—a decision that, for all anyone knew, might lead to the end of heresy altogether. Chigi put Bernini in charge of decorating the Porta del Popolo, through which Christina would pass, as well as a matching fleet of vehicles for her use: a carriage, sedan chair, and litter (for reclining transport) all in sky-blue velvet and silver. In order to move her into the Palazzo Farnese, near Campo de’ Fiori, they kicked out another famous convert who had been living there for almost twenty years—the German prince, now a cardinal, with whom Kircher had traveled to Malta as father confessor.

  Kircher shared a desire with the pope to win over Christina and gain access to her generosity. She had said in letters that she wanted to see her name prominently displayed in Kircher’s books, and so Kircher had eagerly dedicated Ecstatic Journey to her. She was a collector of antiquities and a patron of the arts. Everyone assumed she had a fortune at her disposal and was getting ready to bestow it on Catholic Rome.

  The celebration of her formal arrival, which began two days before Christmas in 1655, featured impossible throngs, an “interminable” procession through the city, and the entire College of Cardinals, in magenta robes, on mules, as well as cannon blasts from the Castel Sant’Angelo, chants in St. Peter’s, dishes of gilded aspic, and bonfires in the Piazza Farnese. Some time after, she made a formal visit to the Collegio Romano, and later a less formal one. On her behalf, as one account has it, “Father Athanasius Kircherus the great Mathematician had prepared many curious and remarkable things.”

  It’s hard to imagine what kind of rapport a bowing and scraping Kircher could have had with this queen in her man’s cloak, black wig, and heavy face cream. She spoke a number of languages and, despite her interest in the occult, was not naive. One French scholar who visited her court in Stockholm wrote to Gassendi: “She has seen everything, she has read everything, she knows everything.” Kircher showed her “the fountains and clocks, which, by vertue of the load-stone turn about with secret force.” She also “stayed some time to consider the herb called Phoenix,” which grew “perpetually out of its own ashes.” It’s not entirely clear what this herb called phoenix was, or what Kircher claimed—whether this plant was really supposed to have grown again from its “ashes” or, as he suggested in a later text, an image of the plant, or apparition, had been generated by exposing the plant’s calcified salts to sunlight, moonlight, and then heat, thereby stimulating the plant’s “seminal virtue” to re-form itself. It sounds most of all like one of Kircher’s playful optical tricks.

  Christina’s visit to Kircher’s museum increased its notoriety within Europe’s elite circles, but it’s not clear that she herself was all that impressed. Her approval didn’t matter anyway, because in the days and weeks that followed, the hopes attached to Christina’s arrival were largely dashed. She was known to talk all through Mass, she had the fig leaves removed from the nude statues in the Palazzo Farnese, and, it soon became clear, she had no money. (Still waiting for promised funds from Sweden, she’d been reduced to pawning jewels and silver plate.) On top of that, despite previous gossip about her lesbianism, it was said she’d begun an affair with the cardinal assigned to be her daily guide.

  Celebrations for Christina nevertheless continued right on into Carnival season, in the weeks before the start of Lent. At night, mock battles between knights and Amazons in orange headdresses were waged in her honor. During the day, the queen watched the annual events on the Corso. Rome raced horses, donkeys, old men, boys, prostitutes, and Jews, at whom the crowds threw “everything from rotten fruit to dead cats.”

  Then, in the spring, the plague came.

  14

  Little Worms

  It arrived in the Kingdom of Naples, apparently along with a transport of soldiers from Sardinia. At the worst point during the summer of 1656, thousands were dying in Naples each day. Desperate and frightened, citizens by the thousands flocked to the churches to pray for the plague to lift. According to one chronicle, people “of the highest quality,” as well as the “disheveled,” and presumably the infected, all joined these “confused processions,” with the horrific result that “the streets and the stairs of the churches were filled with the dead.” By the time it was over in August, as many as a hundred fifty thousand of the city’s inhabitants had died. The epidemic began to ease around the day of the Assumption, August 15, lending credence to the notion that the Virgin Mary had finally interceded. The Jesuits claimed that their prayers to Saint Francis Xavier had made the difference. The Cistercians believed their prayers to Saint Bruno had.

  Rome responded to the news from Naples by policing the seaports and the gates of the city. People and their animals were inspected. But by June the pestilence had “slithered” inside, as Kircher put it, in this case via a fisherman off the boats at Nettuno. This fisherman stayed at a rooming house in what were then the slums of Trastevere, just across the Tiber from Rome proper, where he began to feel ill. He died days later, “with evil signs.” Possibly these were the infected black buboes, or bubones—the term from which bubonic is derived—swelling out as big as eggs or apples from under the armpits and from the groin. The signs might have consisted of black or red carbuncles over the entire body, infected and full of pus, or toward the end, a blackening of the skin from hemorrhage. If he’d been coughing up bloody sputum, the disease had reached his lungs and become pneumonic. Anyone who inhaled the spray in the air could have been infected.

  Was this the same plague responsible for the Great Mortality of the fourteenth century, which killed off more than twenty-five million people, about a quarter of Europe’s population? It’s not perfectly clear what disease that was. The classic twentieth-century explanation—that the bubonic plague bacterium (Yersinia pestis) was carried by fleas, carried in turn by rats—has been challenged by a theory that the disease may actually have been typhus or even anthrax, and not, or not only, bubonic plague. Nevertheless, between 1347 and 1670, some strain or form of pestilence attacked some part of Europe every year except two.

  As reported by Kircher, the sick certainly presented a confusing and seemingly unlimited variety of symptoms. They developed not only “boils and bumps, carbuncles and buboes of various forms,” but “harmful ear tumors or abscesses,” after which followed a “loss of the senses and unconsciousness, weakness and vomiting, hiccoughing or coryza with fever.” Sometimes “the patient begins to have fantasies and talk wildly,” though there might also be “loss of speech and delirium, anxiety and pain about the heart, heat within the breast, distaste for all food, then follows often vomiting, fainting, straining of the heart, great thirst, heat and burning of the throat, sticking and lividity of the tongue, foul breath, frequent stools and severe nose bleed.” Finally, usually within the week, “the poison rages within and conquers the entire body.”

  As soon as cases were confirmed in Trastevere, the Congregation of Health tried to contain the disease by sealing off the area. This work was done under the auspices of Kircher’s former patron Cardinal Francesco Barberini; he had been allowed to return to Rome some years before, and now served on a kind of city health commission. Workers and soldiers came in the dark and built a wooden barrier around the district overnight, shutting in everyone who lived on its narrow medieval streets. Trade with Naples was discontinued, and great chains were dropped across the waterways to keep ships from sailing up the Tiber. Most of the city gates were shut, others were fortified with wooden stockades. But it was only a matter of days before more cases were reported in Trastevere, and then in the Jewish ghetto, and in other parts of Rome.

  The plague was said to exist as “fetid miasma,” or corruption of the air from putrid vapors. People thought that epidemics could be occasioned in the first place by celestial activity—a conjunction of malign
ant Mars with hot and humid Jupiter, for example. Other forms of corrupt air—due to decaying corpses, food, excrement, excessive humidity, stagnant water, emissions from volcanoes or other openings in the earth—were said to join with this miasma and make things worse. The poison could stick to clothes and bedsheets, sacks, cords, ribbons, and hair, and could penetrate the body through pores in the skin.

  A plague doctor of Rome, about 1656

  To counteract it, people scrubbed floors and walls with vinegar; burned rosemary, cypress, and juniper; and rubbed oils and essences on their skin. The wealthy left for the country if they could. Beggars were simply sent to prison or conscripted to help the sick and scrub the streets of rotten garbage and excrement. When members of middle-class households were found to be sick, their houses were often quarantined, with families boarded up inside. The vast majority of the ill, and sometimes those likely to become ill, were taken where their exhalations could do the least harm, to quarantined pesthouses, also called lazarettos, after the biblical story of Lazarus—though if you went in, the chances of dying, and staying dead, were high. “Here you are overwhelmed by intolerable smells,” wrote a visitor to a lazaretto in Bologna some years before. “Here you cannot walk but among corpses. Here you feel naught but the constant horror of death.”

  In the middle of the Tiber, the entire island of San Bartolomeo, site of two churches, a convent, a hospital, and a number of houses, was transformed into Rome’s main pesthouse. Over the two bridges from Rome and Trastevere, past double timber gates, hundreds, perhaps thousands suffered at any given time. Patients shared beds and received both religious and medical care. They were given special preparations of snake meat called theriaca, which because of its sympathetic (or magnetic) power was supposed to draw up the plague’s poisons. The black buboes might be lanced and drained, or cut open (they were often infected and foul smelling) so that leeches could be applied. Sometimes the buboes were brought to a head with irritants such as rock salt or turpentine. The dead from the lazarettos were stripped of their clothing so it could be burned, then loaded on barges, taken down the river, away from the city, and dropped in pits deep enough, as Romans thought, to prevent the fetid, contagious miasma from rising out of the ground again.