“I firstly fitted the Church with every manner of magnificent preparation, both pictures and tapestries,” he later wrote of the renovation. “I restored the ruined altars with concrete and . . . those ornaments which would be necessary . . . for celebrating mass.” To the church, Kircher “joined a structure conspicuous for its thirteen vaults and complete symmetry.” And since there was no way of reaching the “very lofty peak” where Saint Eustace was supposed to have seen the stag, “we built to the crag’s peak a staircase constructed with huge rocks . . . and atop the crag I built a chapel consecrated to divine Eustachius.” Then, “since all these arrangements would be in vain were there no people who would visit the place for the sake of their devotion,” he established an apostolic mission. “Yearly on the festival of the Archangel Saint Michael with the solemn promulgation of complaisance nearly many thousands of people of each sex flocked to participate in the sacraments.”
Even these somewhat oversize acts of devotion smack of self-regard and a sense of personal achievement. But if Kircher ever had any scruples about his motivations, he could turn to the guidance that Ignatius of Loyola had provided on the subject. “A person may wish to say or do something consistent with the Church, something that promotes the Glory of God,” Ignatius wrote. “In those circumstances, if a thought, or rather a temptation, comes from without not to say or do that thing, proposing specious arguments about vainglory or something else, then such a person ought to raise the understanding to our Creator and Lord.” Then, if “one sees that the proposed action is for God’s service, or at least not against it, one must act in a way opposed . . . to the temptation.”
In Kircher’s case, accusations of vainglory didn’t stand a chance. There were still things to be done for the greater glory of God, and the next thing to do was, in a word, everything. Kircher set his sights on a new method for understanding all that could be known.
—
OTHERS IN KIRCHER’S LIFETIME had attempted a new, comprehensive approach to knowledge—Francis Bacon and René Descartes, to name two. But they hadn’t produced anything quite like this. Ars Magna Sciendi (The Great Art of Knowing) was one of the most strangely beautiful books Kircher ever produced, full of symbols and symbolic formulations. It looked as if it might somehow get down to the essential relationship of things, might establish “an order between all thoughts which can enter the human mind,” as Descartes had said a universal language must. But unlike Bacon and Descartes, Kircher wasn’t interested in tearing down or throwing away all previous learning in order to create his method for determining the truth. And it wasn’t skepticism of received doctrines that drove his thinking about the possibility of the project in the first place. It was the wisdom of the ancient philosopher Plato, who said that “nothing is more beautiful than to know all things.” Kircher believed it was possible to experience this kind of beauty, or rather it was possible to teach others how to, since presumably he knew. The mechanism for his universal path of inquiry that could be applied to every field? The combinatory method of Ramon Llull that he’d employed in his music composition system and his mathematical organs.
This great art of knowing was, as Kircher described it, “the art of arts,” “the workshop of the sciences, the fertilizing seedbed of the minds, the key to all human cognition, by which a most complete approach lies open to the understanding of all things which pertain under the notion of the intellect.”
The idea was that the universe was arranged according to certain principles—or that certain principles were inherent in its arrangement. These concepts made for a kind of matrix or architecture by which all nature is engendered. In order to “understand and love God,” as Llull had it, one had to organize the mind in the same way.
Basing his work on the Llullist system, Kircher started out with nine essential principles or attributes of God (a trinity of trinities): Goodness; Magnitude; Duration; Strength; Wisdom; Will; Power; Truth; and Glory. There were nine universal subjects: God; Angels; Heaven; Elements; Man; Animals; Vegetables; Minerals; and Numbers. And nine “respective” principles, or principles of relationship: Difference; Agreement; Opposition; Beginning; Middle; End; Majority; Equality; Minority.
Each of these was given an icon that could transcend the barriers of language. According to Kircher, with the addition of nine interrogatives (for putting statements to test via syllogism), these twenty-seven principles can produce a total of 371,993,326,789,901,217,467,999, 148,150,835,200,000,000 concepts for consideration. This universal method could be applied within any discipline, he explained, and the icons supposedly made the system accessible to people of all languages. He may have imagined it as a missionary tool that could be used by Jesuits around the world. But a great many assumptions have to be made to come up with these principles and subjects in the first place, or to adopt them wholesale from Llull, as in effect Kircher did. In order to get anywhere with them, one really already had to have a philosophy of knowledge and truth in place.
As Umberto Eco has described Llull’s original system, the combinations “do not generate fresh questions, nor do they furnish new proofs. They generate instead standard answers to an already established set of questions. . . . It is, in reality, a sort of dialectical thesaurus, a mnemonic aid for finding out an array of standard arguments able to demonstrate an already known truth.”
Still, the notion of so many combinations might inspire wonder. The graphs in the book, which allowed readers to visualize the possibilities, seemed almost to shimmer. Perhaps Kircher believed that readers might begin to “know” the sublimity of the universe by contemplating these alone. This was the art, not the science, of knowing, after all. It didn’t help determine truth so much as help see the “truth”—that all is one, that “the least is in the highest, the intermediate is in both the lowest and highest; that the highest is in both the mediate and the lowest; and, in a word, that everything is in everything, each in its own way.”
Essential principles combined with universal subjects
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THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY provided a report on this “Voluminous Work,” which, it said, proposed “to enable men to discourse and dispute, innumerable ways, of everything proposed, and to acquire a summary and general knowledge of all things.”
“Of what Use this Doctrine may be for the attainment of knowledge with more ease and advantage,” said the review, “the sagacious reader may judge.”
But there was an intensely intellectual young man named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who was very interested in The Great Art of Knowing, and wrote to Kircher to tell him so. Leibniz is most famous for inventing calculus independently of Isaac Newton, and for developing the binary system, on which computer processing relies. In May of 1670, when he wrote his long and fawning letter, he was a self-conscious and skinny twenty-three-year-old, a young legal advisor in the court of the Prince-Elector of Mainz, where Kircher had served almost fifty years before. He’d entered the University of Leipzig at only fourteen to study law and philosophy. His first job after school was as a professional alchemist in Nuremberg—he had impressed his prospective employer with a dense alchemical treatise he’d entirely made up. Or so the story went; Leibniz himself may have made that story up later in life in order to play down his early and very serious interest in alchemy.
By the time he wrote Kircher, he’d already mapped out a plan to reform the practice of law in the Holy Roman Empire, crafted two essays on physics, started work on a calculating machine, and begun devising a political scheme to redirect French ambitions away from German lands and toward Egypt. (More than a century later this particular piece of bait was taken by Napoleon.) But he had even larger, more idealistic, and overarching ideas in mind, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that many were Kircherian in nature. As a modern historian has said about Leibniz’s subsequent intellectual career, “Virtually every major scientific, linguistic, and historic
al project on which he embarked had been directly inspired by reading Kircher’s works.” Even Leibniz’s idea to use wind power to drain the water from the silver mines of the Harz Mountains seems to have come from Kircher’s proposal, published in Underground World, for ventilating mines with giant weather vanes.
As a boy, Leibniz came across Kircher’s books in the process of devouring the volumes in the library of his late father, a professor of moral philosophy. Having grown up in German lands laid waste during the Thirty Years War, he shared Kircher’s general desire for unity and for synthesis—of not only the political but also the religious, intellectual, and philosophical sort. He was a believer in “the elegance and harmony of the world,” and in the notion of a single, universal Christian church. This non-practicing Lutheran had even begun mounting a defense of Catholic tenets through a series of essays called Catholic Demonstrations, with the goal of proving heretics, skeptics, and certain new thinkers wrong. His defense of transubstantiation, for example, took into account the “philosophy of the moderns,” and in his treatise on the physics of motion, he employed mathematics to make rigorous, almost legalistic arguments for the mind-like qualities of matter.
Like Kircher, Leibniz applied himself to the pursuit of a universal language and to a universal philosophical approach that could be brought to bear on every possible question to produce universally accepted answers. Also like Kircher, Leibniz was an opportunistic courtier and a flatterer to the highest degree. The 1670 letter wasn’t his first attempt to get Kircher’s attention. Four years before, at the age of nineteen, while also working toward his doctorate in law, Leibniz had written his own dissertation on the Llullian combinatorial arts, and sent Kircher a copy, but received no response. Now, after reading The Great Art of Knowing, he wrote again. Calling Kircher a “GREAT MAN,” the “greatest man,” “an incomparable man,” and a “man worthy of immortality” (a play on the meaning of Athanasius), Leibniz praised his latest work:
I have come by chance in a most happy year upon your work about the great art of knowing or combination; I have drunk it deeply, I have read it, I have wished upon it most avidly, and I have not put it down until it was completed; what more can I say? You filled me entirely with admiration and love for you . . .
In fact, young Leibniz told Kircher, “no mortal to this day has penetrated so deeply as you into the secret art of combination.” And he was one to know, since he himself “strenuously, nearly since my childhood,” had engaged in many “cogitations on this matter.”
What Leibniz wanted, it seems, was to develop a correspondence with Kircher to exchange ideas, and also to gain a highly visible benefactor or mentor. Referring vaguely to “new ways of dealing in syllogisms,” and to the “universal, advantageous” ways of bringing figures into the process of “true proclamations,” Leibniz wrote that he had often wished for “one hour” of conversation with Kircher in which to share his ideas—“grand things indeed but nevertheless with an eye to the public good.” He offered his services as a “constant, energetic public announcer” on Kircher’s behalf, suggesting he’d be happy even to hear from one of Kircher’s “substitutes.”
After continuing this way through two pages of minute ink scratchings, he was about to sign off, “except that one thing is left that is worthy of asking.” Leibniz was referring to “book 3, part 5, chapter 4, problem 1,” of Kircher’s The Magnet. “You report,” he wrote, “that in the Arabian Market of Marseilles, you found a certain miraculous material, which even when covered turns itself towards the sun, of what sort no Heliotrope has been known to do.”
Of course: the special sunflower seeds or sunflower-like material that Kircher had been intentionally vague about, the claim that also caught Descartes’s attention. Two of the most brilliant minds of the seventeenth century had stopped themselves over the same section in a nine-hundred-plus-page book.
Leibniz was a bit confused, or pretended to be. “Concerning this thing,” he wrote, “if it is allowed that I ask, what is the name of the material, whether it is a mineral or something of some king, and from which part of Arabia was the most powerful Market, or from what part did the material originate?”
—
KIRCHER WAS RATHER condescending in his response to the young courtier from Mainz. He may have had other things on his mind. By debunking alchemy in Underground World, for example, he had provoked a firestorm of criticism. In the words of one nineteenth-century writer, “All the alchymists were in arms immediately to refute this formidable antagonist.” Johann Glauber, a prominent alchemist-pharmacist, and Johann Zwefler, a prominent alchemist-physician, suggested that Kircher’s hostility toward them was a form of sour grapes; he had tried but failed to master the alchemical art as they had. One professor from Padua named Bonvicini went so far as to claim that he was actually in possession of the philosopher’s stone. As Kircher reported, Bonvicini was then summoned by the Senate of Venice “to assist them with his gold-making art in paying the expenses of the war against the Turks.” Unable to make good on his claims, “his mind collapsed and he fell into a melancholia, of which he died eight days later.”
One critic, a “true pupil of this art” going by the name Salomone de Blauenstein, published a tract, In Defense of the Philosophers’ Stone, In Opposition to the Anti-Alchemy Mundus Subterraneus of the Jesuit Father Kircher in which not only are his arguments calculated against alchemy refuted, but even the skill itself is made manifest to intelligent men insofar as it is possible. His evidence included a story about a Pole named Sendigovius who changed quicksilver into gold in the presence of the Holy Roman Emperor sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century—it had to be true, since the emperor had commemorated the transmutation with a plaque. He also engaged in the increasingly popular pastime of pointing out Kircher’s errors. Kircher was under the incorrect impression, for example, that Arnold of Villanova, the thirteenth-century physician to whom many alchemical tracts and the discovery of carbon monoxide are attributed, was actually two different people: Arnold and Villanova.
“When he read how I had very clearly revealed all the vanities and impostures of the alchemists, as well as the chimera of the Philosopher’s Stone . . .” Kircher explained in a letter, “he was thrown into a rage.” To Kircher, this “Blauenstein” person was not only “an imposter” but “a lying clown and a defrocked monk.”
PART THREE
19
Not As It Was
As 1671 began, the aging Kircher had reason to feel optimistic. His publishers in Amsterdam put out a beautifully illustrated edition of Latium, his study of the area around Rome. It read less like a work of history than a tour through the surrounding countryside by way of ancient literature. According to Kircher, Noah’s family had indeed settled in the region, making it “the primeval seat and colony of the earliest mortals.” Moreover, he said, Noah’s traits and qualities served as the inspiration for the gods of Roman and Greek mythology. The book was really an attempt to reconcile old texts, Roman mythology, and the Bible with the actual geography and archaeological evidence of the place. The maps and engravings depicted the region “not as it was,” as he strangely put it in one case, “but as it could and must have been.”
Those who had devoted much of their lives to studying the topography and ruins of the region unfortunately found this otherwise handsome book to be, in the words of a modern writer, “flawed beyond belief.” One of these scholars published an entire catalog of the errors to be found in Latium, wondering in print whether Kircher had ever actually been to some of the sites he wrote about.
More embarrassment came from the laboratory of Francesco Redi in Florence. After publishing Experiments on the Generation of Insects, in which he disproved Kircher’s claims about spontaneous generation, Redi found himself reading Kircher’s accounts of the healing power of the snake stone in China Illustrated and The Magnetic Kingdom of Nature. It happened that Redi had taken up the
topic of snake stones, too. Plenty of them had been presented to the grand duke by travelers from abroad. Redi was head of the Medici pharmacy, which produced its own vintages of viper-rich theriaca, so he also had plenty of snakes on hand. Over several years he’d conducted five sets of experiments in front of witnesses, using a wide selection of snake stones on a range of bird species, including guinea hens, rock pigeons, and barnyard chickens. In fact, Redi employed a total of two hundred fifty vipers in these and other experiments on snake venom and toxicology. The porous snake stone did have a tendency to stick to the skin, but except in a few of what Redi called “freak” instances, all the birds and animals that had been bitten by vipers died.
In 1671, Redi published his conclusions, that snake stones did not heal victims of poisoning, in a public letter addressed directly to Kircher: Experiments on various natural things and in particular on those that have been brought from India, carried out by Francesco Redi and described in a Letter to Father Athanasius Kircher of the Company of Jesus. As Redi later explained: “The principal point of this letter was for me the experiments which I conducted with this stone, which notwithstanding the witnessing of so many authors, has always, always proved itself to me in all trials most useless and of no value.”
At the same time, an Englishman, Sir Samuel Morland, had been testing an amplifying device he called the tuba Stentoro-phonica—also known as the “speaking trumpet.” In the twenty-first century this device is known as the megaphone. The king’s master of mechanics, Morland had fabricated initial prototypes out of glass and brass but settled on copper as his material of choice. Charles II himself, along with Prince Rupert and other members of the English nobility, participated in a trial in St. James Park. “Standing at the end of the Mall near Old Spring-Garden,” according to Morland’s account, they heard Morland “word for word” from the other end, about eight hundred fifty yards away.
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 19