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

by Glassie, John

  It was in the face of evidence, The Apologetic Forerunner argued, that Kircher distinguished himself from Redi, who Petrucci claimed was too narrow-minded to accept anything but his own preconceived notions about the natural world. “The works of nature are prodigious,” Petrucci wrote, “and whoever does not penetrate her reasons imagines these prodigies impossible and does not believe them.” For Kircher’s willingness to be open to new and surprising discoveries, Petrucci went so far as to compare him to Galileo. Or, since Kircher was behind Petrucci’s argument, it was Kircher himself who made the case for the comparison, and who probably believed it. The book quoted many passages from The Assayer of 1623, in which Galileo described the experience of coming under constant criticism, an experience Kircher must have recognized as his own. “I have never understood . . .” Galileo wrote, “why it is that every one of the studies I have published in order to please or to serve other people has aroused in some men a certain perverse urge to detract, steal, or deprecate that modicum of merit which I thought I had earned.”

  Not many others saw the similarity. Once copies of The Apologetic Forerunner finally reached the bookshop of the Collegio Romano in 1677, for example, only two were sold: one to a certain Monsignor Slusio for the archbishop of Prague, to whom the book was dedicated, and one to another patron, at Kircher’s request.

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  Mentorella

  Despite increasing trouble with his heart and with his hearing, difficulty remembering things, pain from kidney stones, and other frailties and infirmities, Kircher struggled to publish more books before he died. If people wanted experiments, he seemed to decide, then that’s what he would give them. A student named Johann Kestler helped cull everything from Kircher’s books that could conceivably be called an experiment, and compiled a total of 337 observations and trials into one Latin volume that would be published under Kestler’s name: Experimental Kircherian Physiology in which by the greatest multitude and variety of arguments knowledge of the natural universe is investigated and confirmed by experiments in Physics, Mathematics, Medicine, Chemistry, Music, Magnetics and Mechanics. It wasn’t a coincidence that Kestler’s written protestations on behalf of Kircher (“the prodigious miracle of our age”) echoed those of Petrucci in substance and in style; Kircher wrote or edited Kestler’s remarks as well.

  As with all of Kircher’s work, the scientific value of each of these individual “experiments,” on subjects ranging from the projection of visual images to electrical attraction, varied enormously. Many observations and claims that had been called into question through the years were given elaborate defenses that were themselves unconvincing. But this relatively straightforward selection of Kircher’s physical studies—removed from the labyrinthine rhetoric, the utter speculation, and the exhaustive erudition that surrounded them—has caused more than one reader to imagine how much Kircher would have benefited from a good editor all along.

  Another assistant worked to prepare a catalog of Kircher’s museum to preserve the memory of the collection and the place for which he’d become so famous. An elegant engraving was commissioned for the frontispiece of the book, and it has since become one of the most recognizable images from all of Kircher’s printed works. It shows Kircher greeting a pair of visitors within a great, decorated hall. A sunlit array of specimens, skeletons, devices, paintings, and sculptures extends beyond the point where the eye can see. Obelisks, or replicas of obelisks, reach up perhaps four times the height of a man toward cathedral-like ceilings. But the scale represented in the engraving bears little resemblance to the scale of the actual museum in either of its locations within the Collegio Romano. The gallery space the collection occupied until 1672, when it was moved, was nowhere near as vast. And the impressive-looking obelisks were in reality only three or four feet high without their bases. (The obelisks were assumed to have been lost for good before being rediscovered in 1988 in the attic space of the building; the Collegio Romano is now home to a high school.) Maybe what Kircher said about the engravings of ancient sites in Latium also applied to this engraving: it showed the museum “not as it was, but as it could and must have been.”

  Other projects stalled. Publication of one manuscript, a tour through Tuscany, something like Latium, had already been bogged down for many years because of its inaccuracies, and because of sensitivities about how the intellectual history of the region was to be rendered—all the experimentalist studies supported by the Medici, for example, and particularly the contributions of Galileo. At this point the manuscript was passing through various Jesuit hands, being subjected to negotiations behind Kircher’s back and revised in places against his will. “These days, because of age,” Baldigiani wrote about Kircher, “he has become very difficult to deal with, and also he is very easily bothered and has a tendency to be suspicious.”

  The volume on Tuscany never saw the light of day, and the manuscript has gone missing. Other books that Kircher had promised or that Jansson had announced on advertising pages bound into his publications—books on such things as Egyptian art and various translations—would never be written. “Many others,” a disciple wrote, were “preserved in his mind.”

  Kircher devoted his last energies to mathematics, a subject that he’d largely overlooked through the years, but that he must have understood was increasingly important to many of the most respected minds of the time as a way of getting at the truth—objective, certain, not debatable. “Philosophy is written in the mighty book that lies forever open before our eyes (I mean the universe), but you cannot understand it unless you first learn the language and the script in which it is written,” Galileo had pronounced. “It is written in the language of mathematics.” And since then, within a short space of time, people such as Wallis, Napier, Cavalieri, Fermat, Pascal, Mersenne, Huygens, Barrow, Collins, and Roberval had taken the language to a new level.

  In devising the coordinate system for plotting curves and other figures on a plane, Descartes brought geometry and algebra together into what is now called analytic geometry. Pretty soon, three-dimensional as well as two-dimensional shapes could be represented by algebraic functions. “A shape in space has given way to an analytic formula,” twenty-first-century mathematician David Berlinski has explained. “And with this insight, the first step has been taken in a vast, far-reaching project that will in the end bring all forms of continuous motion, the cannonball and rotation of the planets in the night sky, under the control of a numerical apparatus.”

  Although a professor of “mathematics,” Kircher was never a great mathematician. The Englishman John Evelyn had seen him “expound” on “a part of Euclid” in 1644, but when in The Great Art of Light and Shadow Kircher claimed to have cracked the age-old mathematical problem of how to square the circle, his naive solution was ridiculed by Mersenne and others. It was perhaps because Kircher was aware of so much activity in mathematics that he thought to publish Arithmologia, his 1665 book on the subject of numbers, or rather on the subject of numerology. Somewhat counterintuitively, he seems to have intended that volume to show that he wasn’t quite as innocent and foolish as these new mathematicians might believe. He spent a great deal of time laying out the numerological beliefs of “the Cabalists, Arabs, Gnostics and others” in order, he said, to debunk them. And yet for Kircher numbers weren’t mere quantities. He believed in the “genuine and licit mystical signification of numbers”—in the Hermetic “Mystic Monad or, if you will, Oneness” that was associated with God and indivisibility, the source and the entirety of all things, and in “the divisions of substance from the divine mind” represented by all other numbers, fractions of the whole.

  “There must be no doubt but that within numbers lies hidden a certain proximity to divine nature,” he proclaimed. After all, “all creatures breathe numbers: Sky, Earth, Elements and whatever exists in harmony and concinnity with the Angelic, Human, Sidereal and Elemental Universe, all . . . are subjected to the reckonings of nu
mbers.”

  Now in his late seventies, Kircher began a manuscript composed chiefly of trigonometry computations. If the project represented an attempt to make a real contribution to mathematics, it was a weak one. Just about the time that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz began quarreling in print over which one of them had been the first to conceive of the calculus, a conception that Berlinski says caused “a reverberating sonic boom! in the history of thought,” Kircher grew too tired to keep going. He handed the manuscript over to another priest.

  —

  IN NOVEMBER OF 1678, Kircher wrote to a colleague: “You must know that now, bowed down by my seventy-seven years of age, I give my time to nothing besides spiritual exercises, nor do I occupy myself with any other studies . . . I am fully occupied in penetrating the science of the Saints, which is to be found in Christ crucified, so that when death comes it will not find me occupied in empty studies.” At the bottom of the letter there’s a postscript: “Please excuse my trembling hand.”

  The frontispiece of Kircher’s Arithmologia

  Sometime later Baldigiani sent a report to Redi. “Decrepit and old, Professor Kircher is deteriorating at an alarming rate. For more than a year he has been deaf, his vision is failing, he has lost a good part of his memory and he rarely leaves his room, unless to go to the pharmacy or the porter. In short, we have already given him up for lost, though he may live many more years.”

  Kircher’s autobiography, which no one would bother to set into type for more than two centuries after his death, let alone publish in a lavishly illustrated edition, contains some insight into his thoughts in old age. There’s a section at the end in which he reflects on the course of his life. It was God, he wrote, who “wished that I expend my small talent . . . for the glory of His divine name and for the benefit of the common weal.”

  “It was surely God who had destined me from the womb of my mother to pursue this matter in ways marvelous and manifold, first through the efficacy of innate instinct, and then through marvelous and fortuitous happenings, and finally through perils of life endured on land and sea.”

  And it was surely “He who, although I was ordered to travel to Vienna by the command of my Superiors to serve as professor of Mathematics, led me to Rome in order that indisputably in this theater of the shared universe I devote myself to the explication of the obelisks, a thing finally revealed as my talent, meager as it was.”

  But it was not possible for Kircher to pretend that he had nothing to do with the trajectory of his life and work, or with the waning of his reputation.

  “If only I had accomplished this with such perfection and so great a zeal for the glory of God as my gratitude toward the supreme Father of men was demanding . . .” he wrote. “Yea indeed I sometimes strayed from my deserved end, and drew something to myself from the applause of men that was owed to God alone.

  “And so, the subject matter of my studies to which God and obedience have destined me were varied and manifold, and, in the end, hidden and unattainable, indeed an ill-matched task for Herculean shoulders, much less my own, to bear.”

  —

  IN AUGUST OF 1679, Kircher grew so unwell that he was given the last sacrament again, then regained his strength. Months later a Jesuit professor sent a letter with a question about the telescope. An assistant wrote back with an apology that Kircher couldn’t look into it himself; an astronomer at the Collegio Romano would reply.

  By March of 1680, Kircher had begun what a fellow priest called his “second childhood,” which lasted months. His condition began to worsen in November, about the time the seventy-nine-year-old Bernini suffered what must have been a stroke: his whole right side became paralyzed and he lost the ability to speak.

  Kircher died on November 27. Bernini died the very next day. The result was that funeral services for Kircher were overshadowed by the tremendous outpouring of tribute to the baroque master.

  —

  KIRCHER’S BODY WAS to be entombed in the great Jesuit church of Il Gesù, just a few narrow streets away from the Collegio Romano, but he left instructions for his heart to be taken to Mentorella and buried at the foot of the altar there.

  Preparation for burial in the seventeenth century began by cutting open the chest for the removal of internal organs. The cranium was also sawed open, and once it was embalmed, Kircher’s brain, the source of all of his ideas and all his trouble, was packed in a barrel with his intestines, eyes, tongue, lungs, liver, and other organs. His heart was set aside. Deep incisions were made all along the limbs, the back, and the buttocks to drain the blood from the veins and arteries. After all the viscera, layers of fat, and tendrils of membrane were removed, the open cavities were scrubbed with spirits of wine, turpentine, and aromatic oils. Then they were filled with untwisted cotton or tow and large quantities of embalming powder, which was like finely ground potpourri. One recipe alone included rosemary, laurel, hyssop, absynth, mint, rue, sage, wild thyme, pennyroyal, oregano, germander, lavender, chamomile, fennel, rosewood, spikenard, caraway, angelica, cloves, valerian, aloe, mastic, incense, myrrh, styrax, labdanum, canella, mace, and saffron.

  The body was sewn up, bathed in spirits and liquid balm, and anointed. Before being placed in a casket, it was bandaged, dressed in vestments, and wrapped in a linen sheet, which was tied with ribbon at the head and feet. When the time came, Kircher’s wooden coffin was plastered into a lengthwise space in the rough wall of the crypt beneath Il Gesù, the place where aboveground the body of Ignatius of Loyola and the right arm of Francis Xavier are opulently interred.

  Kircher’s heart was removed from its fibrous sac, soaked in spirits, and thoroughly cleaned. The ventricles were filled with embalming powder. Then the heart was anointed with oil, essence of nutmeg, or tincture of musk. It was set in perfumed cotton, powdered, and placed inside a little waxed bag. The bag was put in a small box. The box was wrapped in violet taffeta.

  Perhaps only a few Jesuit companions traveled with this box to Mentorella. The trip from Rome to Tivoli to the mountain took several hours by cart or carriage. From there, the way to the shrine—up the mountain, through the little village of Guadagnolo, and then along the summit to the cliff-side spot—was an ordeal in itself. People now can ride to the top in a car, but for hundreds of years the most common mode of transport there was mule.

  “The track which leads to it from the valley, at the base of the mountain, can hardly be called a road, though there is no other direct way of reaching it,” explained an English priest who made the pilgrimage in the late nineteenth century. “A mule is the only animal that can be trusted to carry one there in safety. It is amazing to see with what steadiness that sure-footed animal trips along the ledge of a precipice, where one false step would be fatal to it and the rider. But the danger of the ascent is soon forgotten when one beholds the beauty of the approach to the sanctuary and the grandeur of the scenery for many miles around.”

  It’s fair to say this last climb had little effect on Kircher’s dead and well-protected heart, but on previous ascents it must have been stirred. The trip may have put him in mind of his herniated journey over the mountains of the Hochsauerland to Paderborn, or any number of climbs in Malta or Sicily.

  The Jesuits who brought his heart up to the mountain said Mass in the little basilica that Kircher had restored, gathering in view of the wooden Madonna who had seemed to address him on the day he discovered the church. They set the box in a space beneath the marble at the foot of the altar, and then sealed it up before returning to Rome, where life went on as usual.

  —

  EFFORTS WERE MADE over the years to restore Kircher’s museum at the Collegio Romano to its former glory, but in the meantime no one kept very good watch over the items and machines that he had painstakingly collected. As a 1709 account has it, there was a clerk “kept quite busy with other undertakings and thus not fully capable of caring for the
m as well as he should have.” Some items were broken or worn by misuse, and some were not maintained. Others “simply vanished after exposure to the eyes of visitors apart from the guard.”

  A French traveler, visiting Rome several years after Kircher’s death, reported that “Father Kircher’s Cabinet in the Roman College was formerly one of the most curious in Europe, but it has been very much mangl’d and dismember’d.”

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  Closest of All to the Truth

  It’s hard to say exactly when the modern age began. But if “what the modern world’s about, what it is, is science,” as David Foster Wallace wrote in his history of the concept of infinity, and modern science is “essentially a mathematical enterprise,” then the modern age has something to do with Isaac Newton. Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, seven years after Kircher’s death, offered an astoundingly rigorous mathematical proof of the Copernican system. Along the way it introduced the notion of absolute space and time (although that was later undone by Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity), laid down the fundamental laws of motion (based on the work of Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes), and explained the movement of the planets, as well as of the comets, the moon, and the tides, by virtue of a single, universal, gravitational force.