Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033)
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Authors: John Glassie
A Man of Misconceptions
THE LIFE OF AN ECCENTRIC IN AN AGE OF CHANGE
John Glassie
R
IVERHEAD
B
OOKS
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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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, 1602â1680. 2. ScientistsâGermanyâBiography. 3. IntellectualsâGermanyâBiography. 4. Eccentrics and eccentricitiesâ GermanyâBiography. 5. GermanyâHistoryâ1618â1648âBiography. 6. GermanyâHistoryâ1648â1740âBiography. 7. ScienceâGermanyâHistoryâ17th century. 8. GermanyâIntellectual lifeâ17th century. I. Title.
CT1098.K46G53 2012 2012026023
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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
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.
âCharles MacKay,
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
, 1852 edition
APOLOGETIC FORERUNNER TO THIS KIRCHERIAN STUDY
S
ometime 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 others, 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 Kircherâan 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”âis 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.