Athanasius Kircher

The Last Man Who Knew Everything

Paula Findlen, Paula Findlen

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135948443
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Geschichte
• Thema: Weltgeschichte

First published in 2004.Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) -- German Jesuit, occultist, polymath - was one of most curious figures in the history of science. He dabbled in all the mysteries of his time: the heavenly bodies, sound amplification, museology, botany, Asian languages, the pyramids of Egypt -- almost anything incompletely understood. Kircher coined the term electromagnetism, printed Sanskrit for the first time in a Western book, and built a famous museum collection. His wild, beautifully illustrated books are sometimes visionary, frequently wrong, and yet compelling documents in the history of ideas. They are being rediscovered in our own time. This volume contains new essays on Kircher and his world by leading historians and historians of science, including Stephen Jay Gould, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Grafton, Daniel Stoltzenberg, Paula Findlen, and Barbara Stafford.-

SECTION 1
The Art of Being Kircher

1
Kircher’s Rome

EUGENIO LO SARDO

The Town

Look at a map of the period. Look down on Rome—the southernmost point of Europe— torn to shreds by wars, attacked to the south by malaria, surrounded by a bitter sea full of strife and dread, infested by pirates. Ninety thousand people were separated only by the Adriatic, the Apennines, and a hundred galleys—which Venice kept always ready for war—from the ruinous regions of the infidel and from the even more hated Orthodox Christians, “foremost enemies of the Holy See.” To the north its spiritual hegemony was threatened by the vacillations of the French and the sledgehammer blows of the kings and princes of the Reformation. The small Italian states—Tuscany, Savoy, Parma, Modena, and the republic of La Serenissima—were rent with internal conflict, as were Poland, Austria, and Spain. Still, these powers acted as dikes to protect the Catholic Church from the Protestant world, which was itself showing signs of division. Gustavus Adolphus himself, the king of Sweden, was on the point of converting at the time of Urban VIII.

Further south lay only Naples and Palermo. But the south was an outpost for Spain, a faithful ally and an invader at one and the same time, prepared in its pride to flaunt before the pope the power of its armies and fleets to force the spiritual leader to serve the designs of the Christian king. The sea, which lay at the gates of the city, at Ostia, was utterly perilous. It took very little to fall into the hands of the pirates. The green flags adorned with silver crescents infiltrated far into the deepest inlets of the Tyrrhenian Sea. With swift incursions they sacked and plundered, putting shipping and the supply of grain and provisions at serious risk. The battle of Lepanto had halted the fleets that had terrorized the West under Barbarossa and Dragut, but this had not been enough to put a stop to the constant drain from piracy, even if the balance of the exchanges between the two sides was perhaps shifting in favor of Christianity.¹

This was the town in which Kircher arrived. He had himself tasted the surprises that the sea held in store, especially on the busiest routes of the upper and middle Mediterranean, and he had even explored the front line of Christianity, the wedge dividing East and West: Sicily and Malta. The invincible fortress of the Knights remained the most faithful ally of the Holy See. It was a thorn in the side of the great Ottoman hound, a gathering point for the armed fleets of the Genoese, the papacy, and the Order of Saint Stephen, which year after year intercepted the cargoes of merchandise going from Egypt to Costantinople in the straits between Cyprus and Rhodes.

This difficult situation, very present to the mind of a seventeenth-century man, began to have its ill effects only in the second half of the century. In Kircher’s time Rome seemed at the height of its splendor. “I felt that I was appearing publicly in the theater of the world,” wrote Galileo, referring to the Eternal City in the foreword to the Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632). This was the stage on which to “show the foreign nations that as much is known on this subject in Italy and especially in Rome as transalpine wisdom could possibly have imagined.”² Thirty years later Kircher used the same words when he stated that “my Gallery or Museum is visited by all the nations of the world and a prince cannot become better known in this theater of the world than have his likeness here.”³

Three Popes

When Kircher arrived, Rome dominated the artistic and intellectual world of Europe. All came to the Eternal City for inspiration—not, as they do now, to view the ruins of antiquity.

The French painter Nicolas Poussin—friend of the Roman antiquarian and naturalist Cassiano dal Pozzo, who was putting together his “paper museum” (museo cartaceo) in via dei Chiavari—studied perspective there and took the first steps of his successful career. He was one among many in that flowering of illustrious names such as Bernini, Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona who animated the artistic life of the city. But this fascinating and dazzling splendor concealed a precarious economic foundation, one that sustained the city and the papacy only with enormous effort.⁴

It was a splendid setting for the Barberini family, one dimmed only by the compromise with the Spanish party over the Galileo affair in 1633. The French scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc had recommended Kircher to Francesco Barberini, the cardinal nipote and, since 1628, secretary of state. Francesco was an enlightened prince, a graduate of the University of Pisa in utroque iure. Lucas Holstein was the family librarian, and the prince had his own scientific cabinet, of which a description still exists in the Montepellier library. “Life is but a dream” (La vita es sueño), wrote Calderon de la Barca the same year that Kircher landed in the pope’s capital. Rome thrived on wonders, the wonders of architecture and art. Its power was a spiritual one in the literal sense of the word: it had no armies, no rich trade fairs, no ports, no gold mines in Peru.

In a few decades, Sixtus V’s city plan was profoundly transformed. The list of the buildings and artistic works completed at that time is astonishing: the colonnade of Saint Peter’s, the ponte Sant’Angelo, the Chiesa Nuova, the Oratorio dei Filippini, the Tempio della Pace, Palazzo Barberini, and Piazza Navona, Sant’Ivo, and the University to cite only a few of the architectural marvels of seventeenth-century Rome. Rudolf Wittkower aptly summarizes this extraordinary effort by noting that: “The anti-aesthetic approach to art of the period of the militant Counter-Reformation was now replaced by an aesthetic appreciation of artistic quality.” The Jesuits too went through a deep metamorphosis: “mundane interests in wealth, luxury, and political intrigue […] replaced the original zealous and austere spirit of the Order.”⁵

Kircher found himself perfectly at home in this world. The Barberini appointed him to head a commission for the interpretation of the hieroglyphs, and he became professor at the Collegio Romano. He thanked the family by dedicating the Coptic or Egyptian Forerunner (Prodromus Coptus sive Aegyptiacus) (1636) to Francesco Barberini. Urban VIII’s death, however, brought a dramatic change in the papal court. The hopes of the “new philosophers” for a humanist and scientific renewal of the Italian cultural life, already quenched by Galileo’s trial, ended abruptly. When free living had already gone too far, Virgilio Malvezzi wrote to Evangelista Torricelli, it was time to rein in free speech.⁶ The Spaniards imposed a Pamphili pope, Innocent X, and the French party in Rome was in dire straits. Antonio Barberini had to escape to France, and as soon as possible, the other members of the family followed him. A deep crisis divided the people. That “imperfect neutrality” among the Christian powers, lead by Urban VIII, was broken, and the property of his heirs was impounded. Olympia Pamphili—the “nobildonna” who refused to pay for the coffin of her brother-in-law, the pope—dominated the life of the capital and emptied the coffers of the papacy. Rome was also declining on the European political scene. In 1648, the papal envoy, Fabio Chigi, was not invited to sign the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. It was the first time in Europe that peace was made without papal intercession.

Kircher, as usual, swam with the current. He was under the protection of the Habsburgs and worked for the Pamphili family for the midcentury Jubilee. With the end of the Pamphili era, the wind shifted again. Chigi, a Senese humanist descendant of the magnificent banker and patron of Raphael, Agostino Chigi, ascended the throne under the name of Alexander VII. The new pope, a man of refined aesthetic taste, was personally linked with the German polymath. They met for the first time in Malta in 1637. Soon after Kircher left, Fabio wrote to him a letter full of kindness and consideration.⁷ The pope was only three years older than the Jesuit. He was a skilled diplomat, having spent twelve years in Germany, an able politician, and a member of the republic of letters. Alexander was the founder of the new library at the University of Rome, designed by Borromini, which in his honor is still called the Biblioteca Alessandrina. Many common interests linked them, principal among them being the passion for the Egyptian mysteries and the Hermetic tradition.⁸ Kircher would remember his friend and protector all his life, dedicating to him two books and a wooden obelisk, on which he called Alexander a master of ancient wisdom, an oracle of culture, and a reborn Osiris. A similar dedication on the same obelisk was offered to Christina of Sweden, who had been greeted by Alexander with great pomp on her arrival in Rome. The former queen of the northern country was “sanctified” as Isis reborn. The gods of Egypt were back on the Tiber shores.

Kircher’s Square Mile

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Piazza Navona became the center of Rome, and the centerpiece of that square was the Fountain of the Four Rivers that Bernini completed, with the intellectual assistance of Kircher, in 1651. A good fountain, Bernini supposedly said according to his first biographer, should always have a true or metaphorical meaning.⁹ Certainly, everything in this splendid masterpiece suggests the idea of the spiritual primacy of the pope, a supremacy both historical and actual. The fountain was intended to be the theatrical set to be seen by thousands of pilgrims during the great Jubilee of 1650. The obelisk, symbol of the sun, with the Pamphili dove on the top, is set on a base of rocks (the Church) and caves (the instincts, or Sin) from which the four most important rivers of the world spring (Figure 1.1). It is an idea often illustrated in Kircher’s books. As in many symbolic systems with multiple meanings,¹⁰ reading Bernini’s work is a question of interpretation. The fountain can be read as an image of the Earthly Paradise—the origin of the four rivers—but also as an image of the faith’s diffusion to the four continents (Australia was not yet discovered). According to Kircher, everything, even the mathematical proportion of the pyramid, had to be carefully interpreted.

The Nile’s head remains half veiled (although Pedro Pais had discovered the river’s source in 1618) to emphasize the mystery of the Egyptians’ ancient wisdom. The Rio de la Plata is represented as a bearded man with a circlet on his thigh, enlightened by apostolic revelation, with a dragon-like armadillo, the Guaranì “tatù,”¹¹ lying at its feet. The Danube is old, like Europe. The Ganges River statue stands with a rudder in its hand. In between the Nile and the Ganges, a palm tree, a symbol o...