If the only Jesuit you ever met was the subject of a biography in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life?
In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library he entered the search term “Jesuit” and filtered it through the genre of “Biography”. The books that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar but still very real Jesuits.
Today: a man who knew everything, Athanasius Kircher SJ, as depicted by John Glassie in A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change.
It’s a challenge today to find the “real” Kircher, a man whose story has been so layered with centuries of speculation and confabulation about his real work: alchemist, seeker of esoteric knowledge, genuine polymath, self-promoter, plagiarist. Glassie cautions readers in his introduction that, as general rule, “Kircher never ruined a good story with facts,” (p. xi) but simply “wanted the world to be magical, and get to make sense, and he believed in his special ability to make sense of it.” (p. xv)
The ninth child of a magistrate, Athanasius Kircher was born in 1602 in the (now) central German town of Geisa. His formative years overlap the violent divisions on religious lines of the Thirty Years War (1618-48). His aptitude for learning is clear and he has “a most tenacious memory.” By the age of 10 is already on his way to becoming a Jesuit. “[T]o my passion for books I add a passion for piety,” he later reflected in his autobiography. (p. 11)
That autobiography reads like an adventure story with miraculous, life-saving interventions when he is about to drown (twice) or is attacked by bandits and saved by nothing other than “Divine good will.” One day when skating on a frozen river, he suffers a hernia but chooses to suffer secretly so as not to jeopardise his membership in the Society. Another thing he tries to keep hidden is his brilliance. “I did not dare to reveal my talent of intellect fearing, least from the complacency arising from some degree of vainglory, I would diminish the flow of divine gifts into me.” (p. 21)
The violence of the religious wars means that his Jesuit training takes him all over Germany, to France, and eventually to Rome. In one of his college libraries he stumbles on a book about obelisks. “From that very moment I never turned my mind from deciphering these figures.” As Glassie explains, obelisks were thought “to contain some of the earliest and most sacred ideas of all: possibly this was the strain of knowledge that originate at the time of Adam, a strain that had survived the Flood and the confusion of tongues.” (p. 56)
Cracking the hieroglyphic code would bring Kircher closer to an understanding of God in all creation. He studies obelisks, “translates” them, and publishes his findings because “he wanted to reveal the way in which all people and all religious traditions were connected by (what he thought was) their common origin.” (p. 141, Glassie’s parenthesis.)
Kircher is a voracious student of all forms of knowledge. He studies volcanoes, even witnessing an eruption of Stromboli. “Within this hollow mountain, Kircher began to imagine what it might be like even deeper within the earth, and how the mountains and fires and rivers and oceans might somehow all be connected, as if they belonged to a kind of organism, or ‘geocosm,’ to use a word he would later coin.” (p. 96)
Here, Glassie introduces a recurring theme in this biography: Kircher’s research that turns very quickly to speculation, regardless of the discipline. Kircher reads widely, borrows broadly, and speculates confidently. He mixes theory and practice, he invents a sun-powered clock driven by a sun-seeking sunflower seed (it’s actually a magnet that powers it, but it impresses the gullible); he invents a giant speaking-tube to communicate between different rooms at the Collegio Romano; he invents a form of camera obscura; he invents a musical instrument and studies the science of harmonics. Each invention opens a door to further research and speculation, as well as prolific and widespread publication. His reputation is international. For him, no matter what he investigates, it’s all “grounds for praise of God,” though to his contemporaries, especially his Jesuit superiors, it’s also “fodder for tribulation.” (p. 125)
He is made Chair of Mathematics at the Collegio Romano, a position formerly held by the great Jesuit mathematician and contemporary of Matteo Ricci, Christopher Clavius. Kircher writes, “There must be no doubt that within numbers lies hidden a certain proximity to divine nature.” (p. 243).
At the Collegio he creates a museum for his inventions and the objects he has collected on his many travels. It quickly becomes a must-see destination for visitors to Rome, especially the nobility and royalty. Glassie points to Kircher’s ambiguous position in the Society, “If the question among Jesuit authorities was whether Kircher was sometimes too concerned with advancing his own name, the answer may have been that even so, he had also advanced the interests of both the Jesuits and the Church.” (p. 209-10)
Kircher then explores the possibility of creating a single common language and even writes what is considered a form of science fiction. In Ecstatic Journey, published in 1656, he describes the flight of a priest and an angel to the moon. He writes, “human thoughts, unless they are based on experiments, often wander as far from the truth as the earth is distant from the moon.” (p. 153) This work appears at a time when Galileo’s “heretical” speculations about the divine placement of heavenly bodies are still vivid in the minds of Catholic astronomers.
In his later years when some gaps in his scholarship begin to surface, Kircher’s focus turns inward. In 1674 when Kircher is 73, a contemporary observes, “Because of his age, his background, and his history of hard work and in depth study, he is not always able to be as rational as he would like.” (p. 233)
Five years later in a letter to a friend, Kircher expresses it this way, “bowed down by my seventy-seven years of age, I give my time to nothing besides spiritual exercises, nor do I occupy myself with 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.” (p. 243)
Glassie presents a complex Jesuit who embraces the notion of finding God in all things so literally that he seeks to capture all knowledge and share it. He respects Kircher “for stimulating, as well as confounding and inadvertently amusing, so many minds; for having been a source of so many ideas – right, wrong, half right, half-baked, ridiculous, beautiful, and all-encompassing.” (p. 272)
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John Glassie’s A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change is published by Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group, 2012.
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Next in this series: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, as presented in the paleontological biography: The Jesuit and the Skull – Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for the Peking Man by Amir D. Aczel