Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher, Dude of Wonders
By SCOTT McLEMEE, New York City
Athanasius Kircher is having a very good year
This month marks the 400th birthday of the Jesuit polymath -- who, by the time he died in 1680, had published enough encyclopedic works to fill a small library. But now -- unlike in previous centuries, when his worldwide reputation declined sharply, his name becoming something of a joke to the few who remembered him -- Kircher's astounding career is being celebrated in suitably awestruck terms. Last Thursday, at a symposium at New York University sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities, experts gathered to ponder a burning question previous generations of cultural historians have neglected to confront: "Was Athanasius Kircher Just About the Coolest Guy Ever, or What?"
The consensus is unambiguous: Athanasius Kircher was, indeed, very cool. A dude of wonders, even. Even a partial catalog of Kircher's accomplishments tends to make one's jaw drop. A German-born Jesuit priest, he served as a professor of mathematics at the Jesuit training institute in Rome. Nicknamed "the master of a hundred arts," Kircher also knew dozens of languages, including Chinese and Coptic. His scientific writings -- studied with rapt interest by scholars (Roman Catholic and otherwise) around the world -- included works on acoustics, astronomy, chemistry, mineralogy, and optics. He also published some of the earliest scholarship on ancient Egypt. His theories about the hieroglyphics turned out to be wrong, for the most part; but Kircher had enough insights and suggestive ideas to make him a recognized pioneer.
And for almost a century after his death, no learned traveler would consider his or her trip to Rome complete without a tour of Father Kircher's museum: a collection of ancient artifacts and stuffed beasts (including such exotic creatures as the aardvark) as well as the master's own inventions. There was, for example, a statue whose eyes and lips began to move in an uncannily lifelike way as it addressed visitors, who were momentarily startled out of their wits. (A concealed assistant operated the proto-robot.)
Not merely erudite, Kircher was also a sort of intellectual daredevil. He entered the mouth of an active volcano, and published a vivid account of what he saw: "The whole area was lit up by the fires, and the glowing sulphur and bitumen produced an intolerable vapor. It was just like hell, only lacking the demons to complete the picture." Examining the blood of plague victims with a microscope, Kircher developed what must have seemed, at the time, like a bizarre theory: Disease might be caused by very tiny organisms entering the body from the outside. And while Kircher was the most respected intellectual in his church, with the full backing of the Pope, some of his intellectual explorations tested the very limits of acceptable thought. His cosmological theories, for example, appeared suspiciously compatible with the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo. The Inquisition prepared an internal document listing the worrisome passages, just in case.
Portions of that memo are quoted by Ingrid D. Rowland, a professor in the humanities at the American Academy in Rome, in The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome, the catalog from an exhibit held in the spring of 2000 by the University of Chicago Library. The following year, the Stanford University Library published its own catalog, The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, in connection with an exhibit and conference held in the spring of 2001. (Stanford holds an almost complete collection of books by and about Kircher, including works by his students.)
Although the Jesuit scholar made a cameo appearance in Umberto Eco's novel The Island of the Day Before (Harcourt Brace, 1995), the public rediscovery of Kircher in the United States is a strictly 21st-century phenomenon. The volumes from Chicago and Stanford, while making sober contributions to the field of Renaissance scholarship, prove almost irresistibly appealing to the nonspecialist as well -- simply for the pictures. Kircher, who enjoyed both papal and secular patronage, could afford to have his work lavishly illustrated with engravings. His books are filled with striking images, a cross-section of his fertile, not to say fevered, curiosity. There are pictures of mummies, tarantulas, imaginary cities, Chinese ideograms, complex mechanical devices, and the basic structures of the cosmos, among other wonders.
On Thursday, at the NYU symposium, any trace of academic reserve vanished as the audience looked at the gorgeous and sometimes baffling images, projected on a screen behind the speakers. "Athanasius Kircher wrote more books than the modern scholar can read, in a mellifluous Latin," said Anthony Grafton, a history professor at Princeton University, during his introductory remarks. "In the age of polymaths, he was the most polymathic of all." The modern reader exploring "the staggeringly strange dark continent of Kircher's work" finds in it, Mr. Grafton said, "the setting for a Borges story that was never written."
In a talk based on a longer paper delivered at Stanford last year, Mr. Grafton considered a dimension of Kircher's intellectual world unfamiliar to later generations of readers: the long-lost enterprise known as "chronology." Scholars devoted enormous energy to assembling a single, continuous narrative of human history -- with the Bible, of course, as the basic framework. As if sorting the events recorded by Greek and Roman historians were not challenge enough, chronologers found themselves wrestling with a constantly growing mass of new data: the information reported by explorers. If only 2,500 years passed between Noah's flood and Jesus's birth, how could one account for ancient civilizations in, say, Mesopotamia or the jungles of the New World?
"In the late 16th and early 17th centuries," Mr. Grafton said, "this was the hottest intellectual field in Europe." Around 1600, the first-known research professorship at a university was created, specifically to advance chronological studies. As Mr. Grafton shows, Kircher was well-versed in the discipline. It formed the matrix of his speculations on ancient Egypt and China. (Although he never got to travel to China as he wished, his student Martino Martini did; so Kircher kept up with the cutting edge of Orientalist scholarship, including the first Western encounter with the annals of ancient Chinese history.)
A close analysis of Kircher's work suggests that he may have entertained doubts about the literal accuracy of the Biblical narrative. "Sitting in the citadel of God's soldiers," says Mr. Grafton of the Jesuit professor, "he thought his way into a sense of history that was radical and innovative, a discovery of the past as unfolding in 'deep time.'"
Discussing the prolific author's relationship with his readers, Paula Findlen, a professor of history at Stanford University, pointed out that Kircher was "the first scholar with a global reputation" -- his books eagerly awaited as far away as Russia and the Americas. In Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of California Press, 1994), Ms. Findlen analyzed the role of Kircher's famous museum in the creation of a humanistic "republic of letters." Her presentation at NYU considered the impact of his books on the international community of scholars (and vice versa). Images of the Internet came to mind in hearing Ms. Findlen's account of "the global writing network of the Jesuits" -- an order of highly educated men, whose work as missionaries included gathering and exchanging information. Some of Kircher's far-flung enthusiasts (religious professionals and otherwise) adored him with a slightly creepy kind of reverence, bordering on the unhinged. One reader had a full-sized painting of Kircher made, based on the portrait in one of his books, and sent him long letters and gifts of chocolate.
One of Kircher's most devoted readers was Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, the brilliant Mexican woman of letters (arguably the most learned person in the New World) who drew on Kircher's work in her poetry. Ms. Findlen showed slides of a portrait of Sor Juana, in which the nun stands in front of an imposing wall of books. The spine of one slender volume reads The Works of Kircher. Perhaps it was a joke by the painter. After all, as Ms. Findlen pointed out, any edition of his works would have run to 54 volumes, most of them sizable.
That did not include Kircher's letters to princes, popes, and fellow scholars. Michael John Gorman, a lecturer in the program on science and technology at Stanford, reported on an international project to make Kircher's correspondence available on the Web. Most of the incoming messages, including letters from more than 700 correspondents, in numerous languages, are held by the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome (one of the participants in the online project). Efforts are under way to prepare a complete collection of Kircher's own letters, now scattered in libraries and archives around the world.
Mr. Gorman also discussed some of the numerous devices the savant built, based on his study of physics. Among them was an instrument that would (the inventor said) answer almost any mathematical problem the user might need solved. But (as is so often the case) there were certain bugs in the software.
"Unfortunately," reports Mr. Gorman, "it required memorizing long poems in Latin to perform the most elementary functions." (If all else failed, one could consult the 850-page treatise that Kircher provided as an instruction manual.)
In the final presentation of the evening, David Wilson, director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, described efforts to revive Kircher's legacy in the field of museology. By the 20th century, the field of curating had become as professionalized and rationalized as any other endeavor governed by bureaucracies and double-entry bookkeeping. The exhibits at Mr. Wilson's institution are a return to the origins of museum-keeping: the eccentric collections of gentlemen who once took pride in the title of "dilettante" (a term derived from a Latin word meaning "delight"). Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (Random House, 1995).
Mr. Wilson calls his collection a "small natural-history museum with an emphasis on curiosities and technological innovations" -- a fitting description of Kircher's once-famous museum in Rome, as well. After the Jurassic opened its doors in 1989, Mr. Wilson began to hear about the great polymath and inventor from visiting scholars. In late 2000, Mr. Wilson mounted an exhibit called "The World Is Bound With Secret Knots: The Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher." The title referred to Kircher's lifelong preoccupation with magnetism. ("Magnetism was the golden chain," writes Ms. Findlen in Possessing Nature, "that manifestly linked together all the segments of the universe. The objects in [Kircher's] Roman College museum served to make these connections apparent.")
Mr. Wilson may not have been able to show his visitors such Kircherian wonders as the bones of a mermaid. But his exhibit reproduced a number of the master's inventions. Perhaps the most beautifully elegant and efficient in design was his sunflower clock. Kircher floated a potted sunflower in a vat of water and stuck a needle in the stem, which then pointed to the hour marked on the edge of the device as the plant rotated freely to follow the sun across the sky.
So how was it that a titan of learning, once known around the world, fell so completely out of view? And why does Kircher's exotic blend of information and imagination have such appeal today?
Mr. Grafton notes that the era of Kircher's predominance as a cultural hero, the 17th century, also saw the rise of intellectual tendencies that would swiftly bury the Jesuit's wild-and-woolly erudition. René Descartes provided a methodology (including a new sort of mathematics) that helped make natural science a field of rational inquiry, rather than mind-boggling marvels. By the 18th century, scarcely anyone bothered with the laborious efforts to create a universal history of mankind built around Scripture. "Chronology," says Mr. Grafton, "became a synonym in the age of reason for mindless pedantry and foolish efforts to solve insoluble problems. The very name of the discipline seemed, and seems, to demand the adjective 'mere.'" And Kircher's "magnetic philosophy" -- like his interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphics as the repositories of profound scientific and philosophical wisdom of the ancients -- sounded like hocus-pocus.
But even his more outlandish flights of scholarly fancy are now being rescued from what E.P. Thompson once called "the enormous condescension of history." As Umberto Eco writes, Kircher was "the father of Egyptology ... in spite of the fact that his main hypothesis was mistaken. By following a false hypothesis he collected real archeological material." And Ms. Findlen noted during her talk that Sor Juana once coined a neologism: "to kircherize." It referred to the sense of intellectual excitement generated by the great scholar's works -- from plugging one's brain into a vast data grid, crackling with creative energy, glowing with previously unimaginable possibilities.
