Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (16 page)

Kircher's arguments about spontaneous generation are hard to follow, largely because he did so much prevaricating and used so many ill-defined terms interchangeably. It was all utter speculation, anyway. Universal sperm was certainly involved: he believed that “seeds of a vegetative and sentient nature” are “scattered everywhere among the elemental bodies.” Whether decomposing matter also generated life on its own or acted as a fertilizer or necessary ingredient is, as one historian commented, “not perfectly clear.” In the case of the plague, Kircher suggested that when the tiny
semina
, or seeds, or “corpuscles,” that emanate from all natural things are corrupted by putrescence, they become the minute carriers of the disease. “Corpuscles of this kind are commonly nonliving,” he explained, “but through the agency of ambient heat already tainted with a similar pollution, they are transformed into a brood of countless invisible little worms.”

Specifics aside, Kircher was making a larger, more fundamental argument against the new mechanistic, material philosophy of Descartes and others, based on which even animals and plants were nothing but elaborate machines. He refused to concede that the physical world was merely physical. To him it was animate on some very basic level.

According to Kircher, “these worms, propagators of the plague, are so small, so light, so subtle, that they elude any grasp of perception and can only be seen under the most powerful microscope.” Therefore, they “are easily forced out through all the passages and pores” of plague victims' bodies and of the sick, and “are moved by even the faintest breath of air, just like so many dust particles in the sun.” They are then “drawn through the breath and through the sweat pores of the body, from which later such fearful symptoms and effects result.”

—

A MEDICAL HISTORIAN
writing in 1932 described Kircher's
Examination of the Plague
as “
a farrago of nonsensical speculation by a man possessed of neither scientific acumen nor medical instinct.” But two years before, another historian determined from it that Kircher was “
undoubtedly the first to state in explicit terms the doctrine of ‘contagium vivum' as the cause of infectious disease”—in other words, that Kircher discovered microorganisms and was the first to propose the germ theory of contagion. If that's true, however, then his articulation of germ theory was predicated on notions (spontaneous generation, animism) that no modern scientist would be caught dead advancing. Besides, the concept of universal seeds went back to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, and the idea that disease is living turns out to be both ancient and mystical.

A lot of what Kircher wrote about plague came from Lucretius, the disciple of Epicurus from whom Gassendi got his modern-sounding ideas about atoms. In his epic poem
On the Nature of Things
, Lucretius wrote that “
there are many seeds of things which support life, and on the other hand there must be many flying about which make for disease and death.” They can come “down through the sky like clouds and mists, or often they gather together and rise from the earth itself, when through dampness it has become putrescent.”

Among other sources, Kircher also borrowed heavily from, but doesn't cite, a sixteenth-century writer most famous for a verse treatise called
Syphilis, or the French Disease
. (Understandably, no one wanted to take the credit for syphilis, which reached epidemic proportions during this time. To Muslims, syphilis was the disease of the Christians, to the English it was the French pox, to the French it was the Neapolitan disease, and to the Italians it was of Spanish origin.) The author, a physician from Verona named Fracastoro, worked out a theory of contagion involving transmission of “
imperceptible particles,” infected and self-propagating, that he called
seminaria
, or “seedbeds,” sometimes translated as “germs.”

What did Kircher actually
see
when he examined the blood of plague patients? He claimed his microscope made “everything appear a thousand times larger than it really is,” but he didn't mean that literally. It's not possible that he saw plague bacilli, which are one six-hundredth of a millimeter long. He may have been using a relatively simple magnifying lens rather than a compound microscope, which employs a system of lenses, in which case he would have been lucky to see much of anything. Even with a compound microscope, any organic specimen might have looked like a mass of tiny worms.

Yet most of Kircher's readers had never looked through a microscope at all. Only one or two treatises on the subject had ever been published, and so
Examination of the Plague
caused a kind of sensation within the Republic of Letters. A doctor in Dresden compared Kircher's brilliance to the shining of the sun. An anatomy professor in Jena informed Kircher that “
the reputation of things Kircherian” had “spread through all of Europe.” In thanks for his copy of the book, a missionary in New Spain sent Kircher chocolate and peppers “which we call Chile.” Eventually, whether or not
Examination of the Plague
hit upon one of the core tenets of epidemiology, it did influence thinking about the way disease is actually spread.

Eager readers may have been under the incorrect assumption that Kircher had something to do with stemming the plague in Rome. And on the question of prevention and cure Kircher
did
provide his considered opinion, but in this case it can't remotely be mistaken for an early expression of modern medical thought: he believed that, short of leaving the area, an amulet made of the flesh of a toad or of dried toad powder, and worn over the heart, was probably the best antidote.

15

Philosophical Transactions

T
hree years after the plague subsided in Rome, the Tiber flooded, having the greatest effect on the Jewish ghetto. Alexander VII spent much of his time in the Palazzo Quirinale with his wooden scale model of the streets and buildings of the city, contemplating his improvement projects. Although unenthusiastic about matters of government, he was given respect for the success of Rome's efforts against the plague, and he had done his part in 1657 by sending the papal fleet to join Venetian ships at the Battle of the Dardanelles, part of the ongoing war with the Ottoman Empire over Crete. He'd also bowed to tradition with regard to nepotism; a little more than a year after his election his brother and nephews had gone on the payroll.

Despite Kircher's previous output, he had only begun to become, as a twenty-first-century historian has put it, “
a book-making, knowledge-regurgitating machine.” In 1658, he published
Ecstatic Journey II
, a precursor of a planned volume on the physical earth called
Underground World
that was going to take several more years to complete. In 1660, after the first major eruption of Mount Vesuvius in three decades, Kircher traveled down to Naples to investigate an apparent miracle.
Crosses had mysteriously begun to appear in the folds of people's clothes, aprons, bed linens, and other fabrics. Kircher the skeptic determined that the causes were natural, not miraculous, a result of the ash in the air—though this didn't mean that God wasn't responsible for them. A book on the subject naturally followed.

Also on Kircher's agenda in the years after the plague: ingratiating himself with the new Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. After Ferdinand III died in 1657, his seventeen-year-old son, Leopold, king of Bohemia and Hungary, succeeded him. The child of married first cousins, Leopold himself happened to be first cousins with Louis XIV of France. He was born with what became known as the Hapsburg chin—a greatly protruding jaw and almost monstrous lower lip—the result of so much inbreeding among European royalty. (His nickname: Hogmouth.) Like his father, and like other kings and queens whose subjects, peers, and family members spoke many different tongues, Leopold had a practical interest in crossing the divide of language. At the same time, because he frequently wanted to keep others from being able to read and understand his secret missives and official directives, he'd developed an interest in cryptography. For Leopold, Kircher produced both an attempt at a universal language that would allow any two parties to communicate and a system of artificial languages or codes by which only certain people could.

In fact, the possibility of a universal language was frequently discussed during the seventeenth century by the likes of Descartes, Leibniz, and many others. In the early 1650s, for example, the Englishman Francis Lodwick proposed one in a book called
The Groundwork or Foundation Laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing
. In 1657, another Englishman, Cave Beck, published his proposal in
Universal Character, By which all the Nations in the World may understand one another's Conceptions, Reading out of one Common Writing their own Mother Tongues.
Kircher's own attempt,
set down in
New and Universal Polygraphy
and made available to a select readership beyond the emperor, was based on the use of the combinatory arts he was so fond of. In essence it was an elaborate system for translating more than a thousand core terms among five languages. It lent itself to the same kind of computing-box system as his method for composing music. As a result, Kircher made a number of wooden arks or “organs” for patrons containing many categorized, combinable slats. They served as tabletop or desktop aids to composition in his “universal language” and a variety of secret codes.

In Germany, Kaspar Schott dutifully continued to work on Kircher's behalf, among other things publishing a new edition of
Ecstatic Journey
meant to address the censors' concerns, and taking over an entire four-volume project on natural magic that Kircher had recognized he would never complete. Schott produced several other fat books of his own, on everything from “physical curiosities” to “technical curiosities” to “serious amusements.” Their final project together involved another one of Kircher's seventeenth-century computers.
He called it his mathematical organ, and it worked on the same principle as his other machines. The slats in this one were meant to enable calculations in every field in which a young prince might need to make them: arithmetic, geometry, fortifications, chronology, horography, astronomy, astrology, steganography, and music. Schott wrote an instruction book for it from his base in Würzburg, finishing just before he died of what must have been exhaustion in 1666. The manual, 850 pages long, was published posthumously.

—

BY 1661,
Kircher's writings were so well known that Johann Jansson, a prominent Amsterdam publisher of atlases and other handsome volumes, approached him with a proposal for an agreement of international scope—an offer of twenty-two hundred scudi for the rights to publish his present and future books in several countries of continental Europe and in England. Not only did Kircher agree to the offer, he was known to mention it frequently in letters and conversation with others.

For these new Protestant publishers, Kircher decided to produce a volume on the history, topography, and landmarks of Latium (Lazio in Italian), the countryside around Rome. It was a subject that could be illustrated with many beautiful engravings, and one that was worthy of scholarly attention. According to the historian Ingrid Rowland, for example, there was a tradition of thinking that after the Flood, Noah “
had taken to traveling the world by raft, vigorously repopulating the flood-drenched continents with the heroic aid of his wife.” And one strain of Hebrew scholarship suggested that Noah had finally come to rest on the Italian peninsula. (Indeed, the fifteenth-century Dominican monk named Giovanni Nanni, aka
Annius of Viterbo, spent his career forging—and then translating and commenting upon—ancient Chaldean, Etruscan, and Egyptian texts in order to prove that Noah had chosen to settle down in his own Italian hometown of Viterbo.)

So it was that later in 1661, Kircher traveled to the ancient town of Tibur “for the sake of refreshing my strength and at the same time to gather material on antiquities for my work on Latium.” It was about thirty miles east of Rome, at the foot of the Sabine Hills. Now called Tivoli, Tibur had been a famous summer residence for ancient Romans, and was the site of an enormous villa built by the Emperor Hadrian. One day during his time there, Kircher set out in search of a particular ruin: “I had heard that somewhere in the nearby mountains there was hidden the famed rubble of the city of Empolitana, referred to rather often by Livy,” he recalled.

“After procuring a travel mate I went out to survey the area, an utterly difficult journey.” They hiked many hours, but the ruins of Empolitana proved elusive. So the two began a very long climb up the slope of the highest mountain in the small range called the Monti Prenestini, which would offer the best view of the hills and valleys on either side below. The mountain was originally called Mons Vulturum or Mons Vulturella, the Mountain of Falcons. Over many hundreds of years the name had become Mentorella. It was sometimes also known as Monte Guadagnolo, after the little village that clings to its southern slope. Above the village is a weathered ridge of scrub and rocks that runs along the length of the mountain. It's about three thousand feet above sea level, and fifteen hundred feet down to the green valley below. Little villages and towns are visible in the foothills of the range a couple of miles to the east. As Kircher and his companion made their way along this ridge, they saw signs of a building on the steep eastern face of the mountain.

The building turned out to be a church “nearly consumed with age.” It stood on a sort of shelf against a tall, craggy outcrop. “When I drew nearer I realized that formerly it had been a magnificent structure,” Kircher recalled. “Still, I marveled that it had been placed in this bristling wilderness.”

Examining the remains of the church, he found a marble inscription: this was the site of the conversion of Saint Eustace. As the story went, sometime early in the second century, a Roman commander named Placidus was hunting on the mountain when a stag came out and stood at the top of the jutting rock. Appearing between its antlers was a vision of the crucifixion of Christ. This was enough to turn Placidus from paganism to Christianity and inspire him to take the name Eustace. After he refused to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods in Rome, however, he and his family were burned to death in a brass bull. Two hundred years later Constantine the Great supposedly came across the site where Eustace had seen Christ, and built a church there. (Today the entire story has been roundly discounted.)

Kircher went up to the altar of this dilapidated church, where there was a statue of the Blessed Virgin. It was “venerable in its antiquity” but “very neglected” and “covered by a filthy rag.” And then “with a certain marvelous impulse from an inner spirit She was seeming to address me,” he wrote. How “deserted by all in this horrible place” she was; how in the past she “was blooming abundantly with great devotion in this very spot.”

Kircher was “thoroughly moved” to his “innermost viscera” by his experience. The view from high up on that mountain was like a more dramatic version of the hilltop view from Geisa. He returned to Rome determined to undertake a restoration of this very remote little church.

—

WHILE KIRCHER WAS
up on the mountain, members of the newly formed Royal Society of London, an entity that has taken on legendary status for its role in the development of Western science, were trying to figure out how to contend with Kircher's work.

Some of the founding members of the Society had begun meeting less formally in the 1640s, in the midst of the English Civil War, and some at Oxford in the 1650s. (They were mostly Parliamentarians rather than Royalists, though the founding group was a mix of both.) After lectures at Gresham College in London, they got together in the lodgings of one professor or another, or in taverns such as the Mitre on Wood Street and the Bull Head in Cheapside, to talk about everything from the “Copernican Hypothosis,” and the “weight of the Air” to “Valves in the Veins” and the “Descent of Heavy Bodies.” One of them maintained an “operator” in his lodgings to grind glasses for telescopes and microscopes; they also had access to the chemicals and instruments of an apothecary.

As described in an early history of the Royal Society, most of the people in this fairly astonishing group were “
gentlemen, free and unconfined,” meaning that with “the freedom of their education, the plenty of their estates and the usual generosity of noble blood” they had the means and the wherewithal to pursue their interests. Collectively, they had studied Descartes, or met him in Paris, and engaged in correspondence with such people as Mersenne, Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens, and Hevelius. They admired William Gilbert's
De Magnete
, William Harvey's
De Motu Cordis
(
On the Motion of the Heart
), and Francis Bacon's vision for an entirely new approach to knowledge based on inductive reasoning and the experimental method. Many of them also had a connection to Kircher.

In a letter written in early 1651, Dr. William Petty—a physician, chemist, economic theorist, and professor of music who also directed a comprehensive land survey of Ireland, designed double-hulled boats, and later became a founding member of the Society—described the initial approach of the Oxford group: to try to establish what had been achieved to date within various areas of knowledge. “
The Club-men,” he wrote, in pre-standardized English, “have cantonized or are cantonizing their whole Academie to taske men to several imploiments and amongst others to make Medullas of all Authors in reference to experimental learning. Thus they intend to doe with Kircherus Workes and others.” Where else would they go, frankly, for the most complete compendia of progress in so many fields?

The society was officially founded in 1660, after a lecture on astronomy by Christopher Wren, to promote “Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning.” Chairing the meeting: John Wilkins, a liberal clergyman who supported the heliocentric model of the universe and believed in the possibility of space travel. Author of a 1648 book called
Mathematicall Magick, or, The Wonders that May Be Performed by Mechanicall Geometry
, he also joined the quest for a universal language, publishing the results of his very elaborate but doomed effort in 1668. (
His classification system later inspired a short essay by Jorge Luis Borges, which in turn inspired an entire book,
The Order of Things
, by Michel Foucault.) During the 1650s Wilkins hosted many meetings of what was sometimes called the Invisible College in his lodgings at Oxford. According to another early Royal Society fellow, John Evelyn (who had documented the papal procession while visiting Rome in 1644), Wilkins put many “
artificial, mathematical, and magical curiosities” on display in his room. These included a “monstrous magnet,” a machine that made rainbows, and a speaking statue. The statue “gave a voice and uttered words by a long concealed pipe”—and sounds an awful lot like it was modeled on the one in Kircher's museum.

Sir Robert Moray, another founding member, had developed his interest in what would now be called scientific matters, as well as natural magic and the Hermetic tradition, by studying Kircher's
Magnes
during a seventeen-month imprisonment at the hands of the Duke of Bavaria in the early 1640s. Moray, a Scot and a Freemason who had worked as a spy for Cardinal Richelieu, was captured while serving in the Scots Guard with the French in the Thirty Years War. Moray had a lot of time on his hands and began a correspondence with Kircher that lasted decades. He later wrote to Kircher about the extreme tides of the Western Isles, and referred others to
Egyptian Oedipus
. (He also seems to have incorporated symbols and ideas from
Egyptian Oedipus
into the imagery and rituals of Freemasonry.) After working behind the scenes at a very high level to help effect the Restoration of the English monarchy and bring Charles II to power in 1660, Moray was given his own house to live in on the grounds of Whitehall Palace. He secured the charter from the king that gave the Royal Society its name.