Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (19 page)

As Kircher told it, Petrucci was “thunderstruck.” He called together the Dominican fathers as well as some of “the more experienced literati” of Rome. “They in turn marveled at my boldness,” Kircher claimed, “and perhaps my lack of temerity, but several decreed that the truth of the matter must be determined by the original on the obelisk itself.”

After the obelisk had finally been rolled, they compared Kircher's scheme with the newly revealed side. “And when they had discovered that soundly and without error all of my markings were composed as on the original,” he recalled, “they were utterly stupefied, those same men who were formerly mocking my interpretations as merely pure conjecture.”

This left “certain individuals saying that this knowledge had been inspired by the power of God, while several, not without calumny, even asserted that the knowledge had been acquired by some illicit pact with a demon. Some, finally, judged that this type of knowledge, attained by many years of study, was able to be acquired by the strength of a singular intellect.”

The pope was of the last opinion, and even asked Kircher for private instruction in hieroglyphics. He wanted to understand the sacred meaning of the newly discovered monument that, in a sort of papal tradition, would be re-erected and “inscribed with the glorious title of his own name.” As Kircher interpreted the obelisk, the sacred meaning had to do with the way the

supreme spirit and archetype infuses its virtue and gifts in the soul of the sidereal world, that is the solar spirit subject to it, from whence comes the vital motion in the material or elemental world, and abundance of all things and variety of species arises.

Again it seemed that the Egyptians believed in the same kind of panspermatic solar abundance that Kircher espoused. It “flows ceaselessly,” according to his translation, because it is “drawn by some marvelous sympathy” that sounds an awful lot like magnetic attraction.

Together with Bernini, who had recently returned from the court of Louis XIV in France, Kircher and the pope made plans for the obelisk to go in the square in front of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, near where it had been found. Bernini's idea to put the monument on the back of a marble elephant alluded to a long tradition in which elephants were associated with intelligence as well as physical strength. But by the time the obelisk was dedicated in July of 1667, ever feeble Chigi had died, and it became a memorial to him. The Latin inscription on the base was written by Kircher:

Everyone who sees the images carved on the obelisk by the wise Egyptians and carried by the elephant, the strongest of beasts, should understand: a robust mind is required to sustain solid wisdom.

The pope never had a robust body, but his mind had sustained enough wisdom to inspire one of Rome's favorite sculptures. Romans endearingly called the elephant
il porcino
(“the little pig”) until a few hundred years ago, when that morphed into
il pulcino
(“the little chick”). Kircher said it was a privilege to “bear the honor of observing him by erecting the Alexandrian obelisk.” But it was Kircher, after all, who revealed the divine wisdom, such as it was, to Chigi; it was Kircher who had worked so hard to penetrate the hidden mysteries of the hieroglyphics in the first place. And so, in helping erect this monument to Chigi's robust mind, he was also erecting one to his own.

—

KIRCHER HAD ONCE
even dared to dream, literally, that
he
might be made pope. According to a report published by Schott, he became “stricken with grave and perilous disease,” and after prescribing “soporific medicines” to himself, fell into a deep sleep. “He dreamt that he had been elected Supreme Pontiff and that he had garnered the legations and congratulations of the Christian Princes and the applauses of all nations, a thing which suffused him with boundless joy.” The dream somehow renewed him.

Now, in Rome, many people were secretly relieved by the death of the “
morbidly austere” Chigi, and they celebrated the announcement of the man who had been elected pope in reality, rather than in his dreams. The new pope, Giulio Rospigliosi, took the name Clement IX. He wrote comic opera librettos and enjoyed evenings out. To the job of secretary of state, he appointed the cardinal who was said to be Queen Christina's lover. Christina, who had been on tours of Paris and Hamburg, returned to Rome and accepted a stipend. She helped Clement establish the first public opera house in the city, and helped persuade him to prohibit the racing of Jews during Carnival. (The prostitute races continued.)

In addition to putting on plays of the
sporchissime
(very dirty) sort, and hosting the best harpsichordists and castrati at her palazzo, Christina took up archaeology, about which Kircher claimed some expertise, and alchemy, which Kircher had disparaged. She also held regular meetings of a literary and intellectual salon, which as a first order of business had banished overdone language and embellishment, the kind that Kircher had embraced.

Kircher knew that some people thought his hieroglyphic interpretations were “pure conjecture.” The story of how he delineated the fourth side of the obelisk may have enhanced his reputation among those who already idolized him, but it didn't “stupefy” quite as many of his detractors as he may have hoped. Those who went to see the obelisk must have noticed that the markings on each side were actually quite similar; it might not be too difficult to guess the fourth side, especially after almost thirty years of hieroglyphic study. To those who were dubious, Kircher was self-aggrandizing, and his self-proclaimed mastery of the hieroglyphics set him up for criticism and ridicule.

Stories about Kircher began to travel within the social circles of Rome and the salons of other cities. Christina wrote in her memoirs, for example, about an incident involving a philologist named Andreas Müller. Müller concocted an utterly unintelligible manuscript, then sent it to Kircher with a note saying it had come from Egypt, and asking for a translation. Kircher apparently produced one right away.

Once the word got out about these sorts of practical jokes, they were passed along with such frequency, and set down in so many different forms, that it became impossible to say for sure which tricks had actually been played. Was it “some mischievous youths of Rome” or a single “wicked wag” who had an old stone engraved with nonsense and then buried it one night at a site where workers were digging? When Kircher was called to interpret this stone, did he say that he needed time to try to discover the meaning, or did he begin, as one account had it, “to leap and dance for joy—and to give a beautiful interpretation of the circles, the crosses, and all the other meaningless signs”?

One anecdote comes by way of the American author, critic, and newspaperman
H. L. Mencken. In 1937, Mencken published
The Charlatanry of the Learned
, an English translation of a book originally printed in the eighteenth century by an ancestor named Johann Burkhard Mencken. As the story goes, Kircher was given a piece of silk paper containing some intriguing, odd-looking characters. After he spent a number of days trying to decipher it, he was finally taken to a mirror and shown that it was merely Latin written in reverse:
Noli vana sectari et tempus perdere nugis nihil proficientibus,
the message read. “Do not seek vain things, or waste time on unprofitable trifles.”

18

Everything

R
ecall that for the Jesuits, the path toward Christ was predicated on an effort to achieve humility. It's unclear how well or how often Kircher took a good look at his apparent lack in that regard. But given that hypocrisy is almost requisitely present in human beings, and common among religious, political, and philosophical practices, he surely wasn't the only vain or self-interested member of the Society of Jesus.

As the satirizing sermon by a monk from another order in Rome went,
the Jesuits “are the best Men that Live on the Earth. They are as Modest as Angels. They never open their eyes to cast a Look upon the Ladies at Church. They are such great Lovers of Restraint, that you never see them in the Streets. They are so in Love with Poverty, that they Despise and trample upon all the Riches in the World. They never come near Dying Persons or Widows, to importune them to be Remember'd in their last Wills. . . . They never go among Courts, or mind State Affairs.”

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.

It's said that as he got older, Kircher spent long periods of time in contemplation at the shrine of Mentorella. “
Those letters you have sent to me,” he wrote a friend in his later years, “I have read with equal affection of the spirit, not in Rome, but established in the vast solitude of the Eustachian or Vulturellian mountain, to which I am accustomed to take myself during the autumn holidays, in order that, free from every worldly noise and with cares of studies somewhat set aside, I might be able to conduct the business of health with God, a business, if anything, of exceedingly great importance in the world.”

Kircher certainly threw himself into the restoration of the shrine there with the same energy he put into his more prominent projects. To help pay for it, he “procured aid” from Leopold, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Duke of Bavaria, the archbishop of Prague, and “the most excellent” king of Naples.

“
I firstly fitted the Church with every manner of magnificent preparation, both pictures and tapestries,” he later wrote of the renovation. “I restored the ruined altars with concrete and . . . those ornaments which would be necessary . . . for celebrating mass.” To the church, Kircher “joined a structure conspicuous for its thirteen vaults and complete symmetry.” And since there was no way of reaching the “very lofty peak” where Saint Eustace was supposed to have seen the stag, “we built to the crag's peak a staircase constructed with huge rocks . . . and atop the crag I built a chapel consecrated to divine Eustachius.” Then, “since all these arrangements would be in vain were there no people who would visit the place for the sake of their devotion,” he established an apostolic mission. “Yearly on the festival of the Archangel Saint Michael with the solemn promulgation of complaisance nearly many thousands of people of each sex flocked to participate in the sacraments.”

Even these somewhat oversize acts of devotion smack of self-regard and a sense of personal achievement. But if Kircher ever had any scruples about his motivations, he could turn to the guidance that Ignatius of Loyola had provided on the subject. “
A person may wish to say or do something consistent with the Church, something that promotes the Glory of God,” Ignatius wrote. “In those circumstances, if a thought, or rather a temptation, comes from without not to say or do that thing, proposing specious arguments about vainglory or something else, then such a person ought to raise the understanding to our Creator and Lord.” Then, if “one sees that the proposed action is for God's service, or at least not against it, one must act in a way opposed . . . to the temptation.”

In Kircher's case, accusations of vainglory didn't stand a chance. There were still things to be done for the greater glory of God, and the next thing to do was, in a word, everything. Kircher set his sights on a new method for understanding all that could be known.

—

OTHERS IN KIRCHER'S LIFETIME
had attempted a new, comprehensive approach to knowledge—Francis Bacon and René Descartes, to name two. But they hadn't produced anything quite like this.
Ars Magna Sciendi
(
The Great Art of Knowing
) was one of the most strangely beautiful books Kircher ever produced, full of symbols and symbolic formulations. It
looked
as if it might somehow get down to the essential relationship of things, might establish “an order between all thoughts which can enter the human mind,” as Descartes had said a universal language must. But unlike Bacon and Descartes, Kircher wasn't interested in tearing down or throwing away all previous learning in order to create his method for determining the truth. And it wasn't skepticism of received doctrines that drove his thinking about the possibility of the project in the first place. It was the wisdom of the ancient philosopher Plato, who said that “nothing is more beautiful than to know all things.” Kircher believed it was possible to experience this kind of beauty, or rather it was possible to teach others how to, since presumably he knew. The mechanism for his universal path of inquiry that could be applied to every field? The combinatory method of Ramon Llull that he'd employed in his music composition system and his mathematical organs.

This great art of knowing was, as Kircher described it, “
the art of arts,” “the workshop of the sciences, the fertilizing seedbed of the minds, the key to all human cognition, by which a most complete approach lies open to the understanding of all things which pertain under the notion of the intellect.”

The idea was that the universe was arranged according to certain principles—or that certain principles were inherent in its arrangement. These concepts made for a kind of matrix or architecture by which all nature is engendered. In order to “understand and love God,” as Llull had it, one had to organize the mind in the same way. 

Basing his work on the Llullist system, Kircher started out with nine essential principles or attributes of God (a trinity of trinities): Goodness; Magnitude; Duration; Strength; Wisdom; Will; Power; Truth; and Glory. There were nine universal subjects: God; Angels; Heaven; Elements; Man; Animals; Vegetables; Minerals; and Numbers. And nine “respective” principles, or principles of relationship: Difference; Agreement; Opposition; Beginning; Middle; End; Majority; Equality; Minority.

Each of these was given an icon that could transcend the barriers of language. According to Kircher, with the addition of nine interrogatives (for putting statements to test via syllogism), these twenty-seven principles can produce a total of 371,993,326,789,901,217,467,999, 148,150,835,200,000,000 concepts for consideration. This universal method could be applied within any discipline, he explained, and the icons supposedly made the system accessible to people of all languages. He may have imagined it as a missionary tool that could be used by Jesuits around the world. But a great many assumptions have to be made to come up with these principles and subjects in the first place, or to adopt them wholesale from Llull, as in effect Kircher did. In order to get anywhere with them, one really already had to have a philosophy of knowledge and truth in place.

As Umberto Eco has described Llull's original system, the combinations “
do not generate fresh questions, nor do they furnish new proofs. They generate instead standard answers to an already established set of questions. . . . It is, in reality, a sort of dialectical thesaurus, a mnemonic aid for finding out an array of standard arguments able to demonstrate an already known truth.”

Still, the notion of so many combinations might inspire wonder. The graphs in the book, which allowed readers to visualize the possibilities, seemed almost to shimmer. Perhaps Kircher believed that readers might begin to “know” the sublimity of the universe by contemplating these alone. This was the art, not the science, of knowing, after all. It didn't help determine truth so much as help see the “truth”—that all is one, that “the least is in the highest, the intermediate is in both the lowest and highest; that the highest is in both the mediate and the lowest; and, in a word, that everything is in everything, each in its own way.”

Essential principles combined with universal subjects

—

THE
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY
provided a report on this “Voluminous Work,” which, it said, proposed “to enable men to discourse and dispute, innumerable ways, of everything proposed, and to acquire a summary and general knowledge of all things.”

“
Of what Use this Doctrine may be for the attainment of knowledge with more ease and advantage,” said the review, “the sagacious reader may judge.”

But there was an intensely intellectual young man named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who was very interested in
The Great Art of Knowing
, and wrote to Kircher to tell him so. Leibniz is most famous for inventing calculus independently of Isaac Newton, and for developing the binary system, on which computer processing relies. In May of 1670, when he wrote his long and fawning letter, he was a self-conscious and skinny twenty-three-year-old, a young legal advisor in the court of the Prince-Elector of Mainz, where Kircher had served almost fifty years before. He'd entered the University of Leipzig at only fourteen to study law and philosophy. His first job after school was as a professional alchemist in Nuremberg—he had impressed his prospective employer with a dense alchemical treatise he'd entirely made up. Or so the story went; Leibniz himself may have made
that
story up later in life in order to play down his early and very serious interest in alchemy.

By the time he wrote Kircher, he'd already mapped out a plan to reform the practice of law in the Holy Roman Empire, crafted two essays on physics, started work on a calculating machine, and begun devising a political scheme to redirect French ambitions away from German lands and toward Egypt. (More than a century later this particular piece of bait was taken by Napoleon.) But he had even larger, more idealistic, and overarching ideas in mind, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say that many were Kircherian in nature. As a modern historian has said about Leibniz's subsequent intellectual career, “
Virtually every major scientific, linguistic, and historical project on which he embarked had been directly inspired by reading Kircher's works.”
Even Leibniz's idea to use wind power to drain the water from the silver mines of the Harz Mountains seems to have come from Kircher's proposal, published in
Underground World
, for ventilating mines with giant weather vanes.

As a boy, Leibniz came across Kircher's books in the process of devouring the volumes in the library of his late father, a professor of moral philosophy. Having grown up in German lands laid waste during the Thirty Years War, he shared Kircher's general desire for unity and for synthesis—of not only the political but also the religious, intellectual, and philosophical sort. He was a believer in “
the elegance and harmony of the world,” and in the notion of a single, universal Christian church. This non-practicing Lutheran had even begun mounting a defense of Catholic tenets through a series of essays called
Catholic Demonstrations
, with the goal of proving heretics, skeptics, and certain new thinkers wrong. His defense of transubstantiation, for example, took into account the “philosophy of the moderns,” and in his treatise on the physics of motion, he employed mathematics to make rigorous, almost legalistic arguments for the mind-like qualities of matter.

Like Kircher, Leibniz applied himself to the pursuit of a universal language and to a universal philosophical approach that could be brought to bear on every possible question to produce universally accepted answers. Also like Kircher, Leibniz was an opportunistic courtier and a flatterer to the highest degree. The 1670 letter wasn't his first attempt to get Kircher's attention. Four years before, at the age of nineteen, while also working toward his doctorate in law, Leibniz had written his own dissertation on the Llullian combinatorial arts, and sent Kircher a copy, but received no response. Now, after reading
The Great Art of Knowing
, he wrote again. Calling Kircher a “
GREAT MAN,” the “greatest man,” “an incomparable man,” and a “man worthy of immortality” (a play on the meaning of
Athanasius
), Leibniz praised his latest work:

I have come by chance in a most happy year upon your work about the great art of knowing or combination; I have drunk it deeply, I have read it, I have wished upon it most avidly, and I have not put it down until it was completed; what more can I say? You filled me entirely with admiration and love for you . . .

In fact, young Leibniz told Kircher, “no mortal to this day has penetrated so deeply as you into the secret art of combination.” And he was one to know, since he himself “strenuously, nearly since my childhood,” had engaged in many “cogitations on this matter.”