Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (2 page)

PART ONE

1

Incapable of Resisting the Force

A
ccording to the memoir of Athanasius Kircher, even the circumstances of his birth were auspicious. And in a sense they were, if you choose, as he did, to leave out the witch hunt.

Kircher's mother was “the daughter of an upright citizen,” his father a learned man with “expertise in expounding complicated matters.” They lived in a hilltop town called Geisa, part of the old principality of Fulda, in a valley of the gentle and green Rhön Mountains. (Fulda was also the name of the small city at the center of the principality; the trip there from Geisa took about three hours on foot.) For a long time before Kircher was born in 1602, his parents were caught up in the conflict that had disrupted northern Europe since 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Catholics and the new Lutherans felt the special kind of hatred for each other that comes from a split within the same religion, as did the Catholics and the Calvinists, the followers of John Calvin.

The effects of the Reformation were especially ugly in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, as Voltaire would later say. It was more like an agglomeration, to use his word, of three hundred more or less autonomous entities loosely organized under the auspices of the Hapsburgs in Vienna, relatives of the king who controlled Spain, Portugal, the kingdom of Naples, the duchy of Milan, and a great deal of the new world. The Holy Roman Empire, such as it was, included feudal lands, secular territories, free cities, Catholic abbeys, and prince-bishoprics with many overlapping interests and internal faith-based animosities.

Kircher's father worked as a magistrate under the ruling Catholic prince of Fulda, a man named Balthasar von Dernbach. In 1576, as Kircher described it, the prince was “driven out by the persecution of heretics into exile.” The “heretics” who threw him out of office and drove him all of three miles away were mainly Lutherans fed up with von Dernbach's effort to re-Catholicize the region, which included throwing Lutherans out of office and installing people like Kircher's father in their place. Although Kircher's father “favored Balthasar's most just cause and defended him with all his might against the attacking heretics,” he too was “vexed by the persecution of the heretics,” to say nothing of “the insolence of the heretics,” and was forced to leave his post.

Von Dernbach and his lawyers spent twenty-six years building the case for his reinstatement, which finally occurred in 1602, near the feast day of Saint Athanasius, who himself had been forced into exile for staunchly defending orthodox Christianity against a powerful heretical sect.
The birth of the ninth Kircher child on this feast day, so close to such an important occasion, meant that the child would get an important-sounding name:
Athanasius
comes from the Greek word for “immortal”;
Kircher
is a variation on the German for “church.”

Soon after von Dernbach regained power, he began to cleanse the principality not only of heresy but of the influence of the devil. Inquiries turned up a woman in her late thirties named Merga Bien, who, among other suspicious things, such as being the wife of von Dernbach's political opponent, had recently become pregnant for the first time in her fourteen-year marriage. In jail she was locked in a dog kennel for some time and forced to confess that her pregnancy resulted from sexual relations with Satan. After more than twelve weeks of detention, she and her unborn baby were burned alive in Fulda's courthouse square.

Many people from the surrounding countryside were subsequently taken from their homes or fields to be put on trial for witchcraft in the name of the one true religion. Every couple of months, as many as thirteen women and girls at a time were burned alive, sometimes at the stake, sometimes all together on a huge pyre after having been stuck through with red-hot skewers. More than two hundred people were executed before von Dernbach died and his administration was finally dissolved, around Kircher's fourth birthday.

The hope is that young Kircher was not exposed to these scenes, to the screaming or to the reek in the air. But from a modern point of view, daily life in Geisa had a harshness and a reek about it regardless. Although Kircher's family probably lived in the kind of half-timbered house that now evokes Old World charm, they also lived within short range of their animals and their own waste. Unsanitary conditions were exacerbated by the fact that, as one historian has put it, “
Westerners at this time looked on water with great suspicion,” though, given the number of waterborne diseases, they were probably right to.

Even in the house of someone of relative status, such as Kircher's father, who at one point also served a few years as Geisa's mayor, the first floor was often used to keep chickens and pigs, to slaughter and butcher animals for meat, as well as to wash clothes and stock provisions. The walls of the house were made by filling its frame with a mix of clay and straw, and the roof was thatched. On the second floor there was probably a kitchen that was filled with smoke, because in these houses typically there were stoves but no chimneys, and a main room, a
Stube
, with hard benches, where family members would sit, eat, sew, mend, study, pray, hang and shelve household items, and perhaps sometimes sleep. Candles stank because they were made of molded tallow, rendered from beef or mutton suet. Any lamps also burned animal fat. In the cold rooms on the floor above the kitchen and the
Stube
, for two adults and nine children there were perhaps three straw or wool beds, though the numbers changed over time: two of Kircher's older brothers died in childhood.

The family's house was steps away from Geisa's market square, at the top of the long hill that led to the center of the town. The variety of available goods must have been fairly limited. People lived chiefly on soups, porridges, hard brown bread, and some meat, though Catholics ate fish and vegetables on fast days, particularly during Lent. When Kircher was a boy, potatoes, coffee, tea, tobacco, chocolate, and corn, not to mention the fork, were very likely unknown to him. (By the time he died, he had become an advocate of tea from China as treatment for kidney stones and hangovers.)

Despite the difficulties inherent in the way of life, the hilltop town of Geisa, overlooking the valley of the Ulster River, would have been a pleasant place to grow up. And from an early age, as might be expected of a boy who would later call himself “master of a hundred arts,” Kircher displayed a “
not ordinary aptitude” for learning. This was thought to go along with his somewhat earthy complexion, his dark skin and dark hair, coloring believed to indicate an excess of black bile, called melancholia. Melancholic types were said to be pensive, dreamy, and intellectual, suited to deep study and the attainment of knowledge, even capable of genius. Moreover, Kircher's head was large, generally agreed to suggest, as one seventeenth-century writer put it, “
a wonderful intellect and a most tenacious memory.” Kircher's father, a scholar of philosophy, theology, and rhetoric, who kept “
thousands of books,” apparently took an aging parent's interest in his youngest, most promising child. As his older sons “
entered orders of various religions and daughters were joined in matrimony,” old Kircher taught the boy music, Latin, and the fundamentals of geography—or as Kircher later described it, the study of “
the world according to its divisions.”

When not receiving lessons from his father, or from a rabbi his father hired to teach him Hebrew, he seems to have received attention from above. Young Kircher was athletic but accident-prone, a bit of an absentminded professor even as a boy, and sometimes he got into the kind of trouble that, he claimed, only the Virgin Mary could get him out of.

One hot summer day, he and some friends walked down to the bottom of the hill to cool off in the river. “It happened that in the midst of a certain mill house, the course of the river, in the manner of a lofty waterfall, was flowing with a more swift current because of the colossal trough of the mill wheel,” he recalled. “Carried to this trough by boyish ignorance and snatched up with the current, I was completely incapable of resisting the force, and now closer and closer to the wheel, with the name of Jesus and the customary prayer to Mary, I trembled at the danger of death and the grinding of my entire body.”

The friends who saw him being “snatched beneath the wheel headlong” all gave up on his survival, “especially since the wheel missed the bottom of the channel by so little that my body would scarcely be able to sustain itself without the pulverizing of all my limbs.” When they finally found him downstream they were hardly able to believe their eyes: “By the singular protection of God and the Virgin Mary I emerged safe from the other side in such a way that no sign of harm was apparent on me.” Having been “restored thus by divine mercy” to them, Kircher rejoiced with his friends and they all “acknowledged the apparent miracle.”

Another apparent miracle occurred during an annual horse race one Pentecost Sunday. After a procession to bless the fields “against the storms brought in by screech owls and Satan,” a crowd of people packed in tight to watch the event. “Upon the start of the race, individuals in the commotion were pressing one another more and more vehemently in their desire to see,” Kircher remembered. “But I, merely a boy, stood in the front of the crowd, since I was not able to withstand the force of those pressing; and violently shaken from my spot into the stadium, I was rolled into the very whirlwind of the horses running with all their might.”

The crowd all shouted for the horses to stop. But as Kircher later asked, “Who can stop galloping horses?” There was nothing to do but curl himself into a ball and entrust himself again to God and the Virgin Mary. “And since I had been lost in the cloud of stirred-up dust, everyone was sure that I had been ground to pieces by the stamping of the horses. But in reality, after the horses had run by I stood up unharmed and safe by the singular gift of God.”

Many people gathered around him to wonder how “amidst so great a whirlwind” he had managed to preserve himself from danger. “To these I responded that not small was the power of the one who rescued Jonah from the belly of the whale, and Tobias from the devouring of the fish, and Daniel from the lions, and who kept me safe from the stamping of the horses.”

There was something special about this boy, as everyone around and even the boy himself—or especially the boy himself—could see.

—

SOME YEARS BEFORE
Kircher was enrolled in the Jesuit school at Fulda, at around age ten, a Protestant professor from Heidelberg complained about the relatively new religious order. “
Very many who want to be counted as Christians send their children to the schools of the Jesuits,” he explained. “This is a most dangerous thing, as the Jesuits are excellent and subtle philosophers, above everything intent on applying all their learning to the education of youth.”

To Protestants, the growth of the Jesuits made for a threatening counterinsurgency, one all the more insidious for targeting the hearts and minds of young people. The Catholic order hadn't been created to combat the heresy of Protestantism but seemed particularly well suited to that task. Its founder, Ignatius of Loyola, a previously vain and self-absorbed mercenary from the Basque region of Spain, had discerned his calling after his leg was shattered by cannon fire at the battle of Pamplona in 1521. He employed military terminology when establishing what he called the regiment or the company of Jesus, whose members served as “soldiers of God” doing “battle with evil.” (Later, more decorously, they were called the Society of Jesus.) Their official mission: “
propagation of the faith”—“particularly the instruction of youth and ignorant persons in the Christian religion.” And like young men signing up to fight an apparently righteous war, thousands of young Catholic men responded to the call to defeat the heretics, wielding a form of intellectual as well as spiritual vigor. In little more than sixty years since the first Jesuit school was started in the Sicilian city of Messina, more than five hundred schools and almost fifty seminaries had been established across Europe. There were about sixteen thousand members of the order by 1600 and Jesuit missionaries all over the world in such places as India, China, the Philippines, Congo, Ethiopia, Morocco, Brazil, Paraguay, and Canada.

Fulda as it looked in the seventeenth century

All of this martial energy notwithstanding, the Jesuits exuded culture and sophistication. After his conversion, Ignatius had studied at the University of Paris, where he'd been exposed to the humanist values of the Renaissance. In the presence of natural beauty, he sometimes found himself in reverie. God existed in all things, according to Ignatius, and there was no reason to be cloistered away from the full realm of his creation. With a style that one modern historian has called “
cosmopolitan, nonconformist, elitist,” the Jesuits engaged young men in Roman and Greek classics, history, literature, and theater. They were so good at connecting with their students that one Protestant preacher believed they must “
anoint their pupils with secret salves of the devil, by which they so attract the children to themselves that they can only with difficulty be separated from these wizards.” And “therefore, the Jesuits ought not only to be expelled but to be burnt, otherwise they can never be gotten rid of.”