Athanasius Kircher
German Jesuit scholar and polymath (1602–1680)
- 8 min read
- 3 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Geology, Medicine and Leonardo da Vinci
Kircher claimed to have deciphered the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptian language, but most of his assumptions and translations in the field turned out to be wrong. He did, however, correctly establish the link between the ancient Egyptian and the Coptic languages, and some commentators regard him as the founder of Egyptology. Kircher was also fascinated with Sinology and wrote an encyclopedia of China, where he revealed the early presence of Nestorian Christians while also attempting to establish links with Egypt and Christianity.
Kircher's work in geology included studies of volcanoes and fossils. One of the first researchers to observe microbes through a microscope, Kircher was ahead of his time in proposing that the plague was caused by an infectious microorganism and in suggesting effective measures to prevent its spread. Kircher also displayed a keen interest in technology and mechanical inventions; inventions attributed to him include a magnetic clock, various automatons and the first megaphone. The invention of the magic lantern has been misattributed to Kircher, although he conducted a study of the principles involved in his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae.
A scientific star in his day, towards the end of his life he was eclipsed by the rationalism of René Descartes and others. In the late 20th century, however, the aesthetic qualities of his work again began to be appreciated. One modern scholar, Alan Cutler, described Kircher as "a giant among seventeenth-century scholars", and "one of the last thinkers who could rightfully claim all knowledge as his domain". Another scholar, Edward W. Schmidt, referred to Kircher as "the last Renaissance man". In A Man of Misconceptions, his 2012 book about Kircher, John Glassie wrote "many of Kircher's actual ideas today seem wildly off-base, if not simply bizarre," but he was "a champion of wonder, a man of awe-inspiring erudition and inventiveness," whose work was read "by the smartest minds of the time."
Life
Kircher was born on 2 May in either 1601 or 1602 (he himself did not know) in Geisa, Buchonia, near Fulda (Hessen, Germany). From his birthplace, he took the epithets Bucho, Buchonius and Fuldensis which he sometimes added to his name. He attended the Jesuit College in Fulda from 1614 to 1618, when he entered the novitiate of the Society.
The youngest of nine children, Kircher studied volcanoes owing to his passion for rocks and eruptions. He was taught Hebrew by a rabbi in addition to his studies at school. He studied philosophy and theology at Paderborn but fled to Cologne in 1622 to escape advancing Protestant forces.
From 1622 to 1624, he spent his regency period in Koblenz as a teacher. This was followed by assignment to Heiligenstadt, where he taught mathematics, Hebrew and Syriac, and produced a show of fireworks and moving scenery for the visiting Elector Archbishop of Mainz, showing early evidence of his interest in mechanical devices. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1628 and became professor of ethics and mathematics at the University of Würzburg, where he also taught Hebrew and Syriac. Beginning in 1628, he began to show an interest in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
In 1631, while still at Würzburg, Kircher allegedly had a prophetic vision of bright light and armed men with horses in the city. Würzburg was attacked shortly afterwards and captured, leading to Kircher being accorded respect for predicting the disaster via astrology, though Kircher privately insisted that he had not relied on it. This was the year that Kircher published his first book (the Ars Magnesia, reporting his research on magnetism), but having been caught up in the Thirty Years' War he was driven to the papal University of Avignon in France. In 1633 he was called to Vienna by the emperor to succeed Kepler as Mathematician to the Habsburg court. On the intervention of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the order was rescinded, and he was sent instead to Rome to continue with his scholarly work, but he had already embarked for Vienna.
On the way, his ship was blown off course and he arrived in Rome before he knew of the changed destination. He based himself in the city for the rest of his life, and from 1634 he taught mathematics, physics and Oriental languages at the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University) for several years before being released to devote himself to research. He studied malaria and the plague, amassing a collection of antiquities, which he exhibited along with devices of his own creation in the Museum Kircherianum.
In 1661, Kircher discovered the ruins of a church said to have been constructed by Constantine on the site of Saint Eustace's vision of a crucifix in a stag's horns. He raised money to pay for the church's reconstruction as the Santuario della Mentorella, and his heart was buried in the church upon his death.
Sign in to keep reading
2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Legacy
Scholarly influence
For most of his professional life, Kircher was one of the scientific stars of his world: according to historian Paula Findlen, he "had a global reputation that was virtually unsurpassed by any early modern author". His importance was twofold: to the results of his own experiments and research he added information gleaned from his correspondence with over 760 scientists, physicians and above all his fellow Jesuits in all parts of the globe. The Encyclopædia Britannica calls him a "one-man intellectual clearing house".
His works, illustrated to his orders, were extremely popular, and he was the first scientist to be able to support himself through the sale of his books. His near-exact contemporary, the English philosopher-physician, Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82) collected his books avidly while his eldest son Edward Browne in 1665 visited the Jesuit priest resident at Rome. Towards the end of Kircher's life, however, his stock fell, as the rationalist Cartesian approach began to dominate (Descartes himself described Kircher as "more quacksalver than savant").
Cultural legacy
Kircher was largely neglected until the late 20th century. One writer attributes his rediscovery to the similarities between his eclectic approach and postmodernism. As few of Kircher's works have been translated, the contemporary emphasis has been on their aesthetic qualities rather than their actual content, and a succession of exhibitions have highlighted the beauty of their illustrations. Historian Anthony Grafton has said that "the staggeringly strange dark continent of Kircher's work [is] the setting for a Borges story that was never written", while Umberto Eco has written about Kircher in his novel The Island of the Day Before, as well as in his non-fiction works The Search for the Perfect Language and Serendipities.
In the historical novel Imprimatur by Monaldi & Sorti (2002), Kircher plays a major role. Shortly after his death, some travellers are locked up in a hotel in Baroque Rome by the papal health authorities because of an epidemic of plague. Kircher's theory about the healing power of music is remembered by the protagonists in various flashbacks and finally provides the key to the puzzle.
In Where Tigers Are At Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, the protagonist works on a translation of a bogus 17th-century biography of Kircher.
The contemporary artist Cybèle Varela has paid tribute to Kircher in her exhibition Ad Sidera per Athanasius Kircher, held in the Collegio Romano, in the same place where the Museum Kircherianum was.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has a hall dedicated to the life of Kircher. His ethnographic collection is in the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome.
John Glassie's book, A Man of Misconceptions, traces connections between Kircher and figures such as Gianlorenzo Bernini, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton. It also suggests influences on Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Anton Mesmer, Jules Verne, and Marcel Duchamp. In the end, Glassie writes, Kircher should be acknowledged “for his effort to know everything and to share everything he knew, for asking a thousand questions about the world around him, and for getting so many others to ask questions about his answers; 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.”
In popular culture
Kircher's life and research are central to the plot of James Rollin's 2015 novel The Bone Labyrinth.
He is mentioned in The Book of Life, the third book in the All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness. He further appears in two separate episodes in Daniel Kehlmann's novel Tyll (2017). He appears somewhat sympathetically in the first instance, exhibiting qualms of compassion about sentencing a man (Tyll's father) to hanging. In the second, Kircher has become wholly unsympathetic, full of his own self-importance. (Kehlmann telescopes some of Kircher's achievements, such as his hieroglyphic translations, to fit within the novel's chronology.)
The permanent exhibition The World Is Bound with Secret Knots at the Museum of Jurassic Technology is based on the life and work of Kircher and uses elaborate 3D technology to highlight the magical quality of many of his ideas and images.
He is also a character (though largely off-stage, he is often mentioned by other characters) in the "Ring of Fire" alternate history series (published by Baen). In it, he was sent back to Germany in the early 1630s, where he became the unofficial pastor of the Catholic church in the temporally transplanted town of Grantville, Thuringia-Franconia.
Kircher features as a favourite author of Father Chmielowski in Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob.