KIRCHER, ATHANASIUS (1602–1680)

KIRCHER, ATHANASIUS (1602–1680), German Jesuit polymath and collector. Considered by many to be the greatest polymath in an encyclopedia age, Athanasius Kircher was a scholar who aspired to expertise in many different domains of knowledge and sought connections among them in a quest to recover ancient pansophia (universal wisdom). He corresponded with scholars, princes, popes, and missionaries, and his books traveled to virtually every corner of the globe.

Born in the German town of Geisa, Kircher entered the Society of Jesus in 1616; he completed his novitiate in 1620 and was ordained in Würzburg in 1628. That same year he requested to be sent as a missionary to China (he would make the same request in 1637). The Superior General turned down his request because he felt that Kircher's unique talents would best serve the society closer to home. After teaching mathematics, philosophy, and Syrian at the Jesuit college in Würzburg for several years and developing a reputation as an inventor of sundials, Kircher found himself caught in the vicissitudes of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and fled Germany. He spent almost two years in Avignon, teaching at the Jesuit college there and cultivating a relationship with the French savant and antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. During this period, he convinced Peiresc that he was the person most capable of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs through the study of Coptic. Peiresc urged his Roman acquaintances, principally the pope's nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, to find a position for Kircher in the Eternal City in order to realize this project.

Kircher arrived in Rome in November 1633, only months after the condemnation of Galileo for his advocacy of heliocentrism. He succeeded Christoph Scheiner in the prestigious chair of mathematics at the Collegio Romano, the leading educational institution of the Society of Jesus. Save for a brief excursion to Malta and Sicily in 1637–1638 to accompany a recently converted German prince on his travels, Kircher remained in Rome for the rest of his life. During his long and productive career, he published over thirty encyclopedic works on virtually every imaginable subject, not including the works of disciples such as Kaspar Schott, Giuseffo Petrucci, Johann Kestler, and Francesco Lana Terzi, who published his ideas—and often his exact words—under their own names. By 1646 his intellectual work had become so valuable and his fame so great the Jesuits relieved him of his teaching duties at the Collegio Romano, allowing him to devote himself fully to his research.

Kircher began his intellectual career with two principal interests: physico-mathematics and ancient Eastern languages and cultures. His earliest publications concerned various mathematical instruments such as the sundial he created in the Jesuit college in Avignon and a multipurpose measuring, calculating, and observational device that he invented during his trip to Malta. By 1636 his first work on Egypt, the Prodromus Coptus sive Aegyptiacus (Coptic or Egyptian forerunner), appeared. During the next two decades, Kircher published a series of works on Egyptian language, philosophy, history, and religion, culminating in his massive Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Egyptian Oedipus) of 1652–1655. In such works, he demonstrated his mastery of hieroglyphs—based on his Neoplatonic understanding of Egyptian as a symbolic and divine language, which bore little resemblance to the early-nineteenth-century decipherment of the Rosetta Stone—and argued strongly that Egypt was a universal source of culture and civilization that had anticipated Christianity with its strong Trinitarian symbolism. Kircher parlayed his expertise into a series of famous interpretations of the principal obelisks of Rome, namely the obelisk erected at the center of the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini's famous fountain in Piazza Navona and the one atop Bernini's elephant in front of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Kircher assisted Bernini in devising the words beneath each obelisk and published his interpretations of them in 1650 and 1666 respectively.

In addition to his work on Egypt, Kircher was equally prolific and bold in his account of the natural world. In 1641, his popular Magnes sive de Arte Magnetica (The magnet or the magnetic art) appeared, one of several publications in which Kircher argued that magnetism was the principal force organizing and controlling nature. At the same time, he began to develop his ideas on optics, leading to his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Great art of light and shadow) of 1646—a work filled with numerous optical demonstrations such as Kircher's famous magic lantern. Kircher complemented his work on optics with similarly intensive studies of acoustics in such works as his Musurgia Universalis (Universal music making) of 1650. The hydraulic organ in the Quirinale in Rome still today bears traces of his skills at designing ingenious musical machines that created sound without regular human intervention. Finally, Kircher spent over twenty years developing an explanation of earthquakes, after witnessing the eruption of Mount Etna in his youth. His Mundus Subterraneus (Subterranean world) of 1664–1665 attempted a comprehensive portrait of all the natural forces that organized the earth, just as his controversial Iter Ecstaticum (Ecstatic journey) of 1656 sought to explain what the cosmos looked like in an imaginative dialogue between an angel and a philosopher who discussed its composition while traveling throughout the heavens.

Kircher's reputation as a man who knew almost everything emanated not only from his publications but from his role as custodian of one of the most famous museums in Europe. Founded in 1651, the museum of the Collegio Romano flourished under his guidance. Kircher filled it with natural objects, machines, antiquities, paintings, and curiosities brought back by missionaries from all over the world. Visitors were enthralled by dancing demons, talking automata, sunflower clocks, Japanese scrolls, Chinese stone rubbings, Greco-Roman and Egyptian fragments, and a seemingly endless series of demonstrations of the powers of the magnet. Kircher parlayed his ability to gather objects and information into expertise on subjects about which he otherwise knew very little. His popular China Illustrata (China illustrated) of 1667, for example, was written without once traveling to Asia or knowing much about its languages, customs, and religions.

Kircher relied upon his ability to command the resources of the entire Jesuit order in the service of a universal account of the presence of Christianity in every corner of the world. His boundless curiosity and energy, a source of wonder in his own lifetime, made him a figure of fun in a later age when scholars such as Leibniz declared that Kircher had written much but known nothing about virtually every interesting subject of his age. He was one of the last great humanistic scholars of the seventeenth century, a man of faith whose vision of the world was as global as the missionary networks of his religious order.

See also Dictionaries and Encyclopedias ; Galileo Galilei ; Jesuits ; Leibniz, Gottried Wilhelm ; Museums ; Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benlich, Horst, et al. Spurensuche. Wege zu Athanasius Kircher. Dettelbach, Germany, 2002.

Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley, 1994.

Findlen, Paula, ed. Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York, 2003.

Godwin, Joscelyn. Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge. London, 1979.

Leinkauf, Thomas. Mundus Combinatus: Studien zur Struktur der barocken Universalwissenschaft am Beispeil Athanasius Kircher SJ (1602–1680). Berlin, 1993.

Lo Sardo, Eugenio, ed. Athanasius Kircher S. J. Il Museo del Mondo. Rome, 2001.

Marrone, Caterina. I geroglifici fantastici di Athanasius Kircher. Viterbo, Italy, 2002.

Rowland, Ingrid. The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome. Chicago, 2000.

Stolzenberg, Daniel, ed. The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher. Stanford, 2002.

Paula Findlen