Kircher, Athanasius

(b Geisa at the Ulster, Germany, 2 May 1602 [or 1601]; d. Rome, Italy, 28 November 1680)

polymathy, dissemination of knowledge.

Kircher was the youngest of six sons (there were also three daughters) of Johannes Kircher of Mainz, D.D. and bailiff of the abbey of Fulda, and Anna Gansek of Fulda. He was educated at the Jesuit Gymnasium in Fulda (1614-1618), where he learned Greek and Hebrew, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1616.

He soon afterwards was at Paderborn, where, until 1622, he studied humanities, natural science, and the various disciplines of seventeenth-century mathematics. After fleeing to Münster and Neuss from the volunteer corps of Christian of Brunswick, he continued his studies at Cologne, where he completed his education in philosophy. At Koblenz (1623), he took up humanities and languages and taught Greek. The following year he taught grammar at Heiligenstadt in Saxony, also studying languages and, especially, physical curiosities.

From 1625 to 1628 Kircher studied theology at Mainz; he was ordained a priest in 1628. His surveying work for the elector during this time contributed to his later interest in geography. At Mainz he first used the telescope for his observations, chiefly of sunspots. He then spent the year of probation at Speyer, where he became interested in hieroglyphics after reading a book on obelisks of Rome. In 1628 Kircher was appointed professor of philosophy and mathematics, as well as of Hebrew and Syriac, at the University of Würzburg. Here he had his first exposure to professional medicine. He also wrote and edited his first book, Ars magnesia, which was based on his own experiments.

In 1631, because of the Thirty Years’ War, Kircher fled Würzburg and took his disciple, Caspar Schott, with him. Kircher reached Lyons and was appointed to lecture at Avignon, on papal territory. At Avignon he was engaged in different fields, including astronomy, deciphering hieroglyphics, and surveying. His efforts to design a planetarium, using mirrors to direct the light of the sun and moon into the De La Motte tower of the Jesuit college, resulted in a book on astronomical observations by reflected light and another one on catoptrics.

In Avignon, Kircher met the young J. Höwelcke (Hevelius) and corresponded with Christoph Scheiner. In 1633 he was introduced by N. C. Fabri to Gassendi in Aix. It was also Fabri who advised Kircher to attempt an interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Kircher later edited an improved Coptic grammar (Rome, 1643), recognizing the importance of Coptic in deciphering hieroglyphics.

In 1633 Kircher was appointed by Ferdinand II to a professorship of mathematics in Vienna. But after several shipwrecks, he arrived by chance at Rome, only to learn that he had in the meanwhile been called there—with the intercession of Fabri—by Pope Urban VIII and Cardinal Barberini. In his first years in Rome he worked independently. Later, perhaps in 1638, he was appointed professor of mathematics at the College of Rome. He resigned this post after some eight years. On the whole, he devoted himself to independent studies in this cultural center for some forty-six years until his death.

Some forty-four books and more than 2,000 extant letters and manuscripts attest to the extraordinary variety of his interests and to his intellectual endowments. His studies covered practically all fields both in the humanities and the sciences. This is in harmony with the style of the period, in which polymathy was highly praised. A tendency to deal with curious questions led him to study orientology, including the culture of the Far East. Kircher enjoyed the privilege of living in Rome, the center of a worldwide network of Jesuit missionaries and others who reported on their journeys. Kircher sought to disseminate the knowledge that was at his disposal. His printed works, comprehensive and illustrative, became very popular. Guericke, for example, was greatly indebted to Kircher’s Magnes, sive de arte magnetica (1643), Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646), Itinerarius exstaticum (1656), and Mundus subterraneus (1665). Schott exchanged letters with Kircher about Guericke’s discoveries, and Jungius and Leibniz quoted from Kircher’s works.

Like Manfredo Settala at Milan, Kircher collected various objects and rarities of nature, art, and superstition. In 1663 Martin Fogel of Hamburg visited “Kircher’s Museum,” as he called it (although it had been founded by Alfonso Donmines in 1650). He recorded his amazement at, for example, a rare piece of wood dug out of the earth; an Antomatum musicum organum; a “Daimunculus in a liquid, ascending, descending, or remaining in the middle of it depending on man’s direction”; and a supposed rib and tail from one of the legendary Sirens. In 1913, relics of Kircher’s museum were divided between the Museo Nazionale Romano, Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo, and Museo Paleoetnografico del Collegio Romano.

Kircher’s diverse studies—including magnetism, optics, astronomy, philology, music theory, acoustics, physics, geology, chemistry, geography, archeology, arithmetic, geometry, theology, philosophy, and medicine—have been only partially explored by specialists as they exist only today, in terms of their own respective sciences.

Certain specific studies by Kircher, however, are worthy of mention. In Ars magnesia he described a device for measuring magnetic power by means of a balance. Later, he carefully compiled measurements of magnetic declination from several places around the world, as reported by Jesuit scholars, and particularly by his disciple Martin Martini (1638), who in a letter suggested the possibility of determining longitudes by the declination of a magnetic needle. Recognizing the importance of this method, Kircher brought it to the attention of the scientific world. Kircher also drew lines from the pole of a terella to the magnetic needle moved around it. In short, magnetism, on which Kircher published five books, was for him an omnibus of scientific and also fantastic theories.

Equally interested in optical phenomena, Kircher was one of the first to report on the fluorescence produced by a tincture of wooden pieces called by the Mexicans “Tlapazalli”; that is, lignum nephriticum. The tincture was used for curing nephritis. Related to the fluorescence was Kircher’s artificial production of the phosphorescent substance first described as Lapis Bononiensis (stone of Bologna) by J.C. La Galla in 1612; its basic material was heavy spar. It was Kircher, too, who first reported on sea phosphorescense of organic origin and on afterimages.

In Ars magna lucis et umbrae, Kircher applied “magna” to “magnes” of his first work. He argued that light—the “attracting magnes of all things” and connected with the heavens by an unknown chain—behaves exactly like the magnes. He discussed the projecting of sunlight or candlelight on plane mirrors, which were painted with colored pictures, or through an illustrated glass sphere. Only Thomas Rasmussen Walgensten (to whom Kircher referred in the second edition in 1671) succeeded in uniting this principle of projecting translucent pictures by rays having a pointlike source with G. Porta’s projection through a hole, to the true magic lantern. Exploring the myth of Archimedes’ burning mirrors, Kircher stated that the more times light is reflected between several plane mirrors, the more burning power the rays will obtain. He thus supported the story of Archimedes’ purported device.

Optics and horology, both allied to astronomy, also interested Kircher. As a young man he had erected sundials at the Jesuit colleges in Koblenz, Heiligenstadt, and Würzburg. later he collected various kinds of clocks, including those powered by “heliotropic revolutions of the seed of the solanum plant.”

In astronomy Kircher made some progress with telescopes. For the first time he depicted Jupiter and Saturn. His chief interest lay in observations of solar and lunar eclipses and of comets. He acted as a clearinghouse, particularly for reports on eclipses, and supplied astronomers including G. B. Riccioli, G. D. Cassini, and Hevelius with valuable information. Kircher was aware of the improbability of any advance on or deviation from the theory of Copernicus but was enthusiastic about Tycho’s system, and he believed—his censors notwithstanding—in the existence of similar worlds created by an omnipotent God.

Kircher’s third scientific work worthy of mention was Mundus subterraneus. This book on the “subterranean world” is a mixture of odd, partly true speculation. Kircher pointed out a hydrologic circle of water by evaporation, geysers, creeks, cold-water springs, and oozing through the seabed back to the abyss. He assumed the existence of vast underground reservoirs. From subterranean naphtha springs, he suggested, there might be an ever-burning lamp fed on the way through channels; he traced this idea back to the Egyptians of antiquity. He saw hot springs and volcanic eruptions as the consequence of subterranean regions of fire (Kircher witnessed the eruptions in 1638 of Stromboli, Etna, and Vesuvius).

The Mundus subterraneus comprised many branches of science, including physics, geography, and chemistry. Kircher described in it a graduated aerometer, unaware that Hypatia had already used this principle around the year 400. Like Magiotti, Kircher explained in his Magnes (3rd ed., 1654) the measuring of temperatures in terms of buoyancy by immersing small glass balls in a liquid. Although his geography remained on the general level of sixteenth-century knowledge, unrelated to recent views such as those of Bernhard Varen, his description of the influence of weathering, which he ascribed to a kind of chemical process and to cold, was sound, as was that of the geological action of water and wind. He opposed fraudulent alchemy but supported the transmutation of metals, particularly of iron into copper.

As a “mathematician,” Kircher dealt not only with “the hidden mysteries of numbers” and geometryinventing a “pantometrum” for solving problems of practical geometry—but also, as indicated, with optics, statics, hydrostatics, astronomy, and acoustics. He suggested in 1638, in his Specula Melitensis (“a watch tower of Malta”)a machine for reading scientific data and, in 1668, a device resembling an organ for teaching methods of solving mathematical problems. Designed to teach all disciplines systematically Kircher’s Ars magna sciendi (1669) was in the mainstream of the didactic and encyclopedic movement of the century. His Polygraphia nova et universalis (1663) contains a system to reduce by the art of combination all languages into one universal tongue; Kircher built on the tradition of Lull but provoked the criticism of Leibniz, Martin Fogel, and the linguist Andreas Müller of Berlin.

It is not surprising that Kircher recorded the first—though imperfect—description of a speaking trumpet (Musurgia universalis, 1650). He also reported on remarkable echoes and on the sound of a bell in a vacuum campana ringed by a magnet but did not reach a genuine interpretation of the phenomenon. On Kircher’s alleged discovery of classical Greek music notes from Pindaric odes, see P. Friedlaender, in Herms, 70 (1935), 463-471. In biology he stated only a relative constancy of the species appealing to God and the history of creation. He frequently used the microscope in his medical investigations (Scrutinium physico-medicum, 1658).

Despite particular contributions in specific scientific fields, it should be kept in mind that by far the most of what Kircher described in his works was already known and was due rather to amusement and dissemination of news than to reasonable demonstration of knowledge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A fairly complete bibliography of Kircher’s printed works is in Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, part 1, vol. 9 (Brussels-Paris, 1893), cols. 1046-1077. See also the catalogues of the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris; Library of Congress; and the British Museum. For catalogues of printed writings listed in Kircher’s works, see Sommervogel, col. 1072.

Works by Kircher treated above are Ars magnesia, hocest disquisitio bipartita emperica seu experimentalis, physico-mathematica de natura, viribus et prodigiosis effectibus magnetis (Würzburg, 1631); Horologium Aven-astronomico-catoptricum (Avignon, 1634); Primitiae gnomonicae catoptricae (Avignon, 1635); Prodromus coptus sive aegyptiacus (Rome, 1636); Specula Melitensis encyclica, hoc est syntagma novum instrumentorum physico-mathematicorum (Naples, 1638); Magnes, sive de arte magnetica (Rome, 1641; 2nd ed., Cologne, 1643; 3rd ed., Rome, 1654); Ars magna lucis et umbrae in mundo (Rome, 1646; 2nd ed., Amsterdam, 1671); Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650; facs. repr. Hildesheim, 1970); Itinerarium exstaticum (Rome, 1656); scrutinium physico-medicum contagiosae luis, quae pestis dicitur (Rome, 1658); Pantometrum Kircherianum, hoc est, instrumentum geometricum novum, à . . . Kircheroantehac inventum, nunc . . . explicatum . . . à Gaspare Schotto (Würzburg, 1660); and Polygraphia nova et universalis, ex combinatoria arte detecta (Rome, 1663).

Subsequent works include Mundus subterraneus (Amsterdam, 1665); Arithmologia, sive de abditis numerorum mysterijs (Rome, 1665); Magneticum naturae regnum (Rome, 1667); Organum mathematicum, libris IX. explicatum a P. Gaspare Schotto (Würzburg, 1668); Ars magna sciendi (Amsterdam, 1669); Phonurgia (Kempten, 1673; facs. repr., New York, 1966); and Tariffa Kircheriana, sive mensa Pythagorica expansa (Rome, 1679).

The main collection of Kircher’s letters and MSS is preserved in the archives of the Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Rome. On other letters, see the papers of John E. Fletcher quoted and Sommervogel, cols. 1070-1077. The Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, Hamburg, has an original letter of kircher to C. Schott (30 May 1672); a cop0y of a letter from Kircher to Schott (12 Feb. 16750; and an extract of a letter from Kircher to Joannes Monrath (9 Apr. 1660).

A letter from Leibniz to Kircher (16 May 1670) in the Pontificia Università Gregoriana has been published by Paul Friedländer in Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, 3rd ser., Rendiconti13 (1937), 229-231; Kircher’s answer (23 June 1670), in the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hannover, is in G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ser.2, 1 (Darmstadt, 1926), 48-49, and in Friedländer (see above), pp. 232-233. The Hannover library also has other MSS concerning Kircher.

An early collection of Kircher’s correspondence has been edited by H. A. Langenmantel (see below), comprising 100 separately numbered pages. A letter by Kircher to an unknown person (7 Dec. 1664) has been reprinted in facsimile in Seng (see below).

II. Secondary Literature. A nearly complete bibliography of papers edited from 1913 to 1965, is in M. Whitrow, ed., Isis Cumulative Bibliography,2 (London, 1971). 21; for a list of earlier literature on Kircher see J. Ferguson, Bibliotheca chemica, 1 (London, 1954), 466-468.

The best, although older, biographies are A. Behlau, “Athanasius Kircher, eine Lebensskizze,” in Programm des Königlichen katholischen Gymnasiums zu Heiligenstadt (Heiligenstadt, 1874), 1-18; and Karl Brischar, “P. Athanasius Kircher, ein Lebensbild,” Katholische Studien, III, no. 5 (1877). A detailed, although not faultless biography is G. J. Rosenkranz, “Aus dem Leben des Jesuiten Athanasius Kircher 1602-1680,” in Zeitschrift für vasterländische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde (Verein für Geschichte und Alterthumskunde Westfalens ed.), 13 , n.s. 9 (1852), 11-58.

Kircher’s autobiography, Vita admodum Reverendi P. A. Kircheri (to be used with some reserve) is in H. A. Langenmantel, ed., Fasciculus epistolarum (Augsburg, 1684), 1-78. There is a German trans. with a few relevant additions by Nikolaus Seng, Selbstbiographie des P. Athanasius Kircher aus der Gesellschaft Jesu, (Fulda, 1901); an account of Kircher’s life for young students is J. Leonhardt Pfaff, in Examina autumnalia in Lyceo et Gymnasio Fuldensi, DD. 20-30 M. Sept. 1831 celebranda (Fulda, n.d.), 4-39.

A study on Kircher as polymath is Conor Reilly, “Father A. Kircher, S.J., Master of an Hundred Arts,” in Studies,44 (Dublin, 1955), 357-468; it is not always accurate and is based on a distorted picture of seventeenth-century Germany.

On Leibniz’ relations with Kircher see Paul Friedländer, “Athanasius Kircher und Leibniz, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Polyhistorie im XVII. Jahrhundert,” in Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, 3rd ser., Rendiconti, 13 (1937), 229-247. On letters of Joannes Marcus marci von Kronland to Kircher, see J. Marek, “Neznámé dopisy Jana Marka Marci z Kronlandu,” in D?jiny v?d a techniky,3 (1970), 43-45; and Josef Smolka, “Nové pohledy na J. Marka Marci a jeho dobu,” ibid., 45-49. For works describing Kircher’s museum, see Sommervogel, col. 1076.

Single topics, apart from those listed in Isis (see above) are the following: Three worthwhile analysee by John Fletcher based on new knowledge from Kircher’s MSS are “Athanasius Kircher and the Distribution of His Books,” in The Library, 5th ser. 23 (1969), 108-117; “Medical Men and Medicine in the Correspondence of Athansius Kircher,” in Janus, 56 (1969), 259-277; and “Astronomy in the Life and Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher,” in Isis, 61 (1970), 52-67. Kircher’s thoughts on the hydrologic cycle are touched on in a short note by Asit K. Biswas, in Civil Engineering, 35 (Apr. 1965), 72.

On Kircher’s biology, see Joseph Gutmann, Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) und das Schöpfungs-und Entwicklungs-problem (Fulda, 1938). For aspects of Kircher’geography see Karl Sapper, “Athanasius Kircher als Geograph,” in M. Buchner, ed., Aus der Vergangenheit der Universitä Würzburg (Berlin, 1932), 355-362 a rough sketch on Kircher as music scholar is Oskar kaul, “Athanasius Kircher als Musikgelehrter,” ibid., 363-370.

On medicine, apart from the article by Fletcher (see above), see Georg Sticker, “Die medica facultas Wirtzeburgensis im siebzehnten Jahrhundert,” in Festschrift zum 46. deutschen Ärztgetag in Würzburg (Würzburg, 1927), 75-87. A. Erman gives a critical treatment of Kircher’s deciphering of hieroglyphics in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, XVI (Leipzig, 1882), 1-4. On Martin Fogel’s opinion of kircher’s comparison of languages and on Fogel’s travels, see Hans Kangro, “Martin Fogel aus Hamburg als Gelehrter des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Ural Altaische Jahrbücher,41 (1969), 14-32.

On Kircher’ chemistry see J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, II (London, 1961), 328-333 (the author’s emphasis on Kircher’s criticism of alchemy is more than historically justifiable). On his physics see Edmund Hoppe, Geschichte der Physik (Brunswick, 1926; repr. 1965), passim; Ernst Gerland, Geschichte der Physik (Munich—Berlin, 1913), passim; and Ferdinand Rosenberger, Die Geschichte der Physik, I (Brunswick, 1882; repr. Hildesheim, 1965), passim.

Hans Kangro