KIRCHER, ATHANASIUS

(b. Geisa at the Ulster, Germany, 2 May 1602 [or 1601]; d. Rome, Italy, 27 November 1680).

For the original article on Kircher see DSB, vol. 7.

Scholarly work since the 1980s on Kircher has considerably enriched people’s understanding of the life and work of this seventeenth-century polymath. While an earlier literature primarily sifted through Kircher’s encyclopedic publications to find individual instances in which he offered new information, provided the occasional insight regarding some unexplored aspect of the natural world, or introduced a novel machine, more recent scholarship has tried to assess the goals of Kircher’s numerous projects to harmonize and synthesize knowledge. Rather than dismissing Kircher as an intellectual dilettante who wrote about the wonders of nature and the mysteries of science simply to amuse a baroque audience, historians in the early twenty-first century see Kircher as an exemplary figure in understanding the transition from ancient to modern ways of thinking about the world. He was a man who immersed himself in the currents of scholarship at the height of the seventeenth century while publicly proclaiming the value of traditional learning and faith. Most importantly, he was a fascinating by-product of the Society of Jesus: a Catholic natural philosopher in the age of Galileo, Descartes, and a young Newton, a Jesuit priest whose goal was to incorporate aspects of the new natural and experimental philosophy and a fuller understanding of ancient (especially Neoplatonic and Hermetic) philosophies of knowledge into the traditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic worldview upheld by the Catholic Church following its condemnation of heliocentrism in 1616 and the trial of Galileo in 1633.

The results of Kircher’s speculations were often far from orthodox. It is now known that Jesuit censors critiqued important works such as the Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Mundus subterraneus, and Itinerarium exstaticum prior to their publication on precisely these grounds. The Itinerarium exstaticum, in particular, continued to be criticized and revised after its initial appearance in 1656 for being too favorable toward Copernicanism and too willing to embrace other controversial ideas such as the infinity of space in the way in which it presented the truth of Tychonic astronomy, the official cosmology of the Society of Jesus since 1620. As has been recently argued by Carlos Ziller Camenietski, Ingrid Rowland, and Harald Siebert, Kircher was a man trying to invent a new cosmology— one that incorporated the findings of early-seventeenth-century astronomy and physics into a philosophy deeply indebted to antiquity but also to philosophers such as Nicolas Cusanus and Giordano Bruno.

Research on Kircher since the 1980s has made greater use of unpublished manuscripts and his correspondence (with more than 760 patrons, natural philosophers, experimenters, Jesuit missionaries, and curious admirers) while also offering fresh readings of his published works. The foundational work of John Fletcher and other scholars helped to identify the importance of his letters in understanding his relationship to such important figures as Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Francesco Redi, Evangelista Torricelli, Johannes Marcus Marci, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Subsequent work has tried to assess his place in the seventeenth-century republic of letters as a purveyor of interesting information, collector of curious artifacts, and disseminator of new ideas and discoveries in his numerous, highly illustrated encyclopedias. Modern facsimiles and translations of a number of Kircher’s most important books have been published, and the nucleus of his manuscripts (fourteen folio volumes housed in the archive of the Pontificia Università Gregoriana in Rome, MSS 555–568) is available in a digital edition as The Athanasius Kircher Correspondence Project. Several museum exhibits (most notably, a temporary one in Rome at Palazzo Venezia in 2001 and a permanent one at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California) have attempted to reconstruct some of Kircher’s machines and even to re-create his entire gallery in the Roman College. Rather than being perceived as a secondary figure of the Scientific Revolution—a man who amused many but enlightened few—Kircher might now be described as a scholar-impresario who sought to reveal the hidden connections among different kinds of learning in order to provide a grand, unified scheme of knowledge. Kircher’s unbridled egoism, his failure to fulfill his vast ambitions, and his inability to see the shortcomings of his intellectual program infuriated his critics. At the same time, he also inspired many readers of his books and many visitors to his museum to consider the important scientific and antiquarian questions of his day. In short, Kircher is a fascinating reflection of why and how science mattered in the mid-seventeenth century.

Early Years . Admitted as a student at the Jesuit college in Paderborn on 2 October 1618, Kircher completed his novitiate in 1620. His early reputation as a scholar of ancient languages was soon coupled with a growing interest in mathematics and astronomy. A chance encounter in the Jesuit college library of Speyer with a book on Egyptian hieroglyphics, probably Johann Georg Herwath von Hohenburg’s Thesaurus hieroglyphicorum, inspired Kircher to request a missionary posting in the Near East in 1628. He would repeat this request again in 1637 (earlier Kircher scholarship frequently stated that he had wanted to go to China, misunderstanding the Orient of his dreams because of his subsequent publication China monumentis illustrata in 1667). Both times the Society of Jesus refused to send him, considering Kircher to be better suited to a professorial career and more valuable as a publisher of missionary reports on the natural and human wonders of Asia, America, and the Near East than as an apostle in the field.

While teaching in Koblenz in 1623 Kircher built the first of many sundials. In 1630, during his tenure as a professor at the Jesuit college in Würzburg, he completed his first book: his unpublished mathematics textbook, Institutiones mathematicae. A year later the Ars magnesia, a slim pamphlet outlining the basic principles of universal magnetism as the underlying force in Kircher’s natural philosophy, became his first publication. By the time Kircher arrived in Avignon, France, in 1632, where he was appointed professor of mathematics and Oriental languages at the Jesuit college and quickly befriended the Aix savant Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, he had a strong sense of how to realize his ambitions. He built an even more elaborate sundial that demonstrated his skills in the science of optics as well as astronomy and mathematics and began demonstrating his fabled sunflower clock, a heliotropic plant whose ability to tell time allegedly demonstrated the inherent properties of magnetism in all parts of the natural world. Kircher also promised to show Peiresc a mysterious Arabic manuscript in his possession, attributed to the Babylonian rabbi Barachias Nephi and containing knowledge, according to Kircher, that would help him interpret the proper meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and all the ancient secrets of Christianity.

Although Peiresc never did see the manuscript and began to express reservations about Kircher’s abilities as a linguistic and experimental philosopher, he was nonetheless intrigued enough to persuade the Jesuit general Muzio Vitelleschi and Cardinal Francesco Barberini to have Kircher appointed as professor of mathematics and Oriental languages at the Roman College in November 1633, succeeding Christoph Scheiner in the chair made famous by the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius. Peiresc certainly was fascinated with the new astronomy ushered in by Galileo’s telescope, as was Kircher. However, he considered his Jesuit protègè’s primary function in Rome to be antiquarian and Christian: Peiresc wanted Kircher to edit and translate Pietro della Valle’s Coptic grammar and dictionary, considered the linguistic key to the interpretation of the hieroglyphs. Kircher eventually published it in his Lingua Aegyptiaca restituta (1643), one of many books advertising his ability to decode the hieroglyphs and, more generally, to penetrate the mysteries of Egyptian wisdom throughout his lengthy career. Once in Rome, however, he did not neglect to cultivate his reputation on all fronts, presenting himself as a natural philosopher, inventor, linguist, and antiquarian. News of the sunflower clock even reached the ears of Galileo, now under house imprisonment in Arcetri, whose advocacy of heliocentrism Kircher had discussed sympathetically with Peiresc and Pierre Gassendi in Aix, before Galileo’s condemnation in June 1633.

Work in Earth Science . During a trip to Malta as the confessor of the recently converted Landgraf Friedrich of Hesse-Darmstadt, Kircher created his most spectacular instrument yet: the Specula Melitensis (1638), which contained a planisphere, kept track of the Julian and Gregorian calendars, told universal time, charted horoscopes, and condensed all important medical, botanical, alchemical, Hermetic, and magical knowledge into a single cube known as the “cabalistic mirror.” Returning to Rome, he witnessed the eruptions of Etna and Stromboli and observed the crater of Vesuvius in 1638. His observations of nature’s spectacle in southern Italy inspired a lifelong fascination with those aspects of nature that he would aptly call the “subterranean world.” The Mundus subterraneus (1665) was the first encyclopedia to systematically explore the forces that shaped the world below the surface, including the nature and location of volcanoes, earthquakes, ocean currents, and the formation of fossils. Written from the reports of Jesuit missionaries throughout the world, it was a truly global natural history.

As Kircher developed a nascent interest in what is now called geology and paleontology, he was also bringing to fruition his work on universal magnetism and optics. The publication of his Magnes sive de arte magnetica (1641) cemented Kircher’s reputation as the foremost “magnetic philosopher” since William Gilbert at the beginning of the century. Mersenne provided observations for the table of magnetic declination, forwarding data from his English correspondents. Gassendi, Jesuit mathematicians and natural philosophers such as Christoph Scheiner and Niccolò Cabeo, and Jesuit missionaries in Goa, Macao, Canton, and the West Indies also contributed to Kircher’s project. The Magnes was the first work in which Kircher demonstrated his ability to create a global network of informants, using the combined resources of the Society of Jesus and the European republic of letters to gather information. It also contained his first report—an account he received from the Italian province of Puglia—of the use of music to cure a tarantula’s bite. While highly criticized by some readers for its speculative leaps in attempting to create a full unified account of the forces of nature, it was sufficiently well read to warrant two further editions in 1643 and 1654.

On Light . Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae, a fascinating encyclopedia on the subject of light and shadow, appeared in 1646, the year in which he ceased to have any regular teaching duties at the Roman College, which allowed him to pursue his publications and inventions without impediment. Filled with descriptions of optical and catoptrical devices such as Archimedes’s burning mirror and the magic lantern that continues to be associated with Kircher more than almost any other invention, it enjoyed a similarly mixed reputation. While many readers lingered on the lavish illustrations, fantasizing about how they might re-create Kircher’s machines, others, such as Torricelli and Mersenne, laughed themselves silly over the Jesuit’s claim to have squared the circle through a demonstrably imprecise mathematical proof, which confirmed their suspicions that Kircher did not exactly represent the cutting edge of mathematics.

Understanding the nature of light was one of the central questions of natural philosophy in the mid-seventeenth century, as was the phenomenon of magnetism, which would ultimately interest Isaac Newton in his student days at Cambridge before he rejected its universality in favor of something less tangible and more universal: the idea of universal gravitation. Kircher’s virtue was to recognize the significance of these questions. He attempted to collect all the relevant information and began to analyze it. While his conclusions often seemed flawed to the most critical and knowledgeable readers at the time, they nonetheless mined his books for useful data and specific insights that they might incorporate into their own natural philosophies. A similar tendency can be seen in Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650), which attempted to build on the work of such well-known scholars as Kepler and Mersenne in exploring the idea of universal harmony. Like many of Kircher’s other works, it was a book filled with fascinating descriptions and illustrations, in this case of sound-making machines and automata, including the hydraulic organ he helped to restore at the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome. The machines made a much greater impression on readers than his theories.

Museum Curator and Antiquarian . One year after the publication of this book Kircher was offered the opportunity to become the custodian of the newly created Roman College museum. In 1651 Alfonso Donnino donated his collection of art and antiquities to the Society of Jesus, requesting that it be displayed in the Roman College. Kircher already had a collection of manuscripts, curiosities, and inventions which he had been showing to visitors in his private quarters at the college since the mid-1630s. The creation of an official Jesuit museum allowed him the opportunity to put his own things on display in the new exhibit space. Visitors had virtually nothing to say about Donnino’s collection, since it was far less spectacular than the experience of meeting Father Athanasius in a gallery filled with miniature replicas of the obelisks he had deciphered for the popes; a rubbing of the Nestorian monument and numerous other antiquities; globes, clocks, and magnetic, optical, musical, and perpetual motion machines; his famous speaking tube and magic lantern; and numerous artifacts either gathered by Kircher or donated by Jesuits, patrons, and admirers throughout the world. Posthumously the collection would be known as the Kircherian Museum. It helped to cement Kircher’s image as a kind of baroque Leonardo da Vinci who did not simply sketch his fantasies but attempted to realize them in three-dimensional form.

Although the previous DSB entry did not discuss the Oedipus Aegyptiacus (printed in several parts in 1652–1654 and published in final form in 1655) as part of Kircher’s scientific corpus, subsequent research has persuasively argued that Kircher’s science cannot be separated from his antiquarian pursuits. The most ambitious of Kircher’s numerous books on Egypt, the Oedipus was a vast study of hieroglyphic wisdom made manifest across time and space. Filled with Kircher’s research on such subjects as Jewish Kabbalah, Persian magic, Islamic alchemy, Chaldean astrology, Zoroastrian mysteries, and many other ancient sciences, it reflected his ongoing desire to identify the commonalities between ancient wisdom and modern knowledge. In the Oedipus, for example, Kircher upheld the fundamental importance of the Corpus Hermeticum as a document that demonstrated the essential connection between pagan Egypt and early Christianity (despite having been discredited by Isaac Casaubon as a late antique forgery in 1614). He demonstrated the Egyptian origins of John Dee’s enigmatic Monas hieroglyphica (Hieroglyphic monad) and, more generally, offered an extensive critique of the flourishing of occult philosophy since the early Renaissance, dismissing philosophers who by his standards had abused this science and praising scholars such as Pico della Mirandola who had helped to lay its foundations as a pious pursuit. Kircher’s quest for universal wisdom was also an exploration of the universality of Roman Catholicism. Jesuit censors critiqued the Oedipus for being far too admiring of its pagan sources—which it surely was. But they nonetheless let it appear, allowing readers to enjoy the fruits of Kircher’s lengthy reflection on the ways in which Egyptian wisdom had shaped the nature of human knowledge across the centuries and how Jesuit missionaries in Asia and America had rediscovered the message of Christianity in the “hieroglyphic” writings of the Chinese and the Aztecs.

Publications . In 1652 Kircher renewed his acquaintance with his most important disciple, Kaspar Schott. Called to Rome by the Society of Jesus to assist Kircher with his numerous projects, Schott temporarily became the curator of machines at the Roman College museum. He ultimately published a series of important works that advertised the virtues of Kircher’s inventions. Schott not only helped Kircher with the publication of the Oedipus but played an especially important role in the appearance of the Itinerarium exstaticum (1656), editing the manuscript substantially in the second edition of 1660 to tone down its favorable allusions to aspects of heliocentrism. Schott returned to his position as professor of mathematics at the Jesuit college in Würzburg in 1655, where he continued to edit and publicize Kircher’s work for the rest of his career. He was the most important of several loyal disciples committed to promulgating Kircherian experimental and natural philosophy in the mid-seventeenth century.

Despite the controversies over the Itinerarium exstaticum, by the 1660s Kircher was at the height of his career as one of the best-known authors of his time. In 1661 he signed a contract with Joannes Jansson van Waesberghe of Amsterdam, who received the exclusive rights to publish Kircher’s work in the Holy Roman Empire, England, and the Low Countries in the winter of that year in return for paying Kircher the princely sum of 2,200 scudi. In addition to his many and diverse publications on natural philosophy, Kircher began to publicize another dimension of his research: his ability to create universal and artificial languages. Publications such as his Polygraphia nova et universalis (1663) demonstrated numerous ciphers and codes but also explored the uses of machines in the creation and translation of language. His work in this area not only complemented the research of John Wilkins but also inspired a young Leibniz, who was equally intrigued by Kircher’s writings on Egypt and China.

By the 1670s Kircher’s findings and his philosophy were increasingly under attack and his health was failing, forcing others to step in to defend him. Kircher’s disciple, Gioseffo Petrucci, countered the Tuscan physician and naturalist Francesco Redi’s trenchant criticisms of the miraculous curative powers of the snakestone (a missionary artifact from Asia described in Kircher’s China monumentis illustrata) in his Prodomo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani (1677). One year later his assistant Giorgio de Sepi published the Romani Collegii Societatis Jesu Musaeum celeberrimum (1678), as much a monument to Kircher as to his museum. In the final year of Kircher’s life Johann Koestler produced a well-illustrated digest of Kircher’s best experiments in his Physiologia Kircheriana experimentalis (1680). Two years after Kircher’s death the Prague Jesuit Caspar Knittel offered a final tribute to Father Athanasius, especially to his highly criticized Ars magna sciendi (1669), by publishing the Via Regia ad omnes scientias et artes. Hoc est: Ars universalis, scientiarum omnium artiumque arcana facilius penetrandi (1682). Described in the subtitle as a “Universal Lullian-Kircherian Art of Knowing and Examining,” it was the last treatise to openly advocate Kircherian natural philosophy as the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. In the age of Newton—who, like Leibniz, was fascinated with many of the questions that animated Kircher’s work while ultimately arriving at completely different conclusions—the age of the universal baroque polymath had passed.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Since 2000, the number of modern facsimile editions of Kircher’s works, published primarily in Italy and Germany, has increased considerably. See especially the Editiones Neolatinae series published by A. W. F. Sommer in Vienna, which has printed many of these volumes since 2004. The only modern English translation of Kircher’s work is the China Illustrata, translated by Charles D. Van Tuyl (Muskogee, OK: Indian University Press, Bacone College, 1987), which should be used with caution in relation to the Latin original. For an introduction to Kircher’s manuscripts in the archive of the Gregorian University in Rome, see “A Brief Survey of the Unpublished Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher S.J. (1602–80),” by John E. Fletcher ( Manuscripta 13 (1969): 150–160).

WORKS BY KIRCHER

“Juan Caramuel: Su epistolario con Atanasio Kircher, S.J.” Transcribed by Ramón Ceñal. Revista de Filosofia 44 (1953): 101–148.

“Drei unbekannte Briefe Athanasius Kirchers an Fürstabt Joachim von Gravenegg.” Transcribed by John E. Fletcher. Fuldaer Geschichtsblätter 58 (1982): 92–104.

Astronomia e tecniche di ricerca nelle lettere di G. B. Riccioli ad A. Kircher. Transcribed by Ivana Gambaro. Genoa: Quaderni Centro di Studio sulla Storia della Tecnica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche 15, 1989.

“Le Lettere di Athanasius Kircher della Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze.” Transcribed by Alfonso Mirto. Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere La Colombaria 54, n.s. 40 (1989): 129–165.

La luz imaginaria: Epistolario de Atanasio Kircher con los Novohispanos. Edited and translated by Ignacio Osorio Romero. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonóma de Mèxico, 1993.

“Lettere di Athanasius Kircher dell’Archivio di Stato di Firenze.” Transcribed by Alfonso Mirto. Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere La Colombaria 65, n.s. 51 (2000): 217–240.

Athanasius Kircher an Herzog August der Jünger: Lateinische Briefe der Jahre 1650–1666 aus den Sammlungen der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel—Transkription und Übersetzung. Edited by Thomas Stäcker. Available from http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000005/start.htm.

The Athanasius Kircher Correspondence Project. Edited by Michael John Gorman and Nick Wilding. Available from http://kircher.stanford.edu/ (earlier version at http://archimede.imss.fi.it/kircher/).

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Paula Findlen