Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie Read Free Book Online

where it seemed that Easter would soon be celebrated in February. In order to start fresh with the new calendar, ten days had to be skipped outright. People in Catholic lands who went to bed on October 4, 1582, woke up the next morning on October 15. (Protestant countries resisted the switch for more than a century. Japan and Korea started using the calendar in the nineteenth century, and it took the Bolsheviks to make the change in Russia, which they did after coming to power in 1917. The Gregorian calendar is good until the year 4317, when a single extra day will have to be added.)
    After suffering attacks by dubious Protestants who refused to adopt the new calendar—was this some kind of Catholic trick to steal time?—Clavius presented a plan to the Jesuit hierarchy by which the general intellectual reputation of those heretics could be, as he wrote, “most rapidly and easily destroyed.” He urged the Society to identify and nurture those men who might become “outstandingly erudite” in what had previously been deemed the “minor studies of mathematics, rhetoric, and language.” Clavius envisioned an elite corps of mathematician priests “distributed in various nations and kingdoms like sparkling gems,” serving as “a source of great fear to all enemies” and as “an incredible incitement to make young people flock to us from all the parts of the world.” Many of his proposals were put in place. And so while he was rigorously and rather inflexibly educated in Aristotelian and Thomist doctrines, Kircher also received private instruction in the very discipline that was beginning to undermine them.
    In 1610, twelve years before Kircher arrived in Cologne, Galileo Galilei, a mathematics professor in Padua, published a slim volume,
Starry Messenger
, about the observations he’d made with a new instrument he called the
perspicillum
, or the telescope. It was a very much improved-upon version of the spyglasses that had recently begun to appear in Europe. The configuration (a concave lens at one end of a tube, and a convex lens at the other) was fairly simple, but Galileo’s handcrafted device made things appear, as he wrote, “nearly one thousand times larger and over thirty times closer” than they would with the naked eye. Among other discoveries, he observed four moons revolving around Jupiter. The most basic implication of this was clear to any student of natural philosophy willing to admit it. (At the Jesuit school of La Flèche in Anjou, a student named René Descartes is said to have written a sonnet celebrating the news.) If moons revolved around Jupiter, maybe Earth wasn’t really the center of the universe, around which everything revolved. Galileo also reported that “the moon is not robed in a smooth and polished surface,” as Aristotelian doctrine had it, “but is in fact rough and uneven, covered everywhere, just like the Earth’s surface, with huge prominences, deep valleys, and chasms.”
    The Church seemed willing at first to consider these findings. Clavius and other Jesuit astronomers held a reception for Galileo in Rome, and while Clavius declared telescopes “troublesome to operate,” he confirmed the existence of moons around Jupiter. On the question of the rough surface of the moon, however, the seventy-one-year-old astronomer couldn’t bring himself to believe his eyes. Perhaps the moon was just unevenly dense, he suggested. In a letter to the Church’s chief theologian, a group of Jesuit astronomers wrote together that they were “not sufficiently certain” about the matter. In other words, preconceived notions were such that Clavius couldn’t see through a telescope what modern people, who know the truth, can recognize with the naked eye.
    When Galileo was offered a new job in the Medici court in Florence around this time, he insisted on a double title: “mathematician and