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

philosopher.” Since then he’d gotten into a dispute with Christopher Scheiner, another Jesuit in Rome, over who had been the first to observe spots on the sun, and what they were. Galileo argued that
he
had, that they were imperfections in another supposedly perfect sphere, and that their apparent movement was due to
Earth’s
orbit around the sun. In 1616, after certain Dominicans added their own complaints against him, Galileo was admonished by the Church for his Copernican views. By the time Kircher arrived in Cologne, Galileo was in yet another public dispute with yet another Jesuit astronomer, over the nature of comets.
    During this same period, Johannes Kepler, a brilliant astronomer born near Stuttgart, had been arguing his own mystical as well as mathematical case for a sun-centered cosmology. Kepler spent years working with reams of astronomical data he’d inherited, some say purloined, from the estate of astronomer Tycho Brahe, his former employer. He believed the planets were drawn around a living sun, in ellipses, not circles, by a spiritual, magnetic force. (Although a devout Lutheran, Kepler was currently in the service of the new Catholic Hapsburg emperor, perhaps not actually doing astrological predictions for his military leaders but supplying the astronomical readings for the astrologers who were.)
    In this kind of environment, the Jesuits needed all the new mathematicians they could get. And despite Kircher’s efforts to conceal his intellect, his professors in Cologne saw that he had a bent for mathematics. Humility was important, and generally it
was
better to want to live with Christ in ignominy rather than fame, to be thought a fool and an idiot with Christ rather than to be thought wise and prudent without him. But nothing was more important than to discern God’s call properly. Some were meant to achieve great things,
ad majorem Dei gloriam
, as the Jesuit motto went, for the greater glory of God.
    â€”
    A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, twenty-two-year-old Kircher left Cologne and traveled down the Rhine to the small city of Koblenz. Going south along this route, the riverbanks grow higher and higher until they become tall promontories on top of which sit castles and ancient fortifications. Koblenz itself, whose name comes from the Latin for “confluence,” takes up a triangle of land at the point where the Rhine and the Mosel rivers meet. Yet another Jesuit college and a brand-new church were situated in the middle of the town, helping to form a public square.
    Koblenz, where the Rhine and Mosel rivers meet
    It seems that while in the midst of his philosophy studies (in its third year, the program turned to metaphysics) and his special mathematics training in Cologne, Kircher had also shown enough proficiency with languages to be given a professorship in Greek. “The time came,” he explained in his memoir, “when I was compelled out of obligation to reveal those talents that up until then had remained hidden.” And this, he didn’t seem to mind adding, was greeted with extreme surprise and envy: “People were unable to grasp how a man, for whom up to this point they had held no regard, and in whom no vestige of any inborn intellectual skill had been manifest, was able to evince those points which barely fell within the ken of the greatest masters of languages, mathematics and recondite wisdom.”
    People of Koblenz may have had trouble grasping other things, like what Kircher was doing up on a platform on the side of the Society’s church. They would have seen soon enough that this student of the works of Clavius was installing a sundial he’d designed for the location, complete with a Latin inscription that read, “See! How the shadow flies, so flies both the year and the age like a silent army.”
    â€”
    THERE WERE MANY influences at work in Kircher’s early life, and many that had to do with the cultural rebirth for which