John Glassie | A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change / 2012

purposeful misunderstandings

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Glassie A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012)

 

By coincidence, just as I completed reading Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès fiction, Where Tigers Are at Home—in which one of the central stories concerns the seventeenth century priest Athanasius Kircher—my companion brought me home from the local Barnes & Noble a 2012 biography of Kircher, A Man of Misconceptions, by John Glassie.

 

    Like the Blas de Roblès work, Glassie recounts Kircher’s very active life, from his birth in Fulda in the then Holy Roman Empire (as Voltaire quipped, “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor a Empire”) to his long tenure as the caretaker of his celebrated museum in the Vatican. And like the fiction, Glassie one by one recounts Kircher’s vast array of interests, from his fascination with geology, optics, microbiology, sculpture, medicine, languages (in particular his attempt to read the Egyptian hieroglyphs), philosophy, mathematics, theology, and all things Chinese. Kircher has often been described as the last man to have mastered all knowledge. But in the age of Tycho Brahe, René Decartes, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton—in short at the beginning of what we now recognize as modern science—nearly of all Kircher’s theories regarding these numerous topics have since been proven wrong. A determinedly brilliant Jesuit, Kircher misread texts, jiggled facts, and theorized through fantastical conjectures a world in which everything was interrelated pointing to the hand of God. Although for most of his life the priest was seen as one of the most learned men of the world, and was sought out and corresponded with nearly every major figure of the day, including his friend, the artist Gianlorenzo Bernini, John Evelyn, Queen Christina of Sweden, and several popes for his encyclopedic knowledge, by the end of his life he was perceived by many as a kind of crack-pot, famed for his theories based on little experimentation and great imagination.

      As Glassie engagingly recounts the events of this “adventurer’s” life—a man who at one point had himself lowered into the erupting cone of Mount Vesuvius—he reveals Kircher’s numerous “misconceptions” along the way.

 

                      Many of Kircher’s actual ideas today seem wildly off base,

                      if not simply bizarre. Contrary to Kircher’s thinking, for

                      instance, there is nothing occult or divine about magnetism.

                      There is no such thing as universal sperm. And there is no

                      network of fires and oceans leading to the center of the

                      the Earth. It’s fair to say that from the viewpoint of modern

                      science Kircher has been something of a joke.

 

    The author, nonetheless, paints a somewhat positive picture of the “lying scientist” simply by giving us a larger context of how science in this dawning modernist world was generally perceived. As Glassie points out, “Of course, modern science didn’t exist in 1602,” the year of Kircher’s birth. Despite his wondrous ideas, Galileo was wrong about a great many things. And Newton, apart from his influential ideas, continued to practice alchemy throughout his life, while Kircher dismissed alchemy early on.

      If nothing else, Kircher’s utter fascination with all forces of the earth might stand as a grand testament, akin to the Renaissance thinkers, to connect all knowledge, perceiving thought in general as “the art of knowing.,” which he attempted to delineate in dozens and dozens of Latin tomes. If nothing else, is was Kircher who inspired Bernini to sculpt “The Fountain of Four Rivers” in Rome. And as Glassie reveals, Kircher’s grand misconceptions influenced scores of writers and thinkers throughout the centuries.

     Kircher’s theories of magnetism, for example, were highly influential upon the eighteenth century physician Franz Anton Messmer. And the priest’s fascination with magnetism seems somewhat prescient today in a world where “magnetism…has taken on ever-increasing significance in almost every scientific and technological field.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz claimed that Kircher influenced much of his early thinking and inspiration. And although the old priest was utterly wrong in his interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, he was right to associate them with Coptic, and had he further studied that relationship he might have cracked the code that was later achieved through the discovery of the Rosetta stone by Napoleon’s forces in Egypt. Poe quotes Kircher in his story “A Descent into the Maelström,” and Jules Verne’s famed A Journey to the Center of the Earth was almost entirely based on ideas by the “German egoist,” a character also in the story itself. Nearly all of the writings and teachings of the nineteenth century “psychic” Madame Blavatsky, expressed in Theosophy, are cribbed from Kircher’s writings. The list of later influences, misguided or benign, continues through the centuries.

     Finally, one simply has to pause in awe and wonderment with regard to Kircher’s voluminous activities. Although one might perceive his as nearly always misguided and often a fraud, science certainly would have been less interesting without him.

 

Los Angeles, May 11, 2012

Reprinted from Rain Taxi