Athanasius Kircher was a serious 17th-century Jesuit scholar, but he enjoyed playing the showman. One of his oddest inventions was a clock incorporating a live sunflower that he claimed could tell time as the plant, seeking the sun, turned to follow its path. By secretly manipulating the contraption with magnets, Kircher fooled even his most learned contemporaries. When the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz asked about making his own botanical timepiece, Kircher, who lived in Rome, cagily suggested the clock wouldn’t function so well in a northern climate.
But Kircher also was known to expose other people’s gimmickry in the name of truth. A clock conceived by the English Jesuit Francis Line featured a glass sphere in which a suspended orb rotated, supposedly in rhythm with heavenly motions. Observers wondered: did its movements somehow prove the earth rotates around the sun? Kircher debunked the machine’s magic: a hidden magnet made the orb move.
Kircher’s contradictions typify his era. Born in Germany in 1602, he lived at the height of the Baroque age, when clever tricks and trompe l’oeil were much appreciated. But it was also the dawn of empiricism, which would challenge medieval, scholastic methods of learning. After Kircher’s death in 1680, Enlightenment scientists who had no use for his games discredited him, and he fell into obscurity.
Kircher’s contemporaries would have been dumbstruck. A true Renaissance man, he had spent his life documenting the world’s vast range of knowledge, from medicine to mechanics, in a 40-volume opus. At the Jesuits’ Roman College, he opened his Museo Kircheriano, a fabulous collection of antiquities, curiosities and one-of-a-kind machines. European royalty were among his many visitors, and he had hundreds of correspondents around the globe.
Today, scholars are taking a new interest in the Jesuit polymath, and Stanford is at the forefront of the revival. In 1998, the library acquired a near-complete set of Kircher’s books—39 first editions of his encyclopedic volumes—plus catalogs of the museum and several works by his disciples. The acquisition led to an international symposium sponsored by Stanford’s history and philosophy of science program and a major exhibition at Green Library earlier this year, as well as an ambitious digital archive project.
History professor Paula Findlen, who has studied Kircher since 1984, offers some explanation for his renaissance. For one thing, his world view was global, as ours is today. Using Jesuit missionaries to collect materials from Mexico City to Beijing, he saw himself as a clearinghouse for this “worldwide web” of information. As a young man, Kircher wanted to become a missionary to China; instead, he lived out his dream “virtually” through colleagues, who sent him data on foot-binding, Confucianism, the Great Wall and bird’s nest soup, among other things. He also synthesized ancient and medieval sources with newer material (which later rankled Enlightenment thinkers, who wanted to free themselves of outdated ideas).
In a way, Findlen says, we can use Kircher’s ideas to reconstruct the opinions of a whole generation of Baroque intellectuals. His books, all in Latin, range in subject from magnetism to world languages to music theory to Egyptology to medicine. Kircher managed to touch on practically all the knowledge of his own day—and even though many of his assertions have since been disproved, he established a starting point for future study in a variety of fields.
Michael John Gorman, a lecturer in Stanford’s science, technology and society program, has another theory about the Jesuit’s appeal. “Kircher is very much a man of our time,” he says. “Descartes and Galileo preferred a world that didn’t mix knowledge and entertainment, but for Kircher, the two were inseparable.”
Kircher’s idea of infotainment came through most clearly in his fascination with odd machines and contraptions—technical devices that could also amuse. Seventeenth-century visitors to his museum had to begin their tour by speaking into a long tube that wound its way to his apartments. It wasn’t exactly a telephone, but it was as close as he could come. (Among other things, Kircher was an acoustics expert.) Then, if allowed in, they’d encounter a speaking statue called the Delphic Oracle. “Kircher would hide behind it and take questions and make its eyes roll,” Gorman explains. Or they might view a magic lantern show—a precursor of today’s movies.
Some of Kircher’s notions seem surreal—for example, his assertion that a trillion giants inhabited the earth before the Flood. His translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs was celebrated during his lifetime but, like many of his endeavors, was later found to be erroneous. (Still, the 19th-century French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion used Kircher’s volumes as an aid to his own interpretations.) But in other areas, he was ahead of his time—for instance, he believed that tiny microbes could cause illness long before it was the accepted view.
The University’s purchase seems almost prescient, too. “Since we bought them, prices have tripled on some books,” says Henry Lowood, curator for the library’s history of science and technology collections, who guided the acquisition. (The purchase price is confidential; however, first editions of Kircher’s books can run from a few thousand dollars to upwards of $17,000.) The collection belonged to 82-year-old Ella Mazel of Lexington, Mass., who acquired them over a 20-year period. A collector and former editor, she doesn’t read Latin but says she adored the remarkable illustrations—flying Chinese turtles, unwrapped mummies, lizards trapped in amber
Daniel Stoltzenberg, a graduate student in history who edited the sumptuous 160-page catalog for the library’s exhibition, believes the engravings are a big part of modern interest in Kircher. “The images are really striking,” he says. “People [then] get drawn into the books themselves.”
Stanford’s Athanasius Kircher Correspondence Project, undertaken with the help of the Institute and Museum of History of Science in Florence and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, will afford more universal access to Kircher. Gorman and Nick Wilding, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford, have assembled a searchable digital archive (accessible at www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/hdis/kircher.html) of more than 2,000 letters from 760 correspondents in almost 30 languages (illustrations include a flying donkey).
Some of them relate to Kircher’s research as a Jesuit: he set out to prove the universality of the Christian Trinity and found supporting evidence in practices observed by missionaries halfway around the world. Through his correspondents he also amassed huge amounts of information on foreign, especially Asian, cultures, much of which ended up in his bestselling China Illustrata. That book had a lasting impact: its illustrations of Chinese costumes, for example, helped spark a chinoiserie vogue all around Europe.
Findlen predicts a robust future for Kircher, and she and others are developing courses that include study of his work. This long-dead Jesuit could turn out to be a patron saint of the academy, accomplishing the two dreams of any great Renaissance man: to study everything of importance, and to be remembered for doing so.
Meredith Alexander, MA ’99, covers the social sciences for the Stanford News Service.
