Athanasius Kircher’s magical instruments: an essay on ‘science’, ‘religion’ and applied metaphysics

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Abstract

In this paper I endeavour to bridge the gap between the history of material culture and the history of ideas. I do this by focussing on the intersection between metaphysics and technology—what I call ‘applied metaphysics’—in the oeuvre of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. By scrutinising the interplay between texts, objects and images in Kircher’s work, it becomes possible to describe the multiplicity of meanings related to his artefacts. I unearth as yet overlooked metaphysical and religious meanings of the camera obscura, for instance, as well as of various other optical and magnetic devices. Today, instruments and artefacts are almost exclusively seen in the light of a narrow economic and technical concept. Historically, the ‘use’ of artefacts is much more diverse, however, and I argue that it is time to historicize the concept of ‘utility’.

Introduction

If one were transposed to the seventeenth-century museum of the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit college in Rome, one would encounter a totally different world: a world stuffed with prodigies, exotic animals, relics, obelisks and bizarre machines. One would enter the fantastic universe of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), who was the head of the museum, professor at the college and a famous intellectual and ‘experimentalist’. Some of Kircher’s instruments have already been subject to elaborate scholarly interpretative efforts, but even these, such as the sunflower clock, the magnetic Jesus rescuing Peter in the midst of the waters, and the cats locked into a catoptric chest, still turn our categories upside down and keep defying our understanding. Their utility and the ways to use them are not self-evident; their purposes, their meanings, the ‘language they speak’, are alien to us. Kircher’s artefacts have become ‘unreal’ for us, and in order to understand them, it is necessary to draw on all resources possible. In particular, as I will show, it is crucial to pay attention to the interplay between his texts, objects and images as well as their diverse contexts and uses.1

In this paper, I try to uncover the meanings of Kircher’s artefacts by confronting them with hitherto neglected parts of his texts. I focus on the metaphysical epilogues in two of Kircher’s books, the Magnes sive de arte magnetica opus tripartitum (1641, third edition 1654) and the Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1646, second edition 1671), and I establish their relation with the body of the text, with his artefacts and with the practices in which both texts and artefacts were used. Until now, there has been little real interest in this aspect of Kircher’s thought, and these abstract metaphysical texts have seemed rather awkward appendices to treatises centred on instruments. Recent developments in the historiography of material culture have yielded important new insights in Kircher’s artefacts, natural philosophy and experimental pursuits, but lofty metaphysics seems to be a blind spot for such a perspective. I hope that a slight shift in focus will be able to shed new light on the current Kircher-debate. In particular, I will argue that the meaning of his metaphysical chapters is central to the meaning of his artefacts, and vice versa.

In this paper, I aim at blending the history of material culture with the history of ideas, and I hope to show the fruitfulness of such an approach. This text is thus an essay in ‘applied metaphysics’ in the simple sense that it relates Kircher’s abstract metaphysical considerations to its applications in ‘science and technology’.2 It is also an essay in applied metaphysics as Daston (2000, p. 1) defines it: ‘Applied metaphysics assumes that reality is a matter of degree, and that phenomena that are indisputably real in the colloquial sense that they exist may become more or less intensely real, depending on how densely they are woven into scientific thought and practice’.

Section snippets

‘Inter-medial’ approaches

The Jesuits have always been fond of mixed media spectacles, from the markedly sensual and visual Spiritual exercises of their founding father Ignatius of Loyola, to the elaborate stage plays they performed in order to retrieve lost souls.3 The visual culture of the Jesuits and their taste for

Word and images

The Ars magna lucis et umbrae, Kircher’s magnum opus on light and shadow, is divided into 10 books, which are meant to correspond to the 10 Zephiroth. These are, according to the Cabbala, the 10 mystical stages in the emanation from God.

The artefacts

Kircher’s museum at the Collegio Romano, a ‘theatre of nature and art’ (Sepibus, 1678, frontispiece), contained many of the instruments described in his books. The extant descriptions of his museum give us some insight into the nature of the collection, which included not only several kinds of clocks, ingenious fountains, barometers, burning mirrors, perspective machines and anamorphoses, but also perpetual-motion machines, optical tricks, a mermaid’s tail, the bones of a giant and a host of

Metaphysics

In both Ars magna and Magnes, the body of the text, with its descriptions of mathematical and natural philosophical theories and instruments, is framed by a metaphysical frontispiece and a metaphysical epilogue.23

Utility and entertainment?

The idea emerges that Kircher’s oeuvre, this unity without unification, abounds in different ways of proclaiming an overarching message. His use of texts, figures and artefacts all have to be included and integrated to hear his harmonious chord of different meanings—religious, moral, political, philosophical, experimental, technical, artistic, …—working together to fulfil the Jesuit ideology. In an important paper, Harris (1989) has tried to identify this ideology and its interest for the

Applied metaphysics

Let us now recall those allegedly ‘impious’ instruments, seemingly desecrating the most holy mysteries: Kircher’s devices to create a magnetic and catoptric resurrection, and his magnetic toys re-enacting the rescue of the drowning Peter. Gorman (2001, p. 26), in an otherwise brilliant text, remarks: ‘Surely to place the Resurrection in this mechanical context was tantamount to reducing it to a secret combination of natural causes and denying its miraculous status?’ The point is, however, that

Technological expressionism

I have shown that Kircher gives multiple indications to read his instruments in a religious and metaphysical way, as ‘visualisations of the invisible’. In using this kind of allegory or symbolism, Kircher is a child of his time. Apart from a vogue of symbolism, however, the Jesuits had also more subtle reasons for not making certain meanings explicit. In their attempt to gain dominance in education and at court, Catholic messages should not be too overt in order to avoid provocation, and their

By way of conclusion: the meaning and utility of artefacts

This essay was a search for the different ‘meanings’ (or ‘uses’) of Kircher’s devices. I have analysed different texts and illustrations related with his artefacts, and indicated the practices in which they were used. His instruments carried ‘scientific’, political, social and apostolic meanings, as well as meanings related with entertainment, spectacles and courtly culture. I argued, however, that it is particularly important to interpret Kircher’s artefacts in their metaphysical framework,

Acknowledgements

In the course of my work on this project, I received support and helpful comments from Ann Blair, Peter Dear, Lorraine Daston, Adam Mosley, Nick Jardine, Eric Schliesser, Nick Wilding and an anonymous referee, and I am very grateful for this. Leuven University, the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Cornell University and Harvard University were institutional havens were I could do my research. This research was funded, at various stages, by the Francqui Foundation in

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