Abstract » Kiss
Budapest 2010
Encyclopaedism, Pansophia, and Universal Communication, 1560–1670
Farkas Gábor KISS
Alchemy in the Jesuit Order: With or Without Paracelsus?
Fundamental questions of science, for example the order of the cosmos or the possibility of alchemy, were solved authoritatively at the highest level in the Jesuit order (as in the Galileo affair), while conciliatory efforts, such as those of Christophorus Clavius in the case of Copernicanism, were dismissed. It is well known that Jesuits were not stubborn traditionalists from their foundation but that they were sensitive to new ideas and methods, yet from the 1620s the cosmos propagated and officially accepted by the order was the geocentric system of Tycho Brache. Still, Juan de Pineda, Cornelius a Lapide, Claudio Acquaviva, or Athanasius Kircher held firm Aristotelian views both in cosmology and in physics (which implied the scientific excommunication of alchemy), however different their standpoint might have been in detail.
As recent research has shown in several seventeenth-century cases, a number of influential personalities of the Order sided with alternative views. In certain cases, as that of Honoré Fabri, who explicitly supported the Copernican cosmos, such opinions were suppressed, while Athanasius Kircher, for example, who apparently aligned himself with the official viewpoint, could publish and republish his Iter extaticum, in which, as Jesuit censors noted, Copernicanism appears as a serious alternative and is widely discussed in proportion to other cosmological possibilities. The presence of such parallel paradigms is not a new phenomenon in the history of science, yet the question arises of how to interpret the problem of multiple possibilities in a powerful scientific community such as that of the Jesuits. Is it a simple rebirth of the ancient ‘indifference to truth’, as may be observed in the works of ancient scientific writers and polymaths (for example, Pliny the Elder and Manilius), a consequence of the encyclopaedic approach to science, or can it be considered as an aid to cover an inner crisis of conscience?
In my earlier studies, I tried to draw a general picture of the connections of Athanasius Kircher to Hungary, which can best be described as a centre-periphery relationship: Hungarian Catholic aristocrats, close to the circles of the Vienna court (Archbishop George Lippay, Count Francis Nádasdy) paid to get into the European respublica litteraria, something which is emphasised both in the letter exchanges and in dedications, and – as a contemporary Jesuit notes – they tried to invite Kircher personally to Hungary, ‘to make the fame of our poor country shine brighter’. On the other hand, we can detect Kircher’s scientific influence as well: a number of anonymous publications (a series of calendars, a treatise about physiognomy and a prognosis about the comet of 1661) printed at the Jesuit University of Trnava (Nagyszombat) have survived from the years 1658–69, all of which name a certain ‘Astrophilus’ as the author. Documentary evidence (taken from the Jesuit ‘Litterae annuae’ of the Austrian Province and the correspondence of Athanasius Kircher) shows that Astrophilus must have been Johann Misch, a Luxemburger Jesuit teaching at the University. Misch dealt with astrology (in the prognostications of the calendars, where the most important issue for him was the relation of free will to judicial astrology), with astronomy (he described the first telescopic astronomical observation in Hungary in his prognosis about the comet), with physiognomy (he published a summary of the Physiognomia humana of Honorius Nicquetius in 1663), and with alchemy (he exchanged letters with Kircher about the fixation of mercury). Following the experiments of Misch, Dr Georg Schaidenperger, a close friend of his and the doctor of the Jesuit College of Trnava, addressed several questions to Kircher concerning his criticism of alchemy and of the scientific work of Paracelsus, to which Kircher devoted several chapters in his Mundus subterraneus (1665). In these letters, Schaidenperger tried to maintain both the theoretical and the practical possibility of alchemical transmutation, and to defend Paracelsus, whom he thought to be the greatest German scholar, from the charges of heresy and misconduct.
In my paper, I will try to answer two questions. First, what rhetoric and communication strategies could a well-educated physician living at the scientific periphery of Europe use to persuade a Jesuit celebrity of science to change his mind in a fundamental issue of physics? Second, how does his approach to alchemical criticism relate to other contemporary efforts to destabilise the official standpoint of the Order, particularly in Vienna.
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