Die große kosmologische Kontroverse: Rekonstruktionsversuche anhand des Itinerarium exstaticum von Athanasius Kircher S. J. (1602–1680) (review)

Modern hindsight tells us the great cosmological controversy of the seventeenth century revolved around Galileo Galilei, from his observations with the telescope in 1610 to his condemnation for heresy by the Roman Inquisition in 1633. In seventeenth-century eyes, however, as Harald Siebert shows in this meticulously researched, subtly argued book, Galileo’s career formed one episode in a much longer, larger discussion about the world’s composition and our own place in it. Within the Roman College of the Society of Jesus, where Galileo had made both respectful friends and bitter enemies, the controversy took on particular urgency, for the College had ranked as one of the foremost European centers for astronomical research ever since Father Christoph Clavius led the team that reformed the calendar for Pope Gregory XIII in the early 1580s. There at the Roman College in 1634, a few months after Galileo’s sentence of life imprisonment had been commuted to house arrest, a German Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, arrived to take up the professorship in mathematics that had once been held by Clavius himself. Another twelve years would pass before Kircher finally set down his thoughts on cosmology. He had hardly been lazy in the meantime: in a little more than a decade, he had written large, ambitious books on magnetism, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (which he claimed to be able to read), acoustics, and machines, gaining an international reputation for the breadth of his knowledge and an impressive array of illustrious patrons. When he finally did write on cosmology, he chose the same medium, the dialogue, that Galileo had used for his controversial Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. Kircher, however, wrote his own dialogue, the Itinerarium exstaticum of 1656, in Latin rather than Galileo’s Tuscan vernacular. Furthermore, the conversation in Kircher’s Itinerarium took place between a Jesuit father, Theodidactus, and an angel, Cosmiel, who guided Theodidactus through the heavens much as Beatrice once guided Dante, albeit with a biting wit more reminiscent of Galileo’s acid-tongued alter ego, Salviati (to whom Theodidactus plays a dense Simplicio).

Siebert traces the complicated journey of Kircher’s Itinerarium through the toils of the Jesuits’ system of internal censorship, its initial publication in Rome, and its subsequent republication in Germany four years later, in an edition annotated (and sometimes altered) by Kircher’s onetime student and subsequent colleague, for a brief period, at the Roman College, Father Gaspar Schott. Close friends, Kircher and Schott, as the book reveals, maintained distinct opinions about the cosmos and the ways of the world, and shaped their editions of Kircher’s Itinerarium to significantly different effect. Siebert provides the most incisive account to date of Kircher’s distinctive world system, which Cosmiel describes as almost infinite in extent, filled with planets circling around a myriad of stars, but with the whole marvelous machinery centered on a stationary earth. It was a tense compromise between religious orthodoxy and scientific speculation, and Gaspar Schott, for one, would have none of it; his revision of the Itinerarium moves Cosmiel and Theodidactus (and implicitly Kircher) more firmly into the ranks of the Copernicans. Siebert’s painstaking comparison of the 1656 Roman and 1660 German editions of the Itinerarium raises tantalizing questions about what these two Jesuit scientists really thought, about the universe and about each other; whatever they thought, it was of baroque complexity.

Siebert’s most striking contribution in this remarkable volume is his painstaking reconstruction of Kircher’s cosmological system, with its careful effort to preserve the essence of Church doctrine by retaining a fixed center point for the great cosmic machinery, and yet taking into account the evidence provided by decades of research with telescope, helioscope, and more traditional astronomical instruments. The result is an anomaly in...