Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Read Online Free PDF Page A

applying their minds and their senses to the story of Christ’s life and good works. In the third week, to the blood and tears of his passion. And in the last week, finally, with joy and gratitude, unshuttered windows and sunshine, to his resurrection. As meditations progressed, novices were urged to compare their own previous choices and actions with those of Jesus, and to contemplate the kind of life that God intended for them—they were to try to sort away all other voices, influences, and impulses. Discerning God’s call from the deceptive call “practiced by the evil leader,” otherwise known as the devil, was difficult, especially since the evil leader often tempted people “under the appearance of good.”
    The key was to get rid of what Ignatius called “disordered attachments” to such things as comfort, success, and praise. Losing these attachments required a special kind of humility: “I have it,” he explained, “if I find myself at a point where I do not desire, nor even prefer, to be rich rather than poor, to seek fame rather than disgrace, to desire a long rather than a short life, provided it is the same for the service of God and the good of my soul.” And yet the most perfect humility is achieved when you actually “want and choose poverty with Christ rather than wealth, and ignominy with Christ in great ignominy rather than fame,” and when you “desire more to be thought a fool and an idiot for Christ, who was first taken to be such, rather than to be thought wise and prudent in this world.”
    It can’t be said whether Kircher, still a teenager, actually discerned God’s call, or whether he believed that he had, or whether these intensive days of meditation and fasting brought on any of the psychological or physical symptoms—euphoria, light-headedness—that might be mistaken for the effects of spiritual revelation. But these exercises had a profound influence on him. In order to achieve salvation in heaven—his ultimate desire, and a preference or self-interest that no one, not even Ignatius, had chosen to give up—he understood that he was going to have to develop some humility here on earth. And soon, it seems, he took pride in showing more humility than any of his peers. Kircher devoted himself to the ecclesiastical and communal life, and after making his first vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience at the end of the two-year novitiate, he began the three-year program in philosophy. “I did not dare to reveal my talent of intellect,” he wrote in his memoir, “fearing lest, from the complacency arising from some degree of vainglory, I would diminish the flow of divine gifts into me.” The decision had the added benefit of bringing on the kind of scorn that, as described by Saint Ignatius, made him seem even
more
like Christ. “This silence and masking of my ability caused both the instructors and the students to consider me stupid,” Kircher remembered. In fact, they “all judged me to be foolish and stupid in my rejoicing in and exultation of the love of Christ.”
    In Kircher’s retelling, he not only took his spiritual life more seriously than the other novices did, but actually had something significant—“the great gift of my intellect”—to be humble about. But if one of the most verbal men in history really kept silent, as he claimed, throughout his course in logic, an entire year of disputation and oral argument, it was in fact a profound act of self-restraint. And if he continued “in this manner” the next year, when studies turned to “physics,” or natural philosophy, now called physical or natural science, he must nevertheless have been paying attention; he devoted many of the next sixty years to it.
    â€”
    FOR THE HUMANIST JESUITS , there was no conflict between religion and knowledge of the natural world. A greater understanding