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

particularly if swampy or putrescent or excremental. Who could deny that maggots appeared on rotting flesh? “It be a matter of daily observation,” as one seventeenth-century writer characterized it, “that infinite numbers of worms are produced in dead bodies and decayed plants.” And plenty of the old authorities, including Aristotle, agreed. (Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation from
living
matter too, contending that cabbages engendered caterpillars.) Augustine surmised that
semina occulta
(hidden seeds) were responsible for things that sprang up from the earth “without any union of parents.” Pliny held that insects originated from rotten food and milk and flesh, as well as from fruit, dew, and rain. Ovid, Plutarch, Virgil, and Democritus all apparently believed that bees were born from the dung of bulls.
    Aristotle didn’t stand in the way of modern science all by himself. And it wasn’t impossible or uncommon, especially outside the Church, to disagree with Aristotelian ideas. But natural philosophy was philosophy: it was more through reason than observation that the natural world was known; through erudition, as opposed to experimentation, that the “truth” of a matter was usually determined. Ancient authorities held sway; the more ancient they were, the more sway they held. Knowledge increased by adding authorities, arguments, and commentaries onto the pile, rather than by ruling out ideas through trial.
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    KIRCHER DIDN’T GET very far in physics in Paderborn. Barely two months had been spent in the course when, as he put it, “a new crisis arose which presented to me the ultimate occasion to endure suffering and grief on behalf of Christ.”
    The crisis came in the form of Prince Christian of Brunswick, also known as Christian the Younger, the Insane Bishop, the Mad Bishop, and the Mad Halberstadter. This Protestant military leader sometimes referred to himself as
“Gottes Freund, der Pfaffen Feind”
(God’s friend, the priests’ foe), other times simply as “the supreme hater of Jesuits.” Rallying to the increasingly complicated cause against the Catholic Hapsburg emperor, Christian had levied an army of ten thousand and was advancing through Westphalia, in the direction of Paderborn.
    Christian had been made bishop of Halberstadt just a few years before, at the age of seventeen, after the death of his older bishop brother. “He possessed little qualification for this office,” wrote twentieth-century historian C. V. Wedgwood, “save an unreasonable dislike of the Catholics.” Christian wore a sparse mustache and an early modern mullet, and he was preceded in Paderborn by his well-cultivated reputation for committing unspeakable atrocities. “The most famous of them, namely that he forced the nuns of a plundered convent to wait, naked, on him and his officers, was invented by a journalist in Cologne.” Nevertheless, he had torn through Westphalia in his own particular way. “He issued startling letters, suggestively burnt at the four corners, and bearing the words ‘Fire! Fire! Blood! Blood!’ to every sizable village he passed. This method seldom failed to extract a ransom in hard cash from the people.”
    As Christian’s army approached, the Jesuit superiors acted to close the college—“lest there be a violent attack on the city and all be cut down to a man,” Kircher explained.Soon a crowd of Paderborn’s Protestants formed outside its doors; Christian’s proximity apparently freed them to manifest their own hatred toward the Jesuits. When the rector went out to speak to the mob, a burning torch was thrown at him. He was beaten and dragged away. Inside the school, a plan was made for the priests and novices to leave that night in small groups. They were to change out of their robes and into secular clothes. “And since the enemy was beginning to encircle