The Last Man Who Knew . . . What?

I’ve read in my life about two people being called The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Isaac Newton and Athanasius Kircher. One is extremely famous, and the other is Athanasius Kircher. I first heard about Kircher in a History of Music Theory class I took at the University of Iowa around 1985. There, he was presented as a polymath, which I learned was a fancy word meaning someone who knows everything. Among the things he knew, apparently, was music theory. But I never learned much of the details because his works on music have never been translated from Latin. (I started reading Kircher's Latin once and quickly realized that deficiency in Latin is one of the many gaps that make me Not A Man Who Knows Everything.)

In any case, learning more about Kircher had been on my mental back burner for decades, and this month that simmering pot finally got brought to the front and spilled its savory contents into my bowl. I had originally put Paula Findlen’s Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything on my reading list for year 4. (You can still see that title on the master list under the "Third Decade" tab at the top of this page.) But last year as I was buying the books for this year’s literary trek, Amazon’s “Customers also bought” feature changed my mind. It seems Amazon readers prefer Joscelyn Godwin’s Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World. It is a beautiful big coffee-table book filled with marvelously clear reprints of hundreds of amazing illustrations from Kircher’s books. Godwin explains that since most people today will have a hard time understanding the Christian and proto-scientific worldview and ideas by means of the texts of Kircher’s many works, the illustrations actually provide the best access to Kircher’s world for the twenty-first century reader. And for the most part he does an excellent job fulfilling that promise.

The book, for all its outstanding virtues, disappointed me in two ways, though. First, Godwin makes at least one mistake in explaining Kircher’s old-world view of the hierarchy of existence. In one diagram Kircher illustrates the inanimate, the sensitive, and the animate by means of three pictures, pictures which he lays out in a triangle and does not label, making it unclear from the text alone which picture goes with which concept. The pictures show – in alphabetical order – a cock and stag, a magnet’s needle, and a palm tree. Godwin’s explication links the inanimate with the needle, the animate to the animals, and the sensitive to the palm tree – the “sensitive palm tree,” he calls it. No one will argue that, of the three pictures, the magnet represents the inanimate. And the forms of the words sure suggest that the ANIMAls represent the ANIMAte. But are palm trees especially sensitive? I mean, do they cry when you insult them? If Godwin really knew the major sources of this Jesuit scholar (he repeatedly says that Jesuits were bound to accept Aristotelianism as interpreted by Aquinas), he would understand that these words represent levels of being. An iron needle has existence but, in spite of its movement, no life; it is inanimate. In addition to existence, a plant has life (Latin anima), but no sense of sight, hearing, etc. So it is animate but not sensitive. Animals, on the other hand, have existence and life and the five senses to boot, so they are sensitive. (Humans reach a fourth level of being, sharing existence, life, and senses with animals but adding reason. But rational creatures weren’t part of Kircher’s present purpose and so didn’t make it into the picture.) Now if Godwin got this central tenet of Aristotelianism wrong, what else, I wondered, did he misinterpret for me in illustrations of things that I knew less well?

I was disappointed in Kircher himself, as well, though. I thought he actually knew things in all the hot fields of study among seventeenth-century European intellectuals. But as Godwin explains (and here I have no reason to doubt him), all we can really say is that Kircher wrote about history, languages, astronomy, music, history of religion, ethics, geology, anthropology, mythology, and physics. What he didn’t know, he just made up. He claimed to have decoded the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but every obelisk ends up saying virtually the same thing in his “translations.” He drew pictures of many machines, only some of which he claimed to have built and seen working. He claimed to have a box of cards that wrote music automatically for the person who knew how to pull the cards out and interpret them, but he only showed samples of music that had been written this way (by whom?), not the system of cards itself.

So this dream I had enjoyed for thirty-five years, a dream of one day knowing about a fascinating genius that no one else knew about, my vision of having secret knowledge about a guy with secret knowledge, my hopes of being more entertaining at parties have all been dashed. I guess I’ll have to settle for Isaac Newton as my example of an intellectual paragon.

But actually, the Last Man Who Knew Everything was probably a woman who didn’t feel the need to tell the world about it.