Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Godwin Joscelyn
Title : Athanasius Kircher A renaissance man and the quest for lost knowledge
Year : 1979

Link download : Godwin_Joscelyn_-_Athanasius_Kircher_A_renaissance_man_and_the_quest_for_lost_knowledge.zip

The last of the polymaths. Scientific research in Kircher's day still had something half-magical about it, and its purpose was nothing less than to penetrate the workings of the Divine Mind. This was the ambition that spurred Athanasius Kircher, and it was the self-same goal that inspired many of his scientific contemporaries, from Kepler to Newton. But the seventeenth century also witnessed the opening of two fissures in human consciousness: fissures that have widened ever since. On a philosophical level, a dichotomy was posited between an objective, material world in which certainty and law prevailed, and a subjective world of mind which was largely an internal affair. A corresponding cultural gap opened between the sciences, whose preserve was henceforth the predictable world of matter, and the arts, which dealt with the realm of spirit, the unquantifiable but numinous domain of meaning, aspiration, and all that we call religion. These distinctions did not exist for Kircher, so much was he a child of the Renaissance. He spread the net of his interest and learning over a stupendous range of subjects. It is impossible to place him in a single category: was he the great musical encyclopaedist of the early Baroque, or the father of geology, or one of the first writers on germs? Was he the designer of magic lanterns and magnetic toys for noblemen and cardinals, or the translator of the Egyptian hieroglyphs ? Or, again, did he compile reports from the Far East, invent a system of logic and a symbolic language, or found one of the earliest museums? He did all of these, and much more. It is hard to think of a more universal man since Leonardo da Vinci. But while Leonardo's time was the high noon of the Italian Renaissance, Kircher lived to see Renaissance encyclopaedism ceding to modern specialization, and the whole basis of traditional thought challenged by the advances of natural science. ...