This book is about a quest for clarity, one that took place at a moment of perilous uncertainty for European intellectuals. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, thinkers in Europe began to question the entire endeavor of natural philosophy, thanks in part to the recovery and translation of several ancient works on skepticism. Until this point, Western philosophy had descended almost entirely from Aristotle, who had taught that the only real knowledge was certain knowledge of the causes of things, acquired through both observation and the logical syllogism. The ancient skeptics, however, had taught that certain knowledge was impossible; the most extreme had believed that we can never know anything at all. Sextus Empiricus (ca. 200 CE), who was cited frequently by early modern thinkers, had expanded upon the ideas of Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360 BCE) by arguing that the appearances of things might offer a way of knowing something about the world, but like Pyrrho and other skeptics, he questioned whether attaining knowledge was possible. Already struggling to assimilate the massive amounts of information flooding into Europe from the New World and Asia, a wide range of thinkers began to question not only the pursuit of knowledge but also the intellectual foundations of Western thought.1
Changes in how philosophers conceived of the study of nature affected early modern thought in profound ways. The utility of the senses, especially vision, was called into question to such a degree that some, like René Descartes (1596–1650), devised entire philosophical systems founded on rational thought instead of the senses. Others, like Robert Hooke (1635–1703), embraced technological “crutches” such as the telescope and microscope in an effort to make the eyes more powerful; in his Micrographia, Hooke advised “supplying [the] infirmities [of the senses] with Instruments, and, as it were, the adding of artificial Organs to the natural,” noting that such an endeavor “has been of late years accomplisht with prodigious benefit to all sorts of useful knowledge, by the invention of Optical Glasses.”2 At the same time, rather than seeking certain knowledge more and more naturalists began to seek only knowledge that was probable or likely. At the Royal Society of London, for example, the self-confessed followers of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) adopted experimental trials and the testimony of reliable witnesses to support their probable claims. The enterprise of natural philosophy changed profoundly, and by the end of the seventeenth century the foundations of modern science had started to take shape.3
Shifting conceptions of knowledge were a key part of the changing currents in early modern natural philosophy. Even so, historians of science first linked these developments almost exclusively with the “innovative” reformers of the seventeenth century, men that included Bacon, Descartes, Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and the others that still populate the hagiography of the so-called Scientific Revolution.4 More recently, scholars of alchemy, natural history, and technology have attempted to expand our understanding of past ideas by focusing not on the familiar traces of modernity glimpsed in the philosophy of the past but, instead, on the complex and varied ways in which early modern people tried to reconcile traditional modes of knowing with a world that seemed to grow larger and more unfamiliar all the time.5
Modern scholarship, however, has struggled to accommodate the role played by religion in the formation of scientific ideas. Our understanding of the past has come a long way since Robert Merton first articulated his famous thesis in which he linked Puritanism with the rise of modern science; we now have a clearer sense of how early modern thinkers of all confessions sought to reconcile their religious convictions with the changing scientific culture of the time.6 Because many of those in Catholic orders were constrained by Church doctrine and politics, however, they often found it difficult to endorse publicly some of the novel theories that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and this seeming reticence on the part of many Catholic intellectuals has made it easier for contemporaries and historians alike to overlook these contributions to the history of science.
Foremost in such contributions were the Jesuits, the colloquialism applied to members of the Society of Jesus, which was founded in 1540 with the approval of Pope Paul III and led for almost two decades by Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556). Ignatius conceived of the Society originally as an order of itinerant missionaries, and within a decade of its founding its members began to spread throughout the known world. Even before Loyola’s death in 1556, however, the direction of the Society started to change. Though Jesuit missionaries continued to travel to far-flung corners of the world, education became increasingly central to the Society’s larger mission. Their colleges multiplied across Europe and beyond, founded wherever Jesuit missionaries and educators could establish a lasting presence, and it was in and around these colleges that the Jesuit study of the sciences took root.7
The precepts that governed Jesuit life and thought demanded public adherence to the philosophical doctrines of Aristotle. Throughout the seventeenth century, however, Aristotelianism was under attack in the universities, coffeehouses, and salons of an increasingly skeptical Europe, and this explains in part why Jesuit philosophers and mathematicians tend to occupy an ambiguous place in histories of intellectual change. Some modern historians have claimed that the Jesuits, as a whole, contributed relatively little to the advancement of science.8 Others have argued that Jesuit scientific activity was routinely subordinated to religious goals and that scientific work as such was seen as valuable only insofar as it contributed to the spiritual mission of the Society.9 Such an interpretation would seem to be reinforced by statements like those made by a close confidant to Ignatius, Jéronimo Nadal (1507–1580), who once wrote that “for us lessons and scholarly exercises are a sort of hook with which we fish for souls.”10 Nonetheless, some historians have argued that the apostolic and spiritual goals of the Society and its repeated insistence on seeing all works as ad majorem gloriam Dei, “to the greater glory of God,” actually left a wide latitude for philosophical and scientific pursuits that did not directly contradict religious orthodoxy. Others, however, see the affirmations of piety that appear often in Jesuit works as a means of satisfying the Society’s censors but not necessarily indicating a genuinely spiritual or pious dimension to the endeavors of all Jesuit philosophers and naturalists.11
Thus, what exactly constitutes “Jesuit science” remains a thorny question for modern scholars, much as it did for early modern Jesuits themselves. Philosophers within the Society of Jesus were constrained by the rules that defined their intellectual lives, and their works subject to censorial oversight. In spite of these restrictions, however, the Jesuits of the seventeenth century were not marginal or ambivalent participants in the intellectual culture of their day. As this study will demonstrate, some highly visible members of the Society dared to question the fundamental tenets of their shared philosophy, grappling with questions about certainty, the utility of the senses, and their implications for the study of nature.
This book examines the ideas of several prominent Jesuit authors whose published works focused on the secrets of nature, and follows their efforts in the seventeenth century to expose and, ultimately, to banish these secrets from the realm of natural philosophy. Collectively, these men shaped an innovative methodology in which natural philosophy, imaginative visualization, and the ingenuity of artifice worked in concert to present a vision of the world free of obfuscation and uncertainty.
My interest in the Jesuit study of the insensible was sparked originally by a consideration of the meditative art produced within the Society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The complex ways in which Jesuit novices learned to negotiate the path to spiritual illumination depended upon the integrated exercise of the senses, particularly vision, and the imagination. By using imagery to stimulate both the eyes and the mind, certain meditative texts inculcated a rigorous methodology that encouraged the imaginative visualization of places, individuals, and abstract ideals that were otherwise unavailable to the direct experience of the senses. Given that such methodologies were well established within the novitiate curriculum of the Society by the early years of the seventeenth century, I found myself wondering if, and how, these methodologies might have influenced the study of nature, and particularly the study of its secrets. This book is the fruit of those early speculations.
At first glance, the idea that Jesuit naturalists could dedicate themselves to the study of such phenomena is problematic. They were obliged by the rules of the Society to teach and defend the ideas of Aristotle (at least while those ideas did not contradict their faith), and because Aristotelian philosophy concerned itself only with causes that fell within the regular course of nature, the hidden causes of extraordinary phenomena were necessarily deemed indemonstrable. A major component of my argument here, however, is that certain Jesuits consciously and deliberately laid the groundwork for an intellectual shift away from the tenets of Aristotelianism; thus, it should come as little surprise that they might do so by studying nature’s secrets and their ontological home, the preternatural.
I will describe in this study two main motivations that drove some Jesuits to expose the secrets of nature: on the one hand, a desire to impose greater clarity on an increasingly fractured and uncertain ontology, and on the other, a perceived need to respond to the sharp and frequent challenges leveled at the Society’s Aristotelian philosophy in this period. Thus, the Jesuit study of natural secrets was tied intimately to larger concerns that preoccupied the vast majority of early modern thinkers: who possessed the right to order and define the world, and how they should do so.
In examining both the spirituality and training of early modern Jesuits, I have come to see elements of thought and practice that lend themselves to both the study and revelation of the unseen. Jesuit novices were trained in techniques of imaginative visualization designed to render visible a range of insensible subjects—by no means unheard of in Christian meditation, but expressed and elaborated upon with careful precision by Jesuits in this period. Pioneered by the Society’s founder, Ignatius Loyola, and developed further by his successors, Jesuit spirituality focused primarily on the figure of Christ and encouraged the active participation of both the senses and the imagination in the act of spiritual communion with God. Its roots lay in varied traditions of medieval piety, but it received its most comprehensive articulation in the Spiritual Exercises, the rigorous program of self-reflection and meditation drawn up by Ignatius and revisited annually by every member of the Society. Ignatius designed the Exercises so that an individual could complete them in about a month, dividing the content into a series of four “weeks” during which the exercitant converted himself from a common sinner to a penitent servant of God and the Church.
The conversion envisioned by Ignatius involved the exercitant’s rigorous self-identification with the suffering Christ and subsequent joy at Christ’s resurrection and ascension, endeavors that he framed almost entirely in sensual and imaginative terms. Ignatius borrowed this emphasis on the sensual from earlier articulations of Christian piety, most particularly those which precipitated his own spiritual awakening as a young man. One of those sources was the Vita Jesu Christi, or The Life of Christ by the Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony, a popular fourteenth-century work that repeatedly exhorted the reader to imagine himself as part of the described scenes taken from events in the life of Christ. Ludolph’s Vita descended from a meditative tradition that stretched back to Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey to God, where he argued that “[all created things] are examples, or rather exemplifications set before our still unrefined and sense-oriented minds, so that by the sensible things which they see they might be transferred to the intelligible which they cannot see.”12
The method embodied in the Exercises involved the visual and imaginative representation of those things singled out as foci of the meditative act, even those that were hidden or impossible to see directly. These could be abstract ideas like the quality of divine mercy or a historical scene from the life of Christ, but no matter how difficult it might be to “see” such things, they become real and tangible for the individual following the Spiritual Exercises through imagined scenes and sensual descriptions.13 The Exercises urged the exercitant to place himself fully within the description provided, drawing on his imagination to create an intense visualization of the scene and those inhabiting it. One finds an important example of imaginative visualization in repeated instances of the “composition of the place,” a kind of visualization that depended almost entirely on sensual impressions; these might include a room where Christ had stood, or a hillside where Mary had rested. A particularly effective example in the Exercises is the description of Hell, with detail provided for each of the five senses: “See in imagination the vast fires, and the souls enclosed, as it were, in bodies of fire … hear the wailing, the howling, cries, and blasphemies against Christ our Lord and against His saints … smell the smoke, the sulphur, the filth and corruption … [etc.].”14
The mingled use of the senses and the imagination that pervades the Exercises came to characterize Jesuit spirituality in this period, but also gives us a way of understanding how and why particular Jesuits approached the problem of insensible causation in nature. It is critical to understand that this manner of contemplation—this steady movement between seen and unseen—was not an occasional preoccupation for Jesuits living in the seventeenth century. As members of communities whose daily rhythms were dictated by religious observance, prayer, and the sensual, imaginative contemplation designed by Ignatius and his successors, it would have become a habit of mind, an oft-repeated way of thinking about God and His creation. We do not need those Jesuits at the heart of this book, individuals like Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) or Niccolò Cabeo (1586–1650), to tell us that this intense contemplation of the unseen lay at the very center of their lives as Jesuits. We know that it did, just as we know that these men, and other naturalists and philosophers within the Society of Jesus, would have engaged in forms of spiritual activity such as that laid out in the Ignatian Exercises at the same time that they were writing works on the natural world. There can be no doubt that the uniquely Jesuit methodology of contemplating the unseen would have played a central role in the lives of highly placed philosophers within the Society, and thus it is eminently sensible that these thinkers should have turned those strategies of imaginative visualization, image-making, and meditative contemplation to the philosophical study of nature’s secrets.
The kind of contemplation inculcated within the early modern Society of Jesus demanded that one move between the concrete and the abstract, and from the visible to the unseen. Importantly, this kind of intellectual movement is also central to mathematics, which deals in both the idealized and the mundane. This similarity provides a useful link between the spiritual practices of the Society of Jesus and the way in which those practices were applied to the study of nature, particularly in the realm of mathematics. As many early thinkers understood it, mathematics was inherently abstract, describing not the actual world but an idealized version of it. Ancient followers of Pythagoras had taught that mathematical correspondences dictated the nature of the cosmos, an unseen framework on which physical reality rested, while Aristotle had struggled to reconcile his physics with a mathematics that seemed divorced from the qualitative motion and change that, for him, defined nature.15 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, mathematics assumed an increasingly prominent role in the study of nature, becoming intertwined as it did so with wider philosophical questions; no longer seen as merely one way of describing particular phenomena, it became, for some, the best way to do so.
The epistemic questions raised by the mathematization of nature were grounded, first and foremost, in notions of certainty: proponents of mathematics in the sixteenth century frequently emphasized the certainty of mathematical axioms and demonstrations. The seventeenth century, however, saw these assumptions complicated in numerous ways, not least among them an increasing desire to connect mathematical reasoning with the increasingly practical and experiential character of natural philosophy. At the same time, attempts to conceptualize the universe as a vast machine encouraged early modern philosophers to analyze the varied parts of nature with respect to the laws of mathematics and, more specifically, the (mathematically derived) laws of motion.16
By the time Niccolò Cabeo, Athanasius Kircher, and Gaspar Schott (1608–1666) set about redefining the study of insensible phenomena within the Society of Jesus, they did so as part of an intellectual culture that had already grappled with fundamental questions of seeing and knowing, not only within Jesuit meditative traditions but also within the context of applied mathematics. These authors all came to depend upon the singular experience in their efforts to study the insensible parts of nature, shifting their focus away from the evident demonstration of causes derived from collective or universal assent that traditionally had characterized Aristotelian epistemology. Likewise, they each embraced the intervention of artifice, seeing a powerful tool for revelation in its capacity to imitate nature. Both of these practices—the dependence upon singular experiences and the use of artifice—had, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, become enshrined in the myriad disciplines that constituted what early modern people called “mixed mathematics,” which applied mathematical methods to a wide range of endeavors and which rose to intellectual prominence in this period.
Before individual Jesuits could benefit from these new ways of studying and manipulating nature, however, mathematicians within the Society first had to convince their peers that the study of mathematics was both valid and philosophically profitable. Though mathematics appeared in the Ratio studiorum of 1599, which codified the general curriculum that was to be taught in the Society’s schools, before this there existed relatively little institutional support for the study of mathematics within the Society. This fact was rooted in a widespread reluctance on the part of philosophical instructors in the Society’s colleges to affirm mathematics as a discipline on equal footing with physics. Mathematics, many claimed, could not provide the kind of information that had long been considered essential to the study of nature: certain demonstrations of causes.
Christoph Clavius (1538–1612), one of the Society’s greatest mathematicians, set out to demonstrate that mathematics should be taught as a properly philosophical enterprise, capable of attaining real knowledge about the world. Writing in the 1580s, he placed mathematics on a hierarchical scale between physics, which studied material phenomena, and metaphysics, which concerned itself with subjects divorced from matter. Mathematics, according to Clavius, used hypothetical entities abstracted from matter to describe material objects, lending it a potentially unique position in Aristotelian philosophy.17 Therein, however, lay the difficulty: one of the most serious objections to mathematics concerned the ontological status of its subjects, which were abstracted from the physical world and were not considered “real” in the same way as the subjects of Aristotelian physics. The task faced by Clavius, and by disciples such as Christoph Grienberger (1561–1636), involved a wholescale redefinition of the pursuit of knowledge, as well as a movement away from the syllogistic and sense-based aspects of late-sixteenth century Aristotelianism.18
The legitimacy of mathematics received considerable support from a theological debate concerning divine grace between the Jesuits and the Dominicans around the turn of the seventeenth century, another example of the mutual interaction of philosophy and theology within the Society. In that debate the Jesuits posited the concept of a scientia media, a “middle way” of knowing, and used this to justify their claim that God could have a certain knowledge of hypothetical objects (considered, in the “pure” Thomism espoused by the Dominicans, to be an impossibility). The advent of this scientia media meant that “the dichotomy between the hypothetical and the real, the practical and the speculative, the necessary and the probable, was ignored.”19 This blurring of lines permitted the followers of Clavius to argue that one could still arrive at a knowledge of (hypothetical) mathematical entities that was no less certain than that of physical causes.
In the wake of Clavius’s efforts, both mathematicians and astronomers within the Society were instrumental in altering the resolutely Aristotelian orientation of Jesuit philosophy by embracing new ideas about experience.20 In particular, Jesuit mathematicians focused on the utility of the singular experience fashioned by the use of apparatus or artifice, a theme that would be deployed most effectively in the spectacular museum of Athanasius Kircher and its links with the growing culture within the Society of public mathematical demonstration.21 Traditionally, Aristotelian knowledge had depended to a significant degree on universal experience: that which was experienced by everyone was deemed demonstrably certain in a way that a singular experience could not be. A contrived event, whether a discrete observation made using a telescope or a single experiment of the kind reported by virtuosi like Robert Boyle, was sharply and inevitably circumscribed by circumstance, and its utility to natural philosophy was similarly limited.22 Consider, for example, the misgivings of Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650), one of the most prominent Jesuit astronomers of the period. In his Oculus of 1619 he expressed reservations about the deliberate manipulation of contrived experiences, and articulated a profound concern about the artificial interference of instruments such as the telescope, which restricted sharply the numbers of people to whom phenomena were available for observation. Only by creating a means of observing celestial phenomena like sunspots without the aid of a telescope could a properly Peripatetic science become possible; divorcing astronomy from such artificial assistance meant that such phenomena were now accessible “to the eye of anyone.”23
What preoccupied many of these debates within the Society of Jesus was a growing desire to reconcile singular and contrived experiences with the Aristotelian necessity for the collective or universal experience. In seeking to legitimize such a methodology, of course, proponents of mathematics were far from alone. Historians have demonstrated that early modern thinkers employed a range of strategies to legitimize the use of contrived experiences; the oft-cited example is that of Robert Boyle and his contemporaries in the Royal Society of London, who took great pains to present such contrived events as valid knowledge-claims that could support legitimate philosophical conclusions. Herein lay another, related challenge: namely, how to represent a series of singular, contrived experiences in a fashion that would win general assent from one’s audience. Boyle chose to provide his audiences with such circumstantial detail that they became “virtual witnesses,” localizing and describing his experiments so precisely that his readers could almost believe they were there themselves.24 Interestingly, his strategy was not really all that different from the “composition of place” created by Ignatius as part of the Spiritual Exercises—in both cases, they encouraged the reader to imagine himself actually to have been present, and thereby to have “seen” the event in question.
From the efforts of Clavius to find a place for mathematics in Peripatetic epistemology to Scheiner’s struggles with the legitimacy of the singular, contrived experience, prominent members of the Society of Jesus wrestled for decades with basic questions concerning knowledge, observation, and experience. Importantly, they did so when confronted by circumstances and practices that frustrated the act of seeing: a geometrical abstraction; sunspots that could be observed only with the aid of a telescope; a singular experiment witnessed by a select few. In every case, the challenge was to communicate the particulars of this unseen thing to an audience who could not see it for themselves. The Jesuits were far from alone in facing this challenge; it also preoccupied naturalists in the New World and beyond, who struggled to codify a means of conveying information about exotic flora and fauna to contemporaries back in Europe.25 Nonetheless, the Jesuits had to confront this problem within the confines of an Aristotelian epistemology that prized the certain demonstration of causes and the evident empiricism of the senses. There is, consequently, no small irony in the fact that the Society’s identity simultaneously constrained its members within this epistemological framework while, at the same time, offering them a range of strategies and tools with which they might work around these institutional limitations.
In the following chapters, I will show how particular Jesuits responded to a series of contemporary crises in early modern natural philosophy. These individuals argued for substantial changes to Aristotelian philosophy, particularly the rejection of occult qualities and their substitution by other, more meaningful ways of categorizing and explaining insensible phenomena. In some cases, too, we find explicit rejections of certainty as the gold standard for philosophical explanations, another important epistemic shift in early modern Aristotelianism. Like their contemporaries, these Jesuits struggled to reconcile seeing and knowing, dwelling on the problems inherent in the act of seeing before offering solutions to these problems, solutions sometimes rooted in the use of artifice and technology. Yet they also embraced the utility of vision, using images and spectacles to make manifest a range of insensible forces and phenomena. This bewildering, almost paradoxical struggle was shared by others in the seventeenth century; indeed, in some important ways it was emblematic of the wider struggles fought within and around the practice of natural philosophy in this period.
This study centers on Jesuit intellectuals in Europe rather than including the ideas and works of their contemporaries who were active in Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere. Some of the philosophical and methodological challenges faced by these individuals were similar to those encountered by the Jesuits, as I have already suggested. In both cases, the main problem involved making manifest those parts of nature that others could not see or experience directly. While there exists a great deal of excellent scholarship on the science practiced and disseminated by Jesuit missionaries and naturalists overseas, I focus on individuals tied intimately to the Society’s colleges in Europe and to the center of Jesuit influence in Rome. Immersed as they were in European scientific culture, they were able to respond more quickly and comprehensively to the intellectual changes that characterized the seventeenth century, and because their works circulated more widely and easily than did those arriving from overseas their ideas were likely to have reverberated more strongly.26
Most of this study centers on three figures: Niccolò Cabeo, Athanasius Kircher, and Gaspar Schott. They were not the only Jesuits to focus on the problem of nature’s secrets, but they were among the most prominent and widely read of those within the Society of Jesus who dedicated the bulk of their works to the study of insensible phenomena. They were connected in ways that are useful for the historian, by philosophical interests as well as by circumstance. Kircher, for example, followed closely in Cabeo’s footsteps in his work on the magnet, and Schott studied with Kircher at various points over many years. They also represent a continuity of ideas across almost forty years, a fact which suggests that their concern with the hidden realms of nature was part of a sustained endeavor to adapt the common philosophy of the Society to the enormous changes rippling through early modern intellectual life. Moreover, each of these men was connected closely to the culture of education that prevailed in the Society’s many colleges: Cabeo’s Philosophia magnetica was written in the style of the neo-Aristotelian textbook, Schott spent decades teaching students at colleges in Sicily and Germany, and Kircher was appointed as professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit college in baroque Rome.
Together, these three Jesuits exemplified a unified but diverse set of approaches to nature’s secrets. Like all of their contemporaries within the Society, they were trained as skilled manipulators of the links between what could be sensed and what could not. The Spiritual Exercises and other examples of meditative practice, such as Jéronimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia, were central to Jesuit identity in this period.27 They encouraged a tightly focused attention to the movement between the manifest and the insensible, something that persisted throughout the life of each individual member. In other words, the Jesuits were early modern experts in transforming what could not be sensed by the eyes into something that could be seen by the mind, and thereby understood. This shared identity is worth emphasizing, for Kircher, Cabeo, and those like them were not unique within the Society. They were not outliers, nor really all that unusual. Though of course we should hesitate to leap to the conclusion that all Jesuits thought as these individuals did, it is worth remembering that these particular men were active and accepted members of the Society, trusted to teach and to publish. Indeed, this last point is particularly significant, for publishing has always been carefully regulated in the Society of Jesus: that a Jesuit received permission to publish his ideas suggested that those ideas were, at the least, not embarrassing to the Society, and may even have been embraced, openly or not, by others as well.
Kircher, Cabeo, and Schott each benefited from the pioneering efforts of Clavius and his intellectual heirs, and consequently were able to extol the virtues of the singular, contrived experience that offered insights into the invisible force of the magnet or the unseen depths of the earth. They could question the utility of the senses and embrace instead the exercise of the imagination championed first by Ignatius and then elaborated upon by followers such as Jerónimo Nadal, who made the imagination central to the contemplation of the unseen. They could also exploit the possibilities of imagery and artifice in communicating information about the unseen and unwitnessed parts of nature, as did Scheiner and others. The point here is not merely that the Jesuits were grappling with many of the same epistemological challenges faced by their contemporaries across Europe; it should no longer come as a surprise that prominent thinkers within the Society were active participants in the large-scale changes sweeping through early modern natural philosophy. What is both significant and interesting is how these Jesuits couched their responses to these epistemological problems. Their expected adherence to at least a nominal Aristotelianism required them to be far more ingenious in how they addressed issues of certainty, experience, and sensualism than those contemporaries who could bluntly dismiss the Peripatetic philosophy, or who could at least pretend to do so.
Some, like Scheiner and his fellow astronomers within the Society, proceeded cautiously, one foot resting squarely in the Aristotelian camp even as they struggled to change attitudes towards the singular experience and the intervention of artifice in the pursuit of natural philosophical knowledge. Others, particularly Kircher and his disciple Schott, constructed sprawling baroque edifices overflowing with ornamentations and contradictions that merely flirted with the fundamentals of Peripateticism. But in all of these cases, individual Jesuits constructed complex strategies that allowed them to work within the institutional confines of their Society while simultaneously innovating upon their shared philosophy and taking it into the uncharted realms of the unseen.
1 Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1964); Brendan Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Henrik Lagerlund, ed., Rethinking the History of Skepticism: The Missing Medieval Background (Leiden: Brill, 2010). On European struggles to assimilate discoveries from the New World, see as examples Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and Maria Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
2 Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), Preface, pp. 3–4.
3 Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); on Descartes, see Raffaella De Rosa, Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); on the experimental culture in the Royal Society see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
4 Classic examples of this kind of scholarship include Richard S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (New York: John Wiley, 1971) and A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science, 1500–1750 (New York: Longman, 1983; first pub. 1954).
5 Examples include Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Allison B. Kavey, Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550–1600 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
6 R.K. Merton, “Puritanism, Pietism, and Science,” The Sociological Review, vol. 28 (1936), pp. 1–30. For examples of more recent and nuanced scholarship, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, eds., Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
7 John W. O’Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
8 Examples of such scholarship include Paolo Rossi, “The Scientist,” in Baroque Personae, ed. R. Villari (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 285–6; Isabelle Pantin, “Is Clavius Worth Reappraising? The Impact of a Jesuit Mathematical Teacher on the Eve of the Astronomical Revolution,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 27 (1996), pp. 593–8.
9 For example, Steven J. Harris, “Transposing the Merton Thesis: Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of the Jesuit Scientific Tradition,” Science in Context, vol. 3 (1989), pp. 29–65.
10 Jéronimo Nadal, Exhortatio Coloniensis 6a (1567), in P. Hieronymi Nadal Commentarii de Instituto Societatis Iesu, ed. Michael Nicolau, S.J., vol. 5 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1962), p. 832, n. 21.
11 On the latitude sometimes afforded to Jesuit science, see Paul Richard Blum, “Apostolato dei Collegi: On the Integration of Humanism in the Educational Programme of the Jesuits,” History of Universities, vol. 5 (1985), pp. 101–15; on the secular rather than pious motivations of some Jesuits, see Mordechai Feingold, “Jesuits: Savants,” in Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003), esp. p. 7 and passim.
12 George E. Ganss, S.J., ed., Ignatius of Loyola: The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), p. 19.
13 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 180.
14 Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, points 65–70.
15 R. Netz, “The Pythagoreans,” in Teun Koetsier and Luc Bergmans, eds., Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004); Edward Hussey, “Aristotle and Mathematics,” in Christopher Tuplin and Tracey Elizabeth Rihll, eds., Science and Mathematics in Ancient Greek Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 217–29.
16 Michael Mahoney, “The Mathematical Realm of Nature,” in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds., The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 704.
17 Peter Dear, “Jesuit Mathematical Science and the Reconstitution of Experience in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 18, no. 2 (1987), p. 139. See also Romano Gatto, “Christoph Clavius’ ‘Ordo Servandus in Addiscendis Disciplinis Mathematicis’ and the Teaching of Mathematics in Jesuit Colleges at the Beginning of the Modern Era,” Science and Education, vol. 15 (2006), pp. 235–58.
18 For more on Clavius and Grienberger, see Ugo Baldini, “The Academy of Mathematics of the Collegio Romano from 1553 to 1612,” in Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, pp. 47–98.
19 Rivka Feldhay, “Knowledge and Salvation in Jesuit Culture,” Science in Context, vol. 1, no. 2 (1987), p. 207.
20 Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 32.
21 On this culture of public demonstration, see Rivka Feldhay, “On Wonderful Machines: The Transmission of Mechanical Knowledge by Jesuits,” Science and Education, vol. 15 (2006), pp. 151–72.
22 Dear, Discipline and Experience, pp. 51–3.
23 Dear, Discipline and Experience, p. 104.
24 Steven Shapin, “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 14 (1984), pp. 481–520.
25 Although focused on the eighteenth century, the work of Daniela Bleichmar explores in excellent detail the problems faced by these naturalists; see her Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), as well as “Learning to Look: Visual Expertise Across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 46, no. 1 (2012), pp. 85–111.
26 On Jesuit science beyond Europe, useful examples include Andrés I. Prieto, Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011); Florence C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Steven J. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, John W. O’Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, S.J., eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 212–40.
27 Walter S. Melion, “Memory, Place, and Mission in Hieronymus Natalis’ Evangelicae historiae imagines,” in Memory and Oblivion: Proceedings of the Congress of the History of Art (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 603–8.