Jesuit Science and the End of Nature’s Secrets by Mark A. Waddell

Abstract

Jesuit Science and the End of Nature's Secrets. By Mark A. Waddell. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2015. Pp. x, 214. $119.95. ISBN 978-1-4724-4972-6.)When the French Catholic philosopher and priest Pierre Gassendi declared in 1629 that all natural philosophy was either magnet or a remora (p. 53), he defined the intellectual terrain that preoccupied an emerging generation of Jesuit natural philosophers. Both were wondrous preternatural phenomena whose puzzling properties made them intensely fascinating yet difficult to know. The lodestone became a subject of a considerable corpus of Jesuit natural philosophy, embodied especially by the work of Niccolo Cabeo and Athanasius Kircher. Instead, by 1662 Kircher's disciple and collaborator, Kaspar Schott, dismissed the remora, a legendary small fish believed to be capable of stopping ships by attaching itself to the hull, as a fabulous product of the human imagination. Its occult qualities were not spiritually dangerous, unlike the weapon-salve, a magnetic unguent allegedly able to heal wounds at a distance. After fiercely debating its existence for a few decades, the Society of Jesus prohibited any teaching on this subject in 1651.These singular episodes frame the subject of Mark Waddell's study of Jesuit science and the demise of occult qualities in the seventeenth century. Focusing especially on the works of Cabeo, Kircher, and Schott, he encourages us to take Jesuit natural philosophy seriously in order to come to a better understanding of the nature of their probabilism. What issues occupied Jesuits who saw themselves as the pre-eminent Catholic interpreters of nature? How did they approach their subject and to what degree did they gradually alter the Aristotelian worldview that lay at the heart of the Thomist synthesis, and became the core of Jesuit pedagogy?The magnet proved to be an essential secret of nature. In 1600 the English physician William Gilbert made it a cosmological principle that one could know and test experientially, and ultimately a proof of heliocentrism. Instead, Jesuit nat- ural philosophers believed that the magnet creatively reconfigured Aristotelian arguments about the relationship between the visible and the invisible in their own explanations. Cabeo's Philosophia magnetica (1629) responded to Gilbert by restoring this subject to the realm of traditional natural philosophy. A little over a decade later, Kircher made the study of magnetism a demonstrative science, producing pages of lavishly illustrated descriptions of machines he would ultimately display in the Roman College museum but already showed visitors in his quarters in Rome. …