Science, Myth and Eastern Souls: J. S. C. Schweigger and the Society for the Spread of Natural Knowledge and Higher Truth

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Germany, it was rare to find a German Protestant intellectual who had much positive to say about the historical role of the Jesuit order. Branded as anti-scientific, obscurantist and anti-modern, the Jesuits were one of liberal Protestants favorite targets of criticism. When a German Protestant used the word “Jesuit”, it was generally safe to assume the label was meant as an insult. It is surprising, then, to find the chemist J. S. C. Schweigger, the son of a Protestant theologian and himself a doctor of theology, holding forth at the 1837 meeting of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte (the yearly annual meeting of German scientists) about the world historical importance of the early modern Jesuit missions to Asia. The birth of modern natural science, Schweigger claimed, was intricately bound up with the accomplishments of the Jesuits in the East; modern science had flourished in the seventheenth-century in no small measure because of the example the Jesuits provided of a successful marriage between theology and natural research.1 Much recent historical work has uncovered the importance of the Jesuit order for early modern science. For a German Protestant in the mid-ninetheenthcentury, however, this opinion was decidedly unusual, and previous research on Schweigger offers limited clues as to why and how he might have developed his idiosyncratic reading of the history of science. J. S. C. Schweigger (1779-1857),