Page - 23 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

23Introduction mathematics as a key part of the Jesuit curriculum63). Some of Clavius’s stu- dents also flirted with Copernican cosmology, and after its firm condemnation in 1616 did not revert to Ptolemy but compromised on the “geo-heliocentric” system advanced by Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). Most interestingly, internal con- flicts between Jesuits and Dominicans are proposed to be as important for the denouement of 1633 as the (far from unanimous) Jesuit hostility to Galileo.64 Somewhat similarly to, or as a counterpart of the cautious feelers toward Copernicanism, while seventeenth-century Jesuit natural philosophy in gen- eral firmly remained on Aristotelian grounds, not only did Aristotelianism mean a commitment to an ideal of public demonstration of scientific knowl- edge but this also entailed meaningful participation in developing the concept and practices of experiment.65 Jesuit men of science went “public” in a differ- ent sense, too: as any other savant, they keenly and openly engaged in the dis- cussions that excited the contemporary Republic of Letters.66 Perhaps no indi- vidual figure exemplifies this more strikingly than “the last man who knew everything”: Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), whose interests and works ranged across virtually all known disciplines, and under whose leadership the Collegio Romano emerged as the major hub of a network for collecting and filtering scientific information as well as displaying it in objectified form to a select public.67 If Jesuit science was, in this sense, sociable, it also put an emphasis on utility. Mathematics as conceived by Clavius and his colleagues was a practical discipline, with applications in chronology (as in the case of the calendar re- form of 1582, associated with his name), astronomy, geography, navigation, sur- veying, hydraulics, and military technology. This was, of course, strongly tied to curricular needs as mentioned above. Thus, many Jesuits became not only poets, historians, and artists but also astronomers, physicists, cartographers, and—most peculiarly of all—military architects and hydraulic engineers, advising governments on the building of fortresses and on flood control 63 Antonella Romano, La Contre-Réforme mathématique: Constitution et diffusion d’une cul- ture mathématique jésuite à la Renaissance (Rome: École française de Rome, 1999). 64 Rivka Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 65 Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32–62; Marcus Hellyer, Catholic Physics: Je- suit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). 66 Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2003). 67 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Mod- ern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004).