ABSTRACT
Athanasius Kircher was first summoned to Rome from France in 1634, to take up a chair in mathematics at the Jesuits’ Roman College in the immediate wake of Galileo Galilei’s trial and condemnation for heresy. The holder of this chair in mathematics also taught astronomy, and hence Kircher inherited the position, the study, and the astronomical instruments of his predecessors-most notably the great Christoph Clavius, creator of the Gregorian calendar and the first person to invite Galileo to lecture in Rome, but also Galileo’s more recent adversaries: Orazio Grassi, Christoph Grienberger, and Christoph Scheiner, this last personage a particularly bitter rival of the sharp-tongued Tuscan scientist.1 In 1633, Kircher had admitted to friends in Avignon that several of the most prominent Jesuit astronomers, including Clavius and Scheiner, actually believed in a Suncentered, Copernican universe; the tone of Kircher’s remark suggests that he must have shared these Copernican convictions as well. Whatever these men’s private beliefs may have been, a conservative Jesuit curriculum, adopted in 1599, compelled them to teach an Earth-centered cosmology, as Kircher explained:
The good father Athanasius…could not restrain himself from telling us, in the presence of Father Ferrand, that Father Malaperti and Father Clavius themselves in no way disapproved the opinion of Copernicus-indeed they would have espoused it openly had they not been pressed and obliged to write according to the premises of Aristotle-and that Father Scheiner himself did not comply except under compulsion and by obedience.2
