Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie Page A

Proceedings
    A s part of their preparation for lives of obedience, Jesuit scholastics were, and still are, frequently uprooted and reassigned. Pretty soon this newly immodest young man was sent off again, to a place called Heiligenstadt, in a relatively remote part of Saxony, to teach what Kircher rather condescendingly called “the rudiments of grammar.” It may be that his superiors hoped to reintroduce him to the humility they had only recently urged him to leave behind. But it was probably too late for that. As one Jesuit historian has said about Kircher’s previously humble pose, “later he tended to over-compensate at times for his early behavior.”
    The route to Heiligenstadt—where, as it happened, Kircher’s father had once been a lay instructor to Benedictine students—passed through Fulda. His father and his mother had both died since he’d been gone, and his brothers were out in various rectories and monasteries, but his sisters (their names were Agnes, Eva, and Anna Katharina) still lived in the region. One or more of them may have warned him about the rest of the way.
    â€œI was advised by many to change my religious garb,” he remembered, “since the area to be traversed was infested with heretics.” But Kircher refused, saying that he would rather die in his black cassock than make his way safely in any other clothes—perhaps also thinking that the last time he’d worn secular attire, mendacious Düsseldorfers had seen fit to trick him, and he’d almost drowned in the icy Rhine.
    Kircher left with a messenger as his hired guide and headed through the region of the Eichsfeld, the “field of oaks,” a rustic source of some of the fairy tales later collected by the Brothers Grimm. At one point Kircher and his companion entered “a certain dark and bristling valley,” as he described it in his memoir, “which from its formidable appearance had earned the name the Valley of Hell.” Suddenly they were “surrounded by heretic horsemen,” who focused on Kircher’s robes. “Upon recognizing from my clothes that I was a Jesuit, they immediately stripped me of everything, save my undergarments,” he wrote. “After I was robbed of all my clothes, traveling provisions and books, and broken down with blows and lashings to boot, they prepared my death by hanging.” He was dragged between two horses to a tree.
    â€œWhen I saw that they were acting in earnest, so fierce and howling in their implacable hatred of Jesuits that they had utterly resolved to kill me,” he remembered, “presently, with spirit composed, knees bent on the ground, and eyes raised toward the sky with tears, I passionately entrusted myself to God and Mary, giving thanks to divine goodness, which had rendered me worthy of enduring death on behalf of His own most sacred name. As the tears copiously welled up, I felt myself replete with as great an abundance of consolation as I had ever experienced in my life, nor any longer did fear seize me, prepared as I was to pour out life and blood for God.”
    According to Kircher, this display had an immediate effect on one of the soldiers. Such was the power of the one true faith over the heretical kind. This soldier then gave a speech (“What are we doing, comrades?”) that persuaded the others to drop the project completely and even to give back the things they’d taken.
    Kircher thanked God profusely for protecting him. On the other hand, he felt some disappointment: “The unique and so longed-for opportunity to die on behalf of His glory had been lost.”
    Two days later, they finally reached little Heiligenstadt with its college and its old castle, built in the tenth century by a Frankish king named Dagobert. Heiligenstadt means “Holy City.” It’s now called Heilbad Heiligenstadt, literally “Spa Holy City,” and in the twenty-first century,