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abstract: RIVKA FELDHAY
Can the Earth
be moved by a machine? Remarks on the transmission of mechanical knowledge
by Jesuits
Marin Mersenne spent the last months of 1644 and the beginning of the next year in Italy, where he was travelling in search of manuscripts, new contacts and new ideas. Like most savants travelling in those days, he dedicated the greatest part of his time to the magnificence of Baroque Rome, where he also paid a visit to the flourishing intellectual center of the Jesuit order, the Collegio Romano. Thanks to his voluminous correspondence we know that Mersenne was involved in the controversies that took place in Rome that year between Galileans and their conservative opponents, among them Jesuits (1). Obviously, by 1644 the great master of the “Galileisti” was already dead and buried – without ceremony and commemoration – for almost three years. Less known is the death of Paulus Guldin a year later, namely in 1643. Guldin was one of Clavius’s most talented disciples, a mathematician in the Archimedean tradition, who engaged himself in many of the scientific polemics of the time, especially those over indivisibles, which he had led against Kepler and Cavallieri. Furthermore, both Galileo and Guldin had not set foot in Rome for many years before their death. Galileo spent the last nine years of his life in house arrest in the villa Arcetri. Guldin had probably been delicately “distanced” from Rome to the Austrian Assitance sometime around 1618, for reasons I have not been able to discover yet. In terms of historical space and time, then, there was hardly any chance for Galileo, Mersenne and Guldin ever to have met in Rome in the middle of the 17th century. Yet, the encounter did take place – if not in real life, then in the textual space created for them in a fictional dialogue written by Paulus Casati and published in Rome in 1658. Casati, a Jesuit mathematician well known for his mission to Queen Christina from Sweden that culminated in her conversion to Catholicism, had taught at the Collegio Romano just a few yeas after Mersenne’s visit. His Terra Machinis Mota is made up of five dissertations, all in dialogue form between our three interlocutors: Glaileo, Mersenne and Guldin. When Casati finally published his text in 1658 Mersenne was already dead for ten years. So were the great stars of the Galilean camp, among them Cavallieri, Torricelli and Renieri. Their death symbolized the beginning of a rather long era of opposition to, but also of elaboration and transmission of the Galilean heritage. In the historiography of Italian science, this period has mostly been remembered in terms of the continuous struggle between “ancients” – the official Catholic culture led by the Jesuits - and “moderns”, namely the Galilean camp. But Casati’s text offers us a window to the kind of mechanical science the Jesuits transmitted and disseminated. Its actual reading clarifies again how difficult it is to label his tradition of writing as simply “ancient”. In this context, it is not superfluous to remind ourselves that Casati was one of the most authoritative writers of the tradition of “Jesuit mechanics”. In 1684 he published his Mechanicorum libri, based upon courses he gave at the Collegio Romano during the 50’s. This text, the first general manual of mechanics was read all over Europe before the publication of Newton’s Principia. His Terra machinis mota is not a teaching course in mechanics, and thus cannot exhaust questions about the scope and teaching methods of the subject. However, the letter to the “Dear Reader” includes indications concerning the origins of those parts of the text I shall analyze in some detail. The letter mentions a real disputation actually led at the Collegio Romano under the auspices of Prince Cardinal Hassia Lantgravius and Antonio Monforte (a well known patron), during the time Casati taught there. This archeology, touching upon the circumstances of its composition immediately point to the kind of audiences to which the text was addressed. In addition, the rhetorical possibilities opened by its literary form explain why Casati’s text is uniquely informative on the Jesuit self-perception of their own relation to the new science. The self-image that the Jesuits desired and attempted to construct and sell to their audiences in non-formal ways gradually emerges as the text unfolds. Through a vivid portrayal of Galileo as one protagonist in the drama of a friendly and courteous dialogue with two representatives of the official culture, the sour conflict between “ancients” and “moderns” is made to disappear. Instead, a picture of the dynamics of a common cultural field imagined by some contemporary Jesuits, at least, is made to appear. My aim in this paper is to add to the discussion of science teaching in Italy of the mid-1650’s by drawing attention to the mechanical contents the Jesuit disseminated outside the classrooms, but with pedagogical goals and much didactic skill. However, my analysis will not stop with the contents discussed. Rather, the dialogue form with its special rhetorical gestures also allows for tracking the teachers’ perception of their own environment, and perhaps their attempts to structure it by means of literary representations of the kind we are here facing. In fact, the decision to forge the encounter between Galileo, Mersenne and Guldin in a dialogue can be seen as a strategy for promoting the Jesuits’ image as educators and a means to extend the program to the wider public of dilettantes and virtuosi. In the first part of my paper, I shall present the basic approach to mechanics transmitted through Casati’s Terra machinis mota. In particular, I would like to throw light on the selection of the open questions chosen for dramatization, the technical level of the discussion, its level of detail, and the possibility to infer from these its didactic purposes. In the second part, the analysis of the role played by each of the three protagonists will expose them as representations of three different approaches to a basically common project that is at the heart of the consensus between them. Last, I will delineate the context of the 40’s and 50’s within which Casati and other Jesuits of his milieu attempted to establish their position.
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