Besides lecturing on anatomy and botany, Rudbeck would take students on strolls in his garden, emphasizing the importance of firsthand knowledge of the properties of plants. He had also pledged to give informal instruction in other technical subjects, including architecture and shipbuilding, just two of the many classes he taught at his factory down by the river. Some of the kingdom’s most prominent future technicians and engineers would indeed be trained by Rudbeck. His absolute favorite course, however, was pyrotechnics; he loved to send up his own homemade fireworks to light up the Uppsala night sky.
Perhaps an even more serious challenge than his teaching commitments, though, was the array of other projects fighting for his attention. Since Rudbeck had built the anatomy theater, for instance, he was expected to actually use it. Some professors were already heard mumbling about this great expense, complaining that Rudbeck, in characteristic fashion, had built the theater way out of proportion to what was actually needed. At a time when the number of students in the medical school was at best ninety and at worst only three, Rudbeck had built a theater of approximately two hundred seats.
The academy could of course fill this capacity by opening its doors and selling admission tickets to public dissections, as did on occasion happen, but some had already started to notice the glaring lack of dissections taking place there. In fact, no more than two or three dissections were ever held under Rudbeck’s leadership in that expensive theater.
His botanical garden was another concern, though for a slightly different reason. It required regular care and constant vigilance, planting, watering, and cultivating, as well as maintaining the small buildings Rudbeck had constructed on its site. Given the expense, this scientific luxury was often dangerously close to being axed from the university budget. Many professors did in fact want to close it, and Rudbeck had to defend it many times. The common professors did not value this particular garden, Rudbeck once sarcastically explained, because it did not give them any delicious “cabbage, carrots, or turnips.”
Besides that, Rudbeck was trying to keep another one of his typically ambitious projects up and running: the waterworks system. With one man, one horse, one pump, and an elaborate network of underground pipes, Rudbeck had devised a rather ingenious scheme to bring water from the river to many places around town. For the time it ran during the 1660s and early 1670s, many people in Uppsala enjoyed having water carried right to their doorsteps. Beneficiaries included the royal castle, the bishop’s estate, and, according to Rudbeck’s design, even the house of Olaus Verelius. The waterworks also served his botanical garden and even the Community House, so that even the most underprivileged in the university town, quite radically, shared the luxury of fresh water with Sweden’s royalty and their guests at the castle.
The theater, the garden, the waterworks, the Community House—so many projects, so many interests, so many considerations for a man of Rudbeck’s passions. A great deal indeed depended on the investment of Rudbeck’s time and energy. Additionally, as a high-ranking official at Uppsala University, he was obliged to attend countless meetings in the council chamber. And now, as old stories from Norse manuscripts caught his fancy, the dilemmas of being a Renaissance man were all too clear.
4
A CARTESIAN WITCH HUNT
—CHARLIE CHAPLIN,
Drawing its name from the Latin form of Rene Descartes’ name, Renatus Cartesius, the Cartesian doctrine threatened to upset many cherished beliefs. Fundamentally this was a deterministic system that envisioned the universe as a machine. In this pure world of matter and motion, animals were soulless and unthinking automata. Human beings worked like machines as well, statues equipped with the power of reason. Like other types of matter, humans, animals, and all forms of life were whirling about in motion in a larger universe which was conceived of as a giant vortex, and which in turn consisted of an infinite number of other vortices. From the whirls of the tiniest particles to the largest planetary sweeps, Descartes had brought the heavens and earth together under the same single set of laws, with no center, no limits, and, many said, no place for God.
As if that were not troubling enough, such radical notions took place in the context of Descartes’ exciting new method, which excelled in overturning traditions. His entire philosophical edifice was built on what he called a “method of doubt.” After abandoning all previous knowledge, dismissing it as empty, “vain and useless,” and then casting it “wholly away,” the philosopher put his method to use challenging everything else—that is, until he found something that simply could not be doubted. The result was one of the famous lines in philosophy: “I think, therefore I am” (and at the same time, one of the most punned upon: from the college T-shirt “I drink, therefore I am,” to the skeptic’s quip about modern gullibility, “I am, therefore I think”).
But Descartes’ concept was the kernel of his larger system, providing an unassailable foundation from which he would construct his broad vision of the world. At its heart, Cartesianism was a rational, deterministic philosophy that built on this method of doubt, emphasizing the strict necessity of proof, and proceeding through the investigation of cause and effect to reach “clear and distinct” propositions. Not surprisingly, this methodical approach appealed greatly to natural philosophers, who were inclined to logical and mathematical thinking.
No surprise, either, that this doctrine excited emotions in one of the most passionate centuries in modern history. Despite fierce denials by Cartesians, many theologians suspected that Cartesian thought ultimately challenged sacred scripture and the very basis of religious faith. When the Cartesian natural philosophers responded that they could use reason “to prove God,” this also seemed repulsive, and secretly subversive.
Watching this radical vision of a machine-universe, best understood by using a method of doubt and apparently leading only to cryptic creeds, the Uppsala theology department had good reason to be alarmed. At stake, too, was its long-established authority at the university, where it had enjoyed a frankly privileged position. The department had long exerted a great influence over everything from selecting staff to examining materials for publication to teaching the theology classes that were mandatory for all degree candidates.
In many ways the Cartesian philosopher was a real threat to this established order—and the battle over this heretical metaphysics was waged as if it were a life-and-death struggle.
WITH THE HIGHLY esteemed theologian Lars Stigzelius leading the charge, the theologians went after individuals who were suspected of harboring Cartesian sympathies. Well trained in logical discourse himself, Stigzelius was teaching Aristotelian logic at the university when Olof Rudbeck was a boy playing the gallant Spanish knight on his hobbyhorse. Stigzelius began by complaining of the
The problem emanated, the theologians said, from the medical faculty, particularly some of the young professors, who were almost certainly the first Swedes to import Cartesian thought. Many Uppsala doctors had studied at Leiden University, a hotbed for the dangerous philosophy. The leading medical authorities, Olof Rudbeck and Petrus Hoffvenius, had both studied there, and they were now accused of being the first Cartesians in Sweden, that is, after Rene Descartes himself.
One of the first occasions for this inevitable showdown, and the incident that first brought Rudbeck into the proceedings, came quite early. The jovial “Don Juan of doctors,” and good friend to Rudbeck, Petrus Hoffvenius issued a dissertation in the spring of 1665 with a blatantly Cartesian veneer. The theologians rallied, and requested that the troublesome medical doctor receive a scolding.
Claiming that he could not bear the arrogance of Hoffvenius’s accusers, Olof Rudbeck came to the medical professor’s defense. It was a peculiar situation, he said, to see scholars so vehemently opposed to Hoffvenius’s treatise when in fact very few of them had ever read the work, or would even have understood it had they tried. “They had not even looked at the index of topics on the title page,” Rudbeck observed.
Disturbed at the turn events were taking in this attack on Hoffvenius, and the implications for the university at large, Rudbeck could not restrain himself. He blurted out, “If this is the way a faculty or a professor will be treated, no honest man will ever be able to write anything for the public good,” then continued, “I recognize no
