Verbiest, Ferdinand
Creators: name: Golvers, Noël
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019

description: Ferdinand Verbiest, born on 9 Oct. 1623 in Pittem (Kortrijk; Flanders-Belgium), from a family which was recently promoted to the regional administrative elite, initially studied at Bruges (from there the occasional epithet: “<em>Brugensis</em>”; before: “<em>Pitthemensis</em>”), later in the Jesuit college of Kortrijk (until 1640), where he finished his studies, publishing a long Latin <em>‘(carmen) genethliacum’</em>. In Oct. 1640 he was matriculated in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven, and, after the 1<sup>st</sup> year, he entered the Jesuit Society of the <em>Provincia Flandro-Belgica</em>, in Mechelen; this shift from a secular education to a Jesuit one was probably already prepared, but the turning point may have been the excessively triumphalist celebrations of the first century of the Jesuit Society in the Flemish-Belgian province in 1640. Anyway: already in the 1<sup>st</sup> year of the Novitiate, he was apparently attracted by a missionary vocation, and – together with his later fellow fathers F. de Rougemont and Philippe Couplet, who were to follow him in the next decades to China -, he signed a document, made by the novice master Nicasius Bonart, all applying for the mission in Chili (sic). As this first premature application remained obviously without any answer, he continued his studies at the Jesuit college in Leuven, during the winter semester of 1644-45 being taught, <em>inter alios</em>, by Andreas Tacquet, a young talented and already reputed SJ mathematician. This was followed by new applications (“<em>Litterae Indipetae</em>”) in 1645, always for the West Indies. After a first authorization he left for Cadix, but the authorization having been withdrawn by the Spanish authorities, Verbiest and his fellow fathers had to return to Flanders. There he was appointed Professor of Latin and Greek in the Jesuit College of Brussels, with responsibilities for the ‘poesis’ and ‘rhetorica’ class, including the yearly <em>Affixiones</em>, and probably also for the Latin class in the nearby Palace School of Brussels (1647 – 1651), succeeding his teacher Sidronius Hosschius. After repeated requests to the General (of which nothing is preserved) the Provincial sent him to the <em>Collegio Romano</em> for his theologian studies (academic year 1652-1653): there he certainly met Athanasius Kircher, at that time exempted from his teaching burden but at his zenith as researcher and writer, with (until 1655) his assistant Gaspar Schott(us); contacts are not directly proven, unless by two letters of Verbiest, sent afterward to Kircher (&amp; Schott): in these letters, Verbiest showed himself cooperative, asking at the same time for recent Kircher materials. The first of these letters left Seville, where Verbiest studied the 2<sup>nd</sup> year of theology in the <em>Colégio San Hermenegildo</em>. After the defense of his doctoral dissertation on (13th?) April 1655, he left Spain for Italy, to push the Superior General for a decision on his missionary vocation. Surprisingly enough, in the following weeks and months – on his way to Rome - he ‘switched’ his application from the Western into the Eastern Indies (which included China), probably because he heard – through a correspondence, e.g. with his former colleague from Brussels, Ignatius de Melgaer, about the success of Martino Martini’s recruiting in the Flemish-Belgian province in the 1<sup>st</sup> half of 1654, but certainly also as the China mission had apparently more perspective. At any rate, after his application for China had been accepted, apparently despite some manipulations from unspecified “<em>malevoli</em>”, he spent the second half of 1655 in the SJ college of Genoa (<em>Via Balbi</em>), probably completing his mathematical education, as a good mathematical competence / experience was – since Ricci’s time († 1610) – a necessary prerequisite for the successful China missionary. Looking for possible supervisors, one could probably point to the presence of Father Giacomo Bonvicini (1619 - 1657), who taught mathematics in the Genoa College between 1651/2 and 1655/6, author, e.g., of a manuscript ‘<em>Brevis Introductio in totam mathematicam’</em> (Garibaldi; Fischer).