Athanasius the Decipherer | profile

I heard somewhere that if the ancient Chinese wanted to use a powerful curse on you, they would tell you to “live an interesting life.” This implicit claim to the benefits of a peaceful life was alien to the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, about whom we began talking last week. And not just because of this particular episode from his time as a volcano, when, convinced that nature is a hieroglyph to be deciphered, he descended into the gorges of Etna and looked for an explanation for its flames in the petrified lava. Also and above all because he led a life full of physical and mental adventures.

At the age of fifteen, Athanasius gets lost in a forest (he had been walking for two days to see a play) and spends a night in a tree so that he will not be eaten by wild animals or murdered by thieves. 1621: He completed his novitiate at the Paderborn College, where the troops of the Duke of Braunschweig gathered in a cruel mood. The Thirty Years’ War took its toll and many of his fellow students were hanged. Kircher and some of his companions flee. They cross the snow, they step in the mud, they don’t eat. As he crosses the frozen Rhine, his feet break through the ice and he sinks, and although the current carries him away, he manages to get out with the help of the Holy Spirit. He studies philosophy in Cologne.

In 1623 he moved to Koblenz, where he studied and taught Greek. He receives a Conchabo at school in Heiligenstadt, where he has to get there through a region dominated by the Protestant heresy. Kircher refuses to dress like a layman and continues to maintain his priestly habits. The only thing a devotee cannot do is hide under his own cassock. Some soldiers stop him, strip him naked and are ready to hang him on the branches of an oak tree to watch death shake the legs of a Catholic, but one of them takes pity and allows him to stay alive and continue on his way. Then they say that faith does not work miracles.

Already in Heiligenstadt he teaches Hebrew, Syriac and mathematics, writes a book about magnetism and assembles a device that demonstrates perpetual motion. The fact that the instrument fails does not prevent it from increasing its fame. He outrages people when he discovers sunspots through a telescope. The rector of Mainz advises him to clean his lenses, because Aristotle called the sun the primum incorruptibile, and this philosopher, like Perón later, is never wrong.

In 1629 or 1631 (the information is inaccurate), having already been ordained, he requested a transfer to China. No, his superiors tell him. As a sublimation or revenge, a few decades later he published his work “China monumentis, qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata”, an even more extensive title, free from all frills and more precise and descriptive of its subject than certain literary works in vogue today. Yesterday’s editors wisely summarized it with the first and last terms: China illustrata. The work – based on information from Jesuit missionaries – seems to contain everything from cartographic precisions to studies of the wings of dragons, and above all it allows the dubious Christian presence to prevail over local religions since the first history of the Central Empire (the world). Of course, this is a common practice in hegemonic and ethnocentric religions, which subordinate the forerunners, transforming their gods into saints or demons, and defining any element common to both as a partial intuition of the truth that the dominant religion seeks to represent in its entirety. In this case, Kircher claims that the Chinese are descended from Ham, the son of Noah, and that Confucius is the name of Moses. Aside from these slips of Catholic syncretism, what is most important is his overall commitment and passion as a linguist. Kircher affirms that Chinese characters are abstract hieroglyphs, arguing a century before Leibniz, who claimed that this language was or should be the universal language.

But his contributions to creating rationality for the central problem of our species, the Babel of languages ​​(“Every word, the weight of the world”), are not limited to the language of the Middle Kingdom. Even before his chinophile mammoth, in 1655, in his book “Egyptian Oedipus” (Oedipus Aegyptiacus), he claimed to have found the solution to the riddle of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, a key that Champollion would actually only find a few centuries later. Too bad. However, for us the error does not matter, because in science and art the solution only ensures success and forces us to move from one topic to another. On the other hand, the mistake is always incredibly productive, it opens up possibilities for the search for knowledge and the fantastic. The fallacy is the winged horse that stops our imagination. And Kircher viewed the world as a hieroglyph and saw it as his mission to decipher it. Shall we continue? The Voynich case is still missing, and…