Athanasius Kircher has been described in many ways: the last man who knew everything, an encyclopaedic genius, a brilliant dreamer. In seventeenth-century Rome his name was famous throughout Europe; two centuries later it had become almost a byword for learned error. Today historians reread him with more balance, as an exemplary case of the coexistence of experimental science, Catholic faith and Hermeticism.
From Germany to Rome
Kircher was born in 1602 at Geisa, in the Fulda region, and in 1618 entered the Society of Jesus. His education took place during the dramatic years of the Thirty Years' War, which forced him to flee several times. He taught in various German cities and then at Avignon, where he became interested in astronomy and Egyptian antiquities.
In the early 1630s he was called to Rome, to the Collegio Romano, the great Jesuit university, where he taught mathematics, physics and oriental languages. After some years he was released from teaching to devote himself entirely to research and writing. He remained in Rome until his death in 1680.
Coptic and Egypt
Kircher's most solid contribution concerns Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in characters derived from Greek. With the Prodromus coptus sive aegyptiacus (1636) and the Lingua aegyptiaca restituta (1643) he was among the first in Europe to study it seriously and to argue that it derived from ancient Egyptian. This insight proved correct and was useful, almost two centuries later, to Jean-François Champollion.
His most famous error, on the other hand, concerns hieroglyphs. Following a Neoplatonic tradition and the Renaissance success of Horapollo's Hieroglyphica, Kircher was convinced that Egyptian signs were sacred symbols capable of expressing theological and philosophical ideas, rather than a script that also records sounds. In the three volumes of the Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-1654) he proposed long and complex translations of inscriptions which, once deciphered, would turn out to be royal titles and far simpler formulas.
The obelisks of Rome
Kircher's interest in Egypt had effects still visible in the city today. He was consulted on the obelisk that Gian Lorenzo Bernini placed on the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, and devoted the Obeliscus Pamphilius (1650) to it. He also worked on the Minerva obelisk, carried by Bernini's elephant. For him the obelisks were witnesses to a most ancient wisdom, the legacy of Hermes Trismegistus that Christianity would bring to fulfilment.
The curious scientist
It would be a mistake to reduce Kircher to fanciful Egyptology. He was also a tireless observer of nature:
- in 1638, during a journey in southern Italy, he had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius to observe it at close range, an experience that went into the Mundus subterraneus (1664-1665), devoted to volcanoes, underground waters and fossils;
- in the Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646) he studied optics, shadows and projections, and his name is linked to the spread of the magic lantern;
- in the Musurgia universalis (1650) he dealt with acoustics, music theory and instruments, including musical automata;
- with China illustrata (1667) he gathered the reports of Jesuit missionaries on Asia.
Kircher was also interested in the combinatorial art of Ramon Llull, which he took up in the Ars magna sciendi (1669), seeking a universal method for ordering all knowledge.
The Kircherian Museum
At the Collegio Romano Kircher set up a museum that became one of the sights of Rome: ancient finds, natural curiosities, scientific instruments and ingenious machines. It was a "cabinet of wonders" in which nature and art conversed, a faithful mirror of his mind. The collections were later dispersed among various Roman museums.
A European network of correspondents
Kircher did not work alone. From the Collegio Romano he kept up a dense correspondence with scholars, princes and missionaries scattered from Europe to the Americas and China: much of this correspondence survives and is today a precious source for the history of science. Jesuits on mission sent him observations, specimens and drawings, which he reworked in his volumes. This network explains both the vastness of his interests and the speed with which his richly illustrated books circulated in the libraries of the Continent.
An assessment
Kircher embodies a still unified knowledge, in which deciphering hieroglyphs, observing a volcano and theology were meant to confirm one another. This led him into resounding errors, but also to correct insights and an enormous work of collection. For the history of esotericism he matters because he was one of the last great defenders of the prisca theologia, the idea of an original wisdom handed down by Hermes and the Egyptians, at the very time when philological criticism, after Isaac Casaubon, had already exposed its limits.
In short
- Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) was a German Jesuit active for decades at the Collegio Romano.
- He seriously studied Coptic, grasping its link with ancient Egyptian.
- In the Oedipus Aegyptiacus he interpreted hieroglyphs as mystical symbols, with translations that proved wrong.
- He was also an observer of nature, from Vesuvius to optics, and founded a famous museum in Rome.
