Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

Favored by nature, learning even the most difficult of subjects was literally child’s play for him, but despite that he showed such application that he outshone his classmates in everything. There was never a day when he did not come back from school with some new decoration pinned to his coat, rewards with which his father was justifiably well pleased. Appointed class prefect, he assisted the master by explaining Canisius’s catechism to the first-years & heard the juniors’ lessons. At eleven he could already read the Gospels & Plutarch in the original. At twelve he won all the disputations in Latin hands down, could declaim better than anyone & wrote prose & verse with astonishing facility.

Athanasius was particularly fond of tragedy & at the age of thirteen his father gave him, as a reward for a particularly brilliant translation from Hebrew, permission to go to Aschaffenburg with his classmates to see a play: a company of wandering players were putting on Flavius Mauricius, Emperor of the East there. Johannes Kircher sent the little band in the care of a local farmer who was going to the town — two days’ walk away from Geisa — by cart & was to bring them home once the performance was over.

Athanasius was carried away by the talent of the actors & their truly magic ability to bring to life a figure he had always admired. On the boards, before his very eyes, the valiant successor to Tiberius once more defeated the Persians amid sound & fury; he harangued his troops, drove the Slavs & the Avars back over the Danube, eventually reestablishing the greatness of the Empire. And in the last act, when the traitor Phocas killed this model Christian most horribly without sparing either his wife or his sons, the crowd very nearly tore the poor actor playing the role of the vile centurion to pieces.

Athanasius took up Mauricius’s cause with all the hotheadedness of youth & when it was time to return to Geisa our madcap refused to go in the cart with his companions. The farmer who was in charge of the children tried in vain to hold him back: aspiring to an heroic death & ablaze with desire to emulate the virtue of his model, Athanasius Kircher had decided to go alone, like a hero of Antiquity, to face the Spessart forest, which was notorious not only for its highwaymen but also for the wild beasts that were to be found there.

Once in the forest, it took less than two hours for him to get lost. He spent all day wandering to & fro, trying to find the road they had taken on the way there, but the virgin forest grew thicker & thicker & he was seized with dread as night approached. Terrified by the phantasms his imagination saw in the darkness & cursing the stupid pride that had sent him on this adventure, Athanasius climbed to the top of a tree so that he would at least be safe from the wild beasts. He spent the night clutching onto a branch, praying to God with all his heart, trembling with fear & remorse. In the morning, more dead than alive from weariness & trepidation, he plunged deeper into the forest. He had continued like that for nine hours, dragging himself from tree to tree, when the forest started to thin out, revealing a large meadow. Joyfully Kircher went to find out where he was from the laborers who were gathering in the harvest — the place he was looking for was still two days’ walk away! Furnishing him with some provisions, they set him on the right path & it was five days after leaving Aschaffenburg that he returned to Geisa, to the great relief of his parents, who thought they had lost him for good.

Having exhausted his father’s patience, Athanasius was sent to continue his education as a boarder at the Jesuit college in Fulda.

True, discipline there was stricter than in the little school at Geisa, but the masters were more competent & were able to satisfy the young Kircher’s insatiable curiosity. There was also the town itself, so rich in history & architecture, the church of St. Michael, with its two asymmetrical towers, & above all the library, the one founded with his own books by Rabanus Maurus so long ago & where Athanasius spent most of his free time. Apart from Maurus’s own works, in particular the original copies of De Universo & of De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis , it contained all sorts of rare manuscripts, for example the Song of Hildebrand , the Codex Ragyndrudis , the Panarion of Epiphanius of Constantia, the Summa Logicae of William of Ockham & even a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum , which Athanasius could never open without a shudder.

He often talked to me about that last book, every time he recalled his childhood friend, Friedrich von Spee Langenfeld. He was a young teacher at the Fulda seminary &, recognizing in Kircher the qualities that distinguished him from his fellow students, it was not long before he became attached to him. It was through him that Athanasius discovered the darker side of the library: Martial, Terence, Petronius … Von Spee introduced him to all these authors, whom propriety insists should not be read by innocent souls; & if the pupil emerged from this dubious trial strengthened in his aspiration to virtue, that still does not exonerate his master, for “vice is like pitch, as soon as you touch it, it sticks to your fingers.” We are, however, all the more willing to forgive him this slight bending of the rules of morality because his influence on Kircher was solely beneficial: did he not go out with him every Sunday to the Frauenberg, the Hill of Our Lady, to relax in the abandoned monastery & talk about the world as they contemplated the mountains and the town below?

As for the Malleus Maleficarum , Athanasius well remembered his young mentor’s anger at the cruelty and arbitrariness of the treatment inflicted on those supposedly possessed by the devil who were caught in the net of the Inquisition.

“How can you not confess to having killed your mother & father or fornicated with the devil,” he said, “when your feet are being crushed in steel shoes or they’re sticking long needles into you all over your body to find the witches’ mark, which does not feel pain and which proves, according to the fools, that you have had dealings with the devil?”

And it was the student who felt the need to calm his master down, urging him to be more prudent in what he said. Then Von Spee would start to whisper, out there on the hillside, quoting Ponzibinio, Weier or Cornelius Loos in support of his outburst. He was not the first, he insisted, to criticize the inhuman methods of the inquisitors; in 1584 Johann Ervich had denounced the ordeal by water, Jordaneus the witches’ mark, & as he said this Von Spee got carried away again, raising his voice and striking terror to the heart of the young Athanasius, who admired him all the more for his reckless courage.

“You see, my friend,” Von Spee cried, his eyes shining, “for one genuine witch—& I am prepared to doubt whether there ever was one — there are three thousand feeble-minded simpletons & three thousand raving madmen whose problems fall into the competence of doctors rather than inquisitors. It is the pretext that these things concern God & religion that allows these cruel supposed experts to have their way. But all they reveal is their own ignorance & if they attribute all these events to supernatural causes, it is because they are ignorant of the natural reasons governing things!”

Throughout his life Kircher repeatedly told me of his fascination for this man & the influence he had had on his intellectual development. Occasionally the young teacher would read him some of the magnificent poems he was writing at the time, those that were collected after his death under the titles of Counter-nightingale & Golden Book of Virtue . Athanasius knew several of them by heart & on certain evenings of anguish in Rome, he would declaim some in a low voice, as you would say a prayer. He had a marked preference for The Idolater , a poem the Egyptian coloring of which he found particularly delightful. I feel as if I can still hear his resonant voice reciting it in a solemn, restrained style: