When Humanity was in the Humanities: Peiresc in the 1630s

Early modern scholars do not usually provide much of an example of tolerance. Odium Philologicum is almost a byword for the anti-Socratic disjunction between learning and wisdom that, as much as anything else, has made erudite a disreputable adjective. However much "intellectuals" in the modern era have developed their identity dialectically, against the type of the early modern polymath, they have nevertheless inherited this same unhappy disjunction between knowing many things and living wisely as a result.

Almost nothing is more common today than the deployment as intellectual argument of claims radically at variance with the way in which the thinker actually lives—as a friend, or spouse, or parent, or child. Isaiah Berlin once remarked on the self-refuting character of moral relativism: in deciding between different life courses, a clear, if implicit, statement of priorities is always being made. By this standard, too many intellectual arguments are simply incoherent.

And yet it does not have to be this way. Indeed it was not always so. The example of Montaigne of course hovers into view. But so too does the less well-known life of another Frenchman, who was born in the year the first edition of Montaigne's Essays was published, and who like him was hailed as a "modern Socrates": Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637).¹

Peiresc was born into a family of the lower, legal aristocracy, and after early education by the Jesuits, studied law at Padua, Montpellier, and Aix. His travels through the Republic of Letters took him as a young man to Italy, the Low Countries, and England. He inherited his uncle's seat in the local parliament (more court than legislative body), through which he came into contact with the neo-Stoic orator du Vair who, in turn, introduced him into the Parisian circle of the humanist historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou. Although Peiresc lived at the court of Louis XIII for seven years, the bulk of his life was spent in Provence.

That he is known at all today has almost nothing to do with such details of "official" biography. Rather, his small share of fame was earned by an omnivorous intellectual curiosity that brought him into epistolary contact with the far reaches of the globe and with nearly every intelligent European, in pursuit of learning's advancement. He was an astronomer, botanist, classicist, zoologist, and nearly everything else in between. He was also at the very forefront of the very beginning of Oriental studies in Europe. It was this enterprise that brought him into contact with Rabbi Salomon Azubi and Athanasius Kircher.²

We know little of Azubi's life. He was born in Sophia, probably in the 1580s, and is first reported in France in 1619 at the head of the rabbinical court in Carpentras. He came to Peiresc's attention in 1630 and their surviving correspondence dates from the years 1632 to 1635. By 1636 Azubi had already left Provence for Turin and the next year he is found in Livorno. He was still there in 1647 when we lose track of him.

Kircher, by contrast, a Jesuit who fled the sack of Würzburg to Avignon in 1632, whence he came into contact with Peiresc, and then moved on to Rome in 1633, has become one of the best known and celebrated of early modern scholars. Famed in his own time for astounding learning and an astonishing imagination, he was the author of a series of monumental, if not uniformly influential, books on symbolism, language, sound, light, and space travel. He used the Jesuit order as a personal procurement service so that his Museum Kircherianum was soon the talk of Rome. It survived long after him only to be resurrected, in typically Kircherian fashion, in Los Angeles a few years ago, suitably transformed into the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

What Azubi and Kircher had in common was Peiresc. Three letters from Azubi to Kircher, in Hebrew, survive (those to Peiresc are in French). The longest one is undated and is addressed to Kircher at Carpentras...