Guillaume Postel


Guillaume Postel was a French linguist, astronomer, Cabbalist, diplomat, professor, and religious universalist.
Born in the village of Barenton in Normandy, Postel made his way to Paris to further his education. While studying at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, he became acquainted with Ignatius of Loyola and many of the men who would become the founders of the Company of Jesus, retaining a lifelong affiliation with them. He entered Rome in the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in March 1544, but left on December 9, 1545 before making religious vows.

Diplomacy and scholarship

Postel was adept at Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac and other Semitic languages, as well as the Classical languages of Ancient Greek and Latin, and soon came to the attention of the French court.

Travel to the Ottoman Empire

In 1536, when Francis I sought a Franco-Ottoman alliance with the Ottoman Turks, he sent Postel as the official interpreter of the French embassy of Jean de La Forêt to the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople.
Postel was also apparently assigned to gather interesting Eastern manuscripts for the royal library, today housed in the collection of oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Works

In Linguarum Duodecim Characteribus Differentium Alphabetum Introductio, published in 1538, Postel became the first scholar to recognize the inscriptions on Judean coins from the period of the First Jewish–Roman War as Hebrew written in the ancient "Samaritan" characters.
In 1543, Postel published a criticism of Protestantism, and highlighted parallels between Islam and Protestantism in Alcorani seu legis Mahometi et Evangelistarum concordiae liber.
In 1544, in De orbis terrae concordia,, Postel advocated a universalist world religion. The thesis of the book was that all Jews, Muslims and heathens could be converted to the Christian religion once all of the religions of the world were shown to have common foundations and that Christianity best represented these foundations. He believed these foundations to be the love of God, the praising of God, the love of Mankind, and the helping of Mankind.
In his De la République des Turcs Postel makes a rather positive description of the Ottoman society.
His 1553 Des merveilles du monde et principalemẽt des admirables choses des Indes & du noveau monde is one of the earliest European descriptions of religion in Japan. He interprets Japanese religion in terms of his universalist views on religion, claiming that the indigenous Japanese religion was a form of Christianity and that one could still find evidence of their worship of crucifixes. Such claims about Japanese religion were common in Europe at the time; Postel's writings may have influenced Francis Xavier's expectations of Japan as he traveled there.
Postel was also a relentless advocate for the unification of all Christian churches, a common concern during the period of the Reformation, and remarkably tolerant of other faiths during a time when such tolerance was unusual. This tendency led him to work with the Jesuits in Rome and then Venice, but the incompatibility of their beliefs with his prevented his full membership in their order.

Cosmographer and Cartographer

Postel is believed to have spent the years 1548 to 1551 on another trip to the East, traveling to the Holy Land and Syria to collect manuscripts. After this trip, he earned the appointment of Professor of Mathematics and Oriental Languages at the Collège Royal. He took an interest in geography in his course of lectures at the Collège Royal from 1537. In 1557, he published a short compendium under the name, De Universitate Liber, perhaps inspired by that of Henricus Glareanus. This geographer had drawn two polar projections which remained in manuscript. Postel enlarged his treatise in the Cosmographicae Disciplinae Compendium, published in Basel by Oporinus in 1561, in which he set out clearly his ideas on the five continents: Asia-Sem, Africa-Cham or Chamesia, Iapetia or Europe and Atlantides-America divided into boreal and austral, separated from Chasdia or the Austral continent by the Fretum Martini Bohemi. The Cosmographicae Disciplinae had an index of 600 names, which Postel put into his 1578 world map, Polo aptata Nova Charta Universi. He inscribed on it to the south of South America a legend reading: Ce quart de globe, ou demy Hémisphere contient dedans sa longitude clxxx degrès , partie Australle de l'Atlantide dicte Peru ou America par Americ Vespuce Florentin son inventeur, et davantage une partie de la Chasdia or terre Australle vers les Isles Mologa ou Moluques. On his map, the Terre Australe is called Chasdia in three places: under Africa ; under America ; and under the Moluccas, where it is joined to an unnamed New Guinea with its Rio S. Augustin. Between South America and Chasdia is found the mention of the Fretum Martin Bohemi. Chasdia was a term created by Postel: Chasdia qui est vers le Gond ou Pole Austral ainsi appellée à cause que de la Meridionale partie ou Australe procede la Misericorde dicte Chassed. Another legend on the same map over the southern continent reads: CHASDIA seu Australis terra, quam Vulgus nautarum di fuego vocant alii Papagallorum dicunt''. Postel’s world map strongly influenced Gerard de Jode and others of the Antwerp school.

Near East and Central Europe

After several years, however, Postel resigned his professorship and traveled all over Central Europe, including Austria and Italy, returning to France after each trip, often by way of Venice. Through his efforts at manuscript collection, translation, and publishing, he brought many Greek, Hebrew and Arabic texts into European intellectual discourse in the Late Renaissance and Early Modern periods. Among these texts are:
To Postel, the human soul is composed of intellect and emotion, which he envisages as male and female, head and heart. And the soul's triadic is through the union of these two halves.
The mind by its purity makes good errors of the heart, but the generosity of the heart must rescue the egoistic barrenness of the brain.... Religion to the majority is superstition based in fear, and those who profess such have not the woman-heart, because they are foreign to the divine enthusiasms of that mother-love which explains all religion. The power that has invaded the brain and binds the spirit is not that of the good, understanding and long-suffering God; it is wicked, imbecilic and cowardly.... The frozen and shriveled brain weighs on the dead heart like a tombstone. What an awakening will it be for understanding, what a rebirth for reason, what a victory for truth, when the heart shall be raised by grace!... The sublime grandeurs of the spirit of love will be taught by the maternal genius of religion. The Word has been made man, but the world will be saved when the Word shall have been made woman.
Yet Postel did not mean a second incarnation of divinity, his sentiment and language make it clear that he spoke figuratively.

Heresy and confinement

While working on his translations of the Zohar and the Bahir in Venice in 1547, Postel became the confessor of Mother Zuana, an elderly woman who was responsible for the kitchen of the hospital of San Giovanni e Paolo. Zuana confessed to experiencing divine visions, which inspired Postel to believe that she was a prophet, that he was her spiritual son, and that he was destined to be the unifier of the world's religions. When he returned from his second journey to the East, he dedicated two works to her memory: Les Très Merveilleuses Victoire des Femmes du Nouveau Monde and La Vergine Venetiana.
Based on his own visions, these works brought Postel into conflict with the Inquisition. Postel's ties, however, with the very men tasked with trying him led to a verdict of insanity, rather than heresy, which could to the death penalty, and consequently Postel was confined to the Papal prisons in Rome. He was released when the prison was opened upon the death of Paul IV in 1559. Czech humanist Šimon Proxenus ze Sudetu, reports that in 1564 Postel was detained to the monastery of St. Martin des Champs in Paris, "because of his delusions on the Mother Jeanne".
Postel resumed his life in Paris, but the Miracle at Laon in 1566 had a profound effect on him, and that year he published an account of it, De summopere considerando miraculo, in which he again expounded upon the interrelatedness of all parts of the universe and his imminent restoration of the world order. As a result, he was sentenced to house arrest by the parlement of Paris, and eventually spent the last eleven years of his life confined to the monastery of St. Martin des Champs.

Works