The Pious Hoax Hypothesis

 

THE PIOUS HOAX HYPOTHESIS

I invite readers to suspend judgement, surrender all assumptions, accept the premise for a moment, and consider the implications...

Proposal

The Voynich manuscript (specifically the text) is a late medieval hoax, but a hoax perpetrated with noble rather than ignoble intent. It was prepared as an epistemological critique of the natural sciences. 

Scenario

Nicholas of Cusa, no less – or a follower thereof - or let’s just say someone ‘Cusean’ in the relevant milieu-  - prepared the text as a hoax, but not as a nefarious hoax, not as a literary fraud done for money, but as a lesson, a philosophical demonstration. 

As we continue to struggle to make sense of the work, and are confounded by it, the lesson is for us. 

The manuscript is a pious hoax, a work prepared not to deceive but to instruct, to teach by example. 

Those who fail to learn the lesson remain lost in the labrynith of contradictions and ambiguities that is the Voynich manuscript.

* * *

There is a passage in one of Nicholas of Cusa’s minor dialogues that provides the key to this reading. 

Far from being a remote intellectual, Cusanus took a keen interest in the practical sciences of the layman and wrote a series of works in which an unnamed “Cardinal” (Cardinal Nicholas) discourses with an anonymous “Layman” about philosophical matters that arise from everyday life. 

In this passage Cusanus makes a pregnant comparison between the type of knowledge the “Layman” might have of the natural sciences and with the reading of a Latin manuscript. He writes:

[The situation is] as if a layman who did not know the meaning of the words were to read aloud from some book: the reading aloud would proceed by the power of reason. For he would read aloud by making inferences regarding the differences of the letters, which he would combine and separate; and this would be the work of reason. Yet, he would remain ignorant of [the content of] what he was reading aloud.

The translator, Jasper Hopkins, provides this illuminating explanation of the passage in the footnotes:

Ordinarily, a layman, who is an autodidact, would not know Latin, the language of most scholarly manuscripts in Nicholas’s day. 

Moreover, in the Latin manuscripts, not all individual words are properly separated by a word space. (Thus, at times, “adeo” is confusable with “a deo”.) Moreover, the letters “t” and “c” (as in  “sic” or “sit”) may not be easily distinguishable. Or the combinations “im,” “mi” “ini” may not be differentiable without a sense of what the entire word is suppose to be. (Thus, “in eo”, which is often written without an intervening space, may be confused for “meo”.) 

A layman, who is not necessarily illiterate, might have learned how to expand the word-abbreviations used in Latin manuscripts and might have been taught how to pronounce Latin words—without, however, having learned to understand the meaning of Latin sentences.

Cusanus is making an epistemological point. It is an epistemological point perfectly familiar to any Platonist but one likely to be lost on modern people because it is at odds with the outlook of modern science. 

Nicholas is not counted among the saints of modern science because he was a rationalist, not an empircist, and he contributed nothing to the empirical method. He did suggest the timing of the pulse for medical diagnosis, but that is his only ribbon in the scientific Hall of Fame. 

His cosmology is overlooked in the history of science because he arrived at it by reason, not by observation, just as many of his other proto-modern surmises – elliptical orbits, an infinite universe etc. – are ignored because he did not arrive at them by scientific method. His thinking did not culminate in Enlightenment Empiricism. 

What Cusanus is saying is this: 

The natural scientist (here represented by the ‘Layman’) learns how to pronounce the text of nature – is able to discern the letters and expand the abbreviations, and so on – but has no idea what it actually means. 

Indeed, empircism proposes that this is a virtue. 

The scientific method avoids (or suspends forever) questions of meaning.

It is only concerned with describing nature, finding and manipulating the levers and pullies of nature, unconcerned with ultimate causes or intrinsic meanings. 

Cusanus is comparing this type of knowledge to knowing how to pronounce and sound out a Latin manuscript without being able to understand what the words actually say. 

That is the position of the modern scientist. He can describe the universe down to milliseconds after the Big Bang. What does it all mean? Who knows? – it’s not a scientific question.

* * *

Two Platonic doctrines underpin Cusanus’ position, both from Plato’s cosmological tour de force, the Timaeus. 

The first is the so-called stoichea analogy, whereby the cosmos is compared to a written text (with atoms being letters that in various combinations make words and sentences.) 

The second is the characterization of the study of phusis as “a likely story” – an eikos muthos. 

The natural sciences are not ‘muthos’ (myths) to Plato, but neither are they ‘logos’ – solid truth. 

Instead, they concern likelihoods, probabilities, approximations. A likely story.

Cusanus is a good Platonist. We apply the powers of reasoned judgment to probabilities – a type of methodical cleverness – but there is a higher faculty – nous – by which we grasp the ‘Logos’ of things. 

Strictly speaking, this is scientia. What we misname as ‘science’ is a prodiguously systematic but blind unpicking of nature for the purposes of power and exploitation. 

Cusanus’ ‘Layman’ can unpick the Latin of a manuscript, but he is none the wiser for it. 

* * *

Now let us suppose that the Voynich manuscript has been prepared to illustrate exactly this point, that is to say, to put us in exactly that position.

We are confronted by a text as opaque as nature itself, and scholars try to decipher it, bit by bit, letter by letter, through the exercise of reason, but without any understanding of what it might mean. 

The manuscript is a unique complex of conundrums: perhaps it has been designed to be so?

The above quoted passage by Cusanus then becomes deeply suggestive. 

There is a body of opinion that has warmed to the idea that the text might consist of some system of Latin abbreviations or shorthand. 

Scholars pore over the handwritten pages trying to make out the glyphs and the rules that govern their arrangement. The manuscript is the proverbial “some book”:

… as if a layman who did not know the meaning of the words were to read aloud from some book… 

And our study of its text, our linguistic analysis, our computational attacks, are all a matter of:

…making inferences regarding the differences of the letters, which he would combine and separate; and this would be the work of reason.

Reading the Voynich text – so-called ‘Voynichese’ – presents unique methodological challenges. 

It is sometimes described as a ‘black box’ problem. It is like a sealed black box. The joins are seamless, there is no way in and we cannot even tell if there is anything inside. 

How is it to be studied? We can count instances and make graphs, but if our “inferences regarding the differences of the letters” are wrong, all our calculations are misconceived. 

The text has so far defied all our probing. 

The history of modern ‘Voynich Studies’ has been an unhappy spectacle. It is like a protracted  episode from the sitcom the Big Bang Theory: Sheldon and the boys find an old manuscript and take it to the lab. “Wow! Spiral nebula!” says Leonard, and they soon decide it must be by da Vinci (who else?) and contain the secrets of quantum mechanics…. But they still don’t know what it says. 

We know that Voynichese appears in two dialects, has a heavily constrained grammar, seems structured like a syllabary, and the letters that look like Latin vowels seem to behave like Latin vowels, so the letter that looks like an [o] is probably pronounced like an [o], but we have not the slightest clue what even one word means. 

We might study it intensely for decades more and still be in the same position. 

We will forever be in that position, of course, if the text, in fact, is a hoax, if “hoax” is the right word. Ruse. Wile. Artifice. Pedagogical device. 

In this scenario Cusanus or some hypothetical Cusian – as per the Cardinal and the Layman in the dialogue – has prepared a Latin manuscript with all the arcane tricks and pitfalls of a Latin manuscript – conventions over which Nicholas had complete command, by the way; he was one of the great manuscript scholars of his age. 

The Voynich script is, as we have it, an assembly of Latin abbreviation marks and conventions, some of them obscure. The text is formed like highly compressed Latin. Conceviably, it rehearses every Latin trick known. It is an ensemble of Latin tricks.

But, this is just a manufactured appearance. 

In reality, by this scenario, there is no plaintext. The entire Voynich manuscript is an exercise for the ‘Layman’ in expanding and decrypting abbreviated, compressed Latin. 

All he can achieve through the application of cleverness is a “likely story” about what it might all mean. 

The purpose of making the ‘Layman’ do this exercise is to teach him, at length, the limitations of what he calls ‘science’. 

* * *

In any hoax solution to the Voynich riddle, the manuscript’s author has had us jumping through hoops for no reason for centuries. It becomes not just a riddle but almost a crime: the crime is wasting our time for fun or profit. 

In this alternate proposal the deception has been imposed upon us for noble reasons. 

The work is, as it were, an allegory of modern science. 

The Voynich text is to the Voynichero what the text of nature is to the natural scientist. They go about studying them in the same way, using the same methods, methods of quantification, experimentation and observation. 

This enables us to discern the letters, infer the grammar, parse the vocabulary, learn the phonetics, gather information, but not understand. 

In Nicholas of Cusa’s thought, the inability of cleverness to reach truth is a profound matter and the subject of his doctrine of divine ignorance, itself rooted in the Via Negative of Dionysius the Areopagite. 

He taught that man can only ever attain approximations of the truth, likely stories. 

One of his dialogues with the Layman concerns this theme applied to weights and measures. Exact measurements are impossible, by nature. We can make finer and finer measurements that approach exacitude, but exactitude itself belongs to God. 

Famously, he analogizes the world to a straight line that, on another scale, is revealed as part of the circumference of a circle. (The natural sciences can take very fine measures of the straight line without ever suspecting it is part of a circle.) 

Again: this is all Platonic. Cusanus finds ways – within Trinitarian orthodoxy – to illustrate the epistemological distinctions Plato makes in such celebrated sections of the Republic as the Divided Line and the Simile of the Cave. 

It is necessary here to appreciate the Platonic (also called ‘rationalist’) critique of the empirical method and the sciences founded upon the empirical method. 

The empiricist, the Platonists have always said, is like the man searching for his car keys under the street light, not because that’s where he dropped them but because that is where he can see best. 

For Cusanus the empiricist is like the man – the Layman – who can slowly put together all the sounds of a Latin manuscript without having comprehension. 

The scientific model is metaphysically inadequate. 

Scientific, or modern, man lives under a mountain of ever-increasing and essentially incomprehensible data about a meaningless cosmos and at best extracts creature comforts from it with his resulting technology. For all it’s pyrotechnics, it’s a squalid vision. 

* * *

The text is not, for all of that, a vicious hoax. It is not pointless in the end, or along the way. There is a point to empirical inquiry, reasoning and human conjectures, to be sure, but it not the same as understanding. 

Nor need the ‘language’ be trivial. To be effective – and to invite and withstand endless inquiry - it could encode, be based upon, natural cycles and systems, structures to hang an array of Latinisms upon. 

In what is perhaps a more plausible version of this hypothesis, Cusanus (or some Cusean) - let's throw the Neoplatonist Cardinal Bessarion into the mix here - has prepared the text – the glyph system, and so on - as an independent project, extracted from a wealth of familiarity with Latin manuscript and orthographic conventions. It has then been taken, adapted and illustrated by someone else. 

All the same, the text is a literal demonstration of the unnamed Cardinal’s Latin metaphor when speaking to the Layman in Cusanus’ dialogue. 

Let us quote it again:

[The situation is] as if a layman who did not know the meaning of the words were to read aloud from some book: the reading aloud would proceed by the power of reason. For he would read aloud by making inferences regarding the differences of the letters, which he would combine and separate; and this would be the work of reason. Yet, he would remain ignorant of [the content of] what he was reading aloud.

And let us recall Hopkin’s footnote to this:

A layman… might have learned how to expand the word-abbreviations used in Latin manuscripts and might have been taught how to pronounce Latin words—without, however, having learned to understand the meaning of Latin sentences…

This is the Cusean critique of the natural sciences. 

And consider his note as if it is a description of the Voynich text itself:

…not all individual words are properly separated by a word space. (Thus, at times, “adeo” is confusable with “a deo”.) Moreover, the letters “t” and “c” (as in  “sic” or “sit”) may not be easily distinguishable. Or the combinations “im,” “mi” “ini” may not be differentiable without a sense of what the entire word is suppose to be. (Thus, “in eo”, which is often written without an intervening space, may be confused for “meo”.) 

The proposal is that someone has prepared a text to demonstrate this, a text that is, in this way, parallel to the text of nature. 

And that text has survived and is now what we pore over, exposing it to empirical inquiry, unpicking it, composing likely stories about it – unaware of the historical irony of our predicament -  and we call it the Voynich manuscript, Beinecke Ms. 408.

R.B.