Casaubon and 1614: the end of Hermes' antiquity

For a century and a half, ever since Ficino had translated him, Hermes Trismegistus had been considered one of the most ancient teachers of humanity, a contemporary of Moses or only a little later. In 1614 a Genevan philologist transplanted to London, Isaac Casaubon, published a few pages that cracked this certainty beyond repair. He did not write a work on Hermeticism: his critique appeared almost in passing, within a religious controversy. Yet it is considered one of the founding moments of modern textual criticism.

A Protestant against Baronius's Annales

Casaubon, born in Geneva in 1559, was one of the greatest Greek scholars of his time. After years spent in Paris as royal librarian, he moved to England in 1610 at the invitation of King James I. There he undertook a refutation of the Annales ecclesiastici of Cardinal Cesare Baronio, the monumental history of the Church written from a Catholic perspective. The volume, entitled De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI, appeared in London in 1614.

Baronio, like many authors before him, had cited Hermes Trismegistus and the Sibyls as pagan witnesses who had clearly foretold the mysteries of Christianity. Casaubon, a Protestant, wanted to show that these testimonies had no historical value, and to do so he examined the language, style and content of the Hermetic writings with the tools of philology.

The philologist's arguments

The proofs Casaubon put forward were above all linguistic and historical. The Greek of the treatises, he observed, is not that of a remote age, but contains terms and expressions typical of the imperial period. It includes concepts of Platonic philosophy and formulas that echo the New Testament, in particular the Gospel of John. Moreover, no Greek author of the classical age, neither Plato nor Pythagoras, ever cites these texts, which ought to have been venerable sources.

The conclusion was clear-cut: the writings attributed to Hermes had been composed in the Christian era by authors imitating Greek philosophy and Christian theology, perhaps to lend their own ideas the authority of a revered name. The supposed pagan prophecy of the Gospel turned out to be, in reality, a reflection of the Gospel itself, and not an anticipation of it.

Reactions and the survival of Hermes

The discovery was not immediately accepted by everyone. Robert Fludd continued to regard Hermes as a most ancient author, and the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, in the mid-seventeenth century, built his interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphs without taking Casaubon's objections into account. The Cambridge philosopher Ralph Cudworth, in 1678, accepted the late dating but argued that the texts might preserve older Egyptian doctrines.

Modern scholarship places the composition of the Greek Hermetic treatises between the first and third centuries AD, in Roman Egypt. In 1945, among the Coptic codices discovered at Nag Hammadi, further Hermetic texts emerged, including a dialogue known as the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth. The debate today concerns above all how much is authentically Egyptian in this literature written in Greek.

Casaubon did not destroy Hermeticism, which continued to inspire alchemists and philosophers, but he changed its status: from primordial revelation it became a chapter in the religious history of late antiquity. For readers of Agrippa, the date 1614 marks the border between the world in which he wrote and the one in which his sources would be reread with critical eyes.