For a century and a half after Marsilio Ficino's translation, most European scholars believed that Hermes Trismegistus was an Egyptian sage who lived in the time of Moses or even earlier. In 1614 a Protestant philologist showed that this was not so. The episode is a crucial moment in the history of esotericism, because it shows the encounter between reverence for a tradition and the critical method.
Who Casaubon was
Isaac Casaubon was born in Geneva in 1559 to a family of French Protestant refugees. He became one of the greatest Greek scholars of his time: he edited classical authors such as Theophrastus, Athenaeus and Polybius, and taught in Geneva and Montpellier. He later worked in Paris as librarian to King Henry IV, and after the king's assassination moved to England at the invitation of James I. He died in London in 1614 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
A polemical work
His critique of Hermeticism did not arise from an interest in esotericism, but from a religious controversy. Cardinal Cesare Baronio had published the Annales ecclesiastici, a monumental history of the Church supporting Catholic positions. James I encouraged Casaubon to write a refutation.
So in 1614 there appeared De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI, a series of sixteen critical exercises on Baronio's first volume. In one of them Casaubon examined the cardinal's use of supposed pagan prophecies of Christ, including those attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and the Sibyls.
Casaubon's evidence
Casaubon's analysis rested on precise philological and historical arguments:
- language: the Greek of the Hermetic treatises is not that of a remote age, but late Greek, with words and expressions attested only in the first centuries of the Christian era;
- ideas: the texts contain plainly Platonic doctrines and concepts close to Christian theology, such as the Word and regeneration, which could not belong to an author earlier than Plato;
- the silence of the sources: no ancient Greek author, not even Plato or Aristotle, who were interested in Egyptian wisdom, cites Hermes as the author of these writings;
- the lack of Egyptian features: the content does not reflect the Egyptian religion Casaubon could know from Greek sources, but the Greek philosophy of the imperial age.
His conclusion was clear: the Corpus Hermeticum had been composed in the Christian era by authors of Greek culture, perhaps partly to lend ancient authority to recent ideas.
He was not the first to doubt
Casaubon was not the first to be suspicious. Already in the sixteenth century some scholars had questioned the antiquity of Hermes, and others had noticed suspicious similarities with Christianity. But his analysis was the most systematic and the most authoritative, thanks to his reputation as a philologist.
The reactions
The effect was neither immediate nor universal. Many went on believing in Hermes's antiquity for decades:
- the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, in his great works on Egypt, continued to regard Hermes as an ancient sage;
- the English philosopher Robert Fludd remained attached to the Hermetic vision;
- the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, in 1678, accepted that the texts were late, but argued that they might preserve elements of an ancient Egyptian theology.
Slowly, however, Casaubon's dating prevailed in the learned world. The collapse of Hermes's antiquity deprived Hermeticism of the role of "first theology" it had held in the Renaissance.
The judgement of modern historians
In 1964 Frances Yates, in her book on Giordano Bruno, identified Casaubon's dating as the watershed that closed the era of Renaissance Hermeticism. This reading has been very influential, although later studies have shown that Hermeticism lived on well beyond 1614, changing as it went.
There is a further twist. Twentieth-century research, especially after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, has reassessed the Egyptian context of the texts. The historian Garth Fowden, in The Egyptian Hermes, showed that the Hermetic writings arose in circles of Roman Egypt where Egyptian traditions and Greek philosophy coexisted. Casaubon was right about the date, but may have underestimated the Egyptian roots.
What this story teaches
For Studio Esoterico Cornelio, Casaubon's story holds a lesson in method. A spiritual tradition does not lose value when its true origin becomes known: the Hermetic treatises remain texts of great depth even if written in the second or third century. Historical knowledge, rather than destroying the inner search, makes it more aware.
In short
- Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) was one of the greatest Greek philologists of his age.
- In 1614, in a polemical work against Baronio, he showed that the Corpus Hermeticum dated from the Christian era.
- His evidence concerned language, content, the silence of ancient sources and the absence of clear Egyptian features.
- Many Hermeticists, such as Kircher and Fludd, kept believing in the antiquity of Hermes.
- Modern scholarship confirms the dating but reassesses the Egyptian context of the texts.