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Thomas Traherne and Hermes Trismegistus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
Among Renaissance Platonists, the texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus provoked both adulation and controversy. Scholars variously considered the texts precious repositories of ancient wisdom; labeled them frauds; or, more cautiously, suggested they were partly corrupt, partly wise. The first step towards enlightenment came in 1614, when Isaac Casaubon challenged the authenticity of the hermetic texts. Except by ignoring Casaubon, no one thereafter could believe (as William Baldwin could in 1555) that ‘of all the Philosophers’ Hermes was ‘not onely the most excellent, but also the most auncient.’
No longer coeval with Moses, no longer indeed assured of personal existence, Hermes came in the seventeenth century to occupy an equivocal position. On the one hand, Casaubon's argument was far too convincing to be denied; on the other, the traditional reputation of Hermes, in Marsilio Ficino's influential words, ‘Primus… Theologiae Autor,’ was far too popular to die a swift and decisive death.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1966
References
1 On pre-Renaissance views of Hermes, see Yates, Frances A., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition(London, 1964), pp. 6–12 Google Scholar. Lactantius and Augustine were the chief authorities, and on their respect for Hermes the Renaissance attitude was founded.
2 The Tretise of Morall Phylosophy,.rev. ed. (London, 1555), sig. B8. This work was first published in 1547.
3 Opera, 11 (Basel, 1576), 1836; quoted by Traherne in his Ficino Notebook, B.M. MS. Burney 126, f. 58.
4 Nourse, A Discourse of Natural and Reveal'd Religion (London, 1691), p. 22. Miss Yates discusses ‘reactionary hermetists’ of the ‘post-Casaubon era’ in Bruno, pp. 403-423; on p. 398 she observes the frequent reluctance to accept the full import of Casaubon's evidence. On the dating, see Yates, pp. 398-402.
5 Edward Stilling fleet, Origines Sacrae (London, 1662), p. 35.
6 Commonplace Book, Bodl. MS. Eng. poet. c. 42, s.v. ‘Generation,’ ff. 48^.2-49.2. (References to the Commonplace Book, hereafter cited as CB, give both folio and column.) It is possible that the Commonplace Book passage is copied from another author, the words ‘Esteem ’ being an interlinear insertion, but the sentiment belongs to Traherne, who repeated the general idea in his Christian Ethicks (London, 1675), sig. 2H5V (hereafter cited as CE). With this assessment compare the essentially similar if considerably more nervous view of Ralph Cudworth (discussed by Yates, Bruno, pp. 427-431), who in an early sermon referred to ‘Hermes Trismegist … . who, I think with Casaubon, was rather a Christian Divine than a Philosopher’ ﹛The Union of Christ and the Church [London, 1642], p. 27). The conclusion of modern authorities that the hermetic philosophy is an eclectic mixture consisting mainly of Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Stoicism, and bearing ‘nulle marque evidente ni de christianisme ni de neoplatonisme’ is irrelevant in the present context; see Nock, A. D., ‘Preface,’ Corpus Hermeticum, I (Paris, 1945)Google Scholar, v. This four-volume edition (Paris, 1945-54) by Nock and Festugiere, A.-J. is the most scholarly; Festugiere's La Revelation d'Hermes Trismegiste, vols. (Paris, 1944-54)Google Scholar is the great authoritative study. Since for practical purposes Traherne assumed Hermes to be one person (e.g.: ‘God is an infinit & Eternal Mind, according to Trismegistus, Plato, Socrates, & others’ [CB, s.v. ‘God,’ f. 50v.2]), the present study does the same, ignoring recent scholarship.
7 CE,sigs. 2H5-2H7, 2H8, 2I2V. Christian Ethicks is now available in a modern-spelling edition by Bottrall, Margaret, under the title The Way to Blessedness (London, 1962)Google Scholar. A critical edition by the present writer and George R. Guffey will be published by the Cornell University Press in 1967.
8 Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1958). Quotations from the Centuries (which with the Introduction occupy vol. 1) will indicate the number of the Century in roman, the number of the paragraph in arable, thus: C rv. 74. Quotations from the works in vol. 11 will give title, volume, and page, thus: ‘Wonder,' n, 6.
9 For an account of the cooperative methods of making the extracts, see my article 'Thomas Traherne's Commonplace Book,’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vnn (1964), 459, 463-464. The way in which Traherne first superintended, then took over the labor of copying indicates again his lively interest in Hermes.
10 B.M. MS. Bumey 126, ff. 58-58v.
11 Marcel, Raymond, Marsile Ficin (Paris, 1958), pp. 255–256 Google Scholar, 748.
12 Opera, n, 1836; Marcel, Ficin, pp. 603, 605. Ficino's genealogy resembled Augustine's (see Yates, Bruno, pp. 11, 14). On these and similar genealogies, see D. P. Walker, 'The Prisca T/ieo/ogi'a in France,'Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XVII (1954), 201-221.
13 Casaubon was not the first to doubt. Philippe de Mornay in 1581 qualified a reference to Hermes by a parenthetical caveat—‘(if the bookes that are fathered upon him be his in deed, as in truth they be very ancient)’—but as a man of the pre-Casaubon age he could then go on to cite Hermes confidently and repeatedly in his Ficinian role as the first theologian. See Mornay, A Worke Concerning the Trunesse of Christian Religion, tr. Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding (London, 1617), p. 26 et passim.
14 J. F., Preface to Hermes Trismegistus, Divine Pymander … Together with … Asclepius, tr. John Everard (London, 1657)Google Scholar, sigs. A2, A5V-A6. Traherne used this, the second, edition; see ‘Traherne's Commonplace Book,’ PBSA,p. 464, n. 12. On the source and content of Everard's translation, see Scott, Walter, tr. and ed., Hermetica, 1 (Oxford, 1924)Google Scholar, 43. n. 3.
15 See A. J. Festugiere, ‘L'Hermetisme,’ Arsberdttelse Kungl. Humanistika Vetenskapssamfundeti Lund (1947-48), p. 10. This long article summarizes Festugiere's Revelation.
16 Hermes, Pymander, 1.44-45; quoted in CB, s.v. ‘Heaven’ and ‘God,’ f. 50.1. Cf. Pymander, iv.43: man ‘is not only not good, but flatly evill, as being mortall.’ In giving quotations from Hermes, I use Everard's 1657 edition, giving the number of the book in roman, the verse in arabic; these are the same in the 1650 and 1657 editions. Further references will be made within the text of the present study, followed when appropriate by the rubric under which the quotation has been entered in the Commonplace Book and (likewise when appropriate) the page of CEon which it is quoted.
17 Traherne, Church's-Year-Book, Bodl. MS. Eng. th. e. 51, f. 90; cf. f. iv and CE,sigs. P7V, P4; C 1.55; Poems, n, 148, 169 ff.; ‘Thanksgivings for the Soul,’ 11, 235. Cf. also Thomas Hobbes, who said the fancy ‘seemeth to fly from one Indies to the other, and from Heaven to Earth, and to penetrate into the hardest matter, and obscurest places, into the future, and into her self, and all this in a point of time’ ('The Answer of Mr Hobbes to Sir Will. D'avenant's Preface Before Gondibert,’ in Davenant, Gondibcrt (London, 1651), p. 78). I am indebted to Miss E. G. W. Mackenzie of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, for this reference.
18 London, 1717, pp. 76-78. This work, published as the first part of A Collection of Meditations and Devotions, In Three Parts, was formerly ascribed (as the other two parts still tentatively are) to Mrs. Susanna Hopton; see Catherine Owen, A., ‘The Authorship of the “Meditations on the Six Days of Creation” and the “Meditations and Devotions on the Life of Christ”,’ Modern Language Review, LVI (1961), 1–5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Augustan Reprint Society will shortly publish an edition of the Meditations by George R. Guffey.
19 ‘The Person,’ 11, 78. Cf. ‘The Estate’ and ‘The Enquirie,’ which join ‘The Person’ in celebrating the human body.
20 See Marshall, William H., ‘Thomas Traherne and the Doctrine of Original Sin,' Modem Language Notes, LXXIH (March, 1958)Google Scholar, 161-165.
21 At times Hermes asserted divine immanence: ‘making all things appear,’ God ‘appeareth in all, and by all’ (v.8), but he never dwelt with Traheme's intense lyricism upon God's physical immanence.
22 Herbert, ‘Self-condemnation,’ Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1953), p. 170.
23 C n.90, Cf. Poems, 11, 156, 158, 173.
24 Studien zu Thomas Traherne (Tubingen, 1932), p. 65.
25 To those characteristics mentioned in the following paragraphs might be added this image in the ‘Thanksgivings for God's Attributes': ‘O the wonderful excellency of thine eternal Nature! It is as a Sphere, O Lord, into which we were born, whose Centre is everywhere, circumference no where’ (n, 318). Margoliouth's note quotes the OxfordDictionary of Quotations, which claims the image is ‘said to have been traced to a lost treatise of Empedocles'; but in the Renaissance it was universally ascribed to Hermes. It is not in the Pymander.
26 CE, sig. E6V; cf. also sigs. L6, 2M3V, 2N6V-2N7; C 11.7-11; ‘Meditations on the Fourth Day's Creation,’ pp. 39-46. For the sun as a symbol of the soul, see CE,sigs. F8V, G5,2N7; as a paradigm of love, CE, sigs. 2M2, 2M3V; as an emblem of God, Meditations, p. 41.
27 CE, sig. aI. Cf. the poem on sigs. 2B5V-2B6, quoted in part in C m.21 and reprinted by Margoliouth, n, 186-187; and also, C m.20.
28 As noted above (n. IO), Traherne apparently read Hermes in Latin before he read Everard's translation. But this fact does not alter the situation, since the Ficino Notebook may be most plausibly dated in the late 1660's—long after Traherne had formed his philosophy.
29 This is essentially the conclusion of Ellrodt, Robert, L'Inspiration personnelle et Vespritdu temps chez les poètes métaphysiques anglais, pt. I, vol. n ﹛Pokès de transition, pokés mystiques) (Paris, 1960), 267 Google Scholar. Ellrodt's discussion of similarities between Hermes and Traherne (pp. 267-275, 333-334) is generally good but is occasionally weakened by factual errors caused by his imperfect knowledge of the Commonplace Book.
30 Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn, n (London, 1962), 2546.