Casaubon's Proof: The Ancient Wisdom Was New All Along

Isaac Casaubon was one of the finest classical scholars of his generation — a man who could read Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac with equal ease, who had spent his life with the great texts of antiquity, who knew from long experience the difference between what a first-century author sounds like and what a third-century author sounds like. He had come to London in 1610 to work for James I on a polemical treatise against Cardinal Cesare Baronio. In the course of that work, he turned his attention to the Corpus Hermeticum.

He approached it the same way he approached every text: with close attention to vocabulary, syntax, literary allusion, and historical context. He was not trying to debunk anything. He was following the evidence.

The evidence led somewhere uncomfortable.

The Corpus Hermeticum used Greek philosophical vocabulary that had not existed before Plato — terms from the Stoic and Neoplatonist traditions that postdated the pharaonic Egypt where Hermes Trismegistus was supposed to have lived. The texts made allusions to New Testament passages that had not yet been written at the time Hermes allegedly composed them. The theological anxieties the texts expressed — about the soul's entrapment in matter, about the escape from planetary fate, about the relationship between gnosis and salvation — were the anxieties of the first three centuries of the Common Era, not of any earlier period. They were contemporary with Gnosticism, with Neoplatonism, with early Christianity. They were, in fact, those traditions.

Casaubon published his conclusion in 1614: the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were composed between roughly 100 and 300 CE. The "first theologian" older than Moses was a literary fiction. A hundred and fifty years of Renaissance Hermeticism — the prisca theologia, the chain of ancient wisdom from Hermes through Pythagoras through Plato — rested on a misdating.

He was right about the dates. He was arguably wrong about the implications. The texts were still the product of one of history's great moments of religious synthesis: a fusion of Egyptian religious thought, Greek philosophy, Jewish monotheism, and emerging Christian theology, forged in the crucible of Roman-era Alexandria. Their ideas had roots genuinely older than their composition. And the tradition they had generated — the Hermetic tradition that ran through Ficino, through Bruno, through the alchemists — did not evaporate when Casaubon proved its founding myth was myth.

It went underground instead. It became Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Theosophy, the Western esoteric tradition in its modern forms. It had survived the closing of the temples, the burning of the libraries, the execution of Bruno. It survived Casaubon's proof too — not by refuting it, but by deciding that the truth about when the texts were written did not change the truth of what they said.