Translate Hermes First: Ficino and the Dying Cosimo

In the spring of 1463, a Macedonian monk named Leonardo da Pistoia arrived in Florence carrying a manuscript. Cosimo de' Medici, the aging patriarch who had effectively ruled Florence for three decades and built the greatest private library in Europe, took one look at it and sent a message to Marsilio Ficino.

Put Plato aside, the message said. I am old. I want to read this before I die.

The manuscript was a collection of Greek texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus — the "Thrice-Great Hermes," a legendary Egyptian sage identified with the god Thoth. Ficino, who had been laboring for years on the Platonic translations that Cosimo had commissioned, was a twenty-nine-year-old priest of extraordinary gifts. He turned to the new manuscript.

He translated the Corpus Hermeticum in a matter of weeks. The first text — the Poimandres — was finished in April. Cosimo read it. He read the others as they came. He died that August, having spent his last months not with Plato but with what Ficino was convinced was the most ancient theology in the world.

Ficino believed — and his belief was not unreasonable given what was then known — that Hermes Trismegistus was a historical figure who had lived before Moses, possibly before Abraham. The Corpus Hermeticum seemed to describe the creation of the world, the fall of the soul, the nature of the divine mind, and the path of return to God — and to do so in a way that appeared to anticipate Christian theology without having the benefit of Christian revelation. For Ficino, this was evidence of a prisca theologia — an ancient theology, older than any specific tradition, that had flowed through Hermes, then Pythagoras, then Plato, then into Christianity. Hermes was the first theologian.

He was wrong about the dates. The Corpus Hermeticum was composed in the first through third centuries CE, during the same Roman-Egyptian period that produced the Gospel of John and the Neoplatonists. A century and a half after Ficino's death, the scholar Isaac Casaubon would prove this by examining the Greek vocabulary of the texts. But Ficino could not know this, and even if he had, it might not have changed much. The ideas in the Corpus Hermeticum were real: they were the product of one of history's great moments of intellectual synthesis, and they rewrote European thinking about the soul, about the cosmos, about the relationship between magic and philosophy.

Cosimo had wanted to read the oldest wisdom before he died. He read some of the best wisdom instead. His scholar translated it in a hurry because a man was dying. The urgency of mortality produced one of the Renaissance's most consequential acts of transmission.