Mead files Isaac Casaubon's 1614 verdict among the "warring opinions" of the older critics and dismisses the lot: "so far we have no arguments, no really" critical investigation. His own footnote records what Casaubon concluded, that the Poemandres "is a pseudepigraph". Casaubon reached that verdict from the Greek itself, judging its vocabulary and phrasing far too late for a sage contemporary with Moses. Later scholarship divided his conclusion, keeping his dating of the treatises to the early Christian centuries and dropping his claim of Christian authorship. Mead, who wants an older tradition behind the texts, passes over the half of the argument that lasted. On the date, the reader should weigh Casaubon against Mead.
Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
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page 13
And that such opinions were the only ones as late as 1630, is evident from the favour still shown to the voluminous commentaries of de Foix and Eossel. Nevertheless some fifty years previously, a hardy pioneer of scepticism had sturdily attacked the validity of the then universal Hermes tradition on one point at least — and that a fundamental one. For Patrizzi (p. la) declares that a certain Jo. Goropius Becanus was the first after so many centuries to dare to say that Hermes (as a single individual) never existed ! But the worthy Goropius, who appears to have flourished about 1580, judging by an antiquarian treatise of his on the race and language of the " Cimbri or Germani " published at Amsterdam, had no followers as yet in a belief that is now universally accepted by all critical scholarship. But this has to do with the Hermes-saga and not directly with the question of the Trismegistic works,
1 Op. tit., p. 3a.
2 In which Patrizzi did but echo the opinion of his predecessors, such as Vergecius, the editor of the first edition of the Greek text, Candalle and many more.
and so we may omit for the present any reference to the host of contradictory opinions on " Hermes " which are found in all the writers to whom we are referring, and none of which, prior to the decipherment of the hieroglyphics, are of any particular value.
It was about the middle of the seventeenth century that the theory of plagiarism and forgery was started. Ursin ( Joh. Henr. Ursinus), a pastor of the Evangelical Church at Ratisbon, published at Niirnberg in 1661, a work, in the second part of which he treated of " Hermes Trismegistus and his Writings,"1 and endeavoured to show that they were wholesale plagiarisms from Christianity, but his arguments were subjected to a severe criticism by Brucker some hundred years later.2
This extreme view of Ursin was subsequently modified into the subsidiary opinions that the Trismegistic works were composed by a half-Christian (semi-christiano) or interpolated by Christian overworking.
The most distinguished name among the early holders of the former opinion is that of Isaac Casaubon,3 who dates these writings at the beginning of the second century ; Casaubon's opinions, however, were promptly refuted by Cudworth in his famous work The True Intellectual System of the Universe, the first edition of which was printed at London, in folio, 1678.1 Cudworth would have it, however, that Casaubon was right as far as the treatises entitled " The Shepherd of Men " and " The Secret Sermon on the Mountain " are concerned, and that these treatises were counterfeited by Christians since the time of lamblichus — a very curious position to assume, since a number of the treatises themselves look back to this very " Shepherd " as the original document of the whole " Pcemandres " cycle.
1 De Zoroastre Badriano Hermete Trismegisto Sanchoniathone Phcenicio eorumque Scriptis, et Aliis contra Mosaicce Scriptural Anti-quitatem ; Exercitationes Familiar es, pp. 73-180 — a book now very scarce.
2 Jacob! Bruckeri, Historia Critica Philosophies (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1767), i. 252 ff. Lib. ii., cap. vii., " De Philosophia JSgyptiorum." See also Meiners' Versuch iiber die Religionsgeschichte der altesten Volker besonders der Egyptier (Gottingen, 1775).
3 De Rebus Sacris . . . Exercitationes ad Card. Baronii Prolegomena, i., n. 10 (London, 1614). Casaubon concludes that the whole book, i.e. the " Pcemandres," is a pseudepigraph, the pure invention of some Christian or other, or perhaps better, of some semi-Christian (p. 56).
But, indeed, so far we have no arguments, no really critical investigation,2 so that we need not detain the reader among these warring opinions, on which the cap was set by the violent outburst of Colberg in defence of orthodoxy against the Alchemists, Rosicrucians, Quakers, Anabaptists, Quietists, etc., of which fanatici, as he calls them, Hermes, he declares, was the Patriarch.3
THE ONLY ARGUMENT ADDUCED
One might almost believe that Colberg was an incarnation of a Church Father continuing his ancient polemic against heresy ; in any case the whole question of heresy