Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
1 See his dissertation on Hermes and the Hermetic writings in the edition of 1820, vol. ii., pp. 128-155.
2 Though Reitzenstein (p. 1) speaks of the " schneidende
Kritik" of Casaubon.
3 Vol. i., p. 89, of the following amply entitled work, Das Platonisch-Hermetisches [st'c] Christenthum, begriffend die historische Erzehlung vom Ursprung und vielerley Secten der heutigen Fanatischen Theologie, unterm Namen der Paracelsisten, Weigelianer, Rosencreutzer, Quaker, Bohmisten, Wiedertauffer, Bourignisten, Labadisten und Quietisten, by M. Ehre Gott Daniel Colberg, 2 vols. (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1690, 1691).
was now revived, and the eighteenth and nineteenth century criticism of the Trismegistic works almost invariably starts with this prejudice in mind and seeks (almost without exception) to father the Trismegistic writings on Neoplatonism, which it regards as the most powerful opponent of orthodoxy from the third century onwards. Harles (1790) gives the references to all the main factors in the evolution of this opinion during the eighteenth century ; 1 but the only argument that the century produced — indeed, the only argument that has ever been adduced — is that the doctrines of the Trismegistic writings are clearly Platonic, and that too of that type of mystical Platonism which was especially the characteristic of the teaching of lamblichus at the end of the third century A.D., and which is generally called Neoplatonism ; therefore, these writings were forged by the Neoplatonists to prop up dying Paganism against the ever more and more vigorous Christianity. We admit the premisses, but we absolutely deny the conclusion. But before pointing out the weakness of this conclusion of apologetic scholarship, we must deal with the literature on the subject in the last century. The eighteenth century produced no arguments in support of this conclusion beyond the main premisses which we have admitted.2 Has the nineteenth century produced any others so as to justify the position taken up by the echoes of opinion in all the popular encyclopaedias with regard to these most valuable and beautiful treatises ? l
1 Op. supr. rit. ; the most " advanced " writer on the subject being Tiedemann, to whose work we have already referred ; but unfortunately we have not been able to procure a copy, and the British Museum is without it. Tiedemann thinks that none of the Trismegistic writings existed before the fourth century, while Fabricius himself, whose summary of prior opinion is overworked by Harles, assigns them to the time of Porphyry and lamblichus, though Harles dates the earliest of them from the end of the first to the middle of the second century (p. 48, n.).
2 It may be worth while here to record the opinion of Gibbon, who would ascribe a Christian origin to some of the Trismegistic