Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

Pietschmann in his learned essay,1 based in part on A. G. Hoffmann's article " Hermes " in Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopiidie der Wissenschaften und Kunste? An exception to this tendency, however, is to be found in the opinion of Aall ; 3 who, though he adduces no proof, would on general grounds place the composition of the Hermetic literature (though whether or not by this he means our extant Trismegistic sermons is not clear) as far back as the second century B.C., and would see in it an offshoot from the same stem which later on supplied the ground - conceptions of the Johannine theology.4

ENGLISH ENCYCLOP^DISM

In England, as we have seen, the subject, like BO many others of a similar nature, has been almost entirely neglected, but with the encyclopaedic activity of the past generation we find it touched upon, and in the usual encyclopaedic fashion. The German position is assumed, without one word of proof or reference to any, as an " acquired fact of science " ! The " last effort of expiring Heathendom " theory is trotted out with complacency and with that impressive air of official knowledge which makes the pronouncements of the family physician a law unto all its members, from baby to father — until the specialist is called in. And

He contends that G. H. xiii. (xiv.) shows a Neo-pythagorean tendency, — a term far vaguer than Neo-platonic even.

1 Hermes Trismegistos n. agyp., griech. u. oriental. Uberlieferungen (Leipzig, 1875).

unfortunately these ex cathedrd encyclopaedic pronouncements are all the general reader will ever hear. This is the case with all those three indifferent articles in our current dictionaries of reference.1 We are assured that, "as all are generally agreed," the writings are Neo-platonic, and this without any qualification or definition of the term, and that too in dictionaries where the term " Neoplatonic," in articles on the subject, is applied solely to the " Chain " from Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus onwards. The presumption is plain that by Neoplatonic forgeries we are to understand a date of at earliest from the middle of the third century onwards.

2 A laborious article replete with references, but dealing solely with the Hermes-saga and not with our writings.

3 Aall (A.), Geschichte der Logosidee in der Philosophic (Leipzig, vol. i. 1896, vol. ii. 1899), ii. 78, n. 4.

4 Cf. Reitzenstein, Zwei religionsgeschichtliche Fragen (Strassburg, 1901), p. 93, n. 3.

CHAMBERS'S OPINION

And this although Justin Martyr (dr. 150 A.D.) bestows emphatic praise on these very same writings and classes their writer, "Hermes," among the "most ancient philosophers," a point which the German theorists and their English copiers have all discreetly shirked, but which, together with other considerations, has forced Chambers, in the preface to his translation (London, 1882), to give quite a new meaning to the term Neoplatonist, which he uses of Hermes in his title,2 and to declare that our Hermes is entitled " to

1 Art. " Hermes and Hermes Trismegistus," by L. Schmitz, in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (London, 1870), a work which is now entirely out of date ; Jowett's art., " Hermes Trismegistus," in the Encyclopedia Britannica (9th ed., London, 1880), repeated in the recent reprint without alteration ; and Mozley's art., " Hermes Trismegistus," in Smith and Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography (London, 1882) ; to both of which articles, if not to the works themselves, the above remark also applies.

2 The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus,
Christian Neoplatonist.