Agostino Steuco

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Agostino Steuco (1497–1548) signed his books Augustinus Steuchus Eugubinus — Augustine of Gubbio, the small Umbrian town where he was born — and is remembered chiefly for two words he set on a title page in Lyon in 1540: philosophia perennis, the “perennial philosophy.” An Augustinian Canon Regular who became bishop of Kisamos in Crete and keeper of the Vatican Library under Pope Paul III, he gave that phrase its first sustained currency in a treatise of ten books, De perenni philosophia, dedicated to the pope who had appointed him. Through it he named, in two Latin words, the conviction that one and the same knowledge of God has been present among all peoples in every age — and handed later centuries a banner they would carry in directions he never intended.

A wisdom always present

The book belongs to a project already a century old in Steuco’s time. Scholars in fifteenth-century Florence and their successors had assembled a genealogy of pagan sages — Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato — held to have grasped, in fragments, truths the Church would later teach in full. The scheme went by the name prisca theologia, the “ancient theology.” Its architect was Marsilio Ficino, who at the command of Cosimo de’ Medici had set aside his work on Plato in 1463 to translate the Corpus Hermeticum first, on the understanding that Hermes was the elder and the fountainhead. Ficino’s preface to that translation, the Pimander, traced a single line of theology — Hermes to Orpheus to Aglaophemus to Pythagoras to Plato — each sage passing on a unitary teaching that Christianity would complete. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola widened the lineage to take in Kabbalah and the Chaldean wisdom, and the conviction that all true philosophy converged on the Gospel became a settled habit of the Florentine Renaissance.

Steuco took the underlying claim and recast its shape. The older idea stressed a chain — a pedigree of named privileged teachers carrying a treasure handed down from one primeval source. Steuco’s term shifted the emphasis from transmission to permanence. What he described was not so much a wisdom handed down as a wisdom perpetually present: a single knowledge of the first principles, given to humankind at the creation, never wholly lost, surfacing among Egyptians and Persians and Greeks and Jews alike because it belonged to the mind of every people in every age. Charles Schmitt, whose study established Steuco as the author of the phrase, renders the governing thesis as the claim that there has always been one and the same knowledge of God among all nations. The distinction is fine but consequential. The prisca theologia is genealogical and esoteric, a lineage of initiates; the philosophia perennis, as Steuco framed it, is universal — a standing endowment of the human intellect, which Steuco grounded partly on the late Platonist Iamblichus and his teaching that knowledge of the divine is innate, native to the soul rather than acquired.

The whole apparatus served a single end. Steuco read the philosophers, the Hermetic writings, and Scripture as agreeing, at bottom, with the doctrines of the Church. Where a Neoplatonist spoke of the One, where Hermes addressed the Father who is mind, where Plato reasoned toward the Good, Steuco found the same God the creeds confessed — glimpsed unevenly, expressed in alien idiom, but the same. The agreement was the argument. If the wisest of the ancients, writing centuries before Christ and far outside Israel, had already arrived at the substance of Christian teaching, then that teaching was no recent invention and no provincial sect: it was the eternal religion of humanity, of which the Catholic Church was the full and final custodian.

Apologetics, not pluralism

It is easy to mistake the perennis philosophia for an early ecumenism, a generous gesture toward the equal dignity of the world’s faiths. It was nearly the opposite. Steuco wrote in the shadow of Luther, and his synthesis was a weapon of the Counter-Reformation. Where the Protestant reformers appealed to Christian antiquity — the pure early Church, before the accretions — to justify reforming the present one, Steuco answered with an appeal to the universal antiquity of truth itself. The Church did not need reform back toward a lost origin, because the truth it guarded had never been absent from the world; it ran continuous from the dawn of the human race to the present hierarchy at Rome. Wouter Hanegraaff, who devotes a chapter to him, reads the doctrine as conservative and static — a defense of the existing Church as the perfected vessel of an ageless knowledge, not an invitation to set the religions side by side as equals. Pope Paul III, to whom the book was dedicated, was the pope who would summon the Council of Trent; the dedication was no accident of patronage.

That polemical edge ran straight through Steuco’s other work, which was philological before it was philosophical. He had spent formative years among the manuscripts of the Grimani library in Venice, and he handled Hebrew and Greek with a confidence rare among Italian churchmen of his generation. He produced a recognitio of the Old Testament against the Hebrew — annotations on the Pentateuch, and later on the Psalms and Job — using Hebrew and Greek witnesses to correct Jerome’s Vulgate where he judged it astray. This was dangerous ground, and it brought him into open quarrel with Erasmus. The two men shared a method: both believed the sacred text should be read in its original tongues and corrected by the best manuscripts. But Steuco came to see in that very method a door opened to heresy. He charged Erasmus with having helped foment the Protestant revolt — with loosening, through philological license, the authority of the Church’s Bible. The irony is exact. Steuco prosecuted his case against the freedoms of textual criticism as a textual critic, and the same instrument he turned against Erasmus’s reading of the Bible was the instrument that would, within a lifetime, dismantle the historical scaffolding of his own great book.

The keystone removed

For the synthesis rested on a date. Everything depended on Hermes Trismegistus being a real Egyptian sage of immense antiquity, a contemporary of Moses or earlier, whose theology therefore anticipated Christian doctrine rather than echoing it. Read that way, the Hermetic agreement with the Gospel was the strongest evidence Steuco had: pagan Egypt, unaided, had reached the threshold of Christian truth. Read the other way, the evidence evaporates.

In 1614 the Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon, in a vast treatise written against the ecclesiastical history of Cardinal Baronius, subjected the Corpus Hermeticum to the same kind of linguistic scrutiny Steuco himself had practiced on the Old Testament. The texts, Casaubon showed, were studded with vocabulary and turns of phrase that could not be older than the Greek of the early Christian centuries; they quoted, or were quoted by, late authors; they bore the marks of the very age they claimed to precede. The Hermetica were not pre-Mosaic Egyptian revelation but Greek philosophical writings of late antiquity, composed after Christ, not before. The keystone of the prisca-theologia arch fell out. The ancient pagan witness to Christianity was, at best, a witness to it rather than ahead of it — and the chain of sages on which a century of Florentine learning had been built lost its earliest and most prized link. Giordano Bruno, burned fourteen years before Casaubon wrote, had staked an entire cosmology on the Egyptian Hermes; the dating that undid Steuco unmade that world too.

Steuco did not live to see it; he died in 1548, sixty-six years before Casaubon’s demonstration. But the historical frame he had built on collapsed, and with it the literal form of his proof. What survived was not the argument. It was the phrase.

The afterlife of two words

Philosophia perennis outlasted the apparatus that produced it, and in outlasting it changed meaning more than once. The philosopher Leibniz adopted the term in the early eighteenth century, but emptied it of its transreligious ambition: for him it named a durable core of metaphysical truths that serious thinkers in every era had recovered — a claim about philosophy, not about a single revelation diffused through all the nations. So thoroughly did this domesticated sense take hold that when Aldous Huxley made the phrase famous in English with his 1945 anthology The Perennial Philosophy, he credited it to Leibniz, and the misattribution has been quietly repeated ever since. The man who coined the words was forgotten by the readers who used them most.

Detached from Steuco’s Catholic apologetics, philosophia perennis became available to projects he would have abhorred. The nineteenth-century Theosophists inverted his polarity entirely, locating the highest preservation of the one wisdom not in the Church of Rome but in an Indo-Tibetan hidden tradition — universal truth turned against the very hierarchy Steuco had written to defend. In the twentieth century the term became the banner of the Traditionalist school of René Guénon and his successors, for whom a primordial metaphysical knowledge underlies the world’s orthodox religions and modernity is the long story of its loss; and, along a quite different line, of Huxley’s psychological reading, which sought the perennial wisdom in the convergence of mystical experience across cultures. These modern recastings — their genealogies, their internal disputes, and the scholarly critique they have drawn — belong to the broader history of Traditionalism and perennialism; Steuco stands at their head as the man who minted the coin, not as a member of the schools that later spent it.

The deeper continuity is structural. From Ficino retrojecting his own Platonism onto an imagined Egyptian Hermes, to Guénon locating his metaphysics in a supra-historical primordial Tradition, the recurrent move is the same: to find, behind one’s own convictions, an ancient and universal source — and to have the source repeatedly shown, by the cold work of dating and philology, to be later, nearer, or more constructed than the construction claimed. Casaubon’s redating of the Hermetica was the first great instance of that correction, and Steuco’s book is its most exact casualty.

Sources and scholarship

The decisive modern study is Charles B. Schmitt’s “Perennial Philosophy: From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz,” in the Journal of the History of Ideas 27, no. 4 (1966): 505–532, which established Steuco — not Leibniz — as the coiner of the phrase and traced its transmission through Champier, Francesco Giorgio, Nicholas of Cusa, and Guillaume Postel (Semantic Scholar record). For the source-critical anatomy of the De perenni philosophia — how much of it is assembled from Ficino, Pico, and the patristic tradition — the indispensable work is Maria Muccillo’s Platonismo, ermetismo e “prisca theologia” (Florence: Olschki, 1996), building on her earlier study of the prisca theologia in Steuco’s treatise. The critical-historical placement of Steuco within the genealogy of Western esotericism is set out by Wouter Hanegraaff in Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012), whose first chapter treats Steuco as “the universal Catholic” and reads the perennial philosophy as conservative apologetics rather than pluralism. A concise scholarly orientation, with bibliography, is the entry on the philosophia perennis and on Steuco himself in the Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Springer reference entry); the work’s reputation as a learned but uneven compilation is captured in a recent study pointedly titled after a critic’s verdict, “A Miserable Quilt of Confused Erudition” (University of Notre Dame repository).

The primary text remains in print and in scan. De perenni philosophia libri X (Lyon: Sébastien Gryphe, 1540) circulates in early editions and is the subject of a modern critical edition in the Editiones Florentinae Neoplatonicae series; Ficino’s Pimander (Treviso, 1471), the translation on which Steuco’s reading of Hermes ultimately depends, and the wider Corpus Hermeticum are available in G. R. S. Mead’s English rendering, beginning with the first treatise, the Poemandres. For the philological dispute with Erasmus and Steuco’s Counter-Reformation biblical humanism, the standard point of entry is the work of Ronald K. Delph.

For Steuco, the matter never hung on the survival of a phrase. He had set out to prove that the wisdom confessed at Rome was as old as the human mind, given with creation and recovered in every age; the agreement of Hermes and Plato and Moses was, to him, that proof in the flesh. Strip away the misdated Egyptian and the lineage of sages, and what he meant by philosophia perennis still stood where he had placed it — not as a chain of ancient teachers, but as the single light he held had never once gone out of the world, and toward which, in his account, every people had always been turning.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Prisca Theologia · Marsilio Ficino · Hermes Trismegistus · Renaissance Hermetism · Neoplatonism · Traditionalism Perennialism · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Isaac Casaubon · Corpus Hermeticum