Isaac Casaubon

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Isaac Casaubon was a French Huguenot classical scholar, among the most learned philologists of his age, whose 1614 examination of the Hermetic writings showed them to be far younger than they claimed — a finding that reset the standing of an entire body of esoteric literature. Born in Geneva to refugee Calvinist parents in 1559, he held chairs at Geneva and Montpellier, edited Greek and Latin authors with a rigor that became a model for later scholarship, and ended his career in England under James I, where he died in 1614.

The Hermetic texts had for over a century been read as the work of Hermes Trismegistus, an Egyptian sage thought to predate Moses. Marsilio Ficino, who completed his Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum around 1463 (published 1471), had received it as the oldest theology of all, a wisdom in which the truths of Christianity were foreseen by a pagan of immense antiquity. That dating gave the texts their authority: their resemblance to Christian and Platonic ideas looked like prophecy, not borrowing.

Casaubon’s argument appeared in a long critique of the church history of the Catholic cardinal Cesare Baronio. Reading the Greek closely, he noted that the texts used vocabulary, turns of phrase, and references that belonged to the early Christian centuries, not to remote Egypt — that they cited later authors and spoke in the idiom of post-classical Greek. The writings, he concluded, were composed well into the Common Era, after Christ, by authors steeped in Greek philosophy. The apparent prophecy ran the other way: the parallels were the ordinary traffic of late-antique thought.

Scholarship has largely upheld the verdict. The Hermetica are now placed roughly in the second and third centuries CE, products of a Greek-speaking world that already knew Platonism, Judaism, and Christianity — though specialists since have recovered a genuine Egyptian element Casaubon was inclined to dismiss, so the texts are read today as neither primordial nor merely Greek, but as a meeting of both. His dating is sometimes told as the moment the Hermetic spell broke, the point at which a learned Renaissance could no longer treat these pages as the voice of a prophet older than Moses.

The reality was slower and stranger. Many readers simply went on valuing the texts for what they said rather than for their supposed age; the Cambridge Platonists and later esoteric writers continued to mine them, and the figure of Trismegistus kept its hold on the imagination long after the philology was settled. What Casaubon changed was not belief so much as the terms on which the texts could be defended — and the curious afterlife of that change is that the writings he aged have proved more durable than the antiquity he took from them.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres · Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — Prolegomena (1906)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Cambridge Platonism · Gnosis