Prisca Theologia

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Prisca theologia — “ancient theology” — is the idea that a single body of divine wisdom was revealed in remote antiquity and handed down through a chain of sages, each receiving and passing on the same truth. In its standard Renaissance form the line runs from Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, and Orpheus, through Pythagoras, to Plato, and its content is held to agree, at bottom, with the teaching of the Church. The wisdom is one; the names along the chain are witnesses to it rather than its inventors.

The phrase belongs to fifteenth-century Florence and after, though the impulse is older. Early Christian writers such as Lactantius and Augustine had already treated certain pagan authorities as having glimpsed truths later made plain in the Gospel. What turned this into a structured genealogy was the work of Marsilio Ficino. At Cosimo de’ Medici’s behest he broke off his Latin rendering of Plato to translate the Greek Hermetic writings first, completing them in 1463. Ficino read the Corpus Hermeticum as the work of an Egyptian priest contemporary with or older than Moses, and so placed Hermes at the head of a sequence of prisci theologi whose final flowering was Plato. The Italian humanist Agostino Steuco later coined the companion term philosophia perennis, the “perennial philosophy,” for much the same conviction.

The scheme served a particular need. It let Christian scholars embrace pagan philosophy without apostasy: if Plato and Hermes had drunk from the same ancient spring as the prophets, their books could be studied as partial revelation rather than rival error. For the magical and Hermetic currents of the Renaissance it did more — it lent the authority of immense age to texts they wished to defend.

That authority rested on a dating that did not hold. In 1614 the philologist Isaac Casaubon showed, on grounds of language and content, that the Hermetic writings were not the work of a primeval Egyptian sage but compositions of the early Christian centuries — roughly contemporary with the Gospels they were thought to foreshadow. The keystone of the genealogy was removed, and learned opinion gradually abandoned the prisca theologia as history.

As an idea it proved more durable than as a chronology. The conviction it expressed — that the great traditions are successive guardians of one underlying truth — runs on through later esotericism, and a version of it survives wherever the “perennial philosophy” is invoked. Whether the resemblances among traditions reflect a shared source or only a shared human reaching is the open question the scheme always begged; the prisca theologia answered it in one direction, and modern scholarship reads the same evidence the other way.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres · Plato — Timaeus (Jowett) · The Chaldean Oracles (Mead, 1908)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Renaissance Hermetism · Gnosis · Theosophy