Casaubon's Date

For roughly a century and a half, educated Europe believed it had recovered the writings of an Egyptian sage who lived around the time of Moses. The Corpus Hermeticum, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, was translated from Greek into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in 1463, on Cosimo de' Medici's instruction to set aside Plato and do the Hermetic texts first.

The consequences were large. If these texts were as old as they appeared, then a non-biblical tradition had arrived independently at a monotheism compatible with Christianity, and that tradition was Egyptian. Giordano Bruno, Pico della Mirandola and a great many others built on that foundation. Hermetic thought runs through the natural philosophy, the art and the political theology of the period.

In 1614 Isaac Casaubon, a Huguenot classical scholar working in England, published a set of exercises examining ecclesiastical history, and in the course of it he examined the Hermetic texts philologically. His method was straightforward. He looked at the Greek.

The vocabulary was wrong for the claimed date. The prose rhythms belonged to a much later period. The texts contained no genuine Egyptian material, no reference to Egyptian practice that could not have been obtained secondhand, and they quoted or echoed writers who lived long after Moses. Casaubon concluded the corpus was composed in the early Christian centuries, roughly the second and third, by Greek-speaking authors in a Hellenised environment.

He was substantially right. The dating has been refined but not overturned, and it is the position of the field today.

The effect on the tradition's standing was severe and rapid. The prestige of the Hermetic texts had rested almost entirely on their supposed antiquity. Take that away and, in the intellectual economy of the seventeenth century, what remained was late syncretic religious writing rather than primordial wisdom. Serious philosophers stopped citing it. Frances Yates, whose 1964 study did more than anything to recover the period, treated Casaubon's date as the hinge on which the whole Renaissance Hermetic project turned.

What is worth extracting from this is the reasoning error on both sides, because the two are mirror images. The Renaissance readers valued the texts because they were old, and they were not. Their successors discarded the texts because they were not old, which does not follow either. Whether a passage is worth reading is not settled by its date. The whole tradition was evaluated on provenance rather than content in both directions.

That is the persistent failure. A source is credited because of where it came from, then discredited when the provenance is corrected, and at no point in the cycle is anyone made to say what is actually in it.

This is also the cleanest example available of scholarship functioning as a suppressive force without anyone intending suppression. Casaubon did honest work and got the right answer. The consequence was that a body of writing stopped being read for three centuries, on the basis of an argument about its date that said nothing whatever about its contents.

The material was there the entire time. Nothing was banned, hidden or burned. It was simply reclassified, and reclassification turned out to be sufficient.