Focus on Creation: Hermetica

Hermetic thought developed in the first three centuries CE, contemporary with Gnostic thought, and even within the same mediterranean context, in Egypt and Alexandria. There are, however, more differences than similarities: the major difference being that the Hermetists did not value the creation as bad and inferior. The treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum - the main source for our knowledge of the Hermetica together with the Asclepius - are, however, not uniform in tone, because they were not written at the same time. They were inspired in the first place by Egyptian traditions. The very name of the alleged author, Hermes Trismegistus, is the Greek personification of the Egyptian Thrice Greatest Thoth. In addition, virtually all treatises bear traces of Greek or Jewish thought. There is no direct Christian influence, although there are parallels to be found, especially with Paul and with John. Because of this eclecticism there are pessimistic passages in the Corpus Hermeticum deriving from gnosticism, for instance a passage on good and evil: 'Here below the Good is called: the Evil which is not all too great' .

The cosmos itself, on the other hand, is not valued negatively. On the contrary: the creation is God's finest product, his first Son and first image, and man is his second. Man is even called an ornament of the cosmos. The dominant tone in the treatises is one of optimism, which is expressed in a phrase from the Asclepius, made famous in the Renaissance: 'magnum miraculum est homo, animal adorandum et honorandum' (man is a great miracle, a living creature worthy of reverence and adoration).

The god of the Hermetists is less abstract and more personal than the First Principle of the Greeks, because in the Hermetica he is in the first place part of a religious and not so much a philosophical system. God is invisible, but man can get to know the Maker by looking at what he made. This view, derived from the Stoa, became a cornerstone of cosmic religiosity in the Hermetica, with the potential to lead to a mystical experience whereby the individual could feel as if he was one with the universe, and so with God: 'I am in heaven, in earth, in water, in air; I am in animals and in plants; in the womb, before the womb, after the womb, everywhere' . This experience would be unthinkable to a gnostic.

The first man, the androgynous Anthropos who still possesses a divine nature, falls as promptly as the biblical Adam: he sees his own image reflected in the water and wants to live on earth in the material world, but in doing so he loses a part of his higher nature, and becomes mortal. But the possibility to return to the divine is not lost, provided that man does not become subject to the passions of the body and the tempations of the senses lulling him into a state of forgetfulness and sleep. In the end the 'Way of Hermes' may lead via knowledge of the cosmos and self-knowledge to intuitive knowledge and a personal experience of God.