Cokky van Limpt

Hermes provides answers to questions evaded by the Church*

Hermetic philosophy There is wide interest in Hermetic literature nowadays. According to Roelof van den Broek, who translated Hermetic works for the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, the Hermetic view of God, man and the cosmos is better geared to dealing with modern issues than Christian dogmatics. From 1990, church historian Prof. Dr Roelof van den Broek and the late Prof. Dr Gilles Quispel (1918-2006) have been translating all now known religious-philosophical texts into Dutch. These books enjoy great popularity; the Corpus Hermeticum for instance sold 12,000 copies. Time for a conversation with Roelof van den Broek, who recently completed the ambitious translation project with the publication of Hermes Trismegistus. Inleiding, Teksten, Commentaren – a collection of texts not previously available in a scholarly Dutch edition.

‘The success of these books indicates that Hermetic literature is not merely of interest to historians of religion, philosophers and others interested in classical Antiquity. The interest in the Hermetica goes much further. These non-Christian texts, as I notice each time I give lectures throughout the country, contain a message which appeals to many Christians, especially those who are alienated from the official Church – who are “partial” Christians, so to speak.’

He believes the reason for this interest to be a generally religious one. ‘People will no longer be dictated what or what not to believe. They want to think and believe for themselves, lead an active and authentic religious or spiritual life in search of the roots of existence.’

It is also true that the Church, insufficiently alert to this new interest, fails to respond. ‘We are living in a globalized world, where evolution is commonly accepted as are other ideas that are contrary to what traditional Christianity prescribes. People are confronted with questions about their destination, about how the world functions and how they can fit God into all of this. The Church has nothing to offer when faced with these modern questions. Theologians address questions of the past. Naturally they are concerned with ‘eternal values’, but you will have to interpret them in a way that appeals to people. The questions of intellectual Christians, such as how we must view the historical Jesus with regard to the traditional doctrine of the Christ of Christian faith, and how to relate God the creator to evolution, are questions inadequately addressed by the Church; these questions are in fact evaded.’

According to Van den Broek, philosophical-Hermetic thought has a decided appeal when people start looking for answers to this type of questions, and offers a richer source of inspiration for modern people than the church dogmas. ‘Hermetism was not a closed system, but a religious experience of reality around us and in us. It offered a holistic view which presented individual existence as part of a cosmic whole. God, cosmos and man were not regarded as distinct, but were believed to be inseparately connected. God is the source of all, not a person but an eternal creative Something. The cosmos, which is called ‘his son’, comes forth from God and within that cosmos man comes into being, “God’s grandchild”, as the Hermetic texts say.’

It is this Hermetic holism which he believes is excellently suited to how many people nowadays wish to believe. ‘God as the source of all that is, man who participates in God, and the unity of the All are thoughts that are easy to combine with evolutionary theory. The realization that you are a part of the world also endows you with responsibility: the way you are and the way you behave matter to serve that world, to enrich it rather than exploit it.’

Seen in that light, he continues, much of traditional Christian dogmatism, which holds that God, cosmos and man are separate, recedes into the background. ‘The cosmos is not present in the Christian tradition. It is man against God, in a free ‘neutral’ world, a world which man confronts rather than takes part in, and yet the most awful things happen in this world, which raise countless questions.’

The optimism of Hermetic thought is also something which appeals to many, Van den Broek believes. ‘Hermetists admire the beauty of the cosmos and the splendid efficiency of the human body and glorify the creator of it all. The Hermetist is even able to ascend to God and become one with God via a process of initiation.’

Such an approach is not to be found in traditional Christianity, which is rather dualistically oriented. ‘Most theologians cannot bring themselves to view creation and God and the relationship between the two in any other way but that which is prescribed by traditional dogma’, he concludes.

In addition to the general audience, there is also a renewed interest in the Hermetica in scholarly circles. ‘Another view of these works has now emerged, which has led to new translations in the 1990s. From the middle of the previous century, the common theory was that the substance of the Hermetica consisted of a somewhat watered-down, very popularized and ill-digested philosophy with a religious veneer. Furthermore, these works were purely regarded as products of the writing-table, unrelated to any living religious movement. The discovery, amongst the Coptic codices discovered at Nag Hammadi (1945), of the Discourse of the eighth and ninth, put an end to that view’.

This text, according to Van den Broek the most important philosophical-hermetic text to have been discovered in the twentieth century, ‘describes how man can spiriutally ascend to God via a process of initiation. The prayers, hymns and sacred vegetarian meals point to the existence of some sort of cultic community’.

According to him this text, combined with a better knowledge of the religious environment in Egypt around the beginning of our era, clinches the evidence for the existence of small, somewhat elite hermetic communities in the first centuries CE, communities which offered instruction, prayers, rituals and initiations.

The Hermetic way of thinking arose in the syncretistic environment of Alexandria in the first centuries CE. ‘Jewish ideas, Greek philosophy, specifically Platonism and the Stoa, as well as Egyptian conceptions coincided to produce something – Hermetic thought or belief – which is neither Egyptian tradition, Greek philosophy or Judaism, but which occupies a class of its own. The oldest texts at least date to the first century CE, possibly before that time. Like any other movement, Hermetism did not descend on earth like a bolt out of heaven. There was a whole trajectory before that.’

There is no evidence of any influence of early Christianity on the Hermetica, says Van den Broek, rather it is the other way around. On the whole Hermetists, Platonists and Christians had no difficulty with their respective images of God. ‘The Christian author Lactantius (310) for instance had a Hermetic image of God which he never abandoned: God is a permanently creative force, neither male nor female yet at the same time both.”

Christians also appealed to Hermes Trismegistus to testify to the truth of Christianity: Hermes, a pagan sage from Egyptian antiquity, had already taught Christian doctrine. It supplied Christianity with a universal aspect and undercut the objection that Christianity was a religious newcomer in an age in which only what the old and familiar mattered.

‘We are apt to make the mistake’, Van den Broek says, ‘to claim that early Christians like Lactantius “made use” of Graeco-Roman views. This is of course incorrect. They were Greeks and Romans, who lived in that world and related Christianity to the views and ideas known to them. It is safe to assume that many cultivated Christians thought like Lactantius.’

If Christians and Hermetists agreed about God, they disagreed over Jesus. Van den Broek: ‘Especially later Christian authors, like Cyril of Alexandria (430), try to harmonize Hermetic philosophy with Christian theology in a way which has resulted in a few prize specimens of Christian interpretation. The Hermetic ‘son’ – cosmos – for instance is associated with the Christian ‘logos’ – the Son who creates all – while Hermetic notions such as mind, light and pneuma are effortlessly attributed to the Christian dogma of the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”

Who reads the Hermetic texts in the translation of Van den Broek, soon discovers that there are correspondences between Hermetic and early Christian customs. Just as disciples in Hermetism called each other ‘brother’, the members of the early Christian communities addressed each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ – this is still common practice in some Christian circles. The notion of Hermes Trismegistus as a ‘spiritual father’, and his disciples as his ‘children’, can also be found in early Christianity. The apostle Paul for instance calls the Christians in Corinth his ‘children’.

The initiate in the Hermetic mystery receives a ‘new name’, which is kept secret from the profane. That, too, is something which we can find in early Christianity. The Revelation of John for instance, chapter 2, verse 17: ‘And I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name having been written, which no one knows except the one receiving it.’

And, Van den Broek remarks, this practice has survived the centuries. The novice entering a religious order acquires a new name, which is also customarily bestowed upon initiation in many esoteric societies.

* Translation of an article which earlier appeared in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, 8 February 2007

Who was Hermes Trismegistus? Ancient sources (Herodotus, Plato) already indicate that the mythical figure of Hermes Trismegistus (‘Thrice greatest’) was in reality Thoth – the Egyptian god of writing, the arts and sciences, magic and the cosmic order, and messenger of the gods who guided the dead to the underworld. The ancient Greeks equated their own god Hermes to Thoth. During the last centuries before the Christian era there was also an ‘interpretatio judaïca’, which identified Thoth with Moses. However, if Thoth was a god, Hermes Trismegistus in the Graeco-Roman world in the first centuries CE was mostly regarded as a divinely inspired man and as an authoritative teacher of divine wisdom from hoary Egytian antiquity. Christians also greatly valued this pre-Christian teacher. Hermes Trismegistus was believed to have knowledge of many sciences. A great many writings circulated that were attributed to him: astrological treatises, magical invocations, alchemical recipes – traditionally known as techncial or practical Hermetica – and religious-philosophical treatises, which allegedly reflected Hermes’ spiritual teachings.