Festugiere on Hermes Trismegistus: The Most Puzzling Book I've Yet Attemtpted to Read

 La révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste: Edition Definitive, by AJ Festugière.

I've read Gravity's Rainbow, Finnegans Wake, everything by Gaddis, Eco in Italian+, Adorno in German, Cervantes in Spanish, Ovid and many others in Latin, and none of them gave me any particular problem.

But I can't even tell you yet what Festugiere's book is, what kind of book it is. Oh, I can tell you one thing for sure, one thing some will no doubt find helpful: it is not not the Corpus Hermeticum, the primary Greek and Latin texts of which were edited by Nock and published with facing-page translations into French by Festugiere. In addition to the volumes by Nock and Festugiere, the Coptic and Armenian parts of the corpus were published by JP Mahe, also with French facing-page translations. I Ramelli also published one very convenient, although large, volume of all of the above except for the Armenian text, with facing-page translation in Italian. Also, all of the above volumes contain thorough introductions and commentaries, in French or Italian as the case is.

Those Greek, Latin, Coptic and Armenian texts are the Corpus Hermeticum, the primary texts of the Hermetic religion or philosophy, however you wish to describe it.

Festugiere's Revelation -- is not that. It's often described as a collection of the primary Hermetic texts, but it isn't. Like Festugiere's and Nock's collection of the primary texts, it was first published in 4 volumes beginning in the 1940's -- but 4 different volumes. It contains many, many excerpts of texts written both before and after the Corpus Hermeticum, texts which, whether in agreement or opposition, inspired Hermeticism and in turn were inspired by it, mostly, but not all, translated into French, and with thorough introductions and commentaries. What is it exactly? Festugiere's description of Hermetic religion? That would be my best guess.

I have not spent much time studying theology, in fact I have spent a good portion of my life avoiding theology. That no doubt accounts for much of my difficulty here.

So why am I not avoiding theology as assiduously as I used to, like a good atheist? Because I have loved so many people to whom these things have been so important, that I cannot ignore them any more. My apologies to Johann Wolfgang von ("-- und leider auch Theologie --") Goethe, who I think would understand.

One of the very last parts of this enormous book, one of the very last appendices, contains a translated text by Proclus under a title saying that finding God is difficult and explaining God is impossible. Maybe I should have a long, good laugh at that, and not try to explain what this book is, besides brilliant.

Another good, long laugh for me personally: Hegel puzzles me profoundly, and recently I've come across the assertion the he was an Hermeticist. 

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The Latin Asclepius

Among the many religious and other cultural syncretisms which resulted from the conquest of Egypt, first by the Greeks in the 4th century BC and then the Romans in the 1st century AD, is the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice blessed Hermes, clearly based on the Egyptian god Thoth. However, while Thoth has an ibis head upon a human body, Hermes Trismegistus is often portrayed with a more typical human appearance.

 

The Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of 16 dialogues in Greek, purported to have been written by Hermes Trismegistus in great antiquity -- some said that Trismegistus had personally advised Moses -- was translated by Marsilio Ficino from Greek to Latin in the 15th century, and has been translated into many other languages since, and occasioned great interest without interruption to the present day, although the scholarly consensus now is that they were written some time in the 2nd or 3rd century AD. 

Another Hermetic dialogue, known as the Latin Asclepius, somewhat longer than those in the Corpus Hermeticum, appears to come from the same time and place, although it is preserved in Latin, in manuscripts also containing philosophical writing by Apuleius, the 2nd-century AD North African Latin poet best known for his epic poem The Golden Ass, sometimes called the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. 

The surviving manuscripts which contain the Latin Asclepius alongside Apuleius' philosophical are as old as the 12th and 13th centuries. Early editions of Apuleius routinely included the Latin Asclepius, under the assumption that Apuleius has translated it from Greek, but comparisons with the striking style of Apuleius' works has for the most part laid that thesis to rest. That the the dialogue was originally Greek seems well-established. Greek versions of passages are cited by Augustus and Lactantius.

The Asclepius who gives this dialogue its title is described within it as a demigod and grandson of the Greek god of medicine of the same name, and not that god himself as is sometimes asserted. The same demigod Asclepius appears in several of the Greek dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum. In the Latin Asclepius, Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius and the god Tat discuss the relationships between the physical and the metaphysical, between the human and the divine, between the mortal and the eternal and other categories of opposites, with Trismegistus however emphasizing the unity of all things, a principle sometimes referred to in Hermetic philosophy simply as the One. 

As far as I know, there has not been much progress made on the question of who wrote the Corpus Hermeticum, the Latin Asclepius and the other related texts in Greek, Latin, Coptic and Armenian. Many of these Coptic texts are among the artifacts in the famous Nag Hammadi library found in the 1940's. For example, I have not found so much as a guess about whether the author of the Latin Asclepius also authored any of the texts preserved in other languages. However, the Latin Asclepius, whether in Latin or translated, tends these days to published along with other Hermetic texts, and no longer with the works of Apuleius.