The only argument adduced. The theory of Hilgers

THE ONLY ARGUMENT ADDUCED

One might almost believe that Colberg was an incarnation of a Church Father continuing his ancient polemic against heresy; in any case the whole question of heresy

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was now revived, and the eighteenth and nineteenth century criticism of the Trismegistic works almost invariably starts with this prejudice in mind and seeks (almost without exception) to father the Trismegistic writings on Neoplatonism, which it regards as the most powerful opponent of orthodoxy from the third century onwards. Harles (1790) gives the references to all the main factors in the evolution of this opinion during the eighteenth century; 1 but the only argument that the century produced—indeed, the only argument that has ever been adduced—is that the doctrines of the Trismegistic writings are clearly Platonic, and that too of that type of mystical Platonism which was especially the characteristic of the teaching of Iamblichus at the end of the third century A. D., and which is generally called Neoplatonism; therefore, these writings were forged by the Neoplatonists to prop up dying Paganism against the ever more and more vigorous Christianity. We admit the premisses, but we absolutely deny the conclusion. But before pointing out the weakness of this conclusion of apologetic scholarship, we must deal with the literature on the subject in the last century. The eighteenth century produced no arguments in support of this conclusion beyond the main premisses which we have admitted. 2 Has the nineteenth century

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produced any others so as to justify the position taken up by the echoes of opinion in all the popular encyclopæ dias with regard to these most valuable and beautiful treatises? 1

If our encyclopæ dias deign to rest their assertions on authority, they refer us to Fabricius (Harles) and Baumgarten-Crusius. We have already seen that Harles will not help us much; will the latter authority throw any more light on the subject? We are afraid not; for, instead of a bulky volume, we have before us a thin academical exercise of only 19 pp., 2 in which the author puts forward the bare opinion that these books were invented by Porphyry and his school, and this mainly because he thinks that Orelli 3 had proved the year before that the Cosmogony of Sanchoniathon was invented by the “Platonici. ” Moreover, was not Porphyry an enemy of Christ, for did he not write XV. Books against the Christians? All of which can scarcely be dignified with the name of argument, far less with that of proof.

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THE THEORY OF HILGERS

The same may be said of the short academical thesis of Hilgers, 1 who first shows the weakness of Mö hler’s strange opinion 2 that the author was a Christian who pretended to be a Pagan and inserted “errors” on purpose. Hilgers finally ends up with the lame conclusion that Christian doctrine was known to the author of the “Pœ mandres” cycle, especially the Gospel of “John” and Letters of Paul; but how it is possible to conjecture anything besides, he does not know. Of the possibility of the priority of the “Pœ mandres” to the writings of “John” and Paul, Hilgers does not seem to dream; nevertheless this is as logical a deduction as the one he draws from the points of contact between the two groups of literature. But Hilgers has got an axe of his own to grind, and a very blunt one at that; he thinks that “The Shepherd of Men” was written at the same time as “The Shepherd of Hermas, ” that simple product of what is called the sub-apostolic age—a document held in great respect by the early outer communities of General Christianity, and used for purposes of edification. Our “Shepherd, ” Hilgers thinks, was written in opposition to the Hermas document, but he can do nothing but point to the similarity of name as a proof of his hypothesis. This topsyturvy opinion we shall seek to reverse in a subsequent chapter on “‘Hermes’ and ‘Hermas. ’”

As to the author of our “Shepherd, ” Hilgers thinks he has shown that “he was not a follower of the

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doctrines of the Christ, but of the so-called Neoplatonists, and among these especially of Philo Judæ us”; in fact he seems, says Hilgers, to have been a Therapeut. 1

THE GERMAN THEORY OF NEOPLATONIC “SYNCRETISMUS”

Here we have the first appearance of another tendency; the more attention is bestowed upon the Trismegistic writings, the more it is apparent that they cannot be ascribed to Neoplatonism, if, as generally held, Neoplatonism begins with Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, and Porphyry in the third century. Therefore, in this subject, and in this subject alone, we find a tendency in later writers to push back the Neoplatonists so as to include Philo Judæ us, who flourished in the first half of the first century! On these lines we should soon get Neo-platonism back to Plato and Pythagoras, and so be forced to drop the “Neo” and return to the old honoured name of simple “Platonici. ”

But already by this time in Germany the theory of Neoplatonic Syncretismus to prop up sinking Heathendom against rising Christianity had become crystallised, as may be seen from the article on “Hermes, Hermetische Schriften” in Pauly’s famous Real Encyclopä die der classischen Alterthumswissenshaft (Stuttgart, 1844), where this position is assumed from the start.

Parthey, however, in 1854, in his preface, ventures on no such opinion, but expresses a belief that we may even yet discover in Egypt a demotic text of the “Pœ mandres, ” which shows that he considered the original to have been written in Egyptian, and therefore not by a Neoplatonist.

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