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The French theory of Egyptian origin
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THE FRENCH THEORY OF EGYPTIAN ORIGIN
In France, moreover, the Egyptian paternity of the Trismegistic writings, and that too on very sensible lines, was asserted about the same time, namely, in 1858, by Artaud in his article on “Hermè s Trismé giste, ” in Hoeffer’s Nouvelle Biographie Gé né rale, published at Paris by Messrs Firmin Didot. Artaud writes:
“In the mystic sense Thoth or the Egyptian Hermes was the symbol of the Divine Mind; he was the incarnated Thought, the living Word—the primitive type of the Logos of Plato and the Word of the Christians. . . .
“We have heard Champollion, the younger, giving expression to the formal opinion that the books of Hermes Trismegistus really contained the ancient Egyptian doctrine of which traces can be discovered from the hieroglyphics which cover the monuments of Egypt. Moreover, if these fragments themselves are examined, we find in them a theology sufficiently in accord with the doctrines set forth by Plato in his Timaeus—doctrines which are entirely apart from those of the other schools of Greece, and which were therefore held to have been derived by Plato from the temples of Egypt, when he went thither to hold converse with its priests. ” 1
Artaud is also of the opinion that these Trismegistic treatises are translations from the Egyptian.
THE VIEWS OF MÉ NARD
Nowadays, with our improved knowledge of Egyptology, this hypothesis has to be stated in far more
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careful terms before it can find acceptance among the learned; nevertheless it was evidently the conviction of Dé vé ria, who in a work of which he only succeeded in writing the first two pages, proposed to comment on the entire text of the Trismegistic Books from the point of view of an Egyptologist. For these Books, he declared, offered an almost complete exposition of the esoteric philosophy of ancient Egypt. 1
But by far the most sympathetic and really intelligent account of the subject is that of Mé nard, 2 who gives us a pleasant respite from the chorus of the German Neoplatonic syncretism theory. And though we do not by any means agree with all that he writes, it will be a relief to let in a breath of fresh air upon the general stuffiness of our present summary of opinions.
The fragments of the Trismegistic literature which have reached us are the sole surviving remains of that “Egyptian philosophy” which arose from the congress of the religious doctrines of Egypt with the philosophical doctrines of Greece. In other words, what the works of Philo were to the sacred literature of the Jews, the Hermaica were to the Egyptian sacred writings. Legend and myth were allegorised and philosophised and replaced by vision and instruction. But who were the authors of this theosophic method? This question is of the greatest interest to us, for it is one of the factors in the solution of the problem of the literary evolution of Christianity, seeing that there are intimate points of contact of ideas between several of the Hermetic documents and certain Jewish and Christian writings, especially the opening verses of Genesis, the treatises of Philo, the fourth Gospel
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[paragraph continues] (especially the Prologue), and beyond all the writings of the great Gnostic doctors Basilides and Valentinus.
Such and similar considerations lead Mé nard to glance at the environment of infant Christianity and the various phenomena connected with its growth, and this he does from the point of view of an enlightened independent historical scholar.
“Christianity, ” he writes, “did not fall like a thunderbolt into the midst of a surprised and startled world. It had its period of incubation, and while it was engaged in evolving the positive form of its dogmas, the problems of which it was seeking the solution were the subject of thought in Greece, Asia, and Egypt. Similar ideas were in the air and shaped themselves into all sorts of propositions.
“The multiplicity of sects which have arisen in our own times under the name of socialism, can give but a faint idea of the marvellous intellectual chemistry which had established its principal laboratory at Alexandria. Humanity had set in the arena mighty philosophical and moral problems: the origin of evil, the destiny of the soul, its fall and redemption; the prize to be given was the government of the conscience. The Christian solution 1 won, and caused the rest to be forgotten, sunk for the most part in the shipwreck of the past. Let us then, when we come across a scrap of the flotsam and jetsam, recognise in it the work of a beaten competitor and not of a plagiarist. Indeed, the triumph of Christianity was prepared by those very men who thought themselves its rivals, but who were only its forerunners. The title suits them, though many were contemporaries of the Christian era, while others were a little later; for the succession of a religion only dates from the day when it is accepted by the
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nations, just as the reign of a claimant to the throne dates from his victory” (pp. ix., x. ).
Mé nard distinguishes three principal groups in the Trismegistic treatises, which he assigns to Jewish, Greek, and Egyptian influences. In them also he finds a link between Philo and the Gnostics.
“Between the first Gnostic sects and the Hellenic Jews represented by Philo, a link is missing; this can be found in several of the Hermetic works, especially ‘The Shepherd of Men’ and ‘The Sermon on the Mountain. ’ In them also will perhaps be found the reason of the differences, so often remarked upon, between the first three Gospels and the fourth” (p. xliv. ).
Next, the direction in which that “link” is to be looked for is more clearly shown, though here Mé nard is, I think, too precise when writing:
“It seems certain that ‘The Shepherd’ came from that school of Therapeuts of Egypt, who have been often erroneously confounded with the Essenians of Syria and Palestine” (p. lvi).
But “instead of the physical discipline of the Essenians, who, according to Philo, practised manual labour, put the product of their toil into the common fund, and reduced philosophy to ethics, and ethics to charity, the ‘monasteries’ of the Therapeuts contributed to Christian propaganda a far more Hellenised population, trained in abstract speculations and mystic allegories. From these tendencies, combined with the dogma of the incarnation, arose the Gnostic sects. ‘The Shepherd’ should be earlier than these schools” (p. lviii. ).
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As to “The Sermon on the Mountain, ” “it can be placed, in order of ideas and date, between ‘The Shepherd’ and the first Gnostic schools; it should be
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a little earlier than the founders of Gnosticism, Basilides, and Valentinus” (p. lxv. ).
If Gnosticism be taken with Mé nard to mean the Christianised theosophy of Basilides and Valentinus from the first quarter of the second century onwards, the oldest Trismegistic treatises are demonstrably earlier, for their Gnosticism is plainly a far simpler form; in fact, so much more simple that, if we could proceed on so crude an hypothesis as that of a straight-lined evolution, we should be forced to find room for intermediate forms of Gnosticism between them and the Basilidian and the Valentinian Gnosis. And of this Mé nard seems to be partly conscious when writing: “We can follow in the Hermetic books the destiny of this Judæ o-Egyptian Gnosis, which, during the first century, existed side by side with Christianity without allowing itself to be absorbed by it, passing insensibly from the Jewish school of Philo to the Greek school of Plotinus” (p. lxvii. ).
Mé nard here used the term Christianity for that tendency which afterwards was called Catholic or General Christianity, the body to which these very same Gnostics gave the principal dogmas of its subsequent theology.
But if the Gnostics were Therapeuts, and the Trismegistic writers Therapeuts, why should Mé nard call them Jews, as he appears to do in his interesting question, “Where are the Jewish Therapeuts at the end of the second century? ” Certainly Philo laboured to give his readers the impression that the Therapeuts were principally Jews, perhaps to win respect for his compatriots in his apology for his nation; but the Therapeuts were, evidently, on his own showing, drawn from all the nations and scattered abroad in very numerous communities, though many Jews were doubtless in
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their ranks—indeed, Philo probably knew little about their communities other than the Mareotic. If, then, the term “Therapeut” will explain some of the phenomena presented by these writings, the combination “Jewish Therapeuts” will certainly not do so. The very answer of Mé nard himself to his question shows that even these Mareotic Therapeuts could not have been orthodox Jews, for the French scholar proceeds to surmise not only that, “some, converted to Christianity, became monks or Gnostics of the Basilidian or Valentinian school, ” but that “others more and more assimilated themselves to Paganism. ”
And by “Paganism” our author says he does not mean “polytheism, ” for “at this period all admitted into the divine order of things a well-defined hierarchy with a supreme God at the head; only for some this supreme Deity was in the world, for others outside it” (p. lxxiv. ).
Mé nard’s introduction meets with the general approval of Reitzenstein (p. 1), who characterises it as feinsinnige, and agrees that he has rightly appreciated many of the factors, especially from the theological side; he, however (p. 116, n. 2), dissents, and rightly dissents, from Mé nard as to any direct Jewish influence on the Trismegistic literature, and refuses to admit that the “Pœ mandres” can in any way be characterised as a Jewish-Gnostic writing.
But the sensible views of Mé nard were impotent to check the crystallisation of the German theory, which was practically repeated by Zeller, 1 and once more by
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[paragraph continues] Pietschmann in his learned essay, 1 based in part on A. G. Hoffmann’s article “Hermes” in Ersch and Grü ber’s Allgemeine Encyclopä die der Wissenschaften und Kü nste. 2
An exception to this tendency, however, is to be found in the opinion of Aall; 3 who, though he adduces no proof, would on general grounds place the composition of the Hermetic literature (though whether or not by this he means our extant Trismegistic sermons is not clear) as far back as the second century B. C., and would see in it an offshoot from the same stem which later on supplied the ground-conceptions of the Johannine theology. 4
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