Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie Read Free Book Online Page B

the Renaissance is named. That revival was of course fueled by the rediscovery of ancient Latin and Greek texts, which helped to put a new emphasis on the individual, the worldly life, the civic life, and the appreciation of beauty as an important aspect of God’s creation. But there was also a mystical component to it that might have had something to do with Kircher’s new attitude.
    In fifteenth-century Florence, in addition to commissioning work from the great Italian painters, the Medicis commissioned many translations of recovered Greek manuscripts from Italian scholars such as Marsilio Ficino. Ficino gave Europe access to the works of Plato for the first time in a thousand years, as well as to those of the so-called Neoplatonists of the second and third centuries.
    More important to Ficino and to his patron, he translated a whole set of newly discovered manuscripts that were thought to be much, much older, and to have been written by an ancient Egyptian named Hermes Trismegistus. What Ficino didn’t know, and what no one else knew at the time, was that they were not really the work of an ancient Egyptian, or any single person. Hermes was a purely mythological figure. His dialogues were really Neoplatonic tracts written by various authors in the first few centuries after Christ. But what historian Frances Yates called the “huge illusion of their vast antiquity” had a major influence on the thinking of the time.
    Ficino’s translations of Hermes were published in as many as twenty editions by the time Kircher got to them, which he undoubtedly did (perhaps even while he was in Cologne). Even Copernicus helped to back up his arguments for a sun-centered universe with a reference to this fictional authority. “In the middle of all these things sits the sun,” Copernicus explained, referring to the planets and the stars. After all, how could you “place such a lantern in a more suitable place, where it can illuminate everything at the same time? Certain men not foolishly call this the light of the world, others the mind, and still others the director of the universe. Trismegistus says it is God made manifest.”
    He was called “Trismegistus” because as a great priest, philosopher, and king, he was “thrice great.” Other texts attributed to him had been known since the days of the early Church; concerned largely with astral energies and hidden sympathies between natural phenomena, they were also thought to contain prophetic statements about the coming of Christianity. Hermes—Mercurius to the Romans, or Mercury—was said, despite his pagan status, to have had access to a secret tradition of original wisdom, and to have lived around the time of Moses.
    The exact chronology was unclear, to say the least. Saint Augustine wrote, for instance, that Hermes lived “long before the sages and philosophers of Greece, but after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, yea, and Moses also: for at the time when Moses was born, was Atlas, Prometheus’s brother, a great astronomer, living, and he was grandfather by the mother’s side to the elder Mercury, who begat the father of this Trismegistus.”
    For his part, Ficino sometimes said Hermes was the same person as Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, known today as a prophet of Persia, and sometimes said that Zoroaster had been his predecessor. Either way, in his preface to the translations he called Hermes “the first author of theology” and traced a line of teaching that went almost directly from Hermes to Orpheus to Pythagoras to Plato. That is, according to Ficino, Plato based his philosophy on the wisdom of Hermes, who based his on even earlier knowledge. “Hence there is one ancient theology,” Ficino wrote, one original theology to which the one true Christian religion was an entirely compatible heir. Hermes “foresaw the ruin of the antique religion, the rise of the new faith, the coming of Christ,