Humanist Networks and Keepers of Ancient Wisdom: Hermes Trimegistus in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Hermes Trimegistus, legendary sage and author associated with the pagan god Mercury, came to be seen as a cultural mediator for learned men of different religious traditions in medieval and early modern Spain. Through this figure, who represented the ideal teacher and philosophical mentor to many pre-modern thinkers and writers, it explores the role of non-Christian culture in the growth of Christian literature and philosophy in Spain. Studies of this period have tended to focus either on the “three cultures” (coexistence, cultural exchange, polemics), or on the reception of the Classical tradition. This project shows that various themes and topics of Late Antiquity lay behind Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultures alike, and thus served both as a cohesive factor among them and as a controversial influence within the particular orthodoxies of each of them. After explaining how the cultural, political, and religious circumstances of early modern Spain determined the reception and understanding of Hermes, this dissertation centers on a lesser-known but increasingly studied figure of Spanish Golden Age literature: Bartolomé Jiménez Patón (1569-1640). Jiménez Patón is the center of this project because he not only wrote the most complete treatise about Hermes Trimegistus of his time (what can be called the Answer, a short text included in his rhetorical treatise Mercurius Trimegistus), but also because he had a well-established network which connected him with the most important writers, erudite men, and even celebrities of sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain. Since Patón was able to publicize his work about Trimegistus through his extended network, the Answer is a starting point to show what Mercurius (Hermes) Trimegistus, the ancient God or wise pagan man, meant for the Christian scholarship of renaissance and baroque Spain. This study also examines how in the same way that the philosophical background of the Hermetic writings in Antiquity was a mixture of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, in the Late Humanism represented by Jiménez Patón there is an equally eclectic reception of all three of them. Those three schools of philosophy reinterpreted in the early modern period, and the controversies with Christian dogma associated with them and Trimegistus, are the nucleus of the last chapters. They show how Hermes’s place in each one of these trends of thought was epitomized by Patón’s treatise. The Answer is analyzed as referential of its contemporary culture, allowing Spanish early modern scholars to be situated in a wider struggle over the status and survival of all non-Christian culture in Europe.