The Arabic Hermes

Abstract

Unfortunately there is still far too much by way of conjecture, innuendo, ahistoricity, ideology, and basic guesswork in the study of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, at least in what passes for historical studies of these intellectual traditions. But as we have seen the serious study of intellectual history, particularly in the Graeco-Arabic period and in classical Islamdom, flourish, so too has attention been placed upon those critical intersections between disciplines and bodies of knowledge. One can no longer argue for the Neopythagorean roots of a particular intellectual tradition or claim that a thinker’s “esoteric” doctrine is due to his/her “hermeticism.” The publication of Kevin van Bladel’s revised Yale doctoral dissertation is a wonderfully solid historical masterpiece that greatly contributes to our understanding of certain strands of intellectual transmission in the late antique Near East, as well as disabuses us of many a myth about the presence of Hermes and hermeticism in classical Islamic learned culture. Hermetic manuscripts on the occult, alchemy, and the esoteric doctrine of the soul abound within collections of Sufi works and without; what is critical is to make sense of why they exist where they are found and to acquire a deeper sense of what constitutes the Arabic Hermes in the same way that we now understand far better the Arabic Plato and the Arabic Aristotle. The historical transmission of texts and ideas is not just an obsession of the positivist pedant, but rather a method to avoid woolly thinking on crosscultural relations and their possibilities, exigencies, and lacunae. It is true that unless texts were available to translators and adaptors, they could not have emerged in an Arabic form. But we should not insist too much on strict historical orthographical trails, however, for orality did figure as a medium of transmission (no doubt partly influenced by Platonic logocentrism) and texts sometimes disappeared and reappeared over the ages. Nonetheless, the story of how early Muslims appropriated Hermes is a case in point of how ideas and figures were taken from their Hellenic (or Hellenizing Near Eastern, or maybe even orientalising Hellenic) contexts and naturalized within an Arabic idiom. The author rather carefully avoids the use of the terms Hermeticist and hermeticism, because we have no evidence of any Muslim community’s continuous engagement with hermetic learning and practice from late antiquity into classical Islam ...