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confirmed by Hermes Termaximus [i.e. Trismegistus] who says that God is nothing, and
yet that God is all.” 504
Ficino’s interest in Dionysius and Hermes is mirrored in the work of Jacques
Lefèvre d’Étaples, who produced one of the first printed Dionysius edition in 1498, as
well as an edition of Ficino’s translation of part of the Corpus Hermeticum in 1594,
followed by the entire translation into Latin in 1505. 505 Lefevre d’Étaples travelled to
Italy several times and met many of the Italian humanists, including Pico Della
Mirandola. Although Lefèvre d’Étaples ultimately disavowed his earlier enthusiasm for
(and defence of) white magic, others in his circle took away from Étaples an interest in
the Hermetic writings, as well as other less theologically suspect esoteric disciplines like
numerology. 506
But while Lefèvre d’Étaples was interested enough in Ficino’s ideas to publish
one of his works, he nevertheless only walked a few tentative steps down Ficino’s
syncretistic path, as we can see from the introduction to his edition of the Corpus
504 Cited in Yates, 125. The Dionysius passage is from the first chapter of the Divine Names.
505 The 1494 volume contained only the so-called Pimander, as translated and edited by Ficino. The 1505
version contained the entire body of works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the Pimander and the socalled
Asclepius. Both works had been printed separately before, but Étaples was the first to bring them
together in a single volume (in the 1505 edition). In this volume he also included a hermetic dialogue called
the Crater Hermetis by the poet laureate Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500), a work composed in the spirit of
the Corpus Hermeticum that Étaples must have considered similar enough in spirit to be published
alongside the more ancient Hermetic works (Hanegraaf and Bouthoorn call it “one of the purest and most
explicit examples of hermetic-Christian syncretism”, 57). Lazzarelli also translated the last part of the
Corpus Hermeticum that was missing from the manuscript Ficino used for his own translation; this second
part of the Corpus was published by Symphorien Champier (1470-1540) in 1507. On Lazzarelli, see
Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500): The Hermetic Writings
and Related Documents, 2005. On Symphorien Champier, see Brian P. Copenhaver, Symphorien Champier
and the Reception of the Occultist Tradition in Renaissance France (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978).
506 Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, Lefèvre: Pioneer of Ecclesiastical Renewal in France (Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1984), 22-24. He did, however, retain his interest in mystical
numbers, at least enough to communicate this interest to several students; both Charles de Bovelles (De
perfectis numeris ad Iacobum Fabrum Stapulensem philosophum claissimum, 1510) and Clichtove (De
mystica numerorum significatione, 1513) published books on numerology. Brian P. Copenhaver, "Étaples
d'Étaples, Symphorien Champier, and the Secret Names of God," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 40 (1977): 189-211.
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