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Enochic Studies in the 1600s--Works and Authors

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Overview

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Enoch Fragments of Syncellus were first collected by Isaac Casaubon in 1602 at the National Library in Paris, and published by Italian-French-Dutch scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger in 1606. They were discussed by Johannes Drusius in 1612 and translated into English by Samuel Purchas in 1613. In 1652 Jacques Goar published the editio princeps of Syncellus' Chronography (Greek text & Latin translation). The Enoch fragments were also included in works by Athanasius Kircher (Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652-54), Thomas Bangius (1657), Johann Heinrich Heidegger (1667-81), and Gottfried Vockerodt (De societatibus et re literaria ante diluvium, 1687). As attested also by the completion of numerous dissertations in French and German universities, the Enoch Fragments of Syncellus quickly became the major focus of scholarly research on Enoch.

Rumors about the existence of a complete copy of the Book of Enoch in Ethiopic strengthened. In 1610 the Spanish Dominican Luis de Urreta claimed to have found the title in a list of works presented to Guglielmo Sirleto, the Librarian of the Vatican, by Antonio Greco and Lorenzo Cremonese, who in the second half of the sixteenth century had been sent to Ethiopia by Pope Gregory XIII as part of a delegation. Urreta's position was popularized in the works of authors such as Samuel Purchas (Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1613), Nicolao Godinho (De Abassinorum rebus, 1615), George Sandys (A Relation of A Journey, 1615), and Peter Heylyn (Microcosmos, 1625).

Following these reports, the French intellectual and collector Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) made strong efforts to recover the Ethiopic book of Enoch. He thought he had reached its goal when a ms arrived from Egypt in 1636 thanks to the mediation of Capuchin Gilles de Loches (Aegidius Lochiensis) and Agathange de Vendôme. The ms however remained unpublished and untranslated. The publication of Pierre Gassendi's biography of Pereisc in 1641 (ET 1657 by William Rand) fostered for decades the illusion that a copy of the lost book of Enoch actually existed in Europe. The explicit reference to "Mazhapha Einok, or, the Prophecy of Enoch, which Ægidius Lochiensis, a learned Eastern Traveller, told Peireschius that he had found in an old Library at Alexandria containing eight thousand volumes" was included in 1675 in Thomas Browne's catalogue of "remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living" (Musaeum Clausum; or, Bibliotheca abscondita). Hopes to recover the lost book of Enoch suffered a major blow in 1681 when Ethiopist Hiob Ludolf finally had to chance to examine the ms purchased by Peiresc and demonstrated that it did not contain the prophecies of Enoch but was a copy of an ancient theological treatise with mere allusions to the book of Enoch.

In 1659 Méric Casaubon dismissed John Dee's magic treatise as a work of sorcery, yet Enoch remained a popular figure in esoteric and literary circles, as the model (and the object) of mystical revelations. In 1665 an anonymous pamphlet was published in England, claiming to contain the revelation of the prophecies of Enoch. In 1667 John Milton's visionary poem Paradise Lost gave a prominent role to Enoch and the myth of the Fallen Angels.

For his antiquity the character of Enoch continued to be associated (or even identified) with other mythical figures of ancient wisdom. Kircher viewed him as the founder of Egyptian Wisdom and once again, identified him with Hermes Trismegistus. At the end of the 17th century, the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet (1656–1732), a leader of the Figurist movement of Jesuit missionaries in China, claimed that Enoch and Fu Xi, the supposed author of the I Ching (or Classic of Changes), as well as Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, were really the same person.

@2014 Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan