Апофатички елементи во „латинскиот Асклепиј“

Abstract

The paper overviews the „Latin Asclepius“, a hermetic text in which the divine Hermes Trismegistus enters a dialogue with his pupil Asclepius, exposing some of the teachings of his religious-philosophical tradition. First, the main historical characteristics and the main points of the text are listed, and the main topics of discourse and teaching with which Hermes Trismegistus addresses his listeners are summarized. Next, the concepts of the order of the world, the hierarchy of principles and the divine nature are analyzed. A special attention is paid to the ways of speaking about god, or the stances that about god it should not be talked about, i.e. the kataphatic and the apophatic approach. Therefore, the article continues with an overview of the possibilities of knowledge about god: through the reason that he has bestowed upon us, and only in the way god himself has determined, that is, of god as partially knowable (the reason has its limitations, and the divine nature is too overwhelming for man’s cognitive abilities); the use of positive divine attributes (god as omnipotent, supreme, most beautiful); and of privative attributes, which are either clearly stated (god as uncreated, incorporeal, limitless, without qualities, non-spatial and so on), or they can be derived from the formulations about god as being all of the names (in fact, his namelessness) and transcendence.