ERMIA. — No ancient source mentions this writer, known only from the title of his brief work: Hermiae philosophi irrisio gentilium philosophorum, which has come down to us in 16 manuscripts, the best of which is cod. Patmos 202, attributed to the 10th century. Taking his cue from St. Paul, who calls the wisdom of this world foolishness (I Cor. 3:19), he reviews the theories of the pagan philosophers concerning the nature and destiny of the soul and the ultimate principles of things, ridiculing them and showing how they contradict one another.
Once the attempts to identify the author solely on the basis of the identity of the name with E. Sozomen, the historian who continued Eusebius, or with the E. (more probably Hermogenes) mentioned by Philaster of Brescia (De haeresibus, 55) and by St. Augustine (De haeresibus, 59), had fallen through, nothing can be said about him except what emerges from the work itself. On this basis, some (Menzel, Diele, Harnack, Wendland) placed him in the 5th or 6th century; others (Otto, Di Pauli, Bardenhewer, Puech, Stählin), with greater justification, assigning the work to the end of the 2nd century or the beginning of the 3rd, based on the title “philosopher” given by the manuscripts, as it was given to many apologists of the 2nd century; on the omission of any reference to Neoplatonism; on the liveliness of the polemic, which presupposes an environment of heated conflict between paganism and Christianity; and on the dependence of the Coharratio ad Graecce of Pseudo-Justin on the Irrisio.
The work has no particular value as a contribution to thought. The theme is a commonplace of skeptical sophistry, widely adopted by apologists opposed to pagan culture. The religious element is little developed, with greater prominence given to physical theories than to theology. No properly philosophical judgments are expressed. Rather than a “philosopher,” E. is a rhetorician endowed with considerable resources as a polemicist, who knows how to employ irony by making his opponents—however eminent, such as Plato and Aristotle—appear ridiculous.