Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. II (the Corpus Hermeticum) — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

1 3. Her. Not any one of these is He ; for He it is that causeth them to be, both all and each and every thing of all that are. Nor hath He left a thing beside that is-not ; but they are all from things-that-are and not from things-thatare-not. For that the things-that-are-not have naturally no power of being anything, but rather have the nature of the inability-to-be. And, conversely, the things-that-are have not the nature of some time not-being.

14. Asc. What say'st thou ever, then, God is ?
Her. God, therefore, is not Mind, but Cause

that the Mind is ; God is not Spirit, but Cause that Spirit is ; God is not Light, but Cause that the Light is. Hence should one honour God with these two names [the Good and Father] — names which pertain to Him alone and no one else.

For no one of the other so-called gods, no one of men, or daimones, can be in any measure Good, but God alone ; and He is Good alone and nothing else. The rest of things are separable all from the Good's nature ; for [all the rest] are soul and body, which have no space that can contain l the Good.

1 In the original there is a word-play — x«pt(rr<£ (separable) and
X«pi}<ra^(contain) — which is impossible to reproduce in translation.

15. For that as mighty is the Greatness of the Good as is the Being of all things that are — both bodies and things bodiless, things sensible and intelligible things. Call not thou, therefore, aught else Good, for thou would'st impious be ; nor anything at all at any time call God but Good alone, for so thou would'st again be impious.

16. Though, then, the Good is spoken of by all, it is not understood by all, what thing it is. Not only, then, is God not understood by all, but both unto the gods and some of men they out of ignorance do give the name of Good, though they can never either be or become Good. For they are very different from God, while Good can never be distinguished from Him, for that God is the same as Good.

The rest of the immortal ones are natheless honoured with the name of God, and spoken of as gods ; but God is Good not out of courtesy but out of nature. For that God's nature and the Good is one ; one is the kind of both, from which all other kinds [proceed].

The Good is He who gives all things and naught receives.1 God, then, doth give all things and receive naught. God, then, is Good, and Good is God.

17. The other name of God is Father, again because He is the that-which-maketh all. The part of father is to make.

1 Cf. C. H.t x. (xi.) 3 : Tis "He alone who taketh naught."

Wherefore child-making is a very great and a most pious thing in life for them who think aright, and to leave life on earth without a child a very great misfortune and impiety ; and he who hath no child is punished by the daimons after death.

And this the punishment : that that man's soul who hath no child, shall be condemned unto a body with neither man's nor woman's nature, a thing accurst beneath the sun.

Wherefore, Asclepius, let not your sympathies be with the man who hath no child, but rather pity his mishap, knowing what punishment abides for him.

Let all that has been said, then, be to thee,
Asclepius, an introduction to the gnosis of the
nature of all things.

COMMENTARY

"AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GNOSIS OF THE NATURE
OF ALL THINGS"

This treatise has no precise title, for, as we have already seen in treating of the make-up of the Corpus, the traditional title, " Of Hermes to Tat, the General Sermon," found in all the MSS., cannot apply to our tractate, which is addressed to Asclepius, and from which Stobaeus quotes under the general title, "Of Hermes, from the [Sermons] to Asclepius."

The supposition, however, that Sermon (II.) has dropped out from the parent copy of our Corpus, owing to the loss of one or more quires or quaternions, explains those phenomena so admirably, that it has only to be brought forward, as it has been by Eeitzenstein, to carry conviction.