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

So then, Asclepius, the name alone of Good is found in men, the thing itself nowhere [in them], for this can never be.

For no material body doth contain It, — a thing1 bound on all sides by bad, by labours, pains, desires and passions, by error and by foolish thoughts.

And greatest ill of all, Asclepius, is that each of these things that have been said above, is thought down here to be the greatest good.

And what is still an even greater ill, is bellylust, the error that doth lead the band of all the other ills — the thing that makes us turn down here from Good.

1 Sc. the body.

4. And I, for my own part, give thanks to God, that He hath cast it in my mind about the Gnosis of the Good, that it can never be It1 should be in the world.2 For that the world is "fullness"3 of the bad, but God of Good, and Good of God.

The excellencies of the Beautiful are round the very essence [of the Good] ; nay, they do seem too pure, too unalloyed ; perchance 'tis they that are themselves Its essences.

For one may dare to say, Asclepius, — if essence, sooth, He have — God's essence is the Beautiful ; the Beautiful is further also Good.

There is no Good that can be got from objects in the world. For all the things that fall beneath the eye are image-things and pictures as it were ; while those that do not meet [the eye are the realities4], especially the [essence] of the Beautiful and Good.

Just as the eye cannot see God, so can it not behold the Beautiful and Good. For that they are integral parts of God, wedded to Him alone, inseparate familiars, most beloved, with whom God is Himself in love, or they with God.

1 Sc. the Good. 2 Cosmos.

3 Or pleroma. The "world" is the pleroma of evil, but •'God" the pleroma of good.

4 A lacuna unfortunately occurs here in the text.

5. If thou canst God conceive, thou shalt conceive the Beautiful and Good, transcending Light, made lighter than the Light by God. That Beauty is beyond compare, inimitate that Good, e'en as God is Himself.

As, then, thou dost conceive of God, conceive the Beautiful and Good. For they cannot be joined with aught of other things that live, since they can never be divorced from God.

Seek'st thou for God, thou seekest for the Beautiful. One is the Path that leadeth unto It — Devotion joined with Gnosis.

6. And thus it is that they who do not know and do not tread Devotion's Path, do dare to call man beautiful and good, though he have ne'er e'en in his visions seen a whit that's Good, but is enwrapped with every kind of bad, and thinks the bad is good, and thus doth make unceasing use of it, and even feareth that it should be ta'en from him, so straining every nerve not only to preserve but even to increase it.

Such are the things that men call good and beautiful, Asclepius, — things which we cannot flee or hate ; for hardest thing of all is that we've need of them and cannot live without them.

COMMENTARY

THE TITLE

This sermon, which bears no proper title, but has been headed by some editor with the enunciation of the subject taken from the opening sentence of the treatise itself, belongs to the Asclepius-group.

Reitzenstein (p. 194) thinks that this tractate and the previous Asclepius-Dialogue — G. H., ii. (iii.) — may very well have formed part of the same collection of Asclepiana.

DUALISM ?

The teaching of our sermon is apparently dualistic ; but is it not only formally so, and as an exercise to raise the thought of the pupil away from the " things he has grown used to " ? For at the end Hermes declares :

" Such are the things that men call good and beautiful, Asclepius — things which we cannot flee or hate ; for hardest thing of all is that we've need of them and cannot live without them."

This is a clear advance on the formal Tat-teaching as to " hating " the body given in 0. H.} iv. (v.) 6, and points clearly to an instruction in which the cosmos was not regarded as the pleroma of bad, in spite of the formal and emphatic statement in § 4 :

" o yap KoV/xo? 7r\^pcDfji.d CCTTL TJ;? /ca/aa?."

Moreover, if we turn to 0. H., ix. (x.), 4 — another treatise of Hermes to Asclepius, and curiously enough having as superscription almost the same proposition as heads our present treatise — we read :

" ^wpiov yap avr^ [/ccm'a?] Y\ yJ}, oux o Kocruost ft>?

CVlOl 7TOT6 epOVO-l /3\a(T(j)*)fJLOVVT€$."

" Bad's place is earth, and not the world, as some will sometimes say with impious tongue."