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

5. This Pleroma of God is the Good and Beautiful.
The Path to this True Good is one of balance, — for it

1 Cf. John i. 16 : " Of His Fullness we have all received, and grace on grace."

2 Cf. John i. 4 : " In Him was Life and the Life was the Light of men."

is the Way of Devotion united unto Gnosis — in Sanskrit terms, the Bhakti-Marga and Jnana-Marga combined.1

6. Finally we learn, though inferentially, that things are not bad in themselves; the evil is that men are content with the little goods they have and cling desperately to these, in ignorance of the greater blessings to which they could attain, did they but open their spiritual eyes for the True Vision of the Good. For even the psychic visions of the soul, in spite of their beauty, give man no hint of that Most Blessed Sight of All.

1 Compare C. H.y i. 27 : " And I began to preach to men the beauty of Devotion and of Gnosis."

CORPUS HERMETICUM VII. (VIII.)

THE GREATEST ILL AMONG MEN
IS IGNORANCE OF GOD

(Text: P. 54, 55; Pat. 18a.)

1. WHITHER stumble ye, sots, who have sopped up the wine of ignorance unmixed, and can so far not carry it that ye already even spew it forth ?

Stay ye, be sober, gaze upwards with the
[true] eyes of the heart ! And if ye cannot all,
yet ye at least who can !

For that the ill' of ignorance doth pour o'er all the earth and overwhelm the soul that's battened down within the body, preventing it from fetching port within Salvation's harbours.

2. Be then not carried off by the fierce flood, but using the shore-current,1 ye who can, make for Salvation's port, and, harbouring there, seek ye for one to take you by the hand and lead you 2 unto Gnosis' gates.

1 Lit. back or up-current.

2 Cf. G. H., iv. (v.) 11 ; ix. (x.; 10 ; x (xi.) 2 ; R. 23, n. 5.

Where shines clear Light, of every darkness clean ; where not a single soul is drunk, but sober all they gaze with their hearts1 eyes on Him who willeth to be seen.

No ear can hear Him, nor can eye see Him, nor tongue speak of Him, but [only] mind and heart.

But first thou must tear off from thee the cloak which thou dost wear, — the web of ignorance, the ground of bad, corruption's chain, the carapace of darkness, the living death, sensation's corpse, the tomb thou carriest with thee, the robber in thy house, who through the things he loveth, hateth thee, and through the things he hateth, bears thee malice.

3. Such is the hateful cloak thou wearest,— that throttles thee [and holds thee] down to it, in order that thou may'st not gaze above, and, having seen the Beauty of the Truth, and Good that dwells therein, detest the bad of it ; having found out the plot that it hath schemed against thee, by making void of sense those seeming things which men think senses.

For that it hath with mass of matter blocked them up and crammed them full of loathsome lust, so that thou may'st not hear about the things that thou should'st hear, nor see the things that thou should'st see.

COMMENTARY
A PREACHING

THERE is little to be said about this powerful appeal to cease from the drunkenness of physical sensations and to awaken to the Light.

Reitzenstein (p. 194) calls it a " Prophetenpredigt" and says that nowhere in the MSS. is it ascribed to Hermes ; by which he can only mean that it bears no other superscription than the descriptive sentence which heads it.

The style and spirit remind us not so much of C. H., iii. (iv.), as Reitzenstein (p. 206, 1) suggests, as of the interpolated or superadded passages in the " Pcemandres" treatise (§ 27):

"O ye people, earthborn folk, ye who have given yourselves to drunkenness, and sleep, and ignorance, be sober now, cease from your surfeit, cease to be glamoured by irrational sleep!"

Did this sentence give rise to our little sermon ; or is the sentence a summary of the preaching? Or do both sentence and sermon come from a common stock ?

THE PROBABLE COMPLETION OF AN
OXYRHYNCHUS LOGION

The last hypothesis seems to be the most satisfactory choice ; and we may compare what would appear to be a familiar figure of speech among such communities with logion 3 of the First Oxyrhynchus Fragment :

" Jesus saith : I stood in the midst of the world (rov /coV/xoi/), and in the flesh did I appear unto them ; and I found all men drunken, and none found I athirst among them ; and my soul grieveth over the souls of men, because they are blind in their heart and see not ..."

Can we fill up the missing word from our sermon ?