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

is [thus their] composition, whereas their dissolution restores them to those bodies which can never be dissolved, that is to say, which know no death. Privation, thus, of sense is brought about, not loss of bodies.

5. Now the third life — Man, after the image of the Cosmos made, [and] having mind, after the Father's will, beyond all earthly lives — not only doth have feeling with the second God, but also hath conception of the first ; for of the one 'tis sensible as of a body, while of the other it conceives as bodiless and the Good Mind.

Tat. Doth then this life not perish ?

Her. Hush, son ! and understand what God, what Cosmos [is], what is a life that cannot die, and what a life subject to dissolution.

Yea, understand the Cosmos is by God and in
God ; but Man by Cosmos and in Cosmos.

The source and limit and the constitution of all things is God.

COMMENTARY

THE COSMOS AS "SECOND GOD"

The superscription enunciates the nature of the treatise. It is evidently taken from the Dialogues to Tat, and originally formed part of some General Dissertation or of a collection of Dissertations.

It formed part of an instruction in which the Cosmos was treated of as " Second God," as we find it also in Philo 1 ; but just as Philo guards against any idea of duality, so does our treatise when it ends with the words (§ 5) :

" The source and limit and the constitution of all things is God."

The Great Body of the Cosmos, the Sphere or Perfect Form, the root of all forms, seems to be bounded by the idea of the Mon or Eternity, or Deathlessness. It is, as it were, the Cave or Womb of all things in genesis, centred in the Pleroma of ideas, the Intelligible Cosmos, which is full-filled with the ideas of God (§ 3).

THE LAW OF APOKATASTASIS

The eternal order and life of Cosmos is preserved by the law of apoJcatastasis or restoration (§ 4), the law of ever-becoming, and cyclic renewal, the making-newagain (avaveaxris) of C. H., iii. (iv.) 1.

There is no question of loss of body, — this is an illusion ; there is a privation of sense, a going into latency of some particular phase of consciousness.

There are then Great Lives — God, Cosmos, Man. Cosmos is made in the image of God, Man in the image of Cosmos. Therefore has Man sense and mind ; by the former he is "in sympathy with" the Cosmos, as Body by the latter he is conscious of God as Mind, — that is the Bodiless. Or as we might phrase it, by sense Man knows the Sensible Cosmos, by mind the Intelligible Cosmos, the Good Mind ; for God is Source and Limit and the Constitution of all things — the Cosmos, both Intelligible and Sensible, included.

i Leg. Alleg., § 21 j M. i. 82 ; P. 1103 (Ri. i. 113) ; Quasi. Sol, i. (quoted by Euseb., Prcep. Evang., vii. 13). See in the " Prolegomena," " Philo Concerning the Logos.53

CORPUS HERMETICUM IX. (X.)

ON THOUGHT AND SENSE

THAT THE BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD is IN GOD
ONLY AND ELSEWHERE NOWHERE

(Text: P. 60-67; Pat. 14, 15.)

1. I GAVE the Perfect Sermon (Logos) yesterday, Asclepius ; to-day I think it right, as sequel thereunto, to go through point by point the Sermon about Sense.

Now sense and thought do seem to differ, in that the former has to do with matter, the latter has to do with substance. But unto me both seem to be at-one and not to differ — in men I mean. In other lives 1 sense is at-oned with nature, but in men thought.

Now mind doth differ just as much from thought as God doth from divinity. For that divinity by God doth come to be, and by mind thought, the sister of the word (logos)2 and

1 Or animals.

2 There is here the usual play on the meanings, reason, word, sermon or sacred discourse.

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instruments of one another. For neither doth the word (logos) find utterance without thought, nor is thought manifested without word.

2. So sense and thought both flow together into man, as though they were entwined with one another. For neither without sensing can one think, nor without thinking sense.

But it is possible [they say] to think a thing apart from sense, as those who fancy sights in dreams. But unto me it seems that both of these activities occur in dream-sight, and sense doth pass out of the sleeping to the waking state.

For man is separated into soul and body, and only when the two sides of his sense agree together, does utterance of its thought conceived by mind take place.