{"collection":"Gnosticism","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/gno/th2/th220.htm","path":"gno/th2/th220.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/gno/th2/th220.htm","text":"Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 2, by G.R.S. Mead, [1906]\nThis treatise bears a double title:\u2014\u201cOn Thought and Sense,\u201d and \u201cThat the Beautiful and Good is in God only.\u201d The former heading is clearly taken from the concluding words: \u201cLet so much then suffice on thought-and-sense\u201d; whereas the introductory sentence speaks of the Sermon on Sense only. The latter heading seems to be a thoughtless repetition of the title of C. H., vi. (vii.).\nThe opening words: \u201cI gave the Perfect Sermon yesterday, Asclepius,\u201d inform us not only that we have to do with an Asclepius Dialogue, but also that our sermon followed directly on the \u201cPerfect Sermon,\u201d a Latin version of which has fortunately been preserved to us. 1\nIt is, therefore, of very great interest to find that Lactantius, 2 in quoting a sentence from our treatise (\u00a7 4)\u2014\u201cDevotion is God-gnosis\u201d\u2014continues with the words: \u201cAsclepius, his hearer, has also explained the same idea at greater length in the Perfect Sermon.\u201d\nLactantius had, therefore, a collection before him in which these two sermons stood in close connection.\nReitzenstein (p. 195) thinks that our sermon must be an extract from a longer one, because he cannot bring himself to believe that so short a treatise could have been found in immediate connection (as the opening words suggest) with so lengthy and detailed a tractate as the \u201cPerfect Sermon.\u201d This may be so; and yet the formal beginning and ending of our sermon would seem to suggest that we are dealing with a complete tractate and not with an extract.\nThe doctrine that in men \u201csense-and-thought\u201d together constitutes human \u201csense\u201d throws some light on the meaning of the term \u201csense\u201d as used elsewhere in the Trismegistic literature, where we should expect to find \u201cmind\u201d employed, and that, too, in the sense of the higher mind.\nNormal human \u201cthought,\u201d then, is, so to say, sensible, entirely bound up in sense-impressions; it is the mind alone that can soar beyond the senses, for it alone can be \u201cillumined by God\u2019s Light\u201d (\u00a7 3).\nThe mind is, as it were, a womb or woman, that can be impregnated either by the \u201cSeeds of God\u201d or by the \u201cDaimonial Energy\u201d; she thus conceives and brings forth virtues or vices.\nAll of this is precisely the same doctrine as Philo preaches, as may be seen by the passages we have quoted in the \u201cProlegomena\u201d on the subject of the \u201cSacred Marriage.\u201d\nThe Seeds of God are Virtue and Self-control and Devotion or Piety; and Devotion in its true sense\nis God-gnosis, or Knowledge of God. The Gnostics, then, \u201cthey who are in Gnosis\u201d\u2014a curious expression\u2014because of their natural divorcement from the \u201cworld,\u201d \u201cplease not the many, nor the many them.\u201d\n\u201cThey are thought mad and laughed at; they\u2019re hated and despised, and sometimes even put to death.\u201d\nMark the impersonal note, the calm laying down of the causes of misunderstanding between the \u201cmany\u201d and the \u201cfew\u2019\u2019; and compare this with the more personal note of the saying underlying the following Synoptic accommodations:\n\u201cBlessed are ye when men hate you and excommunicate you, and revile and expel your Name as evil, for the Son of Man\u2019s sake\u201d (Luke vi. 22).\n\u201cBlessed are ye when men revile you and persecute you and say all evil against you, lying, for My sake\u201d (Matt. v. 11).\nIt is clear, at least it seems so to me, that \u201cLuke\u201d has kept closer to the original, and that that original was addressed not only to the members of a community, but to those who had been cast forth from some other community \u201cfor the sake of the Son of Man\u201d\u2014that is, because of the immediate inspiration of the Logos, which doubtless did not pay sufficient attention to the prejudices of the \u201cmany\u201d of that community.\n\u201cMatthew,\u201d on the contrary, seems to have adapted the Saying for general purposes and the necessities of the Cult of Jesus. 1\nExcellent also is the doctrine that the true \u201cGnostic,\u201d the man who is consciously growing into the stature of\nthe Christ, the true \u201cDevotee of God,\u201d \u201cwill bear with all,\u201d for he is beginning to know the Reason of things.\n\u201cFor such an one all things, e\u2019en though they be for others bad, are for him good; deliberately he doth refer them all unto the Gnosis.\u201d\nHe sees the Good, he sees God, in all things. He is the true Alchemist. For \u201cthing most marvellous, \u2019tis he alone who maketh bad things good\u201d; by spiritual alchemy he transmutes the evil of the world to good; he drains the \u201ccup of bitterness\u201d unto the dregs, and transmutes it into the pure Water of Life.\nIn every Man, then, there are two \u201cmen,\u201d the material (or hylic) and the substantial (or spiritual, \u03bf\u1f50\u03c3\u03b9\u03ce\u03b4\u03b7\u03c2).\nEvil, however, is not a permanent thing; it is but the process of \u201cbecoming good,\u201d the productive side of things (\u00a7 5).\nIt is difficult to bring out the delicacy of the wording of the original in translation. First God\u2019s ultimate intention is stated to be the making of all things like unto (\u1f45\u03bc\u03bf\u03b9\u03b1) Himself; the world-process is to be ultimately consummated in the Great Sameness of Union with Him. But meantime while this making, creating or becoming, or transformation, is going on, the imperfections cannot produce, that is, become creators in their turn; they are unproductive (\u1f04\u03c6\u03bf\u03c1\u03b1). That which is the instrument or organ of God\u2019s making is the Cosmic Course (\u03c6\u03bf\u03c1\u03ac). We are finally (\u00a7 7) told that the differences of bodies are conditioned by the speed of this Cosmic Course; therefore the opposite poles, Other and Same, are both ultimately referable to Cosmos, the Likeness of God.\nThe end to be achieved is to develop the \u201csense-and-thought\u201d of the Cosmos, the One Sense, not manifold,\nbut simple. This is the deliberate working with the Will of God, the Cosmic Will, the perpetual renewing of all things (\u1f00\u03bd\u03b1\u03bd\u03ad\u03c9\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2).\nThe Cosmos, then, as the Logos of God, is the Good Gardener of Life; it is both the place of Life and its Creator\u2014that is to say, both female and male, both Mother and Father.\nBut the Cosmos is not apart from God, nor even in God; God does not have Cosmos as a possession, but is Cosmos and all therein (\u00a7 9). Cosmos is Son of God, His Very Self (\u00a7 8).\nTherefore we can learn to know somewhat of the nature of God by sense and thought, for, \u201cGod is not, as some suppose, beyond the reach of sense and thought\u201d (\u1f00\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9\u03c3\u03b8\u03b7\u03c4\u1f78\u03c2 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u1f00\u03bd\u03cc\u03b7\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2); that is, God does not entirely transcend sense and thought, for God is all things.\n\u201cAs some suppose\u201d doubtless refers again to the \u201cblasphemers\u201d of \u00a7 4\u2014that is, the apparently dualistic doctrine set forth in C. H., vi. (vii.). 1\nAnd so, finally, we learn that Faith, in the true sense, is a certitude of the mind, or of true manhood. \u201cTo understand is to believe\u201d (\u00a7 10). Gnosis and not belief is the Fair Faith.\nCompare with this the \u201cPerfect Sermon,\u201d x. 1:\n\u201cThe reason for a thesis such as this, O my Asclepius, I would that thou should\u2019st grasp, not only with the keen attention of thy soul, but also with its living power as well.\n\u201cFor \u2019tis a reason that most men cannot believe; the Perfect and the True are to be grasped by the more holy minds.\u201d\n136:1 For it would, of course, be absurd to suppose that the \u201cPerfect Sermon\u201d could in any way be thought to indicate C. H., vi. (vii.), the last Asclepius Dialogue in our Corpus; especially when our sermon (\u00a7 4) directly combats the teaching of C. H., vi.\n136:2 Div. Institt., ii. 15 (Ed. Fritz., i. 106); cf. also v. 14.\n138:1 R. (p. 213, 1) brings this passage of our sermon into connection with some assumed persecution of the P\u0153mandres communities in the course of the fourth century; but I cannot myself see the slightest ground for such an assumption.\n140:1 Reitzenstein (p. 171, 2) compares this doctrine of the insensibility and incognizability of God with the Sab\u00e6an Gnosis.","title":"Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 2: I. Corpus Hermeticum: Commentary","type":"page"}