Corpus Hermeticum 10: The Sermon on the Mount
§ About this work
The collection opens with the narrator's vision of the Being Man-Shepherd (Poimandres), Mind of all-masterhood, who reveals the Light, the making of Man, the ascent through the Harmony to the Eighth, and sends the narrator to preach Gnosis. In the Serapeum, Hermes leads Asclepius to establish that the bodiless space containing all motion is God, Cause named Good and Father. The Sacred Sermon narrates cosmogony from Chaos, Darkness, and Water to men born for gnosis. Hermes then addresses Tat across several discourses: the Epistles, where Mind is set as a prize in a Cup; a discourse on the Unmanifest God who is all names and no name; the All-Father, locating Good in God alone; the Seven Powers, rebuking ignorance; and the Eight Sphere, denying true death. The Decalogue treats sense and thought and Cosmos as God's Son; the Sermon on the Mount describes souls' transformations and Gnosis as the Way Up. In the Hymn, Mind instructs Thrice-greatest Hermes on God, Aeon, Cosmos, Time, and Becoming; the Prayer teaches Mind as pilot against passion and Fate; the Discourse to Tat unfolds Rebirth, the twelve Tormentors driven out by ten Powers, and the Secret Hymnody. Hermes writes to Asclepius (to Ammon) on the One Maker who sows Immortality, Change, Life, and Motion. In the Definitions, Asclepius addresses King Ammon on God as All and One, the Sun as Demiurge, and Heimarmenē; a fragmentary discourse treats bodiless things in bodies and reflexions, the King postponing converse. The Encomium of Kings closes with musician analogies, ascending to God then descending to praise Kings, where Love works the harmony.
Hermes tells Tat that yesterday's discourse was devoted to Asclepius, today's to Tat, being an abridgement of the General Sermons. He states that "God, Father and the Good" share one nature, or energy. God's energy is His Will, His essence to will the being of all things; the Cosmos, or Sun, sires but is not the cause of good. The parent is the children's cause by sharing the Good's desire through the Sun; the Good does the creating. The Good's feature is to be known. Tat praises the vision of the Good, saying it increases sight rather than blinding. Hermes says some fall asleep from the body in this Spectacle, as Uranus and Cronus did; Gnosis of the Good is holy silence. A soul may be made like God while still in a body. Hermes describes souls coming from the All-soul and their transformations upward—creeping to water, earth, winged, air, men, daimones, Inerrant Gods—and the vicious soul's return to creeping things; the soul's vice is ignorance, its virtue Gnosis. He explains science as incorporeal, Cosmos as beautiful but not good, and man as evil because subject to death. He lists man's principles: mind, reason, soul, spirit, body, and describes death. Three exist: God, Cosmos, man. Gnosis is the Way Up to the Mount. Hermes describes the infant's soul, forgetfulness becoming vice, and the mind departing at death in a fiery body. He describes the vestures, the robe of fire, the pious soul becoming mind, and the impious soul scourged with whips of its sins. He urges praise to God and prayer for Good Mind, describes the intercourse and hierarchy of souls, the Good Daimon, and concludes that man mounts to heaven, being god subject to death.
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