Corpus Hermeticum 12: The Prayer · 5 of 5 · tr. G.R.S. Mead
Section 1e
Observe this too, my son; that each one of the other lives inhabiteth one portion of the Cosmos - aquatic creatures water, terrene earth, and aery creatures air; while man doth use all these - earth, water air [and] fire; he seeth Heaven, too, and doth contact it with [his] sense.
But God surroundeth all, and permeateth all, for He is energy and power; and it is nothing difficult, my son, to conceive God.
21.
But if thou wouldst Him also contemplate, behold the ordering of the Cosmos, and [see] the orderly behavior of its ordering <this is a play on the word "cosmos", which means "order, arrangement">; behold thou the Necessity of things made manifest, and [see] the Providence of things become and things becoming; behold how Matter is all-full of Life; [behold] this so great God in movement, with all the good and noble [ones] - gods, daimones and men!
Tat: But these are purely energies, O father mine!
Hermes: If, then, they're purely energies, my son - by whom, then, are they energized except by God?
Or art thou ignorant, that just as Heaven, Earth, Water, Air, are parts of Cosmos, in just the selfsame way God's parts are Life and Immortality, [and] Energy, and Spirit, and Necessity, and Providence, and Nature, Soul, and Mind, and the Duration <that is, Aeon or Eternity> of all these that is called Good?
And there are naught of things that have become, or are becoming, in which God is not.
22.
Tat: Is He in Matter, father, then?
Hermes: Matter, my son, is separate from God, in order that thou may'st attribute to it the quality of space.
But what thing else than mass think'st thou it is, if it's not energized?
Whereas if it be energized, by whom is it made so?
For energies, we said, are parts of God.
By whom are, then, all lives enlivened?
By whom are things immortal made immortal?
By whom changed things made changeable?
And whether thou dost speak of Matter, of Body, or of Essence, know that these too are energies of God; and that materiality is Matter's energy, that corporeality is Bodies' energy, and that essentiality doth constituteth the energy of Essence; and this is God - the All.
23.
And in the All is naught that is not God.
Wherefore nor <i.e., neither> size, nor space, nor quality, nor form, nor time, surroundeth God; for He is All, and All surroundeth all, and permeateth all.
Unto this Reason (Logos), son, thy adoration and thy worship pay.
There is one way alone to worship God; [it is] not to be bad.
The Stoic and Plotinian doctrine that all parts of the cosmos are bound by hidden affinities, so that a movement in one part resonates through the whole; the metaphysical basis for astrology, magic, and divination.
Divination through birds, wind, and tokens implies a hidden affinity between cosmic signs and future events.
Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.
[auto] Providence is explicitly named as a part of God to be beheld in the ordering of things becoming.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
The listing of gods, daimones, and men under the movement of God implies a structured hierarchy of beings.
The doctrine of the universe as boundless and without center or circumference, populated by innumerable worlds — Bruno's rejection of the closed Aristotelian sphere; the divine and the cosmos as ontologically infinite.
God surrounds and permeates all, and 'All surroundeth all,' suggesting an ontologically infinite divine cosmos.
Disciplined inward attention — sitting, focused, or open-awareness practice — as a stand-alone term that umbrellas active_contemplation, inner_silence, and dhyana-style sitting.
The practice of beholding the ordering of the Cosmos functions as disciplined inward attention.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
Man is described as using all elements of the cosmos (earth, water, air, fire) and seeing Heaven, mirroring the whole.