<The idea of cyclic
change central to CH III, "The Sacred Sermon", also takes center stage here.
A current of ancient speculation grounded in astrology held that as the
planets returned after vast cycles of time to the same positions, so all
events on earth would repeat themselves precisely into eternity in the
future - and had done so from eternity in the past. The technical term for
this recurrence, apocatastasis, is the word Mead translates as
"restoration" in the beginning of section 4.
<Mead footnotes this
tractate as "obscure" and "faulty" in places, and his translation of the
beginning of section 3 is conjectural. - JMG>
1. [Hermes:] Concerning
Soul and Body, son, we now must speak; in what way Soul is deathless, and
whence comes the activity in composing and dissolving Body.
For there's no death for
aught of things [that are]; the thought this word conveys, is either void of
fact, or [simply] by the knocking off a syllable what is called "death",
doth stand for "deathless".
For death is of
destruction, and nothing in the Cosmos is destroyed. For if Cosmos is second
God, a life <or living creature> that cannot die, it cannot be that any part
of this immortal life should die. All things in Cosmos are parts of Cosmos,
and most of all is man, the rational animal.
2. For truly first of
all, eternal and transcending birth, is God the universals' Maker. Second is
he "after His image", Cosmos, brought into being by Him, sustained and fed
by Him, made deathless, as by his own Sire, living for aye, as ever free
from death.
Now that which ever-liveth,
differs from the Eternal; for He hath not been brought to being by another,
and even if He have been brought to being, He hath not been brought to being
by Himself, but ever is brought into being.
For the Eternal, in that
It is eternal, is the all. The Father is Himself eternal of Himself, but
Cosmos hath become eternal and immortal by the Father.
3. And of the matter
stored beneath it <i.e., beneath the cosmos>, the Father made of it a
universal body, and packing it together made it spherical - wrapping it
round the life - [a sphere] which is immortal in itself, and that doth make
materiality eternal.
But He, the Father,
full-filled with His ideas, did sow the lives <or living creatures> into the
sphere, and shut them in as in a cave, willing to order forth the life with
every kind of living.
So He with deathlessness
enclosed the universal body, that matter might not wish to separate itself
from body's composition, and so dissolve into its own [original] unorder.
For matter, son, when it
was yet incorporate <i.e., not yet formed into bodies>, was in unorder. And
it doth still retain down here this [nature of unorder] enveloping the rest
of the small lives <or living creatures> - that increase-and-decrease which
men call death.
4. It is round earthly
lives that this unorder doth exist. For that the bodies of the heavenly ones
preserve one order allotted to them by the Father as their rule; and it is
by the restoration of each one [of them] this order is preserved indissolute.
The "restoration" of
bodies on the earth 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 <i.e., the Cosmos>, 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?
Hermes: 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.
