The Beautiful And The Good.

The following is from the Tenth Book of the Corpus Hermeticum.

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1 The Good, Aesclepius, is exclusively in God, or rather: God is The Good. in all eternity. That is why The Good is necessarily the cause and essence of all motion and of all genesis: nothing exists that is without The Good. The Good, in perfect equilibrium, is surrounded by a static force of manifestation: it is the entire Plenitude, the Primordial Fount, the Origin if All Things. When I call that which sustains everything good, I mean The Good, which is Absolute and Eternal.

2 This attribute belongs only to God, for there is nothing He lacks, so that no desire for possession can make Him evil. There is nothing He might love and at the loss of which He might be grieved, because sorrow and grief are part of evil. There is nothing stronger than He that might be able to wage war against Him, nor is it keeping within His nature that indignity might be brought upon Him. Nothing excels Him in beauty and thus arouses Him to the love of the senses. Nothing can deny Him obedience and thus move Him to anger. There is nothing wiser than He which could arouse His covetousness.

3 As none of these emotions is to be found in the All-Being, there is nothing in Him other than The Good. And just as none of the other characteristics  can occur in such a Being, likewise The Good cannot be found in anyone else.

4 All the other qualities occur in all beings, in the small as well as in the large, in each of then in a specific way, and even in the world, the greatest and most powerful in all manifested life: for all that has been created is full of suffering, because genesis itself involves suffering.

Where there is suffering, The Good is certainly absent. Where The Good is, there is certainly no suffering whatsoever. Wherever day is, there is no night, and wherever night is, there is no day. That is why The Good cannot dwell in what has been created, but only in the non-created.

But since all matter participates in the non-created, it is also part of The Good. In this sense the world is good: insofar as it likewise brings forth all things it is as such, good. But in all other respects it is not good, being also subject to suffering, and changeable, and the mother of creatures subject to suffering.

5 Human standards of goodness are obtained by comparison with evil. What is not evil beyond measure is here considered to be good, and what is here held to be good is the smallest part of evil. Therefore, it is impossible, here, for what is good to be free from contamination by evil. What is good, here, is affected by evil and ceases to be good. Thus, this good deteriorates into evil. That is why The Good is in God alone; yes, God is The Good .

6 In men, The Good can be found only in name but nowhere in reality. In fact, that is impossible, for The Good cannot be found in a material body which on all sides is stifled by afflictions and arduous exertion, grief and desire, passion and delusion, and images of the senses.

7 However, worst of all, Aesclepius, is that everything to which man is driven by what I have mentioned is here on earth considered to be the greatest good., instead of an extraordinary evil. The passionate desire of the belly, the instigator of all malice, is the error which keeps us here remote from The Good.

8 Therefore, I thank God for what He has revealed to my consciousness with regard to knowledge of The Good, which is not to be found in the world. The world is saturated with evil, just as God is filled with the fullness of The Good, or The Good with the fullness of Good.

9 Around the Divine Being radiates beauty, which indeed dwells in God in supreme, flawless purity. Let us dare to say it, Aesclepius: the essential being of God, if one may speak of it thus, is The Beautiful and The Good.

10 The Beautiful and The Good are not to be found within those who are of the world. All things perceptible to the eyes are chimera, resembling shadows. But that which transcends the senses approaches most closely the essence of the Beautiful and The Good.  And the eyes are no more capable of seeing God than they are capable of beholding The Beautiful and The Good. These are entirely part of God; they belong to Him and Him alone, being inseparable from His essence and expressions of the highest love of God and for God.

11 If you can comprehend  God, you will also comprehend The Beautiful and The Good in their supreme radiation magnificence, entirely illuminated by God. That beauty is incomparable, that goodness inimitable, as God Himself is inimitable. To the extent that you can comprehend God, you will also comprehend The Beautiful and The Good. They cannot be conveyed to other beings for they cannot be separated from God.

12 If you are seeking God, you are also seeking The Beautiful, for there is only one road that leads from here to The Beautiful: a God-serving life of action, guided by the Gnosis.

13 That is why those who are without Gnosis and do not walk on the path of godliness dare proclaim man beautiful and good; man who has never, even in his dreams, seen what The Good is and is in the grips of all kinds of evil, who considers evil to be good and thus assimilates evil without ever becoming satiated with it, fearing to be deprived of it and striving with all his might not only to keep it, but even to increase it.

14 Thus it is, Aesclepius, with regard to human goodness and human beauty. And we can neither escape nor hate them, for the hardest thing of all is that we need them and cannot live without them.

From "That The Good Is To be Found In God Alone And Nowhere Else" The Egyptian Arch-Gnosis, Vol. III - Jan van Rijckenborgh

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