Asclepius: Is will then, Trismegistus, summed up in purpose? Trismegistus: Will, Asclepius, issues from purpose; and from will issues each several acts of will. Not without effect does God will a thing, for he is fully supplied with all things; and all things that he wills are good. He has all things which he wills, and wills the things which he has; and all that he purposes and wills is good. Such is God. The Kosmos is Gods image; and since God is good, the Kosmos also is good. Asclepius: Do you say, Trismegistus, that the Kosmos is good? Trismegistus: Yes, Asclepius; and I will show you that it is so. God dispenses and distributes goods, namely, sense, soul, and life, to all kinds of beings in the Kosmos; and in like manner, the Kosmos gives and supplies all things which seem good to mortals, namely, the succession of births in time, the formation, growth, and ripening of the fruits of the earth, and the like. For you must deem the Kosmos a second god, Asclepius, a god who governs all living things, both those which have souls and those which are soulless. For if the Kosmos has been and is and will be a living and ever-living being, nothing in the Kosmos is mortal. It is the everlasting life of each of its several parts that makes the Kosmos what it is; and seeing that the Kosmos is ever one, and is a living and ever-living being, mortality can have no place in it. It must therefore be filled with life, and with eternal life, if it needs must live for ever. It is God then that everlastingly governs all the sources of life in the Kosmos; he is the eternal dispenser of life itself. But when life has once been dispensed to all the (intracosmic) sources of life, the supply of it is maintained in accordance with eternal law; and the manner of its maintenance I will proceed to explain. The Kosmos moves within the very life of eternity and is contained in that very eternity whence all life issues, and for this reason it is impossible that it should at any time come to a stand, or be destroyed, since it is walled in and bound together, so to speak, by eternal life. And the Kosmos is itself the dispenser of life to all things in it here below, and the place in which are contained all things which are subject to control beneath the sun. The movement is of the Kosmos itself consists of a twofold working; life is infused into the Kosmos from without by eternity; and the Kosmos infuses life into all things that are within it, distributing all things according to fixed and determined relations of number and time, by the operation of the sun and the movements of the stars. The process of time is wholly determined by Gods law ; but the lapse of terrestrial time is marked by the changing states of the atmosphere, and the variations of heat and cold; while that of celestial time is marked by the return of the heavenly bodies to their former positions as they move in their periodic revolutions. The Kosmos is that in which time is contained; and it is by the progress and movement of time that life is maintained in the Kosmos. The process of time is regulated by a fixed order and time in its ordered course renews all things in the Kosmos by alternation. All things being subject to this process, there is nothing that stands fast, nothing fixed, nothing free from change, among the things which come into being, neither among those in heaven nor among those on earth. God alone stands unmoved, and with good reason; for he is self-contained, and self-derived, and wholly self-centered, and in him is no deficiency or imperfection. He stands fast in virtue of his own immobility, nor can he be moved by any force impinging on him from without, seeing that in him are all things, and that it is he alone that is in all things; unless indeed one should presume to say that. he moves (not in time, but) in eternity. But it should rather be said that eternity also is motionless; into eternity all movements of time go back; and from eternity all movements of time take their beginning. God then stands unmoved; and eternity likewise is ever changeless, containing in itself a Kosmos which is without beginning, even that Kosmos which we rightly call imperceptible to senses. This (sensible) Kosmos has been made in the image of that other Kosmos, and reproduces eternity in a copy. Now time, though it is ever in movement, possesses a faculty of stability peculiar to itself, in that its return into itself is determined by necessity. And accordingly, though eternity is stable, fixed, and motionless, yet since time is mobile, and its movement ever goes back into eternity, it results from this that eternity also, though motionless in itself, appears to be in motion, on account of its relation to time; for eternity enters into time, and it is in time that all movement takes place. Hence it follows that on the one hand eternity, stable though it be, is also mobile, and on the other hand, time, mobile though it be, is rendered stable by the immutability of the law by which its movement is determined. And in this way it is possible to hold that God also moves within himself, though God, like eternity, is motionless; for the movement of God, being made stable by his greatness, is no movement, inasmuch as his greatness is necessarily motionless. The being, then, of which I speak, whether it is to be called God, or eternity, or both, and whether God is in eternity, or eternity in God, or each in the other,-this being, I say, is imperceptible by sense; it is infinite, incomprehensible, immeasurable it exceeds our powers, and is beyond our scrutiny. The place of it, the whither and the whence, the manner and quality of its being, are unknown to us. It moves in absolute stability, and its stability moves within it. Eternity then is not limited by the conditions of time; and time, which admits of numerical limitations, is eternal in virtue of its cyclic recurrence. Thus time as well as eternity is infinite, and is thought to be eternal. But eternity is rightly held to rank above time, in virtue of its fixity; for it is firmly fixed, so as to be able, by its rigid immobility, to sustain those things which are in motion. God and eternity then are the first principles of all things which exist. The Kosmos does not hold the first and highest place, because it is mobile; for its mobility takes precedence of the immutability with which it, obeys the law of its everlasting movement, which is a secondary sort of eternity. It is this sort of eternity that enters into all the parts of which the Kosmos is composed. For the Kosmos, changeless in virtue of the unalterable law by which its motion is determined, revolves with an everlasting movement. That movement has had no beginning, and will have no end; it manifests itself and disappears by turns in the several parts of the Kosmos, and that in such fashion that again and again in the chequered course of time it manifests itself anew in those same parts in which it disappeared before. Such is the nature of circular movement; all points in the circle are so linked together, that you can find no place at which the movement can begin; for it is evident that all points in the line of movement both precede and follow one another for ever. And it is in this manner that time revolves. The divine mind is wholly of like nature with eternity. It is motionless in itself, but though stable, is yet self-moving; it is holy, and incorruptible, and everlasting, and has all attributes yet higher, if higher there be, that can be assigned to the eternal life of the supreme God, that life which stands fast in absolute reality. It is wholly filled with all things imperceptible to sense, and with all-embracing knowledge; it is, so to speak, consubstantial with God. The cosmic mind the recipient I of all sensible forms I and of all kinds of knowledge of sensible things.The (merely) human mind is . . ., and is dependent on the retentiveness of mans memory, that is, on his remembrance of all his past experiences. The divine mind I descends in the scale of being as far as man, but no farther; for the supreme God willed not that the divine mind should be interftised with all things, lest it should be put to shame by mingling with the lower animals. The knowledge which corresponds to the character and extent of the human mind is based wholly on mans memory of the past; it is the retentiveness of his memory that has given him dominion over the earth. The knowledge which corresponds to the nature and character of the cosmic mind is such as can be procured from all the sensible things in the KOSMOS. But the knowledge which corresponds to the character of the supreme Gods mind, this knowledge, and this alone, is truth; and of this truth not the faintest outline or shadow is discernible in the Kosmos. For where things are discerned at intervals of time, there is falsehood; and where things have an origin in time there errors arise. Thought, however, differs from mind I in this respect, that our thought attains by mental effort I to the kind of knowledge which corresponds to the character of the cosmic mind; and having come to know cosmic things, it furthermore attains to a knowledge of eternity and the supracosmic gods. And thus it comes to pass that we men see, as through dark mist, the things of heaven, so far as this is compatible with the conditions of the human mind. Our powers, when we aspire to the sight of things so high, are limited by narrow bounds; but great is mans happiness when he has seen that vision. You see, Asclepius, how lowly is our station, and how lofty are the things of which we treat; but to thee, O God supreme, I give my thanks, that thou hast shed on me the light whereby I see...
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 19:23:21 +0000
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