Hermes and John on the Father of Things in the World

Hermes Trismegistus, John Everard (T) · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages pairing a passage from the Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus in John Everard's seventeenth-century translation with a verse from the first epistle of John, printed in Greek with an English rendering beneath.

The Hermetic passage turns on a distinction stated twice: God is the Father of the World, but the World — not God — is the Father of the things in the World. The World is described as begetting everything and making all things alive by its motion, so that it is at once the place and the workman of life; bodies come from matter, some of earth, some of water, some of air, some of fire, the more compounded being the heavier and the less compounded the higher. The swiftness of the World's motion is what produces the varieties of quality in generation. The consequence is a chain of parentage: the World is the Son of God, and the things in the World are the sons of the World — and the Greek word κόσμος is said to be properly used, since it means an ornament and the world adorns and beautifies all things by the variety of generation. The second half sets against this a correction of a familiar phrase. "In the world but not of the world" is described as a convenient para-scripture invented in the third century, and the actual verse is given in Greek and English: that everything in the world — the cravings of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the boasting of what a man has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world. The two texts are placed together because they say the same thing about where worldly things originate, from opposite directions.

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