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The Will of God is Gnostic; He wills to be known. The Divine Purpose is consummated in Self-knowledge. God is knowable, but only by "His own," that is by the Divine Sonship, as Basilides, the Christian Gnostic, calls it, or by the Race of the Sons of God, as Philo and our Gnostics and others of the same period phrase it.
The Sonship is a Race, and not an individual, because they of the Sonship have ceased from separation and have made "surrender of themselves to Powers, and thus becoming Powers they are in God." They are one with another, no longer separated one from another and using divided senses and organs; for they constitute the Intelligible Word or Reason (Logos) which is also the Intelligible World (Kosmos) or Order of all things.
The next three praise-givings celebrate the same trinity of what, for lack of appropriate terms, we may call Being, Bliss and Intelligence, but now in another mode-the mode of manifestation or enformation in space and time and substance of the Sensible Universe, or Cosmos of forms and species.
The three hypostases or hyparxes or subsistences of this mode of the Divine self-manifestation are suggested by the terms Word, All-nature and Form. Word is the Vice-regent of Being, because it is this Word or Reason that established the being of all things, the that in them which causes them to be what they are, the essential reason of their being; All-nature is the ground or substance of their being, the all-receiver or Nurse, as Plato calls her, who nourishes them, the Giver of Bliss, the Ever-becoming which is the Image of Eternity; while Form is the impression of the Divine Intelligence, the source of all transformation and metamorphosis.
The final trisagion sings the praise of God's transcendency, declaring the powerlessness of human speech adequately to sing the praise of God.
Therefore is it said that the sole fit liturgy, or service of God, is to be found in the offerings of reason alone, the reason or logos which is the Divine principle in man, the image of the Image, or Divine Man, the Logos. It is the continual raising of the tension of the whole nature whereby the man is drawn ever closer and closer to God, in the rapt silence of ecstatic contemplation-when alone he goes to the Alone, as Plotinus says. The Name of God can be expressed by Silence alone, for, as we know from the remains of the Christianized Gnosis, this Silence, or Sige, is the Spouse of God, and it is the Divine Spouse alone who can give full expression to the Divine Son, the Name or Logos of God.
The prayer is for Gnosis, for the realization of the state of Sonship, or the self-consciousness of the common being which the Son has with the Father. This is to be consummated by the fulfillment of the man's whole nature, by the completion of his insufficiency or imperfection (hysterema), whereby he becomes the Fullness or Wholeness (Pleroma), the Aeon or Eternity. This is to be achieved by the descent of the Great Power upon him, by the Blessing of God's Goodwill, that Charis or Grace or Love, which has been all along his Divine Mother, but which now becomes his Divine Spouse or Complement or Syzygy.
The prayer is not for self but for others, that so the man may become the means of illumination for those still in darkness, who as yet do not know of the Glad Tidings of the Divine Sonship, who are ignorant of the Race of Wisdom, but who nevertheless are, as are all men, brethren of the Christ and sons of God.
And so in this ecstasy of praise, the traveller, as he sings upon the Path of the Divine, feels within him the certitude that he is indeed on the Way of Return, his face set forward to the True Goal; his going to Light and Life, the eternal fatherhood and motherhood that are ever united in the Good, the One Desirable, or Divine Father-Mother, two in one and three in one.
Finally as God has been praised throughout in His nature of holiness, that is as most worshipful, meet to be adored, praiseworthy and the object of all wonder, so that which has proceeded from Him, His Man, or the Divine in man, now longs consciously to become of like nature with Him, according to the Purpose and Commandment of the Father Who has destined him for this very end, and bestowed on him power over all things.
It is indeed a fair psalm-this Hymn of Hermes, that is, the praise-giving of some lover of this Gnosis who had, as he expresses it, "reached the Plain of Truth" (i, 19), or come into conscious contact with the reality o€ his own Divine nature, and so been made a Hermes indeed, capable of interpreting the inner meaning of religion, and of leading souls back from Death to Life-a true psychagogue. It matters little who wrote it; Greek or Syrian, it may have borne this name or that, it may have lived precisely from this year to that, or from some other to some other year, all this is of little consequence except for historians of the bodies of men. What concerns us here more nearly is the outpouring of a soul; we have here a man manifestly pouring forth from the fullness of his heart the profoundest experiences of his inmost life. He is telling us how it is possible for a man to learn to know God by first learning to know himself, and so unfold the flower of his spiritual nature and unwrap the swathings of the immemorial heart of him, that has been mummified and laid in the tomb so many ages of lives that have been living deaths.
And now we may pass to our next hymn. It is found in a beautiful little treatise which bears as title the enunciation of its subject-"Though Unmanifest God is most Manifest"-and is a discourse of 'father' Hermes to 'son' Tat. The subject of this sermon is that mysterious manifestation of the Divine Energy which is now so well known by the Sanskrit term Maya, so erroneously translated into English as "Illusion"-unless we venture to take this illusion in its root-meaning of Sport and Play; for in its highest sense Maya is the Sport of the Creative Will, the World-Drama or God in activity.
The Greek equivalent of maya is phantasia, which, for lack of a single term in English to represent it rightly, I have translated by "thinking manifest." The Phantasy of God is thus the Power (Shakti in Sanskrit) of perpetual self-manifestation or self-imagining, and is the means whereby all 'This' comes into existence from the unmanifest 'That'; or as our treatise phrases it:
He is Himself, both things that are and things that are not.
The things that are He hath made manifest, he keepeth things that are not in Himself.He is the God beyond all name-He the unmanifest, he the most manifest;
He whom the mind alone can contemplate, He visible unto the eyes as well.
He is the one of no body, the one of many bodies, nay, rather, He of every body.Naught is there which He is not, for all are He, and He is all.
He is both things that are 'here' in our present consciousness, and all that are not in our consciousness, or rather memory-'there' in our eternal nature. He is both the Manifest and Hidden hidden in the manifest and manifest in the hidden, manifest in all we have been and hidden in all we shall be.
From the things that are not He maketh things that are; and so He may be said to create out of nothing-as far as we are concerned; indeed He creates out of nothing but Himself.
He is both that which the mind alone can contemplate-that is the Intelligible Universe, or that constituted in His Divine Being which the divided senses cannot perceive-and also all that which the senses, both physical and superphysical can perceive-the whole Sensible Universe.
He is to be conceived simultaneously from a monotheistic, polytheistic and pantheistic point of view, and from many others-as many points of view indeed, as the mind of man can conceive, not to speak of an infinitude that he cannot ever imagine. He is corporeality and incorporeality in perpetual union. He is in no body, for no body can contain Him, and yet is He in every body and every body is in Him. "Naught is there which He is not, for He is all."
It is indeed difficult to understand why so many in the West so greatly dread the very thought of allowing pantheistic ideas to enter into their conception of God. This fear is in reality over-daring or rash presumption, for they have the hardihood to dare to limit the Divine according to their own petty notions of what they would like God to be, and so they bitterly resent the disturbance of their self-complacency when it is pointed out that He will not fit the miserably narrow cross on which they would fain crucify Him.
What right have we, who in our ignorance are but puny creatures of a day, to exclude God from anyone or anything? But they will reply: It is not God who is excluded; it is we who exclude ourselves from God.
Indeed; try as we may, we cannot do so. This is the impossible, for we cannot exclude ourselves from ourselves. And who are we apart from God? Did we create ourselves? And if we did, then we are God, for self-creation is the prerogative of the Divine alone.
But the pious soul will still object that God is good alone. Agreed, if you will; but what is Good? Is Good our good only, or the Good of all creatures? And if God is the Good of all creatures; then equally so must He be the Evil of all creatures; for the good of one creature is the evil of another, and the evil of one the good of another-and so the Balance is kept even. It is a limited view to say that God is good alone, and then to define this as meaning some special form of good that we imagine for ourselves, and not that which is really good for all; for it is good that there should be such apparent evil in the universe as pantheism, and that man's notions of apparent good should so far fall short of the reality. The wise man, or rather the man who is striving after Gnosis, is he who can see in the Good and Evil as conceived by man good in every evil, and evil or insufficiency in every good.
But if we say with Hermes that "All are He and He is all," we do not assert that we know what this really means, we only assert that we are in this declaration face to face with the ultimate mystery of all things before which we can only bow the head in reverent silence, for all words here fail.
And so the mystic who wrote these sentences continues his meditation with a magnificent hymn, expressive of the inability of the learner's mind rightly to sing God's praises, which, for lack of a better title, we may call "A Hymn to All-Father God."
A HYMN TO ALL-FATHER GOD
WHO, then, may sing Thee praise of Thee, or praise to Thee?
WHITHER, again, am I to turn my eyes to sing Thy praise; above, below, within, without? There is no way, no place is there about Thee, nor any other thing of things that are.
All are in Thee; all are from Thee; O Thou Who givest all and takest naught, for Thou hast all and naught is there Thou hast not.
And WHEN, O Father, shall l hymn Thee? For none can seize Thy hour or time.
For WHAT, again, shall I sing hymn? For things that Thou hast made, or things Thou hast not? For things Thou hast made manifest, or things Thou hast concealed?
How, further, shall I hymn Thee? As being of myself? As having something of mine own? As being other?
For that Thou art whatever I may be; Thou art whatever I may do; Thou art whatever 1 may speak.
For Thou art all, and there is nothing else which Thou art not.
Thou art all that which doth exist, and Thou art what doth not exist,-Mind when Thou thinkest, and Father when Thou makest, and God when Thou dost energize, and Good and Maker of all things.
