The Key — God, Father, and the Good are one nature, one activity
Read the full text in our reader
Hermes — Τὸν χθὲς λόγον, ὦ ᾿Ασκληπιέ, σοι ἀνέθηκα, τὸν δὲ σήμερον δίκαιόν ἐστι τῷ Τὰτ ἀναθεῖναι, ἐπεὶ καὶ τῶν Γενικῶν λόγων τῶν πρὸς αὐτὸν λελαλημένων ἐστὶν ἐπιτομή. ὁ μὲν οὖν θεὸς καὶ πατὴρ καὶ τὸ ἀγαθόν, ὦ Τάτ, τὴν αὐτὴν ἔχει φύσιν, μᾶλλον δὲ καὶ ἐνέργειαν· ἡ μὲν γὰρ φύσεως καὶ αὐξήσεώς ἐστι προσηγορία, ἅπερ ἐστὶ περὶ τὰ μεταβλητὰ καὶ κινητὰ… καὶ ἀκίνητα, τουτέστι τὰ θεῖά τε καὶ ἀνθρώπεια ὧν αὐτὸς βούλεται εἶναι· ἀλλαχοῦ δὲ ἐνέργειαν καθὼς καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἐδιδάξαμεν θείων τε καὶ ἀνθρωπίνων· ἃ δεῖ νοεῖν ἐπὶ τούτου.
Yesterday's discourse, O Asclepius, I dedicated to you; but today's it is right to dedicate to Tat, since it is a summary of the General Discourses spoken to him. Now therefore God and Father and the Good, O Tat, have the same nature — or rather the same activity. For 'nature' and 'growth' is a name that concerns the changeable and movable things and the unmoved — that is, the divine and the human that he himself wills to be; but elsewhere it is 'activity,' just as in the case of the others, divine and human, we taught — which things one must understand of this one too.
CH X opens the treatise Hermes calls 'The Key' — the epitome of the General Discourses to Tat. Yesterday's discourse was dedicated to Asclepius; today's is rightly Tat's. God, Father, and the Good, Hermes says, have one and the same nature — or rather one and the same activity (ἐνέργεια). 'Nature' is the name of that activity as it works in changeable, movable, and unmoved things, the divine and the human that God wills to be; 'activity' is what we called it elsewhere. Both must be understood of God.
'The Key' announces itself as an ἐπιτομή, a summary, of the Γενικοὶ λόγοι, the 'General Discourses' Hermes had given Tat — a compression of a whole curriculum into one treatise, which is why the ancients titled it κλείς, the key that unlocks the rest. The opening move is a careful act of dedication: the previous day's lesson went to Asclepius (CH IX, the treatise now lost from our reading path), today's to Tat. This chain of dedications is the Hermetica's own fiction of transmission — teaching passed hand to hand, Hermes to sons and disciples.
The doctrine proper begins with an identity that the whole treatise will unfold: 'God and Father and the Good have the same nature — or rather the same activity (τὴν αὐτὴν… φύσιν, μᾶλλον δὲ καὶ ἐνέργειαν).' The correction ('or rather') is the point. φύσις, 'nature,' is a word tied to γένεσις and αὔξησις, coming-to-be and growth — it belongs to the realm of the 'changeable and movable (τὰ μεταβλητὰ καὶ κινητά)' things. ἐνέργεια, 'activity' or 'actuality' (Aristotle's word, ἐν-έργεια, being-at-work), is the truer name for what God is, because God does not grow or change. The reveal layer is precisely this substitution: where we would say God has a 'nature,' the Hermetist insists the deeper word is 'activity' — God is not a static essence but a pure being-at-work, and everything that follows in 'The Key' is an unfolding of what that work is.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Corpus Hermeticum CH10.1 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Corpus Hermeticum — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Corpus Hermeticum CH10.1 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/hermetica/CH10.1/