Being and non-being — nothing comes from nothing, and what is cannot not-be
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Hermes — οὐδὲ γὰρ οὐδὲν ὑπέλιπε πλέον τὸ μὴ ὄν, πάντα δέ ἐστι τὰ ἐκ τῶν ὄντων γινόμενα οὐχὶ ἐκ τῶν μὴ ὄντων. τὰ γὰρ μὴ ὄντα οὐ φύσιν ἔχει τοῦ δύνασθαι γενέσθαι, ἀλλὰ τοῦ μὴ δύνασθαί τι γενέσθαι καὶ πάλιν τὰ ὄντα οὐ φύσιν ἔχει τοῦ μηδέποτ' εἶναι.
For non-being left nothing over besides; and all things are those that come to be from the beings, not from the non-beings. For the non-beings have not the nature of being able to come to be, but the nature of not being able to become anything; and, again, the beings have not the nature of never being.
Hermes completes the ontology. Non-being left nothing over — there is no residue of nothingness. All things that come to be are from beings, not from non-beings. For non-beings have not the nature of being able to come to be, but the nature of not being able to become anything; and, conversely, beings have not the nature of ever not-being. The full cosmos of the preceding sections is grounded in a strict law of being: what is, is from what is; nothing is from nothing; and being, once real, cannot lapse into non-being.
Having placed God beyond even the incorporeal Mind (II.12), Hermes closes with the law of being that the whole plenist argument required. It is stated as a pair of denials about 'nature' (φύσις): non-beings cannot come to be anything, and beings cannot ever not-be. Between these two impossibilities there is no room for a void, and no room for creation out of nothing — 'all things that come to be are from the beings, not from the non-beings (ἐκ τῶν ὄντων… οὐχὶ ἐκ τῶν μὴ ὄντων).'
The interlinear keeps τὸ ὄν and τὸ μὴ ὄν — being and non-being — starkly paired, because the doctrine is entirely built on that opposition, the same one II.10 used to abolish the void. Two things are worth seeing under the Greek. First, the phrase οὐδὲ… ὑπέλιπε πλέον τὸ μὴ ὄν, 'non-being left nothing over': nothingness is not even a remainder, a leftover gap — it simply is not. Second, the flat refusal of creatio ex nihilo, centuries before that phrase would become a Christian watchword: the Hermetic cosmos is eternal and full, its beings deriving only from beings, with God as the cause of their being (II.12) rather than a maker who calls them out of nothing. It is the metaphysical bedrock under all the physics of motion and place: a universe with no emptiness in it anywhere, because being and fullness are, finally, the same thing.
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Corpus Hermeticum CH2.13 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/hermetica/CH2.13/