One road to the beautiful — piety with knowledge
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Hermes — εἰ δύνασαι νοῆσαι τὸν θεόν, νοήσεις τὸ καλὸν καὶ ἀγαθόν, τὸ ὑπέρλαμπρον, τὸ ὑπερλαμπόμενον ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ· ἐκεῖνο γὰρ τὸ κάλλος ἀσύγκριτον, καὶ ἐκεῖνο τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἀμίμητον, ὥσπερ καὶ αὐτὸς ὁ θεός. ὡς οὖν τὸν θεὸν νοεῖς, οὕτω καὶ τὸ καλὸν καὶ ἀγαθὸν νόει· ἀκοινώνητα γὰρ ταῦτα τοῖς ἄλλοις τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων ἐστί, διὰ τὸ ἀχώριστα εἶναι τοῦ θεοῦ. ἐὰν περὶ τοῦ θεοῦ ζητῇς, καὶ περὶ τοῦ καλοῦ ζητεῖς. μία γάρ ἐστιν εἰς αὐτὸ ἀποφέρουσα ὁδός, ἡ μετὰ γνώσεως εὐσέβεια·
If you can conceive God, you will conceive the beautiful and good: the super-radiant, out-shone by God. For that beauty is incomparable, and that good inimitable, as is God himself. As, then, you conceive God, so conceive also the beautiful and good; for these are incommunicable to the other living things, being inseparable from God. If you seek about God, you seek also about the beautiful; for there is one road leading to it: piety with knowledge.
If you can conceive God, you will conceive the beautiful and good: the super-radiant, out-shone by God. For that beauty is incomparable, and that good inimitable, as is God himself. As, then, you conceive God, so conceive also the beautiful and good; for these are incommunicable to the other living things, being inseparable from God. If you seek about God, you seek also about the beautiful; for there is one road leading to it: piety with knowledge.
Having argued at length where the Good is not, Hermes turns at last to how it may be reached. The beautiful-and-good is 'super-radiant (τὸ ὑπέρλαμπρον), out-shone by God (ὑπερλαμπόμενον ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ)' — beauty conceived as light lit from a brighter source. And it shares God's uniqueness: 'incomparable (ἀσύγκριτον)' and 'inimitable (ἀμίμητον),' beyond all likeness or copy, 'as is God himself.' The interlinear keeps these two alpha-privatives paired because they make beauty a mirror of the God of CH V — measured against nothing, imitable by nothing.
So the way to know the one is the way to know the other: 'as you conceive God, so conceive the beautiful and good,' for they are 'inseparable from God (ἀχώριστα… τοῦ θεοῦ)' and therefore 'incommunicable (ἀκοινώνητα)' to creatures — they cannot be handed out into the world. The section ends on the treatise's single constructive sentence, and it is the heart of Hermetic religion: 'there is one road leading to it — piety with knowledge (ἡ μετὰ γνώσεως εὐσέβεια).' Not knowledge alone, which the philosophers had, nor piety alone, which the crowd claimed, but the two fused: reverence that knows what it reveres. The whole austere argument that the Good is nowhere here has been clearing the ground for this one road — the marriage of gnosis and worship that will be the Corpus's recurring definition of the way home.
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Corpus Hermeticum CH6.5 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/hermetica/CH6.5/