Creator, creation and divine ideas

Use in the book

Scan 130 says that nothing in created nature fails to indicate God in some manner, even the bad angels whose vestiges have been defiled. It attributes to Democritus, Orpheus, and Pythagoras a recognition of divine power throughout the world, then criticizes the naming of its effects as gods. The alleged views are transmitted through the manuscript’s own synthesis. The entry describes their argumentative use rather than certifying every attribution to the named ancient authors.²²¹

Scans 131–133 distinguish created images and ministers. The world, angels, and natural spirits have different modes of likeness and service. God creates the ministers from nothing, and the angelic offices include giving existence, drawing ideas of forms from chaos, and impressing forms upon things. The natural mediator must not be confused with intellectual beings. Thus creation, differentiation, and material formation belong to an ordered account rather than an unqualified emanation of all things as divine substance.

At scan 190 the Incarnation becomes a manifestation accommodated to human understanding. Nature is a large volume in which religious mysteries and hidden natural wonders can be read through operations. The author’s claim is not that nature independently invents its own sacred meaning. Its maker has placed signs within it, and knowledge of its workings discloses those signs. This makes experimental inquiry a form of reading created works.

Scan 253 answers those who would condemn such inquiry. To know the worker by the work and the Creator by the created thing is presented as legitimate. Nature points out a royal road toward a mortal way of knowing, loving, honoring, and glorifying God. The phrase according to our mortal manner is significant: the knowledge is real within the author’s project but remains finite. It does not make the investigator equal to the object known.

Scans 306–307 bring together natural principles, faith, and the divine exemplar. The writer rejects an exclusive dependence on authors’ opinions and appeals to the relation of creatures to Creator, while acknowledging that mysteries are received by faith. Under Trismegistus’ name he says that God is the first idea of things and that the visible outer world is made according to the divine intelligible inner exemplar. The edition preserves the attribution without claiming a securely identified verbatim Hermetic source for the two sentences.²²²

The final declaration that one matter is plant, stone, metal, body, soul, element, heaven, and star is the culmination of the account of created unity. It does not cancel the distinctions of Creator and creature stated throughout. The manuscript ends with A Dieu, returning the completed exposition to its religious destination. The unity asserted within nature must therefore be read with the repeated limit that God does not enter an equal comparison with his work.

Places to read

1. Manuscript 51v · Scan 130Created vestiges indicate God, but effects must not be mistaken for their first cause.
2. Manuscript 53r · Scan 133Creation from nothing and the offices that bring forms into differentiated existence.
3. Manuscript 80v · Scan 190God’s mysteries manifested through the book of nature.
4. Manuscript 109r · Scan 253The legitimacy of knowing the worker through the work.
5. Manuscript 134v · Scan 306Natural principles and the relation of creatures to Creator in the defense of the method.
6. Manuscript 135r · Scan 307God as first idea and the intelligible exemplar of the visible world.
7. Manuscript 140 · Scan 316One created matter under many predicates, followed by the closing A Dieu.

Translation

Creature can mean any created thing, not only an animal. Where that range would otherwise be missed, created things makes the English sense clear. Idea and exemplar retain their philosophical force rather than becoming thought and example in every sentence.

The edition also preserves the writer’s attributions to ancient authorities as attributions. A reported sentence under Trismegistus’ name is not silently turned into a verified quotation from a particular Hermetic treatise. The distinction allows the manuscript’s reception of authorities to remain visible without making the apparatus promise a textual identification it has not established.

créateur

Attested: H001-S130; H001-S253; H001-S306. The first cause known through, but not identified with, created effects.

créatures

Attested: H001-S306. Created things in their relation to the Creator.

idée

Attested: H001-S307. The first idea of things in the statement attributed to Trismegistus.

exemplaire divin

Attested: H001-S307. The intelligible inner model according to which the visible world is made.