The Texts · Corpus Hermeticum VI

In God Alone Is the Good
(Corpus Hermeticum VI)

On this page: what it is · the sections · section map · translations compared · a world full of evil? · the Beautiful and the Good · where to read it

What Corpus Hermeticum VI is

It is the sixth of the seventeen Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, a monologue in which Hermes teaches Asclepius, who is addressed by name but never answers. John Everard, the first English translator, listed it in his contents as “That in God alone is good” (The Divine Pymander, 1650, p. 72). G.R.S. Mead made it “In God Alone is Good and Elsewhere Nowhere”, numbered VI, with his own count VII in brackets (Thrice-Greatest Hermes, II, 1906, p. 110). Walter Scott printed “That the Good is in God alone, and nowhere else” (Hermetica, I, 1924, p. 165). Mead noted that an editor took the heading from the first sentence (II, p. 115).

Mead placed it in the “Asclepius-group” of treatises (II, p. 115). Scott compared it with CH II, also addressed to Asclepius: the teaching on the Good is close but not the same, so a different author is likely, though he “may possibly have intended Corp. VI to be read as a sequel to it”. He also thought the author of CH X “probably had Corp. VI before him” and tried to correct its pessimism (Hermetica, II, 1925, pp. 169-170). See CH X, The Key.

Nothing in the text names its author or date. Scott found “no trace of anything distinctively Egyptian, Jewish, or Christian”, called the doctrine Platonic, and suggested the second or third century CE, because contempt for the world was more common then (II, p. 169). The only ancient reader in Scott’s apparatus is Didymus: the On the Trinity ascribed to him quotes §2 at 2.3 (Scott, I, pp. 166-167; II, p. 175); Scott dated Didymus to A.D. 380-398, so CH VI is older than that (II, p. 177). Stobaeus did not excerpt CH VI: his excerpts from the Corpus come from treatises II, IV and X only (Scott, I, p. 27 n. 1; see the Stobaean fragments).

The six sections, in plain words

The summaries follow Mead’s six sections; Scott splits §§1-4 into a and b, and Copenhaver’s [1] and [2] begin where Mead’s do. They paraphrase; the lists below quote.

§1 · What the Good is. The Good is free of change and coming to be, active yet at rest, lacking nothing, the source that supplies all things always. That fits God alone. God wants nothing, so desire cannot make him bad; he can lose nothing, so he cannot grieve; nothing is stronger, wiser or set against him, so he has no cause for anger or envy.

§2 · Nowhere in what comes to be. As there is no evil in God, there is no Good in anything else, small or great, not even in the cosmos, the greatest living being. Whatever comes to be is full of passions, and where passion is, the Good is not, as day and night exclude each other. The cosmos is good in one respect only: it makes things.

§3 · Good in name only. Among humans, “good” means “not too bad”. Only the name of the Good is found in people, never the thing, because a material body is hemmed in by pains, desires, anger, deceptions and foolish opinions. Worst of all, each of these is taken for the greatest good.

§4 · The cosmos and the Beautiful. Hermes thanks God for the insight that the Good cannot be in the cosmos, for the cosmos is the fullness of evil, God the fullness of good. He ventures that God’s essence, if he has one, is the Beautiful and the Good. What the eye sees are images and shadows; what it cannot see is real, above all the Beautiful and the Good, which are parts of God. The Greek has a gap here (Mead, II, p. 113 n. 4).

§5 · One road. To know God is to know the Beautiful and the Good, which are beyond compare and cannot be shared with anything else. One road leads there: piety joined with knowledge.

§6 · What people call good. Those who have not taken that road call a man “beautiful and good” though he has never seen the Good even in a dream, takes evil for good, and strives to keep and increase it. Yet these things we cannot escape or hate: we need them and cannot live without them.

Section map

Everard used 31 numbered verses of his own; Mead and Scott follow the six sections. Pages were checked in the scans.

Where the translations part company

Scott moves, brackets or rewrites more of the Greek than Mead does. Three places show how much the English depends on the editor; quotations are checked against the scans.

1. Is the Good free of motion, or the substance of it? (§1)

• Everard 1650: “voyd of all motion and generation; but nothing is voyd or empty of him” (v. 2, p. 72)
• Mead 1906: “from every kind of motion and becoming free (though naught is free from It)” (p. 110)
• Scott 1924: “devoid of all movement and all becoming”, with the aside left out (p. 165)
• Copenhaver 1992: “the substance of all motion and generation (for nothing is abandoned by it)” (p. 21, opening shown on Cambridge Core)

2. What God has no reason to love (§1). Scott moved a clause in the Greek so that the word for a partner, syzygos, goes with love, rendered it “consort”, and compared Valentinian teachings on divine couples (II, pp. 172-173).

• Everard 1650: “nothing equal to him, that he should be in love with it” (v. 6, p. 73)
• Scott 1924: “God has no consort, to excite in him the passion of love” (p. 167)
• Copenhaver 1992: “〈nothing is more beautiful,〉 to cause desire in him” (p. 21; the angle brackets mark his supplement)

3. The worst evil (§3). The manuscripts name gluttony; Scott struck the word out as the work of “some ascetic transcriber” (II, p. 177).

• Everard 1650: “that supream mischief … the pleasures of the Belly, and the ring-leader of all evils” (v. 18, p. 76)
• Mead 1906: “what is still an even greater ill, is belly-lust, the error that doth lead the band of all the other ills” (pp. 112-113)
• Scott 1924: “This error it is that leads the train of all the evils” (p. 169)

In the last sentence Mead has things “which we cannot flee or hate” (p. 114), Everard “which we can neither love nor hate” (v. 31, p. 78). Scott also brackets two phrases that make the Good identical with God, “nay, rather, Good is God Himself” in §1 and “or rather Good is God Himself” in §3 (Mead, pp. 110 and 112), as possibly added by a reader of CH II, since elsewhere the treatise calls the Good a part of God (II, p. 171).

A world full of evil?

The sentence that defines the treatise is in §4: in Mead’s English, the world is “‘fullness’ of the bad, but God of Good” (II, p. 113); Scott wrote “one mass of evil” (I, p. 169). The Greek word is plêrôma. Scott explained it from Philo: the cosmos is so filled with evil that no room is left for good to enter (II, p. 177).

Scott called the treatise “distinguished from most of the other Hermetica by its intensely pessimistic tone” and said that in condemning the cosmos the writer “goes beyond Plato”, siding rather with some Neo-Pythagoreans and Christian Gnostics; he pointed to Plotinus, who argued against those who call the cosmos evil (II, p. 169 and n. 2). The text itself concedes one point: the cosmos is good in so far as it makes things, which Scott read as “a reluctant concession” to the majority view among Hermetic writers (II, p. 175). He also noted that the writer never asks how a good God whose will nothing resists can rule a world full of evil: “With this difficulty the writer of Corp. VI makes no attempt to deal” (II, p. 174).

Mead read the passage differently. He thought the dualism might be only “formally so”, an exercise to lift the pupil’s thought, and set it against CH IX, another lesson to Asclepius, which says “Bad’s place is earth, and not the world, as some will sometimes say with impious tongue”. He saw in that clash “various schools within the Trismegistic tradition” which “wrangled theologically together”; and since a “pleroma of evil” occurs nowhere else, he took the phrase as a metaphor (II, pp. 115-116). The text itself does not settle it. For a darker treatise, see CH VII, The Greatest Evil.

The Beautiful and the Good

From §4 the treatise pairs the Good with the Beautiful. Scott traced both ideas to Plato, the Beautiful especially to the Symposium and the Phaedrus, and found in §4 words taken from those dialogues, among them the two that Mead renders “too pure, too unalloyed” (Scott, II, pp. 169 and 178-179; Mead, II, p. 113). The way to them is “piety joined with knowledge of God” (Scott, I, p. 171); Mead wrote “Devotion joined with Gnosis” (II, p. 114) and compared it with the Sanskrit paths of devotion and knowledge (II, p. 119), a theosophical gloss of 1906. For the term, see the site’s page on gnosis.

The phrase “beautiful and good” in §6 was a common Greek compliment. Scott noted that, said of a man, it “meant something like ‘a gentleman’” (I, p. 171 n. 3): the treatise denies the title to everyone. Even the pious, Scott observed, still need the things they know to be bad, by which he understood food, or the money needed to buy it (II, p. 180); and the writer says nothing about a life after death (II, p. 169).

Where to read Corpus Hermeticum VI free

The first five are free and legal; the last two are in copyright. Links checked 4 November 2026.

• Everard, 1650. The Divine Pymander, “The Sixth Book”, verses 1-31, pp. 72-79. Scan; modernised transcription.
• Chambers, 1882. The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus, chapter VI, pp. 42-45. Scan.
• Mead, 1906. Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II, pp. 110-114, commentary pp. 115-119. Scan; transcription.
• Scott, 1924-1925. Hermetica, vol. I, Libellus VI, Greek and English, pp. 164-171 (scan); vol. II, notes, pp. 169-180 (scan). Heavily emended.
• Parthey, 1854. Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander, cap. 6, Greek with a Latin version, pp. 48-53. Scan.
• Nock and Festugière, 1945. Corpus Hermeticum, vol. I (Paris: Les Belles Lettres), critical Greek text, French translation.
• Copenhaver, 1992. Hermetica (Cambridge University Press), CH VI at pp. 21-23. Cambridge Core.

Key facts

Position	Sixth of the 17 Greek treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, between V (God unmanifest and most manifest) and VII (The Greatest Evil)
Title	Mead 1906: In God Alone is Good and Elsewhere Nowhere; Scott 1924: That the Good is in God alone, and nowhere else; Parthey 1854 (Latin): quod in solo deo bonum sit, alibi autem nusquam
Speakers	Hermes teaching Asclepius; Asclepius does not speak
Length	6 sections (Mead 1906, vol. II, pp. 110-114); Everard 1650: verses 1-31, pp. 72-79
State of the text	Damaged in §4 (Mead, II, p. 113 n. 4); Scott transposes and brackets several phrases
Date	Unknown; Scott suggested the 2nd or 3rd century CE (1925, II, p. 169); quoted by Didymus, On the Trinity 2.3
Free English	Everard 1650, Chambers 1882, Mead 1906, Scott 1924, all scanned at the Internet Archive; Parthey 1854 gives the Greek with a Latin version
Checked	4 November 2026, against the scans listed under sources

Fair questions

What is Corpus Hermeticum VI about?

A short lesson from Hermes to Asclepius: the Good is what lacks nothing and suffers nothing, so it is found in God alone. Everything that comes into being is full of passions, so nothing in the world, and no human being, is good except in name. The only road to the Good and the Beautiful is piety joined with knowledge of God.

Does Corpus Hermeticum VI say the world is evil?

It calls the cosmos the plêrôma, the fullness, of evil, and grants it goodness only in so far as it makes things. Scott (1925) called the treatise unusually pessimistic among the Hermetica; Mead (1906) read the phrase as a metaphor and noted that CH IX rejects it.

Is God the same as the Good in this treatise?

Two phrases say so (in Mead’s English, “nay, rather, Good is God Himself”), but elsewhere the Good and the Beautiful are called parts of God. Scott (1925) bracketed the two phrases as possibly added by a reader of CH II; Mead (1906) and Everard (1650) translate them.

What does “beautiful and good” mean in CH VI?

In §6 it is the Greek compliment for a respected man, which Scott (1924) glossed as “something like ‘a gentleman’”. The treatise says nobody deserves it, because no one in a body is free of evil.

Where can I read Corpus Hermeticum VI for free?

Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (1906), pp. 110-114; Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650), Sixth Book, pp. 72-79; Chambers (1882), pp. 42-45; and Scott’s Hermetica, vol. I (1924), pp. 164-171, Greek and English; Parthey (1854), pp. 48-53, has the Greek with a Latin version. All are scanned at the Internet Archive. Copenhaver’s Hermetica (1992), pp. 21-23, is in copyright.

Sources & further reading

• John Everard (tr.), The Divine Pymander (London, 1650), contents and “The Sixth Book”, vv. 1-31, pp. 72-79; scans: EEB copy, Wellcome copy; page numbers as in the EEB copy.
• Gustav Parthey (ed.), Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander (Berlin, 1854), cap. 6, pp. 48-53; scan.
• John David Chambers (tr.), The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus (Edinburgh, 1882), ch. VI, pp. 42-45; scan.
• G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. II (London, 1906), pp. 110-114, commentary pp. 115-119; scan.
• Walter Scott (ed. and tr.), Hermetica, vol. I (Oxford, 1924), p. 27 n. 1 and pp. 164-171; vol. II (1925), notes pp. 169-180; scans: vol. I, vol. II.
• A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, Corpus Hermeticum, vol. I (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1945); BnF record.
• Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 21-23; Cambridge Core, opening read 4 November 2026.