PART III.

THE THEOSOPHY OF SIMON.

In treating of eschatology and the beginning of things the human mind is ever beset with the same difficulties, and no matter how grand may be the effort of the intellect to transcend itself, the finite must ever fail to comprehend the infinite.  How much less then can words define that which even the whole phenomenal universe fails to express!  The change from the One to the Many is not to be described.  How the All-Deity becomes the primal Trinity, is the eternal problem set for man’s solution.  No system of religion or philosophy has ever explained this inexplicable mystery, for it cannot be understood by the embodied Soul, whose vision and comprehension are dulled by the grossness of its physical envelope.  Even the illuminated Soul that quits its prison house, to bathe in the light of infinitude, can only recollect flashes of the Vision Glorious once it returns again to earth.

And this is also the teaching of Simon when he says: 

I say there are many gods, but one God of all these gods, incomprehensible and unknown to all, ... a Power of immeasurable and ineffable Light, whose greatness is held to be incomprehensible, a Tower which the maker of the world does not know.

This is a fundamental dogma of the Gnosis in all climes and in all ages.  The demiurgic deity is not the All-Deity, for there is an infinite succession of universes, each having its particular deity, its Brahma, to use the Hindu term, but this Brahma is not THAT which is Para-Brahman, that which is beyond Brahma.

This view of the Simonian Gnosis has been magnificently anticipated in the Rig Veda (x. 129) which reads in the fine translation of Colebrooke as follows: 

    That, whence all this great creation came,
    Whether Its will created or was mute,
    The Most High Seer that is in highest Heaven,
    He knows it—­or perchance even He knows not.

In treating of emanation, evolution, creation or whatever other term may be given to the process of manifestation, therefore, the teachers deal only with one particular universe; the Unmanifested Root, and Universal Cause of all Universes lying behind, in potentiality ([Greek:  dynamis]), in Incomprehensible Silence ([Greek:  sigae akatalaeptos]).  For on the “Tongue of the Ineffable” are many “Words” ([Greek:  logoi]), each Universe having its own Logos.

Thus then Simon speaks of the Logos of this Universe and calls it Fire ([Greek:  pyr]).  This is the Universal Principle or Beginning ([Greek:  ton holon archae]), or Universal Rootage ([Greek:  rizoma ton holon]).  But this Fire is not the fire of earth; it is Divine Light and Life and Mind, the Perfect Intellectual ([Greek:  to teleion noeron]).  It is the One Power, “generating itself, increasing itself, seeking itself, finding itself, its own mother, its own father, its sister, its spouse:  the daughter, son, mother, and father of itself; One, the Universal Root.”  It is That, “which has neither beginning nor end, existing in oneness.”  “Producing itself by itself, it manifested to itself its own Thought ([Greek:  epinoia]).”