Adversus Valentinianos

The Valentinians, plainly the most crowded guild among the heretics—because the greater part of them are apostates from the truth, and because they are easily inclined to fables and are not deterred by discipline—care for nothing more than to conceal what they preach; if indeed they can be said to preach who conceal. The duty of guarding it is a duty of a guilty conscience. Confusion is preached, while religion is asserted. For those Eleusinian mysteries too, themselves a heresy of Attic superstition, are a matter of shame in their silence. For this reason they first torment the candidate at the entrance, they initiate at length before they admit him to the seal, they keep their adepts on probation for five years, that they may build up their reputation by suspending knowledge, and so may seem to display as great a majesty as they have built up desire beforehand. Then follows the duty of silence. What is found late is anxiously guarded. But the whole divinity in their inner shrines, all the sighing of the adepts, the whole seal of the tongue, is—the likeness of a male member, revealed. But an allegorical arrangement, holding forth the venerable name of nature, obscures the sacrilege under the patronage of a forced figure, and excuses the slander of falsehood by images. Accordingly, those whom we now mark out as heretics, fashioning the most empty and shameful figments under holy names and titles and arguments of the true religion—out of the easy esteem given them by the occasion of the divine abundance (since from many things many may follow)—have made of the Eleusinia Valentinian seductions, holy by great silence, heavenly only by their taciturnity. If you inquire in good faith, with set countenance and lifted brow, "It is deep," they say. If you make a subtle attempt, by double-tongued ambiguities they affirm the common faith. If you give a hint that you know, they deny whatever they acknowledge. If you contend at close quarters, they scatter your simplicity by their own slaughter of words. Not even to their own disciples do they commit anything before they have made them their own. They have a craft by which they first persuade before they teach. But truth persuades by teaching, it does not teach by persuading.

And therefore we are branded among them as simple, as being only that and not also wise—as though wisdom were forced at once to fail from simplicity, when the Lord joins the two together: "Be wise as serpents, and simple as doves." Or, if we are unwise because we are simple, are they then not simple because they are wise? But the most harmful are those who are not simple, just as the most foolish are those who are not wise. And yet I would rather have my party taken with the better fault, if it is by chance preferable to be less wise than to be worse, to err than to deceive. Moreover, the face of God is awaited in simplicity of seeking, as that very Wisdom teaches—not, indeed, the wisdom of Valentinus, but of Solomon. Then, infants offered the testimony of Christ by their blood. Were they boys, who cried "Crucify"? They were neither boys nor infants, that is, they were not simple. The apostle too bids us grow children again according to God, so that we may be infants in malice through simplicity, and only so be wise in our perceptions; placing me at the same time in the order of wisdom that flows from simplicity. In sum, the dove has been wont to point out Christ, but the serpent to tempt him. The one, even from the beginning, is the herald of the divine peace; the other, from the beginning, the plunderer of the divine image. So simplicity alone will more easily be able both to know God and to display him, while wisdom alone will rather shake and betray him.

Let the serpent therefore hide himself as much as he can, and twist all his wisdom in the windings of his hiding-places; let him dwell deep, let him be thrust down into the dark, let him unroll his coil through tortuous turns, let him proceed crookedly, never wholly at once, a creature that flees the light. Our dove's house is simple too, ever on heights and open and toward the light. The figure of the Holy Spirit loves the East, the figure of Christ. Truth blushes at nothing, save only at being hidden; because no one will be ashamed to lend his ears to that God whom nature has already committed to him, whom he daily perceives in all his works—less known in this alone, that he did not suppose him to be the only one, that he named him in a plurality, that he adored him in others. Otherwise, to persuade men of yet another throng from out of their crowd, to remove them from the homely sovereignty to an unknown one, to twist them back from the manifest to the hidden, is to give offence to faith on the very threshold. Now, if one were also to be initiated into the whole fable, is not something such offered as you heard from your nurse in infancy, amid the difficulties of sleep, the towers of the Lamia and the combs of the Sun? But one who has come to the faith from another awareness, if he should at once find so many names of Aeons, so many marriages, so many offspring, so many issues, so many events, the felicities and infelicities of a scattered and divided divinity—will he hesitate to pronounce on the spot that these are the fables and endless genealogies which the apostolic Spirit, when these heretical seeds were already then sprouting, hastened to condemn? Rightly, then, are they not simple; rightly are they only wise—who neither easily produce such things nor openly defend them, and who do not even fully teach all whom they teach. Cunningly, of course, as being shameful—but unkindly, if they were honourable. And yet we who are simple know all things. In short, we have armed this first wedge of our encounter, the detector and designator of their whole secret; and we augur this first victory, because what is hidden at such great cost—even merely to point it out is to destroy it.

We know, I say, very well their origin too, and we know why we call them Valentinians, although they may seem not to be such. For they have departed from their founder, yet the origin is by no means deleted; and if by chance it is changed, the very change is a testimony to it. Valentinus had hoped for the bishopric, because he was powerful both in talent and in eloquence. But, indignant that another had obtained the place by the prerogative of martyrdom, he broke with the Church of the authentic rule. As minds excited for a primacy are wont to be kindled by the presumption of revenge, he turned to assail the truth, and, having lighted upon the track of a certain old opinion, marked out a path with serpentine cunning. Afterwards Ptolemy entered it, distinguishing the names and numbers of the Aeons into personal substances, but determined outside of God—those which Valentinus had enclosed within the very summit of the divinity, as senses and emotions of movement. Heracleon too drew certain by-paths from it, and Secundus, and the magician Marcus. Theotimus laboured much about the images of the law. Thus there is nowhere now a Valentinus, and yet there are Valentinians, those who are through Valentinus. To this day at Antioch, Axionicus alone consoles the memory of Valentinus by the whole-hearted keeping of his rules. For the rest, it has been permitted to give as much suasion to this heresy as it is customary for a she-wolf to put on a different shape every day. Why not? since they so reckon up that spiritual seed of theirs in each individual. If they have added anything new, they at once call presumption a revelation, and their own talent a charisma, and call it not unity but diversity. And therefore we foresee that, that solemn dissimulation of theirs being set aside, most of them are divided, ready even in good faith to say of certain articles, "This is not so," and, "This I take otherwise," and, "This I do not acknowledge." For by variety the face of the rules is made new. It has also the colours of ignorances.

But for me my boundary-line shall be with the archetypal, principal masters, not with the affected leaders of scattered disciples. Nor shall we be said in any quarter to have ourselves invented the materials which so many men already, distinguished by holiness and excellence—not only our own predecessors, but the contemporaries of the very heresiarchs—have both published and beaten back in most well-furnished volumes: Justin, philosopher and martyr; Miltiades, the sophist of the churches; Irenaeus, the most curious explorer of all doctrines; and our own Proculus, the dignity of virgin old age and of Christian eloquence—whom I would wish to match in every work of faith, as in this. Or, if the heresies are not at all, so that those who drive them away are believed to have invented them, then the apostle will be a liar, who is their herald. But if they are, they will be no other than those which are reviewed. No one is reputed so idle with his pen as to invent when he has matter.

Therefore, in this little book, in which we promise only the demonstration of that secret, lest a fog overspread anyone from names so foreign and forced and compounded and ambiguous, I will first explain how we are going to use them. For the interpretation of some from the Greek does not yield a correspondingly ready form of the name; with some, even the genders do not agree as to sex; with some, the more usual notice is in the Greek. So for the most part we shall set down the Greek; their meanings will be present in the margins of the pages; nor even to the Latin shall the Greek be wanting, but it will be noted above in the lines, that this may be a sign of the personal names, on account of the ambiguities of those which share another signification. But although I have deferred the engagement, professing for the present only the narration, yet wherever the indignity has deserved to be jeered at, the assault shall be wholly by a passing taste of it. Count it, reader, the sport before the fight of the engagement. I will show, but not press home, the wounds. If somewhere there shall even be laughter, the materials themselves will get their due. Many things are thus worthy to be refuted, lest they be honoured by gravity. To vanity, festivity properly yields. It befits truth too to laugh, because she is glad; to make sport of her rivals, because she is secure. We must take care, plainly, lest her laughter be laughed at, if it be unworthy; but wherever the laughter is worthy, it is a duty. In short, in this manner I will begin.

First of all, Ennius, the Roman poet, spoke simply of "the great dining-halls of heaven," by the name of an elevated situation, or because he had read in Homer of Jupiter banqueting there. But it is marvellous what great supernities of supernities, what great sublimities of sublimities, the heretics have hung up, raised aloft, and spread out for the dwelling of their several gods. To our own Creator too the Ennian dining-halls have been disposed in the form of little chapels, with one upper room after another built on top, and distributed to each god by as many stairs as there have been heresies. The world has been made a tenement-house. You would believe the floors of the heavens to be the Felicula block of flats, with so many stories—I know not where. There too the god of the Valentinians dwells, up under the topmost tiles. Him they call, substantially indeed, Aeon Teleios (the Perfect Aeon), but personally Proarche (Beginning-before-the-beginning) and He Arche (the Beginning), and also Bythos (Depth)—a name least fitting for one who dwells in the heights. They define him as unborn, immense, infinite, invisible, and eternal, as though they straightway proved that he exists, if they define him such as we know he ought to be, so that thus he may be said to have existed even before all things. But I demand that he should exist; nor do I mark anything more in matters of this kind than this: that after all things are found those who are said to have existed before all things—and indeed not their own things. Let this Bythos, then, be in greatest and deepest quiet through infinite past ages, in the abundant ease of a placid and, so to say, stupefied divinity, such as Epicurus enjoined. And yet, though they will have him to be the only one, they give him a second person within himself and with himself, Ennoea (Thought), whom they name besides both Charis (Grace) and Sige (Silence). And by chance they come, in that most commended quiet, to admonish him at last to bring forth a beginning of things from himself. This he places, in the manner of seed, in the genital, as it were, womb-parts of his Sige. She at once conceives, and is made pregnant, and brings forth—in silence, of course, being Sige—and what she brings forth is Nus (Mind), most like the Father and in all things equal. In short, he alone is sufficient to comprehend that immense and incomprehensible greatness of the Father. So he too is called both Father and the Beginning of all things, and properly Monogenes (Only-begotten). But not properly, since he is not the only one born. For with him there came forth also a female, whose name is Aletheia (Truth). Monogenes, "Only-begotten," because the first begotten—how much more fittingly would he be called Protogenes, "First-begotten"? Therefore Bythos and Sige, Nus and Aletheia are upheld as the first team of the Valentinian faction, the matrix and origin of all. For there too Nus, who together received the office of his own emission, sends forth, himself too out of himself, Sermo (Word, Logos) and Vita (Life); which Life, if it was not there before, was surely not in Bythos either. And what kind of thing is it that there should not have been life in God? But this offspring too, sent forth for the beginning of the universe and the formation of the whole Pleroma, bears fruit: it procreates Anthropos (Man) and Ecclesia (Church). You have an Ogdoad, a double Tetrad, out of the conjugations of males and females—the cells, so to say, of the primordial Aeons, the fraternal marriages of the Valentinian gods, the whole census of heretical holiness and majesty, a crowd I know not whether of crimes or of deities, certainly the fountain of the rest of the fecundity.

For behold the second Tetrad: Sermo and Vita, Anthropos and Ecclesia—which had sprouted to the glory of the Father; and these too, exulting in this number, and themselves wishing to offer something of the kind to the Father out of their own, bubble up other broods, likewise conjugal, through the coupling of either nature. On this side Sermo and Vita pour forth together a decade of Aeons; on that side Anthropos and Ecclesia bring forth two more, so as to match their parents, since they too, being two, make with the others ten as many as they themselves procreated. I now render the names of those whom I called the decade: Bythios and Mixis, Ageratos and Henosis, Autophyes and Hedone, Akinetos and Synkrasis, Monogenes and Macaria. On the other side, the twelve will be these: Paracletus and Pistis, Patricos and Elpis, Metricos and Agape, Ainos and Synesis, Ecclesiasticus and Macariotes, Theletus and Sophia. I am compelled here to bring forth what these names require, by a parallel example. In the schools of Carthage there was a certain most frigid Latin rhetor, by name Phosphorus. When he was declaiming on a brave man, "I come," he said, "to you, O best of citizens, from the battle with my victory and your felicity, enlarged, glorious, fortunate, greatest, triumphal." And the scholars of Phosphorus's household at once acclaimed, "Pheu!" Have you heard of Fortunata and Hedone and Akinetos and Theletus? Acclaim to the household of Ptolemy, "Pheu!" This will be that secret Pleroma, the fulness of a thirtyfold divinity. Let us see what are the privileges of these numbers—of the four, and the eight, and the twelve. Meanwhile, at the thirty, all fecundity fails; the genital force and power and lust of the Aeons is castrated. As though there did not still remain such great coagulations of numbers, and no other names from the training-school! For why are not fifty and a hundred too procreated? why are not "companions" and "foster-brothers" named?

But this too is a singling-out of persons, that that Nus alone of all enjoys the knowledge of the immense Father, rejoicing and exulting, while the rest of course grieve. Plainly Nus, as far as in him lay, had both wished and tried to communicate to the others too what he knew—how great and how incomprehensible the Father is; but Mother Sige intervened, she, namely, who prescribes silence even to these very heretics of hers; although they say it was done by the nod of the Father, who willed that all should be kindled into a desire of himself. And so, while they are pining away within themselves, while they are burning with a silent longing to know the Father, a crime was almost committed. For out of those twelve Aeons whom Anthropos and Ecclesia had produced, the youngest by birth—let the solecism look to itself, for Sophia is the name—through incontinence of herself, without the fellowship of her consort Theletus, bursts forth to inquire into the Father, and contracts a kind of vice which had indeed begun in those others about Nus, but had flowed down into this one, that is, into Sophia—as vices in the body, born elsewhere, are wont to breathe out their destruction into another member. But under the pretext of love for the Father, rivalry of Nus was getting the upper hand—Nus, who alone rejoiced in the Father. But as Sophia, striving after impossibilities, was frustrated, she is both overcome by the difficulty and stretched out by her affection; and she came within a little, through the violence of the sweetness and the labour, of being devoured and dissolved into the remaining substance; nor would she otherwise have ceased than by perishing, had she not by good fortune run upon Horos. He too has a certain force. He is the foundation of that universe, and its guardian from without, whom they call also Cross (Crux), and Redeemer (Lytrotes), and Reaper (Carpistes). So Sophia, snatched from peril and tardily persuaded, having turned aside from the investigation of the Father, grew quiet, and laid aside her whole animation, Enthymesis (Conception), together with the passion which had moreover befallen her.

But some have dreamed otherwise of the issue and restitution of Sophia. After her vain efforts and the casting-down of her hope, they say, she was disfigured by pallor, I suppose, and leanness and neglect of form, as one who grieved over a Father no less denied than lost. Thereupon, in that mourning, out of herself alone, by no work of marriage, she conceives and procreates a female. Do you wonder at this? The hen too has obtained to bring forth of her own; and they say that vultures bear only females. And yet a mother without a male; and she feared, at last, lest the end too should press upon her, and she hung in doubt about the rationale of the mischance, and was anxious about its concealment. Remedies nowhere. For where now were the tragedies and comedies from which she might borrow a form for setting forth what had been born without shame? While the matter is in evils, she looks up, she turns to the Father. But having striven in vain, as her strength deserted her, she sinks down into prayers. The whole kindred too supplicates for her, and most of all Nus. Why not? being the cause of so great an evil. Yet no issue of Sophia is empty. All her tribulations are at work. For indeed that conflict of hers then came to be the origin of Matter. Ignorance, dread, mourning become substance. There at last the Father, at some time moved, brings forth that Horos whom we mentioned above, through the only-begotten Nus, in this case in his own image, a female-male, since concerning the Father's sex they thus vary. But they add that Horos is called also Metagogeus, that is, the leader-about, and Horothetes (Boundary-setter). By his work, they preach, Sophia was both held back from things unlawful and purged from evils, and thereafter confirmed and restored to her consort; and she herself indeed remained in the census of the Pleroma, but her Enthymesis, and that appendage Passion, were relegated by Horos, and crucified, and made outside of him ("the Evil, as they say, out of doors!")—yet a spiritual substance, as being a certain natural impulse of an Aeon, but formless and shapeless, inasmuch as it had apprehended nothing, and therefore pronounced a weak and a female fruit.

Therefore, after the banished Enthymesis and her mother Sophia had been brought back to her consort, that Monogenes again, that Nus—at leisure now, plainly, from the care and prospect of the Father—for the solidifying of things and the fortifying of the Pleroma, and now the fixing of it, lest any such shaking should again strike it, brings forth a new coupling, Christ and the Holy Spirit. Most shameful, I should think, of two males. Or the Holy Spirit will be female, and a male is wounded by a female. One godhead is granted to these: to procure the harmonizing of the Aeons. And from the fellowship of that office, at once two schools, two chairs, a kind of inauguration of dividing the doctrine of Valentinus. It was Christ's office to bring into the Aeons the nature of conjugal unions (you see plainly what kind of matter), and a conjecture of the unborn, and to make them fit for generating in themselves the knowledge of the Father: namely, that he cannot be grasped nor comprehended, nor can one possess himself of him by sight or hearing, except through the Only-begotten. And yet I will tolerate their thus discoursing that he knows the Father, lest they fasten that on us too. I will rather mark the perversity of the doctrine, that they were taught that the incomprehensible part of the Father is the cause of their perpetuity, but the comprehensible part of him the rationale of their generation and formation. For by this arrangement that, I suppose, is insinuated: that it is expedient for God not to be apprehended, since his inapprehensibility is the cause of perpetuity, but his apprehensibility the cause not of perpetuity but of birth and formation, of those that lack perpetuity. But they constitute the Son as the apprehensible part of the Father. How, however, he may be apprehended, Christ, then brought forth, taught. But it was the Holy Spirit's proper office that all, made equal in the study of doctrine, should know how to follow up the giving of thanks, and might be brought into a true repose.

And so all are made equal in form and knowledge, all made what each one is; no one another, because all are the same to one another. They are all refounded into Nuses, into Anthropoi, into Theleti—the females equally into Siges, into Zoes, into Ecclesias, into Fortunatas—so that Ovid would have deleted his own Metamorphoses, had he known a greater one today. Thereupon they were refreshed, and established, and composed into rest out of truth, and with great fruit of joy they sing hymns in concert to the Father. He too was diffused with gladness, of course, at his sons and grandsons singing so well. Why should he not be diffused with all jocundity, the Pleroma being set free? What skipper does not rejoice even amid disgrace? We see daily the wantonness of sailors' joys. And so, as sailors always exult at a club-feast, something of the kind the Aeons too: being now all one, even in form, much more in opinion; and, the new brothers and masters Christ and the Holy Spirit coming together themselves too, each one contributes into the common store whatever was best and most beautiful in his bloom. Vainly, I think. For if they were all one, by reason of the aforesaid equalizing, the rationale of a club-contribution was idle, which generally consists of the grace of variety. They were all wearing away one good, because they were all that good. Concerning the manner, perhaps, there might have been a rationale, or concerning the form of the equalizing itself. Therefore, out of the collected bronze, as they say, in honour and glory of the Father, they put together the most beautiful star of the Pleroma and the perfect fruit, Jesus. Him they surname Soter (Saviour), and Christ, and Sermo "of his fathers," and "All-things" now, as being constructed out of the deflowering of all—the Jackdaw of Aesop, the Pandora of Hesiod, the Dish of Accius, the Hotchpotch of Nestor, the Miscellany of Ptolemy. How much nearer it had been—taking a hint from certain Attic notions—to call him "Pancarpia" (All-fruits), by authors of names so idle! But, that they might also adorn so great a puppet on the outside, they bring forth as his satellites the angels, a kindred race—if among themselves, it can be so; but if consubstantial with Soter (for I have found it ambiguously set down), what will be his eminence among satellites his equals?

This order, then, contains the first procession alike of the Aeons being born and wedded and generating: Sophia's most perilous fall from desire of the Father; the most timely help of Horos; the expiation of Enthymesis and her conjoined Passion; the tutorship of Christ and the Holy Spirit; the reformed guardianship of the Aeons; the peacock-decking of Soter; the borrowed retinue of the Angels. "What remains," you say, "is, Farewell and applaud!" Nay, what remains, I say, is, Hear and profit. For the rest, these things are said to have run their course within the assembly of the Pleroma—the first scene of the tragedy. But there is another high-strutting beyond the curtain—I mean outside the Pleroma. And yet, if it was such within the bosom of the Father, within the circuit of Horos the guardian, what was it when it was now outside, in the open, where God was not? For Enthymesis—or now Achamoth, which name from here on is written by this alone as untranslatable—when, with the vice of the inseparable Passion, she was expelled into the regions foreign to light (which is a thing of the Pleroma), into that void and empty of Epicurus, she is pitiable even by reason of place. Certainly neither form nor face of any kind: an untimely, that is, and an abortive birth. While things so stand, Christ is moved from the higher regions, and is brought down through Horos, to inform that abortion out of his own powers—a form of substance only, not also of knowledge. And yet she is left with some little property. The odour of incorruptibility is repeated, by which, conscious of her own fall, she might be overcome with desire of better things. Having performed this work of mercy, not without the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, Christ runs back into the Pleroma. It has been the practice for the names of things to accrue also from acts of liberality. Enthymesis was from her act; Achamoth—whence she is, is still inquired; Sophia flows from the Father; the Holy Spirit from the angel. She receives a desire for Christ, by whom she had at once felt herself forsaken. And so she too leaped forth to seek out his light; whom, if she had not known him at all, as having worked invisibly, how did she seek out his unknown light along with him? And yet she tried, and perhaps would have apprehended it, had not that same Horos, who had come so prosperously to her mother, now so inopportunely met the daughter—so that he even cried out at her, "Iao!"—as it were, "Help, Quirites!" or, "By Caesar's faith!" Hence "Iao" is found in the Scriptures. So, driven back from going further, and having no power to fly over the Cross, that is, Horos—because she had had no practice of any Laureolus of Catullus—being left to that Passion of hers in a manifold and entangled snarl, she began to be afflicted with every kind of it: to mourn, because she had not accomplished her undertaking; with fear, lest, as of light, so also of life she should be deprived; with consternation; then with ignorance. Nor as her mother. For that one was an Aeon; but this one, according to her condition, worse—a yet further wave rising up, that of conversion, namely, toward Christ, by whom she had been quickened and tempered toward this very conversion.

Come now, let the Pythagoreans learn, let the Stoics acknowledge, let Plato himself learn, whence Matter—which they will have to be unborn—drew both its origin and substance for all this fabric of the world; which not even that Mercury Trismegistus, the master of all natural philosophers, reflected upon. You have heard of conversion, another kind of passion. Out of this every soul of this world is said to have been constituted, even that of the Demiurge himself, that is, of our God. You have heard of mourning and fear. Out of these the rest were begun. For out of her tears all the nature of waters flowed. From this it may be estimated what kind of issue she suffered, with how many kinds of tears she flooded. She had salt tears, she had bitter and sweet, and hot and cold drops, and bituminous and ferruginous and sulphurous—of course also poisonous; so that from them sweated that Nonacris which killed Alexander, and from them flowed that Lyncestian water which makes men drunk, and from them dissolved itself that Salmacis which makes males soft. Achamoth piped forth the celestial showers, and we take care to keep in our cisterns even another's griefs and tears. Likewise from consternation and dread the corporeal elements were derived. And yet, amid so great a circumstance of solitude, in so great a prospect of destitution, she would sometimes laugh, when she recalled the sight of Christ; from that laughter of joy the light shone forth. By whose providence is this benefit, what was it that compelled her to laugh—was it that we should not always tarry in darkness! And be not amazed that by her gladness so splendid an element radiated the world, when by her sadness too so necessary an instrument flowed down upon the age. O illuminating laughter! O watering weeping! And yet she could already have proceeded by way of remedy with the horror of that place—for she would have shaken off all its obscurity as often as she had wished to laugh—or that she might not be compelled to supplicate her own deserters.

For she too turns to prayers, after a mother's manner. But Christ, who was now irked to set forth outside the Pleroma, appoints a substitute, Paracletus. To her he sends Soter—this will be Jesus, the Father of all the Aeons having bestowed on him the supreme power, that all should be subjected to him, so that "in him," according to the apostle, "all things might be created"—with an office and an escort of his coeval Angels; you would believe it was even with twelve fasces. There at last, smitten by his pompous coming, Achamoth at once drew a veil over herself, out of the first duty of veneration and modesty; thereupon she contemplates him and his fruit-bearing retinue. With what strength she had thence conceived, she runs to meet him: "Hail, Lord!" Here, I think, he confirms and conforms her, taken up, by knowledge now, and files her smooth from all the injuries of passion—those things not being separated to destruction with the same neglect that had befallen in the mischances of her mother. But indeed, the inveterate vices, vicious by use, he merged together; and so, solidified into a mass, he fixed them apart into the corporeal preparation of Matter, changing out of the incorporeal passion the implanted aptitude and nature, by which it might presently be able to arrive at the rival counterparts of corpulences, so that a twofold condition of substances might be ordered: out of the vices, the worst; out of the conversion, the passible. This will be the Matter that has joined us in conflict with Hermogenes and the rest who presume that God wrought all things out of matter, not out of nothing.

From this point Achamoth, freed at last from all evils, behold, now goes on and grows fruitful unto greater works. For, warmed by the joy of so great a success out of infelicity, and at the same time leavened, so to say, by the very contemplation of the angelic lights (I am ashamed, but there is no other way to express it), she somehow took heat meanwhile and herself toward them, and at once swelled with a spiritual conception, after the very image which the force of the rejoicing one, and the itching attention of the gladness, had imbibed and intimately conceived. In short, she gave birth, and thence was made a trinity of kinds out of a trinity of causes: one material, which is from the passion; another animal, which is from the conversion; the third spiritual, which is from the imagination.

By this authority—being now made more practised, namely, in managing matters, of three children—she resolved to form the several kinds. But the spiritual indeed she could not so reach, since she herself too was spiritual. For the fellowship of nature denied that equals and consubstantials should avail one against another. With this mind she turned herself alone to the animal, the disciplines of Soter being brought forth. And first—a thing which is to be both pronounced and read and heard with great horror of blasphemy—she fashions this God of ours and of all, save of the heretics; the Father, and the Demiurge, and the King of all that is after him. From him, that is—if indeed from him, and not rather from Achamoth herself, by whom secretly, he being conscious of nothing of her, and as a puppet drawn from without, he was moved into every operation. In short, out of this ambiguity of persons in the works, they have mingled for him the name of Metropator (Mother-Father), with the other appellations distinguished according to the states and situations of the works: so that of the animal substances indeed, which they commend to the right hand, they call him Father; but of the material, which they consign to the left hand, they name him Demiurge; and King, in common, over the whole.

But neither does the propriety of the names suit the propriety of the works, from which all the names come, since she ought to be called by all these by whom the things were done—except that now it is not by her either. For when they say that Achamoth devised the images in honour of the Aeons, again they twist this back upon Soter as the author, who is said to have wrought through her: so that she indeed should give the image of the Father, invisible and unknown—unknown, that is, and invisible to the Demiurge—but should fashion that same Demiurge as the son of Nus, while the Archangels, the work of the Demiurge, should express the rest of the Aeons. When I hear of so great images of three, I ask—do you not now wish me to laugh at the images of that most perverse painter of theirs? A female, Achamoth, the image of the Father? and the Demiurge, ignorant of his mother, much more of the Father, the image of Nus, who knows the Father? and the Angels, the servants, the likenesses of their lords? This is to paint a mule from an ass, and to delineate Ptolemy from Valentinus.

The Demiurge, then, set outside the limits of the Pleroma, in the ignominious waste of an eternal exile, founded a new province, this world, the confusion of that double substance, disclosed, being cleansed and its diversity distinguished, of the animal and the material. Out of incorporeals he builds bodies—heavy, light, ascending and sinking, heavenly and earthly. Then he bounds the very sevenfold scene of the heavens with his own throne above it. Whence too he is called Sabbatum, from the hebdomad of his seat; and the mother, Achamoth, is called Ogdoad, from the argument of the primordial Ogdoad. But the heavens they reckon to be intellectual, and sometimes they make them angels, as also the Demiurge himself, as also Paradise the fourth Archangel—since they fix this too above the third heaven, from whose power Adam took, sojourning there among little clouds and little shrubs. Ptolemy well remembered the puerile sayings, that apples are born in the sea and fishes in a tree; so in the heavenly regions too he presumed nut-groves. The Demiurge works in ignorance, and therefore perhaps he does not know that trees ought to be set only in the earth. Plainly the mother knew. Why did she not suggest it, who also ministered his very effect? But why, while building so great a height for her son through those works which testify him both Father and God and King before the inventions of the Valentinians, she would not have these things known to herself too, I will ask afterwards.

Meanwhile it must be held that Sophia is surnamed both Earth and Mother—Mother Earth, as it were—and, what you may laugh at the more, even the Holy Spirit. Thus they have conferred upon that female every honour, even a beard, I think, not to say the rest. Otherwise the Demiurge was so far not master of things—namely, that spiritual things should accrue to the census of the animal by reason of his weakness—that, thinking himself alone, he made proclamation: "I am God, and beside me there is none." Certainly, however, he knew that he had not been before. Therefore he understood both that he was made, and that the maker of the made was someone. How then did he seem to himself alone, if not certain, at least suspicious, of some maker?

More tolerable among them is the infamy that falls upon the devil—perhaps because a baser origin befits him. For he is reckoned out of the wickedness of that mourning, out of which they note the births of angels and demons and all spiritual malices. And yet they affirm that the devil too is a work of the Demiurge, and call him "Lord of the world" (Munditenens), and defend him as more knowing of the higher things than the Demiurge—as spiritual by nature, whereas the Demiurge is animal. He deserves from them a preferment, he for whom all heresies are procured.

But the citadels of the singular powers they locate within these bounds. In the highest summits presides the thirtyfold Pleroma, Horos marking the extreme line. Below him Achamoth measures out for herself the middle region, trampling on her son. For beneath is the Demiurge in his Hebdomad; lower still the devil, in this world common with us, co-elemented and embodied together, as was set forth above, out of the most useful mischances of Sophia—so that it would not have even air, the space for the reciprocation of the breath, the tender garment of all bodies, the index of all colours, the instrument of the seasons, had not Sophia's sadness strained this too, as fears strained the animals, as her conversion strained the Demiurge himself. By all these elements and bodies fire was fanned up. Of its original passion in Sophia, since they have not yet published it, I will meanwhile argue that it was struck out of her little fits—for you would believe that she, amid such great vexations, had even taken a fever.

With such figments of God, or of the gods, what figments of man? For having built the world, the Demiurge sets his hands to man, and takes substance for him—not out of this dry earth (they say), which we know to be the only one (as though it had not, even if dry afterwards, yet then, while the waters were beforehand segregated, dried with the surviving slime)—but out of the invisible body of that matter, namely the philosophic, out of its fluid and fusible part; which, whence it was, I am hardly able to estimate, because it is nowhere. For if the fusible and fluid is the quality of liquid, but all liquid flowed out of Sophia's weepings, it follows that we should believe the slime to have consisted of the rheums and gums of Sophia, which are accordingly the dregs of tears, just as what settles of waters is slime. So the Demiurge moulds man, and animates him from his own breath. Thus he will be both choic (earthy) and animal, made to image and likeness; a fourfold thing—so that as image he is reckoned choic, that is, material, although the Demiurge is not from matter; but as likeness he is animal, for this too the Demiurge is. You have two. Meanwhile they say that the carnal surface was afterwards woven over the choic, and that this is the coat of skins, subject to sense.

But there was in Achamoth, from the substance of her mother Sophia, a certain property of spiritual seed, just as Achamoth herself too had sequestered it in her son the Demiurge, not even him being aware of it. Mark the industry of this clandestine providence. For to this end she had both deposited and hidden it, that, when the Demiurge presently should communicate the soul out of his own breath into Adam, the soul should at the same time derive that spiritual seed also, as it were through a channel, into the choic; and so it, being incubated in the material body as in a womb, and grown up there, might be found fit for receiving at some time the perfect Word. And so when the Demiurge commits the offshoot of his soul into Adam, the spiritual man lay hidden, inserted by that very breath, and brought in together with the body—since the Demiurge knew the mother's seed no more than the mother herself. This seed they call Church, the mirror of the higher Church and the census of man; reckoning him accordingly from Achamoth, just as the animal from the Demiurge; the choic of the substance of the earth, the flesh of the matter. You have a new, that is, a fourfold Geryon.

So too they divide the issue of each. To the material, that is, the carnal, which they call also the left, undoubted destruction; but to the animal, which they call also the right, a doubtful event—inasmuch as it wavers between the material and the spiritual, and is owed to that side to which it shall most have inclined. But the spiritual is sent into companionship with the animal, that it may be trained with it and exercised in conduct. For the animal had need also of sensible disciplines; for this too the apparatus of the world was provided; for this too Soter was represented in the world—namely, for the salvation of the animal. By yet another composition they will have him monstrous, having put on the cuttings of those substances whose sum he was about to bring back to salvation: so that the spiritual indeed he took up from Achamoth, but the animal, which he presently put on from the Demiurge, namely Christ; but the corporeal substance, out of the animal, yet constructed by a wonderful and unutterable craft of reason, he bore for the sake of administration, that he might lie subject to the unpleasing offices of meeting and sight and contact and dying. But there was nothing material in him, as being foreign to salvation. As if he were necessary to any but those that lack salvation! And all this, that, by alienating the condition of our flesh from Christ, they may drive it also from the hope of salvation.

Now I render account of Christ—that one whom certain of them insert as Jesus with as great licence as they stuff the spiritual seed into the animal with the breath, having devised I know not what stuffings both of men and of their gods. That the Demiurge too has his own Christ, a natural son. In short, an animal one brought forth by himself, proclaimed by the prophets, set in questions of prepositions—that is, sent forth through a virgin, not out of a virgin; because, conveyed into the virgin, he proceeded through her rather in a transmigratory than in a generative manner—through her, not out of her; suffering her not as a mother, but as a way. Upon this Christ, therefore, Jesus then flew down, in the sacrament of baptism, in the figure of a dove. But there was in Christ too, from Achamoth, a seasoning of the spiritual seed, lest, namely, the rest of the stuffing should grow stale. For in the figure of the principal Tetrad they pack him with four substances: the spiritual, Achamothian; the animal, of the Demiurge; the corporeal, unutterable; and that Soteric, that is, the dove-like. And Soter indeed permeated Christ, impassible, inviolable, inapprehensible. In short, when it comes to the apprehensions, he departed from him in the knowledge of Pilate. Accordingly neither did the mother's seed admit injuries, being equally insubstantial and not even ascertained by the Demiurge himself. But the animal and carnal Christ suffers, in delineation of the superior Christ, who, for the forming of Achamoth, had leaned upon the Cross, that is, Horos, with a substantival, not a cognitional, form. Thus they urge all things into images—plainly being themselves too imaginary Christians.

Meanwhile the Demiurge, still ignorant of all things—although he too will proclaim something through the prophets, not understanding even this work of his own (for they divide the prophetic patronage too among Achamoth, the seed, and the Demiurge)—when he received notice of the coming of Soter, hastily and exultingly runs up with all his forces, the centurion of the gospel. And, enlightened by him concerning all things, he learns even his own hope, that he is to succeed into his mother's place. And so from then on, secure, he pursues the dispensation of this world—or chiefly under the name of protecting the Church—for as long a time as shall have behoved.

I will now gather up from the scattered, by way of conclusion, what they discourse concerning the disposition of the whole human race. Having professed a triform nature at the beginning, and yet united in Adam, from there now they divide it through the singular properties of the kinds, having got an occasion for distinction of this sort out of the posterity of Adam himself, which was also tripartite in moral differences. Cain and Abel and Seth, in a manner the fountains of the human race, they derive into so many arguments of nature and essence. The choic, degenerated from salvation, they reduce to Cain; the animal, deliberated to a middle hope, they set down to Abel; the spiritual, prejudged to certain salvation, they store away in Seth. So they distinguish even the souls themselves by a double property, good and bad—according to the choic state from Cain, and the animal from Abel. The spiritual, from Seth, they superinduce by way of accession—not now nature, but indulgence; so that those whom Achamoth rains down from the higher regions into good souls, that is, inscribed in the animal census. For the choic kind, that is, the bad souls, the saving power never receives. For they have pronounced the nature of nature immutable and unreformable. That grain, then, of spiritual seed, small and tiny in its casting, but augmented and advanced by the schooling of his faith, as we said above—and by this very thing the souls thus take precedence of the rest, so that the Demiurge, then ignorant, made much of them. Out of their list, therefore, he was wont to allege them both into kings and into priests; which souls now too, if they shall have apprehended the full and perfect knowledge of these foolish songs, naturalized now by the brotherhood of the spiritual condition, shall obtain certain salvation—nay, salvation wholly owed.

And therefore they neither think works necessary for themselves, nor observe any duties of discipline, eluding even the necessity of martyrdom by whatever interpretation they please. For this rule, they say, was prescribed to the animal seed: that we should work out by the suffrage of action the salvation which we do not possess by the privilege of our state. For to us, in the inscription of this seed, who are of an imperfect essence (because we are of the loves of Theletus), surely we are reckoned even as an abortion, like their mother. But to us indeed, "Woe!", if we transgress in anything the yoke of discipline, if we grow torpid in the works of holiness and justice, if we should choose to confess elsewhere—I know not where—and not under the powers of this world, before the tribunals of the governors. But they may vindicate their own nobility out of the passivity of life and the diligence of sins, their Achamoth flattering them, since she too made progress by sinning. For also, for the sake of honouring the supernal marriages, it is decreed among them that the sacrament must always be meditated and celebrated, by adhering to a companion, that is, a female; otherwise he is degenerate, and not a legitimate son of the truth, who, having sojourned in the world, has not loved a female nor joined himself to her. And what will the eunuchs do whom we see among them?

There remains the matter of the consummation and the dispensation of the reward. When Achamoth shall have perfected the whole harvest of her seed, and then shall have begun to gather it into the granary—or when, brought to the mills and ground into flour, she shall have hidden it in the bins of dough until the whole be leavened together—then the consummation will press on. Therefore first of all Achamoth herself, out of the region of the middle, out of the second story, is transferred to the summit, restored to the Pleroma; and at once that compacted Soter receives her—her bridegroom, namely—and both shall become a new marriage. This will be in the Scriptures "the bridegroom" and "the nuptial Pleroma" (for you may believe that, where there is migration from place to place, the Julian laws too intervene). Just so the Demiurge too will then change his scene from the celestial Hebdomad into the higher regions, into the now empty dining-hall of the mother—now knowing, yet not seeing her. For if it were so, he would always have preferred to be ignorant.

But the human race will go to this issue: those of the choic and material mark perish utterly with destruction, because "all flesh is grass"; and the soul, with them, is mortal, except that which shall have found salvation by faith. The souls of the just, that is, our own, shall be transmitted to the Demiurge into the receptacles of the middle. We give thanks; we shall be content to be reckoned with our God, in whom is our census. Nothing animal is admitted into the palace of the Pleroma, except the spiritual swarm of Valentinus. There, then, first the men themselves are despoiled, that is, the inner men. But to be despoiled is to lay aside the souls with which they seemed clothed; and these they will render back to their Demiurge, which they had turned away from him. But the spirits themselves become wholly intellectual, subject neither to detention nor to sight, and so are received invisibly into the Pleroma. By stealth, if it is so. What then? They will be distributed to the Angels, the satellites of Soter. As sons, do you think? No. But as attendants? Not even that. But as images? Would that it were even this. Into what, then, if it is not shameful to say it? Into brides. Then they will shut up their Sabine women, ravished, by the law of matrimony. This will be the reward of the spirituals, this the prize of believing. Such useful fables—that Marcus or Gaius, in this flesh, bearded and with all these things, a stern husband, a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather—certainly, what is enough, a male—should, in the bridal chamber of the Pleroma, by an angel—I have said it already by keeping silent—and perhaps you may bear some Aeon Onesimus! For these nuptials to be rightly conducted, instead of a torch and bridal veil, then, I suppose, that secret fire will burst forth, and, having laid waste the whole substance, itself too, all being reduced to ashes, shall end in nothing, and there will be now no fable. But, alas, I am rash, who have betrayed so great a sacrament even in mockery! It is to be feared by me lest Achamoth, who would not be acknowledged even by her son, should rage; lest Theletus should be angered; lest Fortuna should be embittered. And yet I am a man of the Demiurge; I have to turn aside thither where, after one's departure, one does not marry at all; where one is rather clothed over than despoiled; where, even if I am despoiled of my sex, I am reckoned to the angels—not an angel, not an angeless. No one will do anything to me, whom they will not find a male even then.

I will produce, finally, by way of an after-piece on the cithara following so great a fable, even those things which, lest they should clamour against the order and scatter the reader's attention by interjection, I have preferred to defer to this place—things variously commended by the emenders of Ptolemy. For there have arisen out of his very school disciples above their master, who feign a double marriage for their Bythos: Cogitation (Thought) and Will. For one Cogitation was not enough, by which he could have produced nothing—out of two it is by the easiest bringing-forth. The first marriage, Monogenes and Veritas: at the image of Cogitation, the female Veritas; at the image of Will, the male Monogenes. For the force of Will, as that which furnishes the effect to Cogitation, obtains the census of the male.

Others, more modest, mindful of the honour of the divinity, that they might wrest from him the dishonour even of one marriage, preferred to assign no sex to Bythos, and perhaps pronounce, in the neuter gender, "This God" (hoc deum), not "This god" (hic deus). Others, on the contrary, say he is rather both male and female, that Fenestella, the commentator of the annals, may not think the Hermaphrodite to exist only among the Lunenses.

There are those who do not even defend the primacy for Bythos, but a posterior place, sending an Ogdoad before all things, derived indeed itself too out of a Tetrad, but under other names. For first they constitute Proarche; second, Anennoetos (the Unconceivable); third, Arrhetos (the Unspeakable); fourth, Aoratos (the Invisible). So out of Proarche there proceeded, in the first and fifth place, Arche; out of Anennoetos, in the second and sixth place, Acatalepton (the Incomprehensible); out of Arrhetos, in the third and seventh place, Anonomaston (the Unnameable); out of Aoratos, in the fourth and eighth place, Agenneton (the Unborn). What rationale disposes this—that the several ones are born in two places, and those so far apart—I would rather be ignorant than learn. For what right have those things which are so perversely brought forth?

How much better those who, removing all this tedium out of the way, would have no Aeon another out of another, built up through grades like the Gemonian stairs, but, with the cloth dropped, as they say, would have this eight-yoked team excluded at once out of the Father and his Ennoea. From his very movement, in short, they bear their names. "When," they say, "he thought to bring forth, this was called the Father. When he brought forth, because he brought forth true things, this was called Veritas. When he willed himself to be approved, this was pronounced Anthropos. But those whom he had pre-thought when he brought forth—then it was named Ecclesia. Anthropos sounded forth Sermo, and this is the firstborn son; and to Sermo there acceded Vita, and the first Ogdoad was concluded." But this tedium is altogether trifling.

Receive other juggling tricks of a more notable master among them, who, by his pontifical authority, has decreed in this manner: "There is," he says, "before all things, Proarche, inexcogitable and inenarrable and innominable, which I name Monotes (Soleness). With her there was another power, which I also name Henotes (Oneness). Monotes and Henotes—that is, Solitas and Unitas—being one, brought forth, without bringing forth, the Beginning of all, intellectual, unborn, invisible, which the discourse called Monad. To her there is present a consubstantial power, which he calls Union (Hen). These powers, then—Solitas, Singularity, Unitas, Union—propagated the rest of the projections of the Aeons." O difference! Let Union and Unitas be changed; Singularity is the sum, and Solitas. Although you should designate them, it is one thing.

Secundus is now more human, as being briefer, dividing the Ogdoad into two Tetrads, into a right and a left, into light and darkness; only that he will not have that deserting and defaulting power deduced from any Aeon, but from fruits coming out of the substance.

Concerning the very Lord Jesus himself, how great a diversity is split off! These construct him out of the little flowers of all the Aeons; those contend that he consists out of ten alone, whom Sermo and Vita brought forth—whence too into him the titles of Sermo and Vita have run together. Those, rather, out of twelve, out of the offspring of Anthropos and Ecclesia, and therefore say that he was pronounced the Son of Man. Others say he was feigned by Christ and the Holy Spirit, provided for the establishing of the universe, and the heir by right of the paternal appellation. There are those who would have the Son of Man to be said to be conceived from elsewhere, because they presume that the Father himself, by a great sacrament of the name, called himself Anthropos—so that you may hope for anything more from the faith of that god to whom you are now equated. Such conceits over-sprout among them out of the redundance of the maternal seed. And so, growing up, the doctrines of the Valentinians have now run wild into the forests of the Gnostics.