Against Celsus 6.35

For to use the words of prophets is our practice, since we show that Jesus is the Christ proclaimed beforehand by them and demonstrate from the prophetic writings that what is recorded about Jesus in the Gospels was fulfilled. To speak of circles upon circles perhaps belongs to the sect mentioned above, which encloses the seven circles of the archons in one circle, which they say is the soul of the universe and Leviathan. Or perhaps it is a misunderstanding of Ecclesiastes, who says: “Circling, circling goes the wind, and on its circles the wind returns.” Emanations of an earthly church and of circumcision were perhaps taken from what some say, that the church on earth is an emanation of a heavenly church and a higher age, and that the circumcision written in the law is a symbol of a circumcision that took place there in some purification. The followers of Valentinus, in accordance with their own misguided wisdom, give the name Prunicus to a certain Wisdom, of whom they would have the woman with a flow of blood for twelve years be a symbol. Having misunderstood this, the man who jumbles together everything of Greeks and barbarians and sects said: “a power flowing from a certain virgin Prunicus.” The living soul perhaps is spoken of in secret by some of the followers of Valentinus with reference to what they call “the psychic Creator”; or perhaps the living soul, in contrast to the dead soul, is spoken of by some, not ignobly, as the soul of one who is being saved. But I do not know of heaven being called slain, or earth slain with a sword, or many slain that they may live; and it is not unlikely that Celsus made these up himself.