Against the Valentinians

The Valentinians, plainly the most numerous fellowship among the heretics, since it consists mostly of deserters from the truth, is easily drawn to fables, and is not frightened off by discipline, care about nothing more than hiding what they preach, if indeed people who hide can be said to preach. Their duty of keeping guard is the rouge of a guilty conscience. What they proclaim is shame, while what they claim is religion. For those Eleusinian rites too, themselves a heresy of Attic superstition, are ashamed of what they keep silent. That is why they torment the entrant before they seal him, since they train their epoptae for five years, in order to build up expectation by suspending knowledge, and so seem to display a majesty as great as the craving they have built up in advance. Then follows the duty of silence: what is found slowly is guarded attentively. But the whole divinity in the shrine, all the sighs of the epoptae, the whole seal on the tongue: what is revealed is an image of the male member. Yet, holding out the venerable name of “nature”, an allegorical arrangement hides the sacrilege under the patronage of a forced figure and excuses the obscenity with false images. In the same way the heretics we now have in view, shaping the emptiest and foulest fictions with the holy names and titles and arguments of the true religion (… taking occasion from the abundance of divine Scripture, since from much there is much to cut), have made Valentinian Eleusinian mysteries: holy by their allure, great by their silence, heavenly only by their taciturnity. If you ask in good faith, with a set face and raised eyebrow they say, “It is profound.” If you probe them subtly, with double-tongued ambiguities they affirm the common faith. If you hint that you know, they deny whatever they acknowledge; if you fight at close quarters, they break up the battle with a silly show of simplicity. Not even to their own disciples do they entrust anything before they have made them their own. They have a technique by which they persuade before they teach. But truth persuades by teaching; it does not teach by persuading.

And so among them we are branded as simple, as simple only, and not also wise; as if wisdom were forced at once to desert simplicity, though the Lord joins the two: “Be wise as serpents and simple as doves.” Or if we are foolish because we are simple, are they then not simple because they are wise? But those who are not simple are the most harmful, just as those who are not wise are the most foolish. And yet I would rather my side be charged with the better fault, if it must be: it is better to know less than to know worse, to err than to deceive. Moreover, the face of God is sought in simplicity, as Wisdom herself teaches, not Valentinus' Wisdom but Solomon's. Then infants … witness to Christ. The apostle too, bidding us become children again, according to the Lord, so that being infants in malice through simplicity we may at last be wise in understanding, has given once for all the order in which wisdom flows from simplicity. In short, the dove has been wont to point out Christ, the serpent to tempt; the dove from the beginning is the herald of divine peace, the serpent from the beginning the robber of the divine image. So simplicity alone will more easily be able both to recognize God and to show him than prudence alone.

So let the serpent hide itself as much as it can and twist all its prudence into the windings of its lurking-places; let it dwell deep, thrust its coils down into the dark through winding passages; (if) it unrolls, let it advance crookedly and never all at once, a light-shunning beast. Our dove's house is simple too, always on high and open places, toward the light. The figure of the Holy Spirit loves the east, the figure of Christ. Truth blushes at nothing except being hidden; for no one will be ashamed to give ear to it, and to recognize that God whom nature has already entrusted to him, whom he perceives daily in all his works, known less only in this, that he did not think him the only one, that he named him among a number, that he worshipped him in others. On the other hand, to urge on someone yet another crowd besides that crowd of gods, to move him from the lordship he knows at home to an unknown one, to twist him from the manifest to the hidden, is to make faith stumble at the threshold. Now if he is initiated into the whole fable, will he not (recall) something like what he heard in infancy from his nurse amid the struggles of falling asleep, the Lamia's towers and the Sun's combs? But one who comes with some understanding of the faith, if he at once finds so many names of Aeons, so many marriages, so many offspring, so many outcomes, so many events, fortunes and misfortunes of a divinity scattered and chopped up, will he hesitate to declare on the spot that these are the “fables and endless genealogies” which the apostle's spirit forestalled and condemned when these heretical seeds were already sprouting? Rightly, then, they are not simple, rightly they are only prudent, who neither readily bring forward such things nor openly defend them, and who do not fully teach even all whom they instruct: cunningly, to be sure, if these things are shameful; but inhumanly, if they are honourable. And yet we simple folk know everything. So we shall arm this first wedge of battle as the detector and marker-out of their whole secret, and we take this first victory as an omen: what is hidden at so great a cost is destroyed merely by being shown.

We know very well, I say, their origin too, and we know why we call them Valentinians, though they seem not to be. For they have withdrawn from their founder; but an origin is by no means erased, even if perhaps changed: the very change is a witness to it. Valentinus had hoped for the episcopate, since he was capable both in talent and in eloquence; but, indignant that another obtained the post by the prerogative of martyrdom, he broke away from the church of the authentic rule, as minds roused by a claim to first place are wont to be inflamed with the presumption of revenge. Turned to attacking the truth, and having found the seed of a certain old opinion, he marked out a path for his serpent. Afterwards Ptolemy entered on it, distinguishing the names and numbers of the Aeons into personal substances, but set outside God, whereas Valentinus had included them within the very sum of divinity as its thoughts and feelings (and) motions. Heracleon too led off certain byways from it, and Secundus, and Mark the magician. Theotimus worked much on the images of the law. So Valentinus is now nowhere, and yet there are Valentinians, who came through Valentinus. Only Axionicus at Antioch, to this day, consoles the memory of Valentinus by keeping his rules intact. Otherwise this heresy allows itself to dress itself up as much as a harlot is accustomed to touch up her looks every day. Why not, when they reckon that spiritual seed of theirs to be thus in each one of them? If they have built on anything new, they at once call their presumption revelation and their talent a charisma, (prizing) not unity but diversity. And so we see that, laying aside their customary dissimulation, most of them are divided (over) certain articles, ready even to say in good faith, “This is not so,” and “I take this otherwise,” and “I do not acknowledge this.” For with the variety introduced into their rules, the face of the heresy also has the colours of ignorances.

But my business will be with the archetypes, the principal masters, not with the affected leaders of passive disciples. Nor shall we be said to have invented our subject matter ourselves, which so many men distinguished for holiness and excellence, not only our predecessors but contemporaries of the heresiarchs themselves, have both exposed and refuted in most learned volumes: Justin, philosopher and martyr; Miltiades, the sophist of the churches; Irenaeus, the most exact explorer of all doctrines; our own Proculus, the glory of chaste old age and Christian eloquence; whom I should like to follow in every work of faith, as in this one. Or if there are no heresies at all, so that those who drive them out are believed to have invented them, the apostle who foretold them will be lying. But if they exist, they will be none other than those that are being discussed. No one is thought so idle as to invent with his pen subject matter that he already has.

So in this little book, in which we intend only to set out an exposure of that secret, lest the fog of names so foreign, forced, compounded, and ambiguous confuse anyone, I shall first state how we are going to use them. For some of them, when translated from the Greek, do not yield a correspondingly convenient form of the name; for some, the grammatical genders do not match the sexes; some are better known in the Greek. So we shall mostly set down the Greek; the meanings will be given in the margins of the pages; and the Latin names too will not lack the Greek, which will be marked in the lines above, as a sign that they are personal names, because of the ambiguity of those that share another meaning. And although I have postponed the engagement, professing for the present only a narrative, yet wherever an indignity deserves a bruising, there will be a passing attack by way of a foretaste. Count this, reader, as the sham fight before the battle: I shall show the wounds, but not inflict them. And if there is laughter here and there, it will be what the subject matter itself deserves. Many things deserve to be refuted in this way, so as not to be honoured with seriousness. Gaiety is properly due to vanity. It suits truth too to laugh, because in its joy it can play with its rivals without care. Care must certainly be taken that its laughter is not itself laughed at, if it is unfitting; but wherever laughter is fitting, it is a duty. So I shall begin in this way.

The Roman poet was the first of all to speak simply of “the greatest upper rooms of heaven”, by name of its lofty site, or because he had read in Homer of Jupiter feasting there. But it is a wonder what heights upon heights and what loftinesses upon loftinesses the heretics have hung up, raised, and spread out as the dwelling of their several gods. Even for our Creator Ennian garrets have been laid out in the form of little lodgings: with storey upon storey built on, and each god allotted his own by as many staircases as there are heresies, the world has become a lodging-house. You would take so many floors of heavens for the Felicula tenement block. Somewhere there, up at the topmost tiles, dwells the god of the Valentinians too. Him they call, as to his substance, the Perfect Aeon (Aiōn Teleios); as to his person, the Forefather (Propatōr) and First Beginning (Proarchē), and also Bythos (Depth), a name that hardly suited one dwelling on high. They define him as unborn, immense, infinite, invisible, and eternal, as though they proved that he exists just by defining him as we know he ought to be. So I demand that he be shown, (not) said to have existed before all things, but to exist; and in this sort of thing I note nothing more than that those who are said to have existed before all things are found after all things, and those not their own. So this Bythos sits through infinite past ages in the greatest and deepest quiet, in the fullest leisure of a placid and, so to speak, stupefied divinity, such as Epicurus prescribed. And yet to him whom they want to be alone they give a second person, in him and with him, Ennoia (Thought), whom they also name Charis (Grace) and, besides, Sige (Silence). And it happens that in that much-praised quiet she prompts him at last to bring forth from himself the beginning of things. This, in place of seed, he places in his Sige, as in the genital parts of a womb. She receives it at once, becomes pregnant, and gives birth; in silence, of course, being Sige. And whom does she bear? Nus (Mind), very like his father and equal to him in all things. Indeed he alone is able to grasp that immense and incomprehensible greatness of the Father. So he himself is called both Father and beginning of all things, and properly Monogenes (Only-begotten). Yet not properly, since he is not born alone. For with him there came forth also a female, (whose name) is Truth. So Bythos and Sige, Nus and Truth are upheld as the first team of four of the Valentinian faction, the womb and origin of all things. For at that very moment Nus received with his coming forth the task of bringing forth, and he too emits from himself the Word and Life. If Life did not exist before, then it was not in Bythos either; and how can it be that life was not in God? But this offspring too, emitted for the beginning of the universe and the formation of the whole Pleroma, bears fruit: it begets Man and Church. There you have the Ogdoad, a double Tetrad, from the pairings of males and females: the cells, so to speak, of the primordial Aeons, the brother-and-sister marriages of the Valentinian gods, the whole census of heretical sanctity and majesty; a crowd, I do not know whether of crimes or of deities, but certainly the spring of all their further fruitfulness.

For see, the second Tetrad, Word and Life, Man and Church, since it had sprouted into this number for the Father's glory, and being eager themselves to offer the Father something of their own, bubble up other offspring, likewise paired by the coupling of both natures. On one side Word and Life pour out a decad of Aeons together; on the other, Man and Church two more, to match their parents, since these two with those ten make as many as they themselves begot. I now give the names of those I called the decad: Bythios and Mixis, (Ageratos and Henosis, Autophyes) and Hedone, Acinetos and Syncrasis, Monogenes and Macaria. On the other side, these will be the twelve: Paracletus and Pistis, Patricos and Elpis, Metricos and Agape, Aeinus and Synesis, Ecclesiasticus and Macariotes, Theletus and Sophia. I am forced here to show by a comparable example what these names deserve. In the schools of Carthage there was a very frigid Latin rhetorician named Phosphorus. When he was pleading as a brave man, he said: “I come to you, best of citizens, from battle, with my victory, with your good fortune, enlarged, glorious, fortunate, greatest, triumphal.” And at once the students of the Phosphorus school cried out “Pheu!” (“Alas!”). You have heard of Fortunata and Hedone and Acinetus and Theletus: cry out to the Ptolemy school, “Pheu!” This will be that secret Pleroma, the fullness of a thirtyfold divinity. Let us see what are the privileges of these numbers, four and eight (and ten) and twelve. Meanwhile at thirty all fruitfulness fails (the force and power and generative lust of the Aeons is castrated), as if there were not still so many clusters of numbers left, and no other names from the slave-pages' school. For why are fifty and a hundred not procreated too? Why are there not also Sterceiae and Syntrophi among the names?

But there is also this favouritism among the persons: Nus alone of them all enjoys knowledge of the immense Father, rejoicing and exulting, while the others, of course, grieve. Nus indeed, as far as lay in him, had both wished and tried to share with the rest too what he knew, how great and how incomprehensible the Father is. But mother Sige intervened, the same, of course, who prescribes silence to her heretics too; though they say it was done at the Father's nod, since he wanted all to be kindled with desire for him. So while they pine within themselves, while they burn with a silent longing to know the Father, a crime was nearly committed. For of those twelve Aeons which Man and Church had produced, the youngest Aeon (never mind the solecism; her name is Sophia) bursts out in her lack of self-control, without the partnership of her consort Theletus, to search into the Father, and contracts a kind of vice. It had begun, indeed, in the others around Nus, but had flowed down into this one, that is, into Sophia, as vices that have arisen in one part of the body tend to breathe out their ruin into another limb. Under the pretext of love for the Father, however, what prevailed was rivalry with Nus, who alone rejoiced in the Father. As Sophia, striving for the impossible, was frustrated, overcome by the difficulty and stretched by her longing, she came within a little, from the force of sweetness and toil, of being swallowed up and dissolved into the rest of the substance; and she would not have stopped except by perishing, had she not by good fortune run into Horos (Limit). He too has a certain power: he is the foundation of the universe (and) its guardian from outside; they also call him Cross, Lytrotes (Redeemer), and Carpistes (Emancipator). So Sophia, rescued from danger and slowly persuaded (to) turn from her search for the Father, came to rest, and put off her whole intention (enthymesis) together with the passion that had befallen her besides.

But some have dreamt otherwise of Sophia's fate and restoration: that after her vain attempts and the dashing of her hope she was disfigured (by pallor, I suppose, and leanness and neglect), grieving, naturally, no less that the Father was denied her than if she had lost him. Then in that grief, from herself alone, with no help from her consort, she conceives and gives birth to a female. Are you surprised? The hen too has been allotted to lay eggs of herself; and vultures, they say, are all female and yet become mothers without a male. And … at last to fear lest an end too was pressing upon her; to be perplexed about the reason for her misfortune, anxious to keep it hidden. Remedies nowhere. For where were the tragedies and comedies then, from which to borrow a pattern for exposing the child born to her shame? While things are in a bad way, she looks up, she turns to the Father. But having strained in vain, as her strength failed, she sinks into prayers. Her whole kin too pleads for her, above all Nus. And why not? He was the cause of so great an evil! Yet none of Sophia's troubles was wasted. All her distresses go to make the origin of matter, since from that struggle of hers arise the substances: ignorance, terror, grief. Then at last the Father, moved at length, puts forth to deal with these, through Monogenes Nus, the Horos we mentioned above, in his own image, male-female, since they vary thus about the Father's sex too. They add that Horos is also called Metagogeus (Leader-round) and Horothetes (Limit-setter). By his works, they proclaim, Sophia was held back from things unlawful, purified from evils, then made firm and restored to her marriage; and she herself remained on the rolls of the Pleroma, but her Enthymesis, with that appended passion, was banished by Horos, crucified, and put outside it. “Out with evil,” as the saying goes! Yet that was a spiritual substance, as being a natural impulse of an Aeon, but shapeless and without form, inasmuch as it had grasped nothing; and therefore it was pronounced a weak fruit, and female.

So after the exile of Enthymesis and the return of her mother Sophia to her consort, that Monogenes, that Nus, once more (plainly left at leisure by the Father's care and foresight), to consolidate things and fortify the Pleroma and fix it firmly, so that no such shock should befall it again, hatches a new pairing: Christ and the Holy Spirit, a most shameful one, I should think, of two males. Or will the Holy Spirit be female, and the male be wounded by a female? For a single task is given to them: to see to the harmonizing of the Aeons; and from their partnership in this office there came at once two schools, two chairs, a kind of inauguration of the division of Valentinus' doctrine. It was Christ's part to teach the Aeons the nature of marriages (you see what a matter, plainly!) and to guess at the Unborn, and to make them fit to (re)generate in themselves the knowledge of the Father: that he cannot be grasped or comprehended, cannot be attained by sight or hearing, except through Monogenes. And yet I shall put up with their learning to know the Father thus … I shall rather mark the perversity of the doctrine: that they were taught that the incomprehensible in the Father is the cause of their perpetuity, while the comprehensible in him is the ground of their generation and formation. For by this arrangement it is suggested, I suppose, that it is expedient that God not be apprehended, since what cannot be apprehended of him is the cause of perpetuity, while what can be apprehended is the cause not of perpetuity but of birth and formation, which need perpetuity. The Son they make the apprehensible of the Father; but how he is apprehended, Christ, once put forth, then taught. The province of the Holy Spirit was that all, made equal through zeal for the doctrine, should know how to go on to give thanks, and should be led into true rest.

So all are made equal both in form and in knowledge; all become what each one is; none is anything different, because all are the others. They are all recast into Nuses, into Men, into Theletuses, and the females likewise into Siges, into Zoes, into Churches, into Fortunatas; so that Ovid would have erased his Metamorphoses, had he known of today's greater ones. Thereafter they were refreshed and made firm, and, settled into rest by the truth, with great fruit of joy they sing hymns together to the Father. He too was overflowing with gladness, since his sons (and) grandsons sang so well. And why should he not overflow, when the Pleroma had been freed for every delight? What ship's master does not rejoice, even at the cost of his dignity? We see every day the wanton joys of sailors. So, as sailors always exult at a shared feast, the Aeons did something similar: all now one even in form, not to mention in mind, and the new brothers and masters, Christ and the Holy Spirit, joining them, they contribute to the common pool whatever each had most excellent and beautiful in its flower. In vain, I think. For if they were all one through the equalizing mentioned above, there was no point in a shared contribution, which consists mainly in the charm of variety… All contributed one good, which was what all were. Perhaps the point lay in the amount, or in the form of the equalizing itself. So from a whip-round, as they say, to the honour and glory of the Father they fashion the most beautiful star of the Pleroma and its perfect fruit, Jesus. Him they surname Soter (Saviour) and Christ and Word, after his fathers' names, and now also “All Things”, as built from the flower of them all: Aesop's jackdaw, Hesiod's Pandora, Accius' dish, Nestor's posset, Ptolemy's hotchpotch. How much nearer the mark it would have been for such idle inventors of names to call him, after some Oscan clowns, … And so that they might adorn so great a figurine outwardly too, they put forth angels as his bodyguards, of the same kind: if the same kind as one another, that may be; but if consubstantial with the Saviour (for I have found it stated ambiguously), what will be his eminence among bodyguards equal to him?

This first act, then, contains the account of Aeons being born, marrying, and begetting alike; Sophia's most perilous fall through desire for the Father; the most timely help of Horos; the expiation of Enthymesis and her attached Passion; the tutoring by Christ and the Holy Spirit; the guardian reformation of the Aeons; the peacock finery of the Saviour; the matching retinue of the Angels. “For the rest,” you say, “farewell and applaud!” No: “For the rest,” I say, “listen, and hiss it off the stage!” Now these things are said to have taken place within the company of the Pleroma, the first scene of the tragedy; but there is another bout of buskined acting beyond the curtain, outside the Pleroma, I mean. And yet if (this) was the outcome in the Father's bosom, within the circuit of Horos the guardian, what will it be outside, at large, where God was not?

For Enthymesis, or Achamoth as she now is (and from here on I shall write of her only by this untranslatable name), when she was driven out, together with the vice of her inseparable Passion, into places foreign to light (which is the property of the Pleroma), into that void and emptiness of Epicurus, is wretched even in her place. She has, of course, neither form nor any face, being a troubled and abortive offspring. While things stand so with her, Christ is prevailed upon by those above (he is led down through Horos) to form that abortion from his own powers, a form of substance only, not also of knowledge. And yet she is left with some small private fund: the scent of incorruptibility, by which, made aware of her fall, she might be spurred on by desire for better things. Having performed this act of mercy, not without the partnership of the Holy Spirit, Christ hurries back into the Pleroma. It is the custom for names too to come to things from their bounties: Enthymesis came from the act; where Achamoth came from is still being asked; Sophia flows from her mother, Holy Spirit from the angel. She receives a longing for Christ, by whom she had at once felt herself abandoned. So she too leapt forth to seek his light. If she had not known him at all, since he had worked invisibly, how was she seeking his light, as unknown as he? Yet she tried, and perhaps would have grasped it, if that same Horos, who had come so favourably to her mother, had not now met the daughter so unfavourably that he even shouted at her “Iao!”, like “Help, citizens!” or “By Caesar's faith!” That is how Iao comes to be found in the Scriptures. So, driven back from going further, and unable to fly over the Cross, that is, Horos, since she had not been trained in any Laureolus of Catullus, abandoned, entangled in that manifold and perplexing passion of hers, she began to be afflicted with every kind of it: with grief, that she had not accomplished her attempt; with fear, lest as she had been robbed of light, so she be robbed of life also; besides these, with consternation, then with ignorance; and not as her mother had been, for she was an Aeon, (but) worse, as befitted her condition; and yet another wave rose up, namely of turning back toward Christ, by whom she had been given life and tempered for this very turning.

Come now, let the Pythagoreans learn, let the Stoics acknowledge, and Plato himself, where matter, which they will have unborn, drew its origin and substance for all this structure of the world; a thing that not even the famous Hermes Trismegistus, master of all natural philosophers, thought out. You have heard of “conversion”, another kind of passion: from this every soul of this world is said to have been formed, even that of the Demiurge himself, that is, our God. You have heard of grief and fear: from these the rest began. For from her tears flowed the whole nature of waters. From this one may reckon what an end she came to, with how many kinds of tears she was flooded. She had salty ones, she had bitter ones and sweet, hot drops and cold, bituminous ones and rusty, sulphurous too, of course, and poisonous; so that from them Nonacris sweated out the water that killed Alexander, and from them flowed the spring of the Lyncestae that makes men drunk, and from them the Salmacis dissolved itself, which makes men soft. Achamoth even whimpered out the rains of heaven, and we take care to save up in cisterns another's mourning and tears. Likewise from consternation and panic the bodily elements were derived. And yet amid such lonely surroundings, facing such desolation, she laughed now and then, when she remembered seeing Christ; and from that laughter of joy light shone out. Whose gift was this? Providence's? What a kindness! It made her laugh so that we should not remain in darkness for ever! And do not be astonished: why should her gladness not have radiated so splendid an element for the world, when her sorrow too poured out so necessary a supply for the age? O illuminating laughter! O irrigating weeping! And yet she could by now have had a remedy for the horror of that place: she would have dispelled all its darkness whenever she chose to laugh … or so that she need not be forced to beg those who had deserted her.

For she too turns to prayers, in her mother's fashion. But Christ, now loath to set out beyond the Pleroma, sends to her as the deputy of his office the Paraclete, the Soter (this will be Jesus, the Father having granted him supreme power over all the Aeons and subjected them all to him, so that, according to the apostle, all things might be founded in him), with the retinue and escort of angels of his own age, and, you might think, with twelve fasces. Then at last, shaken by his pompous arrival, Achamoth at once drew a veil over herself, out of the first duty of reverence and modesty; then she gazes on him and his fruitful equipment. With the powers she had conceived from these she runs to meet him, saying, I suppose, “Hail, Lord!” He receives her, strengthens her, and gives her form, now also in knowledge, and scours her clean of all the injuries of Passion. These were not separated off to be destroyed with the same neglect as had happened in her mother's misfortunes. Rather, the vices, practised and strengthened by use, he mixed together, and having thus solidified them into a lump he fixed them apart, changing them from incorporeal passion into the bodily stock of matter, and implanting a capacity and nature by which they might soon come to rival the corresponding bodies; so that a twofold condition of substances might be ordered, the worst from the vices, the one susceptible to passion from the conversion. This will be the matter that has set us at odds with Hermogenes and the rest who presume that God worked all things from matter, not from nothing.

From here on Achamoth, freed at last from all evils, behold, now makes progress and bears fruit in greater works. For, warmed by joy at such success coming out of misfortune, and at the same time, so to speak, leavened by the very contemplation of the angelic lights (I am ashamed, but there is no other way to say it), she somehow grew heated within toward them herself, and at once swelled with a spiritual conception of that very image which, by the force of her rejoicing and joy-itching intention, she had drunk in and taken to herself. In short she gave birth, and thence came a trinity of kinds from a trinity of causes: one material, from passion; another psychic, from conversion; the third spiritual, from imagination.

Made more practised in managing affairs by the standing these three offspring gave her, she decided to form each kind. But the spiritual kind she could not touch in the same way, since she herself was spiritual; for the fellowship of nature has denied to things nearly equal and consubstantial any power over one another. So she turned her mind to the psychic alone, having brought forth the teachings of the Soter. And first (a thing that can be said and read and heard only with great horror at the blasphemy) she fashions this God of ours, the God of all except heretics, the Father and Demiurge and King of all things that come after him. For they come from him; if indeed from him, and not rather from Achamoth herself, by whom he was moved secretly, perceiving nothing of her, like a puppet worked by a string from outside, in every operation. In short, from this ambiguity of persons in the works they have concocted for him the name Metropator (Mother-father), the other titles being distinguished according to the states and positions of the works: so they call him Father of the psychic substances, which they assign to the right, Demiurge of the material ones, which they relegate to the left, and King over the universe in common.

But the propriety of the names does not match … the propriety of the works from which the names come, since she by whom things were done ought to have been called all these; except that now they were not done by her either. For while they say that Achamoth devised … images in honour of the Aeons, they twist this back again to the Soter as author, who worked through her: so that she herself should render the image of the invisible and unknown Father, though unknown and invisible to the Demiurge; that the same Demiurge should portray Nus the Son; and that the Archangels, the Demiurge's work, should express the remaining Aeons. When I hear of such great images from those three (the female Achamoth the image of the Father; the Demiurge, ignorant of his mother and much more of the Father, the image of (Nus), who is not ignorant of the Father; and the Angels, servants, the likenesses of their masters), I ask: do you not want me now to laugh at the images of a most perverse painter? This is painting a mule from an ass, and drawing Ptolemy from Valentinus.

So the Demiurge, placed outside the bounds of the Pleroma, in the ignominious wasteland of eternal exile, founded a new province, this world, after clearing up the confusion and distinguishing the diversity of that twofold substance thrust down, of psychic and material things. From incorporeal things he builds bodies: heavy and light, rising and sinking, heavenly and earthly. Then he completes the sevenfold stage of the heavens itself with his own throne above. Hence he was also called Sabbath, from the seven of his seat, just as his mother Achamoth is called Ogdoad, after the model of the first-begotten Ogdoad. The heavens they reckon to be intellectual beings, and sometimes they make them angels, as they do the Demiurge himself; and Paradise too a fourth archangel, since they fix this also above the third heaven; from its power Adam took (something), when he lodged there among little clouds and little trees. Ptolemy remembered well enough the children's sayings, that apples grow in the sea and fish in trees; so he presumed nut groves in the heavens. The Demiurge works in ignorance, and so perhaps does not know that trees ought to be planted only on earth. His mother surely knew. Why did she not suggest it, she who was even supplying his work? But why, while building so lofty a height for her son through those works which bear witness to him as Father and God and King even before the Valentinians' clever notions, she did not wish to make herself known to him, I shall ask later.

Meanwhile we must hold that Sophia is also surnamed Earth and Mother and, what will make you laugh more, even Holy Spirit, as if she were male. So they have conferred all (male) honour on a female; a beard too, I suppose, not to mention the rest. Otherwise the Demiurge was so little master of things (spiritual things, of course, being beyond the reach of the weakness of the psychic rank) that, thinking himself alone, he declared: “I am God, and besides me there is none.” Yet he certainly knew that he had not existed before. So he understood both that he had been made and that there was some maker of what was made. How then did he seem to himself to be alone, if not certain of some maker, at least suspecting one?

Among them the infamy heaped on the devil is more tolerable, perhaps because his origin allows something filthier. For he is ascribed to the wickedness of that grief, from which they record the births of angels and demons and all the spiritual forces of evil. And yet they affirm that the devil too is the work of the Demiurge, and call him the World-ruler, and maintain that he knows more of the higher things, as being spiritual by nature, than the Demiurge, who is psychic. He deserves precedence among them, he for whom all heresies are procured.

They place the citadels of the individual powers within these bounds. In the highest heights presides the thirtyfold Pleroma, with Horos marking its outermost line. Below it Achamoth measures out the middle region, treading on her son; for beneath her is the Demiurge in his Hebdomad. The devil rather shares this world with us, compounded of the same elements and bodies, as was stated above, out of Sophia's most useful misfortunes; so that it would not even have air, the space for drawing breath in and out, the tender garment of all bodies, the revealer of all colours, the instrument of the seasons, had not Sophia's sorrow strained this out too, as her fear did the psychic things, and her conversion the Demiurge himself. Into all these elements and bodies fire was fanned. Since they have not yet published from which original passion of Sophia it came, I shall meanwhile argue that it was shaken out of her little tremors. For you might believe that in such great troubles she also ran a fever.

When such are their fictions about God, or the gods, what are their fictions about man? For the Demiurge, having built the world, turns his hands to man, and takes his substance not, they say, from this dry earth, which we know as the only one (as though, even if dry afterwards, it was not still moist at that time with the mud that remained, the waters having only just been separated), but from the invisible body of matter, that philosophical one, of course, from its fluid and flowing part; and I dare to guess where that came from, since it is nowhere … For if fluidity and flowing are qualities of liquid, and all liquid flowed from Sophia's weeping, it follows that we must believe the mud consisted of Sophia's phlegm and rheum, which are the dregs of tears, just as mud is what settles out of water. So the Demiurge moulds man and animates him with his breath. So he will be both choic (earthy) and psychic, made after the image and likeness, a fourfold thing: the choic is counted as the image (material, that is, though the Demiurge is not from matter), and the psychic as the likeness, for this is what the Demiurge is too. That makes two so far. Afterwards, they say, a fleshly surface was woven over the choic, and this is the “garment of skin”, subject to sensation.

There was in Achamoth, from the substance of her mother Sophia, a certain private fund of spiritual seed, which Achamoth herself had in turn deposited in her son the Demiurge, without his even knowing it. Hear the industry of this clandestine providence. She had deposited and hidden it for this purpose: that when the Demiurge presently imparted a soul to Adam from his own breath, that spiritual seed too might be channelled along with it through the soul, as through a pipe, into the choic; and so, gestated in the material body as in a womb and grown up there, it might be found fit to receive the perfect Word at some future time. So while the Demiurge commits the offshoot of his soul to Adam, the spiritual man lay hidden, inserted into his breath and brought into the body along with it; for the Demiurge knew his mother's seed no more than his mother herself. This seed they call Church, a mirror of the Church above and the rating of the (spiritual) man, so that they derive the spiritual man from Achamoth, as they derive the psychic from the Demiurge, the choic by substance …, the material by flesh. You have a new, a fourfold Geryon.

So they also divide the outcome for each: for the material, that is, the fleshly, which they also call “left”, certain destruction; for the psychic, which they call “right”, an uncertain end, since it wavers between the material and the spiritual and is bound to go wherever it has most inclined. The spiritual, however, is sent out as a companion to the psychic, so that it may be educated with it and exercised in its dealings; for the psychic, they say, needed teachings perceptible to the senses as well. For this the equipment of the world was provided; for this the Soter too was presented in the world, monstrous in yet another composition. They want him to have put on first-cuts of those substances whose sum he was going to bring back to salvation: so that he received the spiritual from Achamoth, and the psychic from the Demiurge, namely the Christ whom he presently put on; but the bodily, built from psychic substance by a marvellous and inexpressible device of reason, he bore meanwhile for the sake of his mission, so that he might be subject, though unwillingly, to being met and seen and touched and to dying; but there was nothing material in him, since that is foreign to salvation. As if he were needed by anyone other than one who needs salvation! And all this so that, by alienating the condition of our flesh from Christ, they may drive it from the hope of salvation too.

Now I give their account of Christ, into whom some insert Jesus with as much licence as they use in cramming the spiritual seed into the psychic along with the breath, stuffing in certain sausage-fillings of their inventions about both men and their gods: that the Demiurge too has his own Christ, a son by nature, and psychic, put forth by him, proclaimed by the prophets, placed within questions of prepositions, that is, born through a virgin, not of a virgin; because, conveyed into the virgin, he came forth in the manner of passing through rather than of being begotten, through her, not from her, finding in her not a mother but a way. Upon this Christ, then, Jesus flew down at the sacrament of baptism in the likeness of a dove. But there was also in Christ a seasoning of spiritual seed from Achamoth, so that the rest of the stuffing should not go stale, of course. For after the figure of the principal Tetrad they pack him with four substances: the spiritual from Achamoth, the psychic from the Demiurge, the bodily and inexpressible, and that of the Soter, that is, the dove's. And the Soter remained in Christ impassible, unhurtable, ungraspable. In fact, when it came to the arrest, he left him, at the hearing before Pilate. Likewise the mother's seed did not admit injuries either, being equally beyond subjection and unknown even to the Demiurge himself. But the psychic and fleshly Christ suffers, as a sketch of the higher Christ, who, in forming Achamoth with a form of substance, not of knowledge, had leaned on the Cross, that is, on Horos. So they press everything into images; plainly they themselves are imaginary Christians.

Meanwhile the Demiurge, still ignorant of everything (or, if he too preached something through the prophets, not understanding even this work of his, for they divide the patronage of prophecy too among Achamoth, (the) seed, and the Demiurge), when he learned of the Soter's coming, ran up quickly and exultantly with all his forces, the centurion from the gospel; and, enlightened by him about everything, he learns also his own hope, that he is to succeed to his mother's place. So from then on, free of care, he carries on the administration of this world, chiefly for the sake of protecting the church, for as long a time as is needed …

Now, to conclude, I shall gather from scattered places what they teach about the arrangement of the whole human race. Having professed at the beginning a threefold nature, yet united in Adam, they then divide it by the particular properties of kinds, taking the occasion for such a distinction from Adam's own descendants, who were divided in three by moral differences too: Cain and Abel (and) Seth. These, as the springs, so to speak, of the human race, they draw off into as many types of nature and of destiny: the choic, fallen away from salvation, they refer to Cain; the psychic, left to weigh a middling hope, they assign to Abel; the spiritual, prejudged for certain salvation, they store away in Seth. So too they distinguish souls themselves by a twofold property, good and bad: according to the choic state from Cain and the psychic from Abel. The spiritual element from Seth they add on as something that comes upon them, no longer a nature but a favour, which Achamoth rains down from above into good souls, that is, those enrolled in the psychic rank. For the choic kind, that is, bad souls, never receives the things of salvation; for they have pronounced the nature of a nature unchangeable and unreformable. So that grain of spiritual seed is sown small and tiny; but, trained by the one (whom) we mentioned above, it is increased and advanced by faith; and by this very thing such souls so outstripped the rest that the Demiurge, ignorant as he then was, made much of them. For he used to pick from their roll men both for kings and for priests. And now too these souls, if they have grasped full and perfect knowledge of this nonsense, being naturalized by kinship with the spiritual condition, will obtain certain salvation, indeed salvation owed to them in every way.

And so they think neither works necessary for themselves, nor do they observe any duties of discipline, evading even the necessity of martyrdom by whatever interpretation they please. For this rule, they say, was laid down for the psychic seed: that the salvation which we do not possess by the privilege of our state we must work out by the support of our actions. For to us, who are of imperfect essence, belongs enrolment in this seed, since we know Theletus, and we are of course reckoned an abortion, as their mother was. And for us indeed it is woe if we exceed the yoke of discipline in anything, if we grow sluggish in works of holiness and righteousness, if we choose to confess somewhere else, I know not where, and not under the powers of this world before the tribunals of governors. But let them claim their nobility from the looseness of their life and their diligence in sins, with Achamoth flattering her own, since she too advanced by sinning. For indeed, for the sake of honouring the marriages above, it is enjoined among them always to meditate on and celebrate the mystery of cleaving to a companion, that is, a woman; otherwise, they say, whoever has lodged in the world and not loved a woman nor joined himself to her is degenerate and not a legitimate son of the truth. And what will the eunuchs do, whom we see among them?

It remains to speak of the consummation and the distribution of the reward. When Achamoth has pressed out the whole mass of her seed, then has begun to gather it into the barn, then, when it has been taken to the mills and ground to flour, has hidden it in the leather trough of dough until the whole is leavened, then the consummation will press on. First of all, then, Achamoth herself will be transferred from the middle region, from the second storey, to the top. Restored to the Pleroma, she is at once received by that composite Soter, her bridegroom of course, (and) the two will become a new married couple (this will be the bridegroom (and bride) in the Scriptures), and the Pleroma will be the bridal chamber. For you would think that when one moves from place to place, the Julian laws also come into play. Likewise, as on a stage, the Demiurge too will then move from the heavenly Hebdomad to the higher places, into his mother's garret, now empty, knowing her now, though not seeing her. For if that was how it was, he would have preferred to remain ignorant for ever.

The human race will go to this end: the choic and material stamp wholly (to) destruction, because “all flesh is grass.” And the soul too is mortal among them, except the one that has found salvation by faith. The souls of the righteous, that is, ours, will be sent across to the Demiurge, into the resting-places of the middle region (we give thanks; we shall be content to be counted with our God), since nothing of the psychic rank is admitted into the palace of the Pleroma, only the spiritual swarm of Valentinus. There, then, first the men themselves, that is, the inner men, will be stripped (and to be stripped is to lay aside the souls in which they seemed to be clothed), and they will give these back to their Demiurge, while they themselves will become wholly intellectual spirits, liable neither to being held nor to being seen, and so will be received invisibly into the Pleroma. Stealthily, if that is how it is. What next? They will be distributed to the angels, the Soter's bodyguards. As sons, you think? Not at all. As attendants, then? Not even that. As images? If only even that! As what, then, if one may say it without shame? As brides. Then they will play among themselves at the rape of the Sabines over their marriages. This will be the reward of the spiritual, this the prize for believing. Useful fables indeed, so that Marcus or Gaius, bearded in this flesh and in this soul a stern husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and certainly, which is enough, a male, in the bridal chamber of the Pleroma by an angel (by keeping silent I have already said it), and perhaps may bear some Onesimus Aeon! For conducting these nuptials properly, instead of torch and bridal veil, I suppose, that secret fire will then break out, and, having laid waste the whole of substance, will itself, when everything has been burned to ashes, end in nothing; and there will be no more fable. But let me not be rash, I who have betrayed so great a mystery even in mocking it. I must fear lest Achamoth, who did not want to be known even by her son, go mad; lest Theletus be angry; lest Fortunata be embittered. And yet I am a man of the Demiurge: after my departure I have a place to turn aside to, where there is no marrying at all; where I (am) to be clothed over rather than stripped; where, even if I am stripped, I am reckoned to my own sex, counted with the angels as neither a he-angel nor a she-angel. No one will do anything to me, since even then they will find me a male.

Finally, as a kind of closing tune after so long a fable, I shall bring forward also those points which, so that they would not disturb the order or scatter the reader's attention by interruption, I preferred to put off to this place: the versions commended in one way and another by Ptolemy's improvers. For there arose from his own school disciples above their master, who fastened on their Bythos a double marriage: Thought and Will. For Thought alone was not enough, since by it he could have produced nothing. From the two the second pair was put forth most easily, Monogenes (and) Truth: Truth female, in the image of Thought; Monogenes male, in the image of Will. For the force of will, as that which gives effect to thought, holds the rank of manhood.

Others, more modest, remembering the honour due to divinity, and wishing to remove from him even the disgrace of a single consort, preferred to assign no sex to Bythos; and perhaps they speak of him in the neuter gender, as “it-god”, not “he-god”. Others, on the contrary, say more: that he is both male and female, lest the annalist Fenestella think the Hermaphrodite is found only among the people of Luna.

There are some who maintain for Bythos not the first place but a later one, setting an Ogdoad before all things, itself too derived from a Tetrad, but with other names. For they place first Proarche, second Anennoetos, third Arrhetos, fourth Aoratos. From Proarche, then, came forth, in first and fifth place, Arche; from Anennoetos, in second and sixth place, Acataleptos; from Arrhetos, in third and seventh place, Anonomastos; from the Invisible, in fourth and eighth place, Agennetos. What reason arranges it so that each is born in two places, and places so far apart, I would rather not know than learn. For what is right in things put forth so perversely?

How much better are those who, clearing away all this tedium, wanted no Aeon built up from another by steps (real Gemonian steps), but had this eight-horse team struck out at one go from the Propator and his Ennoia, the napkin dropped once, as they say. In fact they take their names from the very movement of things. “When he thought to bring forth,” they say, “for this he was called Father; when he brought forth, because he brought forth truly, for this it was called Truth; when he wished himself to be proved, for this he was declared Man; and those whom he had thought of beforehand, when he brought them forth, were then named Church. Man uttered the Word (and this is the firstborn Son), and Life was joined to the Word, and the first Ogdoad was complete.” But this tedium is a small one.

Hear other clever notions, now in a tamer spirit, from a more distinguished master among them, who by his pontifical authority decreed as follows: “There is,” he says, “(before all things) Proarche, unthinkable, unspeakable, (and) unnameable, which I name Monotes. With it was another power, which I also call Henotes. Monotes and Henotes, that is, Solitude and Unity, since they were one, put forth, without putting forth, the intellectual, unbegettable, invisible beginning of all things, which language has called (Monad). With it is a consubstantial power, which he calls Union. These powers, then, Solitude, Unity, (Singularity), and Union, propagated the other emissions of Aeons.” What a difference! Change Union and Unity and Singularity and Solitude however you like: it is one.

Secundus is now more humane, as being briefer: he divides the Ogdoad into two Tetrads, right and left, light and darkness; only he will not have that deserting and defecting power derived from any of the Aeons, but from the fruits … come from substance.

About the Lord Jesus himself, what a diversity splits them! Some build him from the little flowers of all the Aeons; others contend that he consisted of the ten alone which Word and Life put forth, and that this is why the titles of Word and Life met in him; others again say rather from the twelve, the offspring of Man and Church, and that this is why he is called Son of Man after his grandfather; others that he was fashioned (by) Christ and the Holy Spirit, who were provided to establish the universe, and so is heir to his father's title. There are some who have conceived that he is to be called Son of Man for (no) other reason than that they presumed that the Father himself, by a great mystery of the name, called (himself) Man. And what more could you hope from faith in that God, with whom you are made equal in name? Such are the clever notions that sprout up among them from the overflow of the mother's seed. And so the doctrines of the Valentinians, growing on and on, have already run wild into the forests of the Gnostics.