Miscellanies 2.8.38

Is ignorance, then, among good things or bad? If among good things, why does it cease through astonishment? And the minister, the preaching, and the baptism are superfluous for them. But if among bad things, how is evil the cause of the best things? For if ignorance had not existed before, the minister would not have come down, nor would astonishment have seized the Ruler, as they themselves say, nor would he have received a beginning of wisdom from fear for the separating of the elect and of the worldly. And if fear of the preexisting Man made the angels plot against their own formation, because the invisible seed of the substance from above was set in the thing created, then either they were jealous from an empty supposition, which is unlikely, since angels would then have become the destroyers of the creation entrusted to them, as of a child of their own, and would stand convicted of complete ignorance; or they were moved as being held by foreknowledge, but then they would not have plotted against what they foreknew, when they made the attempt, nor would they have been terrified at their own work, having understood the seed from above by foreknowledge; or, finally, they dared it trusting in knowledge. But this too is impossible: that, having learned the difference, they should plot against the Man in the Pleroma, and moreover against the one after the image, in whom they had received the archetype, and, together with the rest of the knowledge, incorruptibility.