Against Heresies 1.14.1–1.17.2

This Marcus, then, saying that he alone was the womb and receptacle of the Silence of Colorbasus, since he was only-begotten, brought forth in this way the seed that had been deposited in him. He says that the Tetrad itself came down to him from the highest, invisible and unnameable places in the form of a woman (since, he says, the world could not bear its male form), and showed him who she was and the origin of all things, which she had never revealed to anyone, either of gods or of men, and narrated it to him alone, saying: “When first the Father, who has no father, who is beyond thought and without substance, who is neither male nor female, willed that what was unspeakable in him should become spoken, and that what was invisible in him should be formed, he opened his mouth and uttered a Word like himself; and the Word, standing by, showed him what he himself was, since he had appeared as the form of the invisible. The utterance of the name came about thus: he spoke the first word of his name; it was Arche, and its syllable was of four letters. He joined to it the second, and this was of four letters. After that he spoke the third, and it was of ten letters. And the one after these he spoke, and it was of twelve letters. So the utterance of the whole name came to be of thirty letters and four syllables.” Each of the elements, he says, has its own letters, its own character, its own utterance, figures and images; and none of them sees the form of that of which it is an element; nor does each know even the utterance of its neighbour, but what it utters itself it names as though it named the whole. For each of them, being part of the whole, names its own sound as the whole, and they do not stop sounding until they come to the last letter of the last element, uttered singly. And he says that the restoration of all things will come when all things, coming into one letter, sound one and the same sound; and he holds that the image of this sound is the Amen we say together. These sounds, he says, are what form the Aeon who is without substance and unbegotten; and these are the forms which the Lord called angels, who unceasingly see the face of the Father.

The common and speakable names of the elements he called Aeons, words, roots, seeds, fullnesses and fruits; and he says that each of them, and what is proper to each, is contained and understood in the name Ecclesia. Of these elements, the last letter of the last element sent forth its voice, and its sound, going out, generated elements of its own after the image of the elements; from these, he says, the things here were set in order and those before them were generated. The letter itself, whose sound followed the sound downwards, he says was received back up by its own syllable to complete the whole; but the sound remained below, as if cast outside. The element itself, from which the letter with its utterance came down, he says is of thirty letters, and each of these thirty letters has in itself other letters, by which the name of the letter is named; and again others are named by other letters, and others by others, so that the multitude of letters falls away into infinity. You will learn more plainly what is meant in this way: the element Delta has five letters in it, D, E, L, T and A, and these letters again are written with other letters, and others with others. If, then, the whole substance of Delta falls away into infinity, as some letters generate others and follow one another in turn, how much greater must be the sea of letters of that element! And if one letter is so infinite, see the depth of letters of the whole name, of which the Sige of Marcus taught that the Propator consists. For this reason, too, the Father, knowing his own incomprehensibility, granted to the elements, which he also calls Aeons, that each of them should cry out its own utterance, since one alone cannot utter the whole.

As he was setting out these things, the Tetrad said to him: “I wish to show you Truth herself. For I have brought her down from the dwellings above, so that you may look on her naked and behold her beauty, and also hear her speak and admire her wisdom. See, then: her head above, Alpha and Omega; her neck, Beta and Psi; her shoulders with her hands, Gamma and Chi; her breast, Delta and Phi; her girdle, Epsilon and Upsilon; her belly, Zeta and Tau; her private parts, Eta and Sigma; her thighs, Theta and Rho; her knees, Iota and Pi; her shins, Kappa and Omicron; her ankles, Lambda and Xi; her feet, Mu and Nu.” This is the body of Truth according to the magician; this is the figure of the element, this the character of the letter. And he calls this element Man, and says it is the fountain of every word, the beginning of every voice, the utterance of all that is unspeakable, and the mouth of silent Sige. “And this is her body. But you, lifting the understanding of your mind higher, hear from the mouth of Truth the Word, Self-begetter and Father-giver.”

When she had said this, Truth looked at him, opened her mouth and spoke a word; and the word became a name, and the name is this which we know and speak, Christ Jesus; and when she had named it, she at once fell silent. When Marcus thought she would say something more, the Tetrad came forward again and said: “You thought the word you heard from the mouth of Truth contemptible. This which you know and think you possess is not an ancient name. For you have only its sound, but you do not know its power. Jesus is an episemon name, having six letters, known by all who belong to the calling. But that which is among the Aeons of the Pleroma, being manifold, is of another form and another type, and is understood by those who are akin to him, whose greatnesses are always with him.”

“Understand, then, that these twenty-four letters which we have are emanations, in image, of the three powers that contain the whole number of the elements above. For reckon the nine mute letters to belong to Father and Truth, because they are without voice, that is, unspeakable and unutterable; the semivowels, being eight, to Logos and Zoe, because they are as it were midway between the mutes and the vowels, and receive the emanation of those above them and the raising up of those below; and the vowels, which are seven, to Anthropos and Ecclesia, because the voice going forth through Anthropos formed all things; for the sound of the voice gave them form. So Logos and Zoe have eight, Anthropos and Ecclesia seven, and Father and Truth nine. But from the smaller number the one who was with the Father came down, sent to the place from which he had been separated, to correct what had been done, so that the unity of the Pleromas, having equality, might bring forth in all the one power that comes from all. And so the group of seven received the power of the eight, and the three places became alike in number, all being Ogdoads; and these, coming together three times, showed the number twenty-four.” And the three elements, which he says exist in conjunction with the three powers, making six, from which the twenty-four letters emanated, when quadrupled by the reckoning of the unspeakable Tetrad, make the same number, and these he says belong to the unnameable one. They are clothed by the three powers in the likeness of the invisible one; and the double letters we have are images of the images of these elements, and, counting them with the twenty-four letters, by the force of analogy they make the number thirty.

The fruit of this reckoning and arrangement, he says, appeared in the likeness of an image: he who after six days went up the mountain as the fourth and became the sixth, who came down and was held in the Hebdomad, although he was the episemon Ogdoad and had in himself the whole number of the elements. This the descent of the dove made manifest when he came to baptism, the dove being Omega and Alpha, for its number is eight hundred and one. And for this reason Moses said that man was made on the sixth day; and in the dispensation, too, it was on the sixth day, which is the Preparation, that the last man appeared for the regeneration of the first man; and the beginning and end of this dispensation was the sixth hour, at which he was fastened to the tree. For the perfect Nous, knowing that the number six has the power of making and of regeneration, made known to the children of light the regeneration that came about through him who was manifested as the episemon in that number. Hence also, he says, the double letters have the episemon number; for the episemon number, combined with the twenty-four elements, made up the name of thirty letters.

He used as minister, as Marcus's Sige says, the greatness of the seven numbers, so that the fruit of the self-willed thought might be manifested. “Understand,” she says, “this present episemon number as him who was formed after the episemon, who was as it were divided into parts, or cut off, and remained outside; who by his own power and prudence, through the emission that came from him, gave soul to this world of seven powers in imitation of the power of the Hebdomad, and made it to be the soul of this visible universe. He himself uses this work as though made by him of his own accord; but the rest, being imitations of the inimitable, serve the Enthymesis of the mother. And the first heaven sounds Alpha, the one after it Epsilon, the third Eta, the fourth, which is the middle of the seven, utters the power of Iota, the fifth Omicron, the sixth Upsilon, and the seventh, the fourth from the middle, cries out the element Omega”: so the Sige of Marcus affirms, who goes on at great length but says nothing true. “These powers,” she says, “all embracing one another together, sound and glorify him by whom they were emitted; and the glory of the sound is sent up to the Propator; and the sound of this glorification, carried down to the earth,” she says, “became the fashioner and begetter of the things that are on the earth.”

He offers as proof the infants now being born, whose soul, as soon as it comes out of the womb, cries out this sound of each element. So, he says, as the seven powers glorify the Word, so too the soul in infants, weeping and wailing, glorifies him. For this reason David also said, “Out of the mouth of infants and sucklings you have perfected praise,” and again, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” And for this reason, when the soul is in pains and calamities, it says “O” for its relief, as a sign of praise, so that the soul above, recognizing what is akin to it, may send help down to it.

So he has raved about the whole name of thirty letters, and about Bythus, who receives increase from its letters, and further about the body of Truth, which has twelve members, each member consisting of two letters, and about her voice, which she spoke without speaking, and about the analysis of the name that has not been spoken, and about the soul of the world and of man, insofar as they have the arrangement that is after the image. Next we shall relate how their Tetrad shows a power equal in number from the names, so that nothing may escape you, dearly beloved, of what has reached us of the things they say, as you have often asked of us.

Thus their all-wise Sige announces the generation of the twenty-four elements: with Monotes there is Henotes, from which come two emissions, as was said before, Monas and Hen, which, doubled, became four; for twice two is four. And again two and four put together showed the number six; and these six, quadrupled, generated the twenty-four figures. The names of the first Tetrad are understood as holy of holies, which cannot be spoken and are understood by the Son alone; the Father knows what they are. The others, which are named with gravity, honour and faith, are with him these: Arrhetos and Sige, Pater and Aletheia. The whole number of this Tetrad is twenty-four letters; for the name Arrhetos has seven letters, Seigē five, Patēr five, and Alētheia seven, which put together, twice five and twice seven, made up the number twenty-four. Likewise the second Tetrad, Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ecclesia, showed the same number of elements. And the speakable name of the Saviour, Iēsous, is of six letters, but his unspeakable name of twenty … in Christ the unspeakable is of thirty letters. And for this reason he says that he …

“But Jesus,” he says, “has this unspeakable origin. From the mother of all things, that is, the first Tetrad, the second Tetrad came forth in the place of a daughter, and an Ogdoad came to be, from which a Decad came forth; so there came to be eighteen. The Decad, joined to the Ogdoad and making it tenfold, produced the number eighty; and again, eighty multiplied by ten produced the number eight hundred; so that the whole number of the letters, proceeding from the Ogdoad into the Decad, is eight and eighty and eight hundred, which is Jesus. For the name Jesus, by the count of the Greek letters, is eight hundred and eighty-eight.” You have plainly, then, the origin of the supercelestial Jesus according to them. Hence also, they say, the Greek alphabet has eight units, eight tens and eight hundreds, showing the number eight hundred and eighty-eight, that is, Jesus, who consists of all numbers; and for this reason he is named Alpha and Omega, signifying his origin from all. And again thus: when the first Tetrad is added up into itself according to the progression of number, the number ten appeared; for one and two and three and four added together make ten, which is Iota; and this they will have to be Jesus. “But Christ,” he says, “is of eight letters, by which the first Ogdoad is signified, which, joined to Iota, generated the number eight hundred and eighty-eight. He is also called Son Christ,” he says, “that is, the Duodecad; for the name Huios has four letters and Chreistos eight, which together showed the greatness of the Duodecad. But before the episemon of this name appeared, that is, Jesus the Son, men were in great ignorance and error. But when the name of six letters was manifested, which was clothed in flesh so as to come down to the perception of man, having in itself both the six and the twenty-four, then, knowing him, they ceased from ignorance and went up from death into life, the name having become their guide to the Father of truth. For the Father of all willed to dissolve ignorance and destroy death; and the dissolving of ignorance was the knowledge of him. And for this reason the Man was chosen according to his will, arranged after the image of the power above.”

For the Aeons proceeded from the Tetrad, and in the Tetrad were Anthropos and Ecclesia, Logos and Zoe. From these, he says, powers emanated and generated Jesus, who was manifested on earth. The angel Gabriel filled the place of Logos, the Holy Spirit that of Zoe, the Power of the Most High that of Anthropos, and the Virgin showed the place of Ecclesia. And so, according to him, the man of the dispensation is generated through Mary, whom the Father of all, as he passed through the womb, chose through the Word for the knowledge of himself. And when he came to the water, there descended on him like a dove the one who had hastened back up and completed the number twelve, in whom was the seed of those who were sown together with him and who came down and went up with him. The power that descended he says was of the Father, having in itself the Father and the Son and the unnameable power of Sige, which is known through them, and all the Aeons. And this was the Spirit who spoke through the mouth of Jesus, who confessed himself the Son of Man and revealed the Father, and who, descending into Jesus, was united with him. And the Saviour of the dispensation, Jesus, he says, destroyed death, but Christ made known the Father. So Jesus, he says, is the name of the man of the dispensation, given in the likeness and figure of the Man who was about to descend into him; and when he received him, he had Anthropos himself and Logos himself, and the Father, and Arrhetos, and Sige, and Aletheia, and Ecclesia, and Zoe.

These things now go beyond “Iu, iu” and beyond “Pheu” and beyond every tragic cry and wail of grief. For who would not hate the wicked poet who composes such lies, when he sees truth made into an idol by Marcus, and that one branded with the letters of the alphabet? The Greeks confess that they received sixteen letters from Cadmus first, and that recently, compared with what is from the beginning, as the saying goes, “yesterday and the day before”; that afterwards, as time went on, they themselves invented at one time the aspirates and at another the double letters; and last of all, they say, Palamedes added the long vowels. Before these things came about among the Greeks, then, there was no truth! For according to you, Marcus, her body is later in time than Cadmus and those before him, and later than those who added the remaining letters, and later in time even than you yourself.

But who will put up with that Sige of yours, so full of words, who names the unnameable, expounds the unspeakable, and declares him who is unsearchable; who says that he whom you call incorporeal and without form opened his mouth and emitted the Word, as though he were one of the composite living beings; and that his Word is like him who emitted him and became the form of the invisible, and yet consists of thirty elements and four syllables? Then, according to the likeness of the Word, the Father of all, as you say, will consist of thirty elements and four syllables. Or again, who will put up with you as you shut up in figures and numbers, now thirty, now twenty-four, now only six, the Founder of all things, the Demiurge and Maker, the Word of God; as you cut him down into four syllables and thirty elements; as you bring down the Lord of all, who established the heavens, to the number eight hundred and eighty-eight, like the alphabet; as you divide the Father himself, who contains all things and is contained by none, into a Tetrad, an Ogdoad, a Decad and a Duodecad; and as you expound by such multiplications what is, as you yourself say, unspeakable and unknowable in the Father? And of him whom you call incorporeal and without substance you fashion the matter and substance out of many letters, generated one from another, having made yourself a Daedalus, an evil fashioner and craftsman of the highest power; and the substance you call indivisible you subdivide into mute, vowel and semivowel sounds, and by falsely ascribing what is mute among them to the Father of all and to his Thought, you have driven all who believe you into the height of blasphemy and great impiety.

Therefore, justly and fittingly, the divinely inspired elder and herald of the truth inveighed in verse against such rashness of yours, saying: “Maker of idols, Marcus, and inspector of portents, / skilled in astrology and the magic art, / by which you confirm the doctrines of error, / showing to those you lead astray signs, / the workings of apostate power, / which your father Satan grants you / to do by the angelic power of Azazel, / having you as forerunner of wickedness against God.” So far the God-loving elder. We, for our part, will try to set out briefly the rest of their mysteries, which are long, and to bring into the open what has long been hidden; for in this way they can easily be exposed and refuted by all.

Uniting into one the generation of the Aeons and the straying and finding of the sheep, these men who have brought everything down to numbers dare to announce it mystically, saying that all things consist of the Monad and the Dyad. Counting from the Monad up to four, they generate the Decad; for one and two and three and four, added together, generated the number of the ten Aeons. Again, the Dyad, going forward from itself up to the episemon, two and four and six, shows the Duodecad. And again, when we count likewise from the Dyad up to ten, the number thirty appears, in which are the Ogdoad, the Decad and the Duodecad. The Duodecad, then, because it had the episemon (the episemon following it), they call passion. And for this reason, since a fall took place in connection with the number twelve, the sheep frisked away and wandered off; for they say a defection took place from the Duodecad. Likewise they divine that one power departing from the Duodecad perished, and that this is the woman who lost the drachma, lit a lamp, and found it. So too the numbers left, nine for the drachma and eleven for the sheep, multiplied by each other, generate the number ninety-nine, since nine times eleven is ninety-nine. That is why they say Amen has this number.

I will not be slow to tell you how they interpret it in another way too, so that you may see their fruit on every side. They will have the letter Eta, with the episemon, to be the Ogdoad, since it stands in the eighth place from Alpha. Then again, reckoning the number of the letters themselves without the episemon and adding them up to Eta, they show the Triacontad. For if one begins from Alpha and ends at Eta, leaving out the episemon and adding together the increasing value of the letters, he will find the number thirty. For up to the letter Epsilon there are fifteen; then the number seven added to them makes twenty-two; and when Eta, which is eight, is added to them, it completes the wonderful Triacontad. And from this they show that the Ogdoad is the mother of the thirty Aeons. Since, then, the number thirty is united from three powers, made three times it gives ninety; and the Triad itself, multiplied into itself, generated nine; so the Ogdoad generated the number ninety-nine. And since the twelfth Aeon by departing left eleven above, they say accordingly that the pattern of the letters is set in the form of their account (for the eleventh among the letters is Lambda, which is the number thirty), and set after the image of the dispensation above: since from Alpha, without the episemon, the number of the letters themselves up to Lambda, added up according to the increase of the letters with Lambda itself, makes the number ninety-nine. And that Lambda, which is in the eleventh place in order, came down in search of its like, to complete the number twelve, and when it had found it was completed, is plain, they say, from the very shape of the letter. For Lambda, as though coming in search of its like, finding it and seizing it to itself, filled up the twelfth place, the letter Mu consisting of two Lambdas. For this reason, they say, through knowledge they flee the place of ninety-nine, that is, the deficiency, a type of the left hand, and pursue the one which, added to ninety-nine, has moved them over to the right hand.

You, dearly beloved, as you read through this, will, I know very well, laugh heartily at such swollen and clever folly of theirs. But they are worthy of mourning who proclaim so great a religion of God, and the greatness of the truly unspeakable power, and such great dispensations of God, by Alpha and Beta and by numbers so cold and so forcibly wrested. And as many as depart from the Church and assent to these old wives' fables are truly condemned by themselves; and Paul bids us avoid them after a first and second admonition. And John, the disciple of the Lord, extends their condemnation further, not wishing us even to bid them greeting: “For he who greets them,” he says, “shares in their most wicked works.” And rightly: “For there is no rejoicing for the ungodly, says the Lord.” But these men are ungodly beyond all ungodliness, who say that the Maker of heaven and earth, the one God Almighty, beyond whom there is no other God, was emitted from a deficiency which was itself made from another deficiency, so that according to them he is the emission of a third deficiency. Blowing at such an opinion and cursing it as it deserves, we must flee far from them; and the more they affirm these things and rejoice in their inventions, the more let us know that they are driven by the most wicked spirits of the Ogdoad; just as those who have fallen into a frenzy, the more they laugh and think themselves strong and do everything as though healthy, and some things as though more than healthy, the worse they are. So too these men, the more they are thought to be wise, the more they wear themselves out, shooting beyond the mark, and the less wise they are. For when the unclean spirit of ignorance goes out, and then finds them occupied not with God but with worldly questions, he takes seven other spirits more wicked than himself, makes their minds foolish, as though they could find out what is above God, and, having fitted them for being shut out, he has lodged in them the Ogdoad of ignorance of the most wicked spirits.

I wish to tell you also how they say the creation itself was fashioned by the Demiurge through the Mother, after the image of the invisible things, without his knowing it. First, they say, the four elements, fire, water, earth and air, were emitted as an image of the Tetrad above; and their operations, counted with them, that is, hot and cold, moist and dry, exactly portray the Ogdoad. From this they reckon ten powers thus: seven bodies carried round in a circle, which they also call heavens; then the circle that contains them, which they call the eighth heaven; then the sun and moon. These, being ten in number, they say are images of the invisible Decad that went forth from Logos and Zoe. The Duodecad is shown, they say, by the circle called the Zodiac; for the twelve signs most plainly portray, as by a kind of shadow, the Duodecad, the daughter of Anthropos and Ecclesia. And, they say, the heaven placed above, joined in the opposite direction to the burden of the universe, which is most swift, weighs it down at its very vault and checks its speed by its own slowness, so that it makes its circuit from sign to sign in thirty years; and this they call an image of Horos, who encircles their thirty-named Mother. The moon, too, going round her heaven in thirty days, signifies by the days the number of the thirty Aeons. And the sun, going round in twelve months and completing his circular return, shows the Duodecad by the twelve months. And the days themselves, having the measure of twelve hours, are a type of the invisible Duodecad. Further, they say that the hour, which is the twelfth part of the day, is adorned with thirty parts because of the image of the Triacontad. And the circumference of the Zodiac itself is three hundred and sixty degrees, each of the signs having thirty degrees; and so, they say, by the circle the image of the connection of the twelve with the thirty is preserved. Further, saying that the earth is divided into twelve zones, and that in each zone it receives one power from the heavens by its descent and produces offspring like the power that sent down the influence, they assert that this is a most manifest type of the Duodecad and its sons.

Besides this, they say that the Demiurge wished to imitate the boundlessness, eternity, infinity and timelessness of the Ogdoad above, and since he could not portray its permanence and perpetuity, because he is the fruit of deficiency, he laid down its eternity in spans of time, seasons and numbers of many years, thinking to imitate its boundlessness by the multitude of times. Here, they say, since the truth escaped him, falsehood followed; and for this reason his work will meet destruction when the times are fulfilled.