Against Heresies 2.28.1–2.29.3

Having, therefore, the rule itself, the truth, and the testimony about God set in the open, we ought not to cast away the firm and true knowledge of God by turning aside to one explanation of questions after another. Rather, directing the solution of questions to this standard, we should exercise ourselves in investigating the mystery and dispensation of the God who exists, and grow in the love of him who has done and does so much for us, but never fall away from the conviction by which it is most plainly proclaimed that he alone is truly God and Father, who made this world, formed man, and gave growth in his creation, calling him from his own lesser things to the greater ones that are with him; just as he brings an infant conceived in the womb out into the light of the sun, and stores the wheat in the barn after strengthening it on the stalk. But one and the same is the Demiurge who formed the womb and created the sun; and one and the same the Lord who brought up the stalk, increased and multiplied the wheat, and prepared the barn.

If we cannot find solutions for all the things sought in the Scriptures, let us still not seek another God besides him who is. For this is the greatest impiety. We ought to yield such things to God, who also made us, knowing most rightly that the Scriptures are perfect, since they were spoken by the Word of God and his Spirit; but we, inasmuch as we are lesser than and later than the Word of God and his Spirit, are to that extent in need of knowledge of his mysteries. And it is no wonder if we experience this in spiritual and heavenly things and in things that must be revealed, since even of the things at our feet (I mean the things in this creation, which we handle and see and which are with us) many have escaped our knowledge, and we commit these very things to God. For he must excel above all. For what if we try to explain the cause of the rising of the Nile? We say much, perhaps persuasive, perhaps not; but what is true, certain, and sure lies with God. The dwelling place of the birds, too, that come to us in springtime and at once withdraw in autumn, escapes our knowledge, though this happens in this world. What can we explain about the ebb and flow of the Ocean, though it is agreed that there is a definite cause? Or what can we declare about the things beyond it, what they are like? Or what can we say about how rains, lightnings, thunders, gatherings of clouds, mists, the bursting forth of winds, and the like are produced; or tell of the storehouses of snow and hail and of the things akin to them? What is the preparation of the clouds, what the state of the mist, what the cause by which the moon waxes and wanes, or what the cause of the difference of waters, metals, stones and the like? In all these things we shall indeed be talkative as we search out their causes; but he who makes them, God alone, is truthful.

If, then, even among the things of creation some lie with God and others have come into our knowledge, what harm is there if, of the things sought in the Scriptures (since the whole of Scripture is spiritual), we solve some by the grace of God and commend others to God, and that not only in this age but also in the age to come, so that God may always teach and man may always learn the things that are from God? As the Apostle also said that, when the other parts have been done away, these remain: faith, hope, and love. For faith toward our Master remains firm, assuring us that he alone is truly God, and that we should love God truly always, since he alone is Father, and that we should hope ever to receive and learn something more from God, because he is good and has boundless riches, a kingdom without end, and immeasurable instruction. If, then, in the way we have described, we commit some questions to God, we shall both keep our faith and continue without danger; all Scripture given to us by God will be found consistent with us; the parables will agree with what is said plainly, and what is said plainly will explain the parables; and through the many voices of the sayings one harmonious melody will be heard in us, praising in hymns God who made all things. For example, if anyone asks, “What was God doing before he made the world?” we say that this answer lies with God. That this world was made by God as a finished work, receiving a beginning in time, the Scriptures teach us; but what God did before this, no Scripture reveals. This answer, therefore, lies with God; and one ought not to wish to invent such foolish, undisciplined, and blasphemous emanations and, by thinking you have found the emanation of matter, to reject God himself who made all things.

For consider, all you who invent such things: since the Father himself alone is called God, who truly is, whom you call the Demiurge; since the Scriptures know him alone as God; and since the Lord confesses him alone as his own Father and knows no other, as we shall show from his own words — when you call this very one the fruit of a defect and the emission of ignorance, ignorant of the things above him, and whatever else you say about him, consider the greatness of the blasphemy against him who is truly God. You seem to speak gravely and honorably when you say that you believe in God; then, since you cannot at all show another God, you declare this very one in whom you say you believe to be the fruit of a defect and the emission of ignorance. This blindness and foolish talk comes to you from this: that you reserve nothing to God, but wish to announce the births and emissions of God himself, of his Ennoea, of the Word, of Life, and of Christ; and you take these from nowhere else than from human experience. You do not understand that in man, who is a composite living being, one may speak in this way, as we said before, of the mind of man and the thought (ennoea) of man: that from mind comes ennoea, from ennoea enthymesis, from enthymesis logos (but which logos? For among the Greeks the logos that is the ruling faculty which thinks is one thing, and the instrument by which the logos is uttered is another); and that a man is sometimes at rest and silent, and sometimes speaks and acts. But since God is wholly mind, wholly reason, wholly active spirit, wholly light, and always the same and existing alike, as it is both profitable for us to think of God and as we learn from the Scriptures, such affections and divisions will not fittingly be ascribed to him. For the tongue, being fleshly, cannot keep pace with the swiftness of the human mind, because the mind is spiritual; hence our word is stifled within and is uttered not all at once, as it was conceived by the mind, but in parts, as the tongue is able to supply it.

But God, being wholly Mind and wholly Logos, speaks what he thinks and thinks what he speaks. For his thought is Logos, and Logos is Mind, and the Mind that embraces all things is the Father himself. Whoever, then, speaks of the mind of God and assigns to the mind an emission of its own declares him to be composite, as though God were one thing and the principal Mind another. Likewise again with the Logos: whoever assigns to him the third emission from the Father is ignorant of his greatness, and indeed has separated the Logos far from God. The prophet says of him, “Who will declare his generation?” But you, divining his generation from the Father and transferring to the Word of God the emission of the human word, which is made by the tongue, are justly exposed by yourselves as knowing neither things human nor things divine.

But, irrationally puffed up, you boldly claim to know the unspeakable mysteries of God; whereas even the Lord, the very Son of God, granted that the Father alone knows the very day and hour of judgment, saying plainly, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the Son, but the Father alone.” If, then, the Son was not ashamed to refer the knowledge of that day to the Father, but said what is true, neither let us be ashamed to reserve to God the questions that are too great for us. For no one is above his master. If anyone, then, says to us, “How then was the Son emitted from the Father?” we tell him that no one knows that emission, or generation, or utterance, or disclosure, or by whatever name one may call his generation, which is unspeakable: not Valentinus, not Marcion, nor Saturninus, nor Basilides, nor angels, nor archangels, nor principalities, nor powers, but only the Father who begot and the Son who was born. Since, then, his generation is unspeakable, those who strive to declare generations and emissions are not in their right minds, promising to declare what is unspeakable. For that a word is emitted from thought and mind, all men certainly know. Those who devised emissions, then, have found nothing great, nor a hidden mystery, if they have transferred what everyone understands to the only-begotten Word of God; and him whom they call unspeakable and unnameable they declare, as if they themselves had been the midwives, giving the emission and generation of his first generation, likening him to the word of men that is emitted.

If we say the same about the substance of matter too, that God brought it forth, we shall not err. For we have learned from the Scriptures that God holds the primacy over all things. But whence or how he emitted it, no Scripture has set forth, nor ought we to fantasize, conjecturing endless things about God from our own opinions; this knowledge must be left to God. Just as the Lord leaves certain things to the Father (and what is the reason why he says that the day and hour are known to no one else but the Father alone?), so too the reason why, when all things were made by God, some transgressed and withdrew from subjection to God, while others, indeed most, persevered and persevere in subjection to him who made them, and of what nature are those that transgressed and of what nature those that persevere — this we must leave to God and his Word, to whom alone he said, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet.” But we are still living on earth and not yet sitting beside his throne. For though the Spirit of the Savior that is in him searches all things, even the depths of God, yet as for us, there are varieties of gifts, varieties of ministries, and varieties of workings; and we on earth, as Paul also says, know in part and prophesy in part. As, then, we know in part, so concerning all questions we must yield to him who gives us grace in part. That eternal fire has been prepared for transgressors, both the Lord said plainly and the rest of the Scriptures show. And that God foreknew that this would happen, the Scriptures likewise show, since he prepared from the beginning eternal fire for those who were to transgress; but the very cause of the nature of the transgressors no Scripture has reported, no apostle has said, and the Lord has not taught. This knowledge, then, must be left to God, as the Lord too leaves that of the hour and the day; and we must not run into such danger as to leave nothing to God, although we receive grace only in part. But when we seek things above us and beyond our reach, we must not come to such audacity as to lay open God and things not yet discovered, as though we had already found out, through the empty talk of emissions, God himself the Maker of all things, and assert that he had his substance from defect and ignorance, and so fabricate an impious argument against God.

Then, too, they have no testimony for their fiction, which was lately invented by them; but they try to make that fabulous narrative which they have contrived stand, sometimes by any numbers whatever, sometimes by syllables, occasionally by names, at times by the letters contained in letters, and sometimes by parables not rightly explained, or by certain conjectures. For if anyone seeks the reason why the Father, who shares all things with the Son, was declared by the Lord to be the only one who knows the hour and the day, he will not find at present any other reason more fitting, more becoming, or safer than this: that, since the Lord is the only true teacher, we may learn through him that the Father is above all. For “the Father,” he says, “is greater than I.” And so the Father has been declared by our Lord to be preeminent in knowledge too, to this end, that we also, as long as we are in the form of this world, may leave perfect knowledge and such questions to God, and lest perhaps, seeking to search out the depth of the Father, we fall into so great a danger as to ask whether there is another God above God.

But if anyone who loves contention contradicts what we have said, and what the Apostle reported, that we know in part and prophesy in part, and thinks that he has grasped the knowledge of all things not in part but universally — being some Valentinus, or Ptolemaeus, or Basilides, or one of those who say they have searched out the depths of God — let him not adorn himself with empty boasting and glory that he has known more than the rest about things that are invisible or cannot be shown; but let him diligently search out, and, learning from the Father, declare to us the causes of the things in this world which we do not know — for example, the number of hairs on his own head, the sparrows caught every day, and the other things we have not foreseen — so that we may believe him about greater things too. But if those who are “perfect” do not yet know the things in their hands, at their feet, before their eyes, and on the earth, and especially the arrangement of the hairs of their own heads, how shall we believe them about spiritual and supercelestial things, and about the things which with empty persuasion they affirm to be above God? So much, then, has been said by us about numbers, names, and syllables, about questions concerning things above us, and about their improper explanation of the parables, since more can be said by you yourself.

Let us return to the rest of their argument. They say that at the consummation their Mother will go back within the Pleroma and receive her bridegroom, the Savior; that they themselves, since they say they are spiritual, will be stripped of their souls, become intellectual spirits, and be brides of the spiritual angels; that the Demiurge, since they call him animal, will pass into the Mother's place; and that the souls of the righteous will rest in the place of the Middle, as animal beings. Saying that like is gathered to like, spiritual to spiritual, while material things remain among material things, they lay down things that contradict themselves, saying that souls pass into the Middle to their like no longer because of their substance but because of their conduct, since they say that the souls of the righteous pass there while those of the wicked remain in the fire. For if all souls pass into refreshment because of their substance, and all belong to the Middle by the very fact that they are souls, since they are of the same substance, then believing is superfluous, and the descent of the Savior superfluous as well. But if it is because of righteousness, then it is no longer because they are souls but because they are righteous. And if souls that would have perished had they not been righteous are saved by righteousness, righteousness is able to save bodies too; for why will it not save those which also shared in righteousness? For if nature and substance save, all souls will be saved; but if righteousness and faith save, why should they not save the bodies which, together with the souls, likewise begin to pass into corruption? For righteousness will appear either powerless or unjust in such a case, if it saves some things because of their sharing in it, but not others.

For it is plain that the works of righteousness are accomplished in bodies. Either, then, all souls will necessarily pass into the place of the Middle, and there is no judgment anywhere; or the bodies too, which shared in righteousness, will obtain the place of refreshment together with the souls which likewise shared in it, if indeed righteousness is able to bring there the things that shared in it. And then the doctrine of the resurrection of bodies, which we believe, will emerge as true and sure: that God, raising our mortal bodies that kept righteousness, will make them incorrupt and immortal. For God is better than nature, having in himself the will, because he is good; the power, because he is mighty; and the accomplishment, because he is rich and perfect.

But they contradict themselves in everything, laying down that not all souls pass into the Middle, but only those of the righteous. For they say that three kinds were emitted by the Mother naturally and according to substance: first, what came from perplexity, weariness, and fear, which is matter; second, what came from impulse, which is the animal; and what she brought forth after seeing the angels who are about Christ, which is the spiritual. If, then, what she brought forth enters wholly within the Pleroma because it is spiritual, and what is material remains below because it is material and will be consumed entirely when the fire within it blazes up, why will the animal not pass wholly into the place of the Middle, into which they also send the Demiurge? And what is it of theirs that will pass within the Pleroma? For they say that souls remain in the Middle, while bodies, because they have a material substance, are dissolved into matter and burned by the fire that is in it; and when their body has perished and the soul remains in the Middle, nothing of the man will be left to pass within the Pleroma. For the mind of man, his understanding, thought, mental intention, and the like are nothing other than the soul; they are movements and operations of the soul itself, having no substance without the soul. What, then, will there still be of theirs to pass into the Pleroma? For they themselves too, in so far as they are souls, remain in the Middle, and in so far as they are body, will burn with the rest of matter.