Against the Valentinians 20–39

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.