The Dove and the Serpent

The Valentinians are beyond question a very large body of heretics. They take in a great many people who have deserted the truth — people with an appetite for fables and no discipline to hold them back — and there is nothing they care about so much as hiding what they preach. If men who hide their teaching can be said to preach it at all. The fussy care with which they guard their doctrine is the fussy care of a guilty conscience. Their disgrace is proclaimed in the very earnestness with which they assert their religion. [c]

Now take those Eleusinian mysteries, which are themselves the heresy of Athenian superstition: it is their secrecy that is their disgrace. So they make every approach to their society an ordeal first; they require a long initiation before they seal a man in; they demand five years of instruction of their fully initiated — all so that by holding back full knowledge they can build up their members’ opinions, and can seem to raise the standing of their mysteries in proportion to the craving they have already created for them. Then comes the duty of silence. What takes so long to find is carefully guarded. And the whole of the divinity is there in the inner sanctuary. At last there is revealed to the fully initiated everything they have longed for: the entire secret of the tongue that may not speak, a model of the male organ. But that whole staging, sheltering under nature’s respectable name, uses a figure forced into service to cover an actual sacrilege, and then pleads empty images as its excuse for a lie.

The heretics we are now taking up, the Valentinians, have put on Eleusinian seductions of their own in exactly the same way, consecrated by a deep silence, with nothing heavenly about them but their refusal to speak. Using the sacred names and titles and arguments of the true religion, and drawing on the rich suggestiveness of Holy Scripture — for where there are many springs, many errors may well flow — they have manufactured the emptiest and foulest fiction to suit what men are easily fond of.

Put honest, straightforward questions to them and they answer with a hard look and a knotted brow: “The subject is deep.” Press them with subtle questions and they take refuge in the ambiguities of their double tongue and claim to hold the same faith you do. Let them see that you understand their opinions and they insist that they know nothing themselves. Close with them in argument and they wreck the victory you were hoping for by cutting their own throats. Not even to their own disciples do they hand over a secret before they have made sure of them. They have the knack of persuading people before they teach them — though truth persuades by teaching, and does not teach by first persuading.

This is why they brand us as simple people — merely simple, and not wise as well, as though wisdom had to be missing wherever simplicity is present. But the Lord joins the two together: “Be wise as serpents and simple as doves.” Now if we are reckoned foolish because we are simple, does it follow that they are not simple because they are wise? The men who are not simple are the most perverse of all, exactly as the men who are not wise are the most foolish. And yet, if I have to choose, I would take the second condition as the smaller fault. It is perhaps better to fall short in the quantity of one’s wisdom than to be bad in its quality — better to be wrong than to make others wrong. [i]

Besides, the face of the Lord is waited for patiently by those who “seek him in simplicity of heart,” as the Wisdom says — not the Wisdom of Valentinus, but Solomon’s. Then again, it was infants who offered their blood as witness to Christ. Was it children who shouted “Crucify him”? They were neither children nor infants; that is, they were not simple. The apostle too tells us to become children again toward God, to be “children in malice” by our simplicity, while being “grown men in our understanding.” At the same time, as to the order in which wisdom develops, I have already granted that it flows out of simplicity.

In short: the dove has generally stood for Christ, and the serpent for the one who tempted him. The one has been from the very first the herald of God’s peace; the other has been from the beginning the spoiler of God’s image. And so simplicity by itself will be the better able to know God and to declare him, while wisdom by itself will rather do him violence and betray him.

So let the serpent hide himself as much as he can. Let him twist all his wisdom into the mazes of his own obscurity; let him live deep in the ground; let him work his way into holes out of sight; let him unroll his length through his own bends; let him crawl crookedly, and never show the whole of himself at once — the animal that shirks the light. Our dove, though: how simple even its house is! Always in high, open places, and always facing the light. As the symbol of the Holy Spirit it loves the East, the sunrise, that figure of Christ. [m]

Nothing makes truth blush except being hidden, because no one is ashamed to give it a hearing. No one will be ashamed to recognize as God the one whom nature has already recommended to him, the one he already perceives in all his works — the God who is imperfectly known for this reason only: that man has not thought of him as one, has named him in the plural, and has worshipped him in other shapes. Yet to bring yourself to turn from that crowd of gods to another crowd, to move from an authority you are at home with to one you do not know, to wrench yourself away from what is plain to what is hidden — that is to trip over faith on its very doorstep.

And suppose you are initiated into the whole fable. Will it not strike you that you have heard something very like it from your nurse when you were a baby, among the songs she used to get you off to sleep, about the towers of Lamia and the horns of the sun? But let a man come to the subject knowing the faith he learned elsewhere. As soon as he meets so many names of Aeons, so many marriages, so many offspring, so many exits, so many outcomes, so many good and bad fortunes of a divinity broken up and mutilated — will he hesitate for a moment to pronounce these “the fables and endless genealogies” that the apostle’s Spirit condemned in advance, while these seeds of heresy were already sprouting?

So they deserve to be reckoned men who have no simplicity and nothing but shrewdness. They bring these fables out only with difficulty, defend them only sideways, and never thoroughly instruct even the people they are teaching. That shows their cunning, if their lessons are disgraceful — or their unkindness, if the lessons are honorable. But we, who are the simple folk, know the whole of it. This is in fact the very first weapon we take up for the encounter: it uncovers their whole guilty secret and puts it on show. And in this we have the first sign of our victory, because merely to point out a thing concealed at such an outlay of artifice is to destroy it.

We know their actual origin, I say, and know it fully; and we are perfectly aware why we call them Valentinians, though they make a show of disowning the name. They have departed from their founder, true enough — but their origin is not destroyed by that, and even if it happens to be changed, the change itself gives evidence of the fact. [t]

Valentinus had expected to be made an overseer, since he was a capable man in both mind and speech. But another man got the position on the strength of the claim his confession of the faith had given him, and Valentinus was so indignant that he broke with the church of the true faith. Like the restless sort of spirit that, once ambition has roused it, usually catches fire for revenge, he turned all his strength to wiping out the truth; and, finding the track of a certain old opinion, he marked out a path of his own with the subtlety of a serpent.

Ptolemaeus came onto the same path afterwards. He separated out the names and the numbers of the Aeons into persons in their own right, though he kept them outside God; Valentinus had included them inside God’s own substance, as feelings and movements of his mind. Then side-tracks were struck off from there by Heracleon and Secundus and Marcus the magician. Theotimus worked hard at “the images of the law.” Valentinus himself was nowhere by now — and still the Valentinians take their name from Valentinus. Axionicus at Antioch is the only man today who gives any comfort to the memory of Valentinus, by keeping his rules in full.

But this heresy is allowed to shape itself into as many different forms as a prostitute, who is in the habit of changing her dress and rearranging it every day. And why not? Going over that spiritual seed of theirs in every man the way they do, then whenever they hit on some novelty they immediately call their own presumption a revelation and their own perverse ingenuity a spiritual gift. They will not have unity — only diversity. So it is quite clear that, once you set their habitual dissembling aside, most of them are in a divided state, ready to say of certain points of their own belief — and to say it sincerely: “That is not so.” “I take that in a different sense.” “I do not admit that.” By this variety, innovation is stamped on the very face of their rules; and on top of that they wear every plausible color that ignorance can put on.

My own path, though, runs along the original patterns laid down by their chief teachers, not with the self-appointed leaders of their miscellaneous followers. And no one anywhere will be able to say of us that we made up our own materials, since these have already been produced — both the opinions and the answers to them — in carefully written volumes, by so many eminently holy and excellent men. Not only men who lived before us, but men who were contemporaries of the founders of the heresy themselves: Justin, philosopher and martyr; Miltiades, the churches’ orator; Irenaeus, that very exact investigator of every doctrine; and our own Proculus, a model of chaste old age and Christian eloquence. I should like to follow all of them closely in every work of faith, and in this one in particular. [y]

Now if there are no heresies at all except the ones their refuters are supposed to have invented, then the apostle who predicted them must have been lying. But if there are heresies, they can be no others than the ones we are discussing. No writer can be supposed to have so much time on his hands that he manufactures materials he already has in hand.

So then — to keep anyone from being blinded by so many outlandish names, collected together, fitted up at will, and of doubtful meaning — let me explain, in this little book, where we undertake only to set out this mystery of theirs, how we intend to use them. Rendering some of these names out of Greek so that the word carries an equally obvious sense is not at all an easy business. With some others the genders do not match. Others again are better known in their Greek form. So for the most part we will use the Greek names, and their meanings will be given in the margins of the pages. The Greek will not go unaccompanied by the Latin equivalents either; only those will be written on the lines above, to mark which are the personal names — a thing made necessary by the ambiguity of the ones that can be taken in more than one sense. [ab]

I must put off all argument, and be content for now with simply setting the thing out. Still, wherever some scandalous feature seems to call for a beating, it must be stormed by all means, if only with a passing thrust. Let the reader take it as the skirmish before the battle: my aim will be to show where the wounds are rather than to cut deep gashes.

If laughter is raised anywhere, that is no more than the subject deserves. There are a great many things that deserve to be refuted in a way that spends no seriousness on them at all. Empty and silly matters are met most fittingly by laughter. Even truth may laugh, because truth is in high spirits; it may play with its enemies, because it has nothing to fear. Only we must take care that its laughter is not unseemly, and so be laughed at itself; but wherever its mirth is decent, indulging it is a duty. And so, at last, I begin.

Ennius, the Roman poet, was the first of them all, and he spoke simply of “the spacious dining halls of heaven” — either because of their height, or because he had read in Homer about Jupiter banqueting up there. But with our heretics it is astonishing what floors upon floors, what heights upon heights, they have hung up and raised and spread out as a dwelling for each separate god of theirs. Even our own Creator has had Ennius’s dining halls arranged for him in the style of private rooms, chamber piled on chamber, with as many staircases assigned to each god as there were heresies. The universe, in fact, has been turned into rooms to let. You would take these floors of the heavens for the separate lodgings of some Happy Isle, I do not know where. [ad]

And there the god even of the Valentinians has his dwelling, up in the attics. As to his essence they call him Aion Teleios, the Perfect Aeon; as to his person, Proarche (Before the Beginning) and Arche (The Beginning), and sometimes Bythus (Depth) — a name that could not be less suited to somebody who lives upstairs. They describe him as unbegotten, immeasurable, infinite, invisible, and eternal, as though by describing him as what we already know he ought to be they had thereby proved him to be a being who could be said to have existed before everything else. I lay it down that he is such a being; and about beings of this sort there is nothing I notice more obvious than this: the ones who are said to have been before all things — things, moreover, that are not their own — turn out to come after everything. Let it be granted, though, that this Bythus of theirs existed through the infinite ages of the past in the greatest and deepest repose, in the extreme rest of a placid and, if I may use the word, stupid divinity, of the sort Epicurus has laid down for us.

And yet, although they would have him be alone, they assign him a second person in himself and with himself: Ennoea (Thought), whom they also call both Charis (Grace) and Sige (Silence). Other things, as it happened, worked on him in this most agreeable repose to remind him that he needed by and by to produce out of himself the beginning of all things. This he deposits, in place of seed, in what serves as the genital region of the womb of his Sige. Conception is instantaneous. Sige becomes pregnant and is delivered — in silence, of course — and her offspring is Nous (Mind), very like his father and his equal in every way. He alone, in fact, can take in the measureless and incomprehensible greatness of his father. And so he is even called the Father himself, and the Beginning of all things, and, quite properly, Monogenes (Only-born). And yet not quite properly, since he is not born alone: a female came out along with him, whose name was Veritas (Truth). How much more suitably could Monogenes be called Protogenes, First-born, seeing that he was born first!

So Bythus and Sige, Nous and Veritas are alleged to be the first team of four of the Valentinian stable — the parent stock and origin of them all. For as soon as Nous received the function of procreating on his own account, he too produces out of himself Sermo (the Word) and Vita (the Life). If Life did not exist before that, then of course Life did not exist in Bythus — and a pretty absurdity it would be if Life did not exist in God! However, this offspring in turn bears fruit, its business being to begin the universe and to form the whole Pleroma: it procreates Homo (Man) and Ecclesia (the Church). There you have an Ogdoad, a double Tetrad, made out of the couplings of males and females: the cells, so to speak, of the first Aeons; the brother-and-sister marriages of the Valentinian gods; the plain register of heretical holiness and majesty; a mob — shall I say of criminals or of divinities? — and, in any case, the fountain of all the fruitfulness that comes after.