The Demiurge and His Christ

She takes to prayer as well, in her mother’s manner. But Christ, who by now had no wish to leave the Pleroma, appoints the Paraclete as his deputy. So Soter is dispatched to her — and Soter has to be the same as Jesus, the one to whom the Father handed over supreme power over the whole body of Aeons by making them all subject to him, so that, as the apostle says, “by him all things were created” — with a retinue and escort of angels his own age and, one supposes, with the twelve fasces. Achamoth, quite bowled over by the pomp of his arrival, covered herself with a veil at once, moved at first by a dutiful sense of reverence and modesty; but afterwards she looks him over calmly, and takes in his fruitful equipage. With whatever energies she had drawn from the sight, she meets him with the greeting: “Hail, Lord!” [a]

At this point, I gather, he receives her, settles her and shapes her in knowledge, and scours her clean of all the outrages of Passion — though without cutting them away entirely, in the indiscriminate way that things had happened in the accidents that overtook her mother. The vices that had grown old and hardened by practice he shovels together; and when he has packed them into a single mass, he fixes them in a body of their own, so as to make up the bodily condition of Matter. Out of her inborn, bodiless passion he draws off a fitness of nature able to reach a matching of bodily substances answering to one another, so that a double condition of substances could be arranged: one full of evil through its faults, the other open to passion by way of her conversion. This is going to turn out to be Matter — the Matter that has drawn us up in battle order against Hermogenes and against everyone else who dares teach that God made all things out of Matter and not out of nothing.

Then Achamoth, delivered at last from all her troubles, goes on — brace yourself — to bear fruit on a grander scale. Warmed by the joy of so great an escape from her wretched state, and heated at the same time by the actual sight of the angelic lights, she became, in the middle of the emotion — one is ashamed to use such language, but there is no other way of saying what is meant — personally on heat for them, and promptly grew pregnant with a spiritual conception, stamped with the very image whose violence her joyous transport and the pleasure of her itching excitement had drunk in and printed on her. At length she gave birth, and up came a set of three natures out of three causes: one material, from her passion; another soul-made, from her conversion; the third spiritual, which had its origin in her imagination. [f]

Having grown more practiced at getting things done — by the authority which, we may well suppose, came to her from her three children — she decided to give each of the natures a form. The spiritual one she could not touch, since she was spiritual herself: sharing one and the same nature very largely disqualifies beings that are alike and of one substance from holding power over one another. So she sets to work on the soul-made nature alone, bringing in Soter’s instructions to guide her. And the first thing she does is a thing that cannot be described, or read, or listened to without a shudder at the blasphemy of it: she produces this God of ours — the God of everyone except the heretics, the Father and Maker and King of everything that is beneath him. For it is from him that they all come. But if they come from him and not rather from Achamoth, or if they come from her in secret, without his noticing her, then he was pushed into everything he did, like a jointed doll worked by strings from outside. [h]

In fact it was this very uncertainty over who was really doing the work that made them coin the mixed name Mother-Father for him, while his other titles were assigned strictly according to the standing and position of his works. They call him Father with respect to the soul-made substances, which they commend to the place of honor at his right hand; they name him Demiurge with respect to the material substances, which they consign to his left; and his title King marks his authority over both classes at once — over the universe, in fact.

And yet the names and the works do not match, though every one of the names is supposed to be suggested by the work. They should all have carried the name of the one who did the things — unless after all it turns out that she did not make them. For although they say Achamoth designed these forms in honor of the Aeons, they turn round and hand the work over to Soter as its author, saying that he worked through her, to the point of giving her the very image of the invisible and unknown Father — that is, the image which was unknown and invisible to the Demiurge; while he formed this same Demiurge as a copy of Nous, the son of Propator; and while the archangels, who were the Demiurge’s own work, were made to resemble the other Aeons. Now, when I am told of three such images, I ask: would you rather I did not laugh at these pictures by their wildly extravagant painter? At Achamoth, a female, as a picture of the Father? At the Demiurge, who does not know his mother, much less his father? At the picture of Nous, who does not know his father either, and at the ministering angels as facsimiles of their lords? This is drawing a mule from a donkey, and sketching Ptolemy from Valentinus. [k]

So the Demiurge, set outside the boundaries of the Pleroma in the shabby solitude of his everlasting exile, founded a new empire — this world of ours — by clearing away the confusion and marking off the difference between the two substances that made it up, the soul-made and the material. Out of bodiless elements he builds bodies: heavy and light, upright and stooping, heavenly and earthly. Then he finishes off the seven stages of heaven itself, with his own throne above them all. That is where he got his extra name Sabbatum, from the sevenfold nature of his dwelling; and his mother Achamoth got the title Ogdoad, on the model of the first Ogdoad. These heavens, though, they take to be intelligent, and sometimes they turn them into angels — as indeed they do the Demiurge himself. They also call Paradise the fourth archangel, because they fix it above the third heaven, whose power Adam shared when he stayed there among its little clouds and shrubbery. Ptolemy remembered the prattle of his boyhood perfectly well — that apples grow in the sea and fish on the trees — and on the same principle he assumed that nut trees flourish in the sky. [m]

The Demiurge does his work in ignorance, so perhaps he does not know that trees are only supposed to be planted in the ground. His mother knew all about it, of course. How is it, then, that she did not point the fact out, since she was actually carrying out an operation of her own? But while she was putting up so vast a building for her son by means of works that proclaim him father and god and king before the Valentinians ever dreamed up their conceits, why she refused to let those works be known even to him is a question I shall ask later on.

Meanwhile you are to hold that Sophia has the surnames Earth and Mother — “Mother Earth,” of course — and, what may make you laugh harder still, Holy Spirit as well. That is how they have heaped every honor on that female; a beard too, I suppose, not to mention the rest. Besides, the Demiurge had so little grip on things — on the score, mind you, of being unable to get near spiritual beings, made as he was of soul-stuff — that he imagined he was the only being there is, and said this to himself: “I am God, and beside me there is none else.” But for all that, he did at least know that he had not existed before. So he understood that he had been created, and that a creature of some sort or other must have a creator. How does it happen, then, that he took himself for the only being, when he was not sure — and when he did at any rate suspect that some creator existed? [o]

The hatred they feel for the devil is the more excusable, seeing that the peculiarly sordid character of his origin warrants it. For they suppose he had his beginning in that criminal excess of her sorrow, the same source from which they also derive the birth of the angels and the demons and all the wicked spirits. Yet they still affirm that the devil is the Demiurge’s work; they call him Munditenens, Ruler of the World; and they maintain that, being of a spiritual nature, he knows the things above better than the Demiurge, who is only a soul-made being. He earns from them the pre-eminence that every heresy provides for him. [p]

Their most eminent powers they pen inside these limits, as in a citadel. At the most elevated summit of all presides the thirtyfold Pleroma, with Horos marking off its boundary line. Beneath it Achamoth occupies the space between for her home, treading her son underfoot. For under her comes the Demiurge in his own Hebdomad — or rather the devil, who lodges in this world along with us, formed, as was said above, of the same elements and the same body, out of Sophia’s most profitable calamities. If it had not been for those, our breath would have had no room to draw air in and let it out again: air, that delicate garment of every bodily creature, that revealer of all colors, that instrument of the seasons — if Sophia’s sadness had not filtered it, just as her fear filtered soul-life and her conversion the Demiurge himself. Into all these elements and bodies fire was fanned. Now, since they have not yet explained to us where the original sensation of fire in Sophia came from, I will take it on myself to guess that its spark was struck out of the little tremors of her feverish grief. For you may be quite sure that, with all her vexations, she ran a good deal of a temperature. [q]

Such being their conceits about God — or the gods, if you like — what sort of fictions have they about man? After making the world, the Demiurge turns his hands to man, and picks for his material not any portion of “the dry land,” as they call it, which is the only stuff we know anything about (although at that time it was not yet dried, the waters not yet having separated from the earthy residue, and it only became dry afterwards), but the invisible sort of matter that philosophy dreams about, made of a fluid, meltable mixture. Where it came from I cannot imagine, since it exists nowhere. Now, since fluidity and meltability are qualities of liquid matter, and since everything liquid flowed from Sophia’s tears, we are forced to conclude that muddy earth is made of Sophia’s eye-rheum and sticky discharges, which are as much the dregs of tears as mud is the sediment of water. So the Demiurge molds man the way a potter molds his clay, and gives him life with his own breath. Made after his image and likeness, man will therefore be both material and soul-made. A fourfold creature! For as to his “image,” he must be reckoned clayey, that is to say material, although the Demiurge is not composed of matter; and as to his “likeness,” he is soul-made, for so is the Demiurge. There are two of his parts for you. Afterwards, they allege, a coating of flesh was laid over the clay foundation, and it is this tunic of skin that can feel. [r]

Besides this, there was in Achamoth a certain property belonging to a spiritual seed, taken from her mother Sophia’s substance; and Achamoth had carefully cut that quality off and planted it in her son the Demiurge, though he was quite unconscious of it. You may picture for yourself the industry of that clandestine arrangement. She had stored it away and hidden it for this purpose: that whenever the Demiurge came to give Adam life by breathing into him, he might at the same moment draw the spiritual seed off along with the life-breath and, as through a pipe, inject it into the clay — so that, fertilized there in the material body as in a womb and grown to full size, it might one day be found fit to receive the perfect Word. So when the Demiurge hands on to Adam a layered shoot of his own life, the spiritual man lay hidden, though put in by his breath and carried into the body at the same time, because the Demiurge knew no more about his mother’s seed than he did about his mother. To this seed they give the name Ecclesia, the Church — the mirror of the church above, and the full measure of man; and they trace that measure from Achamoth, just as they trace the soul-made nature from the Demiurge, the clayey material of the body from the primal substance, and the flesh from Matter. So what you have here is a new Geryon, only a fourfold monster instead of a threefold one. [t]

In the same way they assign each of them a separate end. To the material — that is, the fleshly — nature, which they also call “the left-handed,” they assign certain destruction. To the soul-made nature, which they also call “the right-handed,” they assign a doubtful outcome, since it swings between the material and the spiritual and is bound to fall at last on whichever side it has leaned to most. As for the spiritual, they say it goes into the making of the soul-made nature, so that it may be brought up in its company and schooled by living with it; for the soul-made nature needed training even by the senses. That is what the whole structure of the world was provided for, and that too is why Soter presented himself in the world — for the salvation of the soul-made nature. By yet another arrangement they will have it that he clothed himself, in some monstrous fashion, with the first cuttings of those substances, the whole of which he was going to restore to salvation: he took the spiritual nature from Achamoth, and afterwards took the soul-made being, Christ, from the Demiurge; while his bodily substance, built out of soul-stuff — with wonderful and indescribable skill — he wore as part of the plan, so that he might, against his own will, be capable of meeting people, of being seen and touched, and even of dying. But nothing material was taken on by him, since matter was incapable of salvation. As if he could have been needed more by anyone else than by the very people who needed saving! And all this so that, by cutting the condition of our flesh off from Christ, they may strip it of the hope of salvation as well. [x]

Now I bring forward what they say about Christ, on to whom some of them graft Jesus so freely that they stuff into him a spiritual seed together with a soul-breath. I will not undertake to describe these incongruous stuffings, which they have contrived for their men and for their gods alike. Even the Demiurge has a Christ of his own, his natural son: a soul-made thing produced by himself and announced by the prophets, whose standing has to be settled by prepositions — in other words, he was produced by way of a virgin rather than out of a virgin. On the ground that he came down into the virgin in the manner of a passage through her rather than a birth by her, he came into existence through her and not out of her; he found in her no mother, but nothing more than a road. So on this same Christ, they say, Jesus came down at the rite of baptism, in the likeness of a dove. [z]

And there was in Christ besides, coming from Achamoth, the seasoning of a spiritual seed — to keep the rest of the stuffing from going bad, of course. For after the precedent of the chief Tetrad they guard him with four substances: the spiritual one from Achamoth, the soul-made one from the Demiurge, the bodily one which cannot be described, and the one from Soter, or in other words the dove-substance. As for Soter — that is, Jesus — he remained in Christ to the last, unable to suffer, unable to be injured, unable to be laid hold of. By and by, when it came to the question of arrest, he left him during the hearing before Pilate. His mother’s seed likewise did not admit of being injured, being equally exempt from every outrage and undiscovered even by the Demiurge himself. It is the soul-made and fleshly Christ who does suffer, tracing out the pattern of the superior Christ, who for the purpose of producing Achamoth had been stretched out on a cross — that is, on Horos — in a real though not a knowable form. That is how they reduce everything to mere images; and Christians themselves turn out to be nothing but imaginary beings.

Meanwhile the Demiurge, still ignorant of everything — although he is actually going to have to make some announcement himself through the prophets, and is quite incapable of even that part of his duty, since they divide authority over prophecy between Achamoth, the Seed, and the Demiurge — no sooner heard of Soter’s arrival than he runs to him in haste and joy, with all his might, like the centurion in the Gospel. And being enlightened by him on every point, he learns from him what is in store for himself: that he is to succeed to his mother’s place. From then on he is free of all care, and carries on the administration of this world chiefly on the plea of protecting the church, for as long a time as may be necessary and proper. [ac]