Three Natures and the End

By way of conclusion I will now gather from various places what they claim about the arrangement of the whole human race. They began by setting out their view of man’s threefold nature — which in Adam’s case was still bound together in one — and then, after him, they go on to divide it into three, each part with its own defining marks, finding their opening for the distinction in Adam’s own children, where a threefold division of moral character turns up. Cain and Abel and Seth, who were in a sense the springs of the human race, become the fountainheads of just as many qualities of nature and kinds of essential being. The material nature, which had already been written off as beyond saving, they assign to Cain; the soul-nature, balanced between two opposite hopes, they locate in Abel; the spiritual, marked out beforehand for certain salvation, they store away in Seth. In this way they also make a twofold division among souls, good and bad, according to whether a soul holds the material condition that came from Cain or the soul-condition that came from Abel. Man’s spiritual state they bring in over and above the other two, from Seth, as something that simply arrives — not by nature but as a favor granted — so that Achamoth rains it down among the higher beings into good souls, that is, into the souls enrolled in the soul-class. But the material class — bad souls, in other words — they say never receive anything that saves; for they have pronounced that nature’s nature incapable of change or reform. [a]

This grain of spiritual seed, then, is unassuming and very small when it falls from her hand; but under her training it grows and advances into full conviction, as we have already said. And it was on this very account that those souls so far surpassed all the rest that the Demiurge, ignorant as he still was at that stage, held them in high esteem. It was from their register that he had been in the habit of picking out men to be kings and priests. And these same men now, once they have attained a full and complete knowledge of these silly notions of theirs, will obtain a salvation that is certain — owed to them, in fact, on every count — since they are already naturalized citizens in the brotherhood of the spiritual state.

This is why they think works unnecessary for themselves, and observe none of the duties laid on them, dodging even the demand of martyrdom on whatever pretext happens to suit them. That rule, they say, is imposed on the soul-seed, so that the salvation we do not hold as a privilege of our condition we may earn by our own conduct. On us, whose nature is incomplete, the brand of this soul-seed is stamped, because we are reckoned to have sprung from the loves of Theletus, and so to be an abortion, just as their mother was. But woe to us, of course, if we should slip at any point out of the yoke of discipline, if we should grow slack in works of holiness and justice, if we should want to make our confession somewhere else — anywhere at all, I have no idea where — and not in front of the powers of this world, at the tribunals of the chief magistrates! As for them, they can prove their high birth by the looseness of their lives and their industry in sin, since Achamoth fawns on them as her own; she too found sin no unprofitable line of work. And it is a settled point among them that, in order to do honor to the marriages above, a man must always contemplate and celebrate the mystery by clinging to a companion — that is, to a woman. Otherwise they count him degenerate, and no lawful son of the truth, if he spends his life in the world without loving a woman or joining himself to one. Then what is to become of the eunuchs one sees among them? [e]

It remains for us to say something about the end of the world and the handing out of rewards. As soon as Achamoth has brought in the whole harvest of her seed and gone on to gather it into her barn — or, once it has been carried to the mill and ground into flour, has hidden it in the kneading trough with yeast until the whole lot is leavened — then the end will come on in a hurry. First of all Achamoth herself moves out of the middle region, up from the second level to the highest, since she is restored to the Pleroma. She is taken at once by that put-together Soter as his bride, naturally, and the two of them then celebrate a fresh wedding. This must be the bridegroom of Scripture, the Pleroma of betrothals — you might suppose the Julian laws were getting in the way, with all these removals from one address to another. In the same way the Demiurge will then shift his own stage from the sevenfold heaven up to the higher regions, into his mother’s now vacant upper room: knowing her by that time, though without seeing her. (A happy coincidence!) For if he had once caught sight of her, he would have preferred never to have known her. [i]

As for the human race, its end will run like this. Everything that carries the clay-born and material stamp meets with total destruction, because “all flesh is grass” — and the soul of mortal man is included in that, except where it has found salvation by faith. The souls of righteous men, that is to say our souls, will be conveyed to the Demiurge in the dwellings of the middle region. We are duly grateful: we will be content to be classed with our own god, since that is where we came from. Into the palace of the Pleroma nothing of the soul-nature is admitted — nothing but the spiritual swarm of Valentinus. There the first item of business is the stripping of the men themselves, that is, of the men inside the Pleroma. The stripping consists of taking off the souls they seem to be wearing, which they hand back to their Demiurge just as they got them from him. They then become purely intellectual spirits — nothing that can be laid hold of, nothing that can be seen — and in that state are let back into the Pleroma unseen; on the sly, if the idea can be entertained. And then what? They are handed round among the angels who wait on Soter. As sons, you suppose? Not at all. As servants, then? No, not even that. Well, as ghosts? If only it were nothing worse! In what capacity, then, if you are ashamed to tell us? As brides. So they will end their Sabine rapes by making them legal weddings. This is to be the prize of the spiritual, this the payment for their faith! [n]

Stories like this have their uses. Even though you are only a Marcus or a Gaius, full-grown in the same flesh as the rest of us, with a beard and the other proofs of it — a stern husband, maybe, a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather; never mind what, so long as you are male — you may perhaps, in the bridal chamber of the Pleroma (I have already said it by saying nothing), even become the parent, by an angel, of some Aeon of high number. For the proper celebration of this wedding I suppose that, instead of the torch and the veil, that secret fire is to break out which, after laying waste the whole existence of things, will at last be reduced to nothing itself, once everything has been burned to ashes; and then their story too will be over. But no doubt I am a reckless man myself, for exposing so great a mystery in so mocking a way. I ought to be afraid that Achamoth, who would not make herself known even to her own son, will go out of her mind; that Theletus will fly into a rage; that Fortune will be annoyed. But I am still the Demiurge’s own liegeman. I have to go back after death to the place where there is no more giving in marriage; where I have to be further clothed rather than stripped; where, even if I am stripped of my sex, I am ranked with the angels — not a male angel, and not a female one. There will be no one to do anything against me, nor will they find any male vigor in me then.

Now at last, by way of an encore after so long a story, I will bring out the points I preferred to save for this place rather than break the thread and distract the reader by breaking it. They have been put forward in various forms by the men who have improved on Ptolemy’s teaching. For his school has produced “disciples above their master,” who have given their Bythus two wives — Thought and Will. Thought by herself was not enough to produce any offspring, though with two wives fathering children came very easily to him. The first of them bore him Only Son and Truth. Truth was female, after the likeness of Thought; Only Son was male, taking after Will. For it is the strength of Will that supplies the masculine nature, since she is what makes Thought effective. [v] Others, of cleaner mind and careful of God’s honor, have preferred to assign Bythus no sex at all, in order to clear him of the disgrace of even a single marriage; which is very likely why they speak of “this divine thing” in the neuter rather than “this god.” Others, on the other hand, call him both masculine and feminine — so that the worthy chronicler Fenestella need not suppose that a hermaphrodite was to be found only among the good people of Luna. [y]

There are some who do not claim the first place for Bythus but only a lower one. They put their Ogdoad in the front rank — an Ogdoad itself derived from a Tetrad, though under different names. They set Pro-arche (Before the Beginning) first, Anennoetos (Inconceivable) second, Arrhetos (Unspeakable) third, Aoratos (Invisible) fourth. Then, they say, out of Pro-arche came Arche (Beginning), holding the first place and the fifth; out of Anennoetos came Acataleptos (Ungraspable), the second and the sixth; out of Arrhetos came Anonomastos (Nameless), the third and the seventh; out of Aoratos came Agennetos (Unborn), the fourth and the eighth. By what method he arranges for each of these Aeons to be born in two places, and at such intervals as that, I would rather not know than be told. What can be sound in a system put forward with details as absurd as these? [z]

How much more sensible are those who throw out all this tiresome nonsense and refuse to believe that any one Aeon has come down from another by steps like these — steps that are Gemonian and nothing else — holding instead that at a given signal the eightfold emanation we have heard about issued all at once from the Father and his Ennoea, his Thought; that in fact they get their names from nothing but his own movements. When, as they tell it, he thought of producing offspring, he gained on that account the name Father. After producing, because what he had produced was true, he received the name Truth. When he wanted to be shown, he was announced on that account as Man. Those whom he had conceived beforehand in his thought, when he produced them, were then called Church. As man he uttered his Word, and so this Word is his firstborn Son; and to the Word was added Life. By that process the first Ogdoad was completed. All the same, this whole tiresome story is utterly poor and feeble. [aa]

Now listen to some further conjuring tricks, from a teacher who is a great man among them and who has delivered his rulings with something very like priestly authority. They run as follows. “Before all things comes Pro-arche, the inconceivable and unspeakable and nameless, which I for my own part call Monotes, Solitude. Associated with it was another power, to which I also give the name Henotes, Unity. Now since Monotes and Henotes — Solitude and Union, that is — were only one being, they produced, and yet not by way of production, the intellectual, unborn, invisible beginning of all things, which human speech has called the Monad. This has inherent in itself a power of the same substance as itself, which it calls Unity. And these powers, Solitariness or Solitude and Unity or Union, propagated all the other emanations of the Aeons.” A wonderful distinction, to be sure! Whatever change Union and Unity may go through, Solitariness and Solitude stands profoundly supreme. Whatever name you give the power, it is one and the same. [ac]

Secundus is a little more human, being briefer: he divides the Ogdoad into a pair of Tetrads, one on the right hand and one on the left, the one light and the other darkness. Only he is unwilling to derive the power that revolted and fell away from any one of the Aeons; he derives it from the fruits that came out of their substance. [af] Now about the Lord Jesus himself — into how great a variety of opinion they are split! One party makes him up out of the blossoms of all the Aeons. Another will have it that he is made only of the ten produced by the Word and Life, which is why the titles of the Word and Life were fittingly transferred to him. Others say he sprang rather from the twelve, the offspring of Man and Church, and that this is why he was called “Son of man.” Others again maintain that he was formed by Christ and the Holy Spirit, whose business it is to see to the establishment of the universe, and that he inherits his Father’s title by right. And there are some who have imagined that a different source must be found for the title “Son of man,” since they have had the nerve to call the Father himself Man, on account of the deep mystery of that title — so that what more can you hope for on the subject of faith in that [ag]