Sophia’s Passions and Plato’s Letter

Once there was a kind of peace and harmony among all the Aeons inside the Pleroma, it seemed good to them not only to have glorified the Father by being joined as pairs, but also to glorify him by an offering of fitting fruits. So all thirty Aeons agreed to send out one Aeon, the shared fruit of the Pleroma, to be a pledge of their unity and single-mindedness and peace. He alone was sent out by all the Aeons in the Father’s honor, and among them he is called the Shared Fruit of the Pleroma. That is how these things happened inside the Pleroma. And the Shared Fruit of the Pleroma who was sent out is Jesus — for that is his name — the great high priest. [a]

Sophia, though, was outside the Pleroma, searching for the Christ who had given her form, and for the Holy Spirit. She fell into a great terror that she would be destroyed if he separated from her — he who had given her form and held her together. She was seized with grief and fell into deep bewilderment as she turned it over: who was it that had given her form, what was the Holy Spirit, where had he gone, who had kept them from staying with her, who had begrudged her that glorious and blessed sight? Suffering like this, she turned to prayer and pleading with the one who had left her. While she was making her appeal, the Christ inside the Pleroma had mercy on her, and so did all the rest of the Aeons; and they sent out beyond the Pleroma the Shared Fruit of the Pleroma, to be a husband for Sophia who was outside, and to set right the sufferings she had gone through in her search for Christ.

So the Fruit arrived outside the Pleroma and found Sophia in the middle of those four first passions — fear and grief and bewilderment and pleading — and he set her feelings right. But while he was correcting them he saw that it would not do to destroy them, since by nature they are everlasting and belong to Sophia; and yet it was not fitting either that Sophia should go on living in the middle of such passions, in fear and grief and pleading and bewilderment. So, being an Aeon of that size and the offspring of the whole Pleroma, he made the passions leave her, and he gave them a substance of their own. He made fear into the essence of soul; grief, into material essence; bewilderment, into the essence of demons. But her turning back, her pleading and her prayer he made into an ascent, and repentance, and the power of the essence of soul, which they call “right.”

The Demiurge came out of fear. That, he says, is what Scripture means when it says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” For this was the beginning of Sophia’s feelings: first she was seized with fear, then with grief, then with bewilderment, and so she took refuge in pleading and prayer.

And the essence of soul, he says, is fiery by nature. They also call it the place above the heavens, and the Hebdomad, and the Ancient of Days. Whatever else of this kind they say about that Aeon, they claim it holds true of the being of soul, whom they call the maker of the world. Now he has the look of fire. Moses too, he says, puts it this way: “The Lord your God is a burning and consuming fire.” For Moses also, he thinks, meant it to stand written so. But the power of fire, he says, is twofold, for fire devours everything and is never put out.

So according to this division there is a soul that can die, a kind of go-between, since it is a Hebdomad and a Rest. For it is below the Ogdoad — where Sophia is, a day given form, and the Shared Fruit of the Pleroma — but above Matter, of which it is the maker. If a soul has been shaped after the pattern of the things above — that is, of the Ogdoad — it became immortal and went off to the Ogdoad, which he says is the heavenly Jerusalem. But if it has been shaped after the pattern of Matter — that is, of the passions of the body — the soul is perishable, and is destroyed.

So, just as the first and greatest power of the essence of soul came into being as an image of the only Son, in the same way the devil, the ruler of this world, is the power of the material essence, and Beelzebub is the power of the essence of the demons, which comes out of bewilderment. And so Sophia above worked her energy down from the Ogdoad into the Hebdomad. For the Demiurge, they say, knows nothing at all: on their account he is without understanding, and foolish, and has no idea what he is doing or working at. But while he was in that state of ignorance, not even aware that he was producing anything, Sophia worked every kind of energy in him and poured strength into him. And though she was the one really doing the work, he imagines that he is bringing the making of the world out of himself. That is why he begins by saying, “I am God, and besides me there is no other.” [n]

The Four that Valentinus teaches, then, is “a spring of ever-flowing nature that has roots”; and Sophia is the power from which the creation of soul and of matter has taken its present shape. But Sophia is called Spirit, the Demiurge is called Soul, the devil is called the ruler of this world, and Beelzebub the ruler of the demons. These are the claims they put forward. [p]

On top of this, as I mentioned before, they turn their whole system of teaching into a kind of arithmetic. They hold that the thirty Aeons inside the Pleroma have gone on to send out still more Aeons, in the proportions the Pythagoreans use, so that the Pleroma might be gathered into a whole according to a perfect number. I have already shown how the Pythagoreans divided the heavens into twelve and thirty and sixty parts, and how they have tiny fractions of tiny portions.

This is how these followers of Valentinus subdivide the parts inside the Pleroma. The parts in the Ogdoad have been subdivided in the same way; and Sophia — who on their account is the mother of every living thing — and the Shared Fruit of the Pleroma have sent out Words, who are heavenly angels whose citizenship is in the Jerusalem above, which is in heaven. For this Jerusalem is Sophia, the one outside the Pleroma, and her husband is the Shared Fruit of the Pleroma.

And the Demiurge sent out souls, for Sophia is the essence of souls. On their account the Demiurge is Abraham, and these souls are the children of Abraham. Out of the material and devilish essence the Demiurge shaped bodies for the souls. This is what is meant by the words, “And God formed the man, taking clay from the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” This, on their account, is the inner man, the man of soul, living inside the material body. The material man is perishable and incomplete, formed out of the devilish essence. And this material man is, as it were, a lodging house — sometimes for soul alone, sometimes for soul and demons, sometimes for soul and Words. These Words are the ones scattered down from above into this world, from the Shared Fruit of the Pleroma and from Sophia; and they live in an earthly body along with a soul, whenever demons have not moved in with that soul.

This, he says, is what stands written in Scripture: “For this reason I bend my knees to the God and Father and Lord of our Lord Jesus Christ, that God would grant you to have Christ dwelling in the inner man” — that is, in the man of soul, not the man of body — “so that you may be able to grasp what is the depth,” which is the Father of all; “and what is the breadth,” which is Stauros, the limit of the Pleroma; “or what is the length,” which is the Pleroma of the Aeons. That is why, he says, “the man of soul does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.” Foolishness, he says, is the power of the Demiurge, for he was foolish and without understanding, and imagined he was fabricating the world himself. He did not know that Sophia the Mother, the Ogdoad, was the real cause of everything done by him who had no awareness at all of what he was doing in the making of the world.

So all the prophets and the law spoke through the Demiurge — a foolish god, he says, and fools themselves, who knew nothing. That is why, he says, the Savior says, “All who came before me are thieves and robbers.” And the apostle says, “The mystery that was not made known to earlier generations.” For none of the prophets, he says, said anything about the things we are speaking of; a prophet could not help being ignorant of all of it, since it had certainly been spoken by the Demiurge alone. [v]

So when the creation was complete, and after it there ought to have come the unveiling of the sons of God — that is, of the Demiurge, who up to then had been hidden, and in whose obscurity the man of soul lay hidden with a veil over his heart — when the time came, then, for the veil to be taken away and these mysteries to be seen, Jesus was born of Mary the virgin, according to the words “The Holy Spirit will come upon you” — the Spirit is Sophia — “and the power of the Highest will overshadow you” — the Highest is the Demiurge — “and so what is born of you will be called holy.” For he was not brought into being from the Highest alone, the way those made after Adam’s pattern were made from the Highest alone — that is, from the Demiurge. Jesus, though, the new man, came from the Holy Spirit — that is, from Sophia — and from the Demiurge, so that the Demiurge might finish the shaping and framing of his body, and the Holy Spirit might supply his essence, and a heavenly Word might come out of the Ogdoad, born of Mary.

About this Word they have a great dispute among themselves, and it has been the occasion of splits and quarrels. Their teaching has come apart in two: one branch they call Eastern and the other Italian. The men from Italy, among them Heracleon and Ptolemy, say that the body of Jesus was a body of soul, and that this is why at his baptism the Holy Spirit came down as a dove — that is, the Word of the mother above, Sophia — and came to the man of soul and raised him from the dead. This, he says, is what is meant by the words, “He who raised Christ from the dead will also make alive your mortal bodies and your bodies of soul.” For the dust has fallen under a curse; “for,” he says, “you are dust, and to dust you will return.” The Easterners, on the other hand, among them Axionicus and Bardesanes, say that the body of the Savior was spiritual, since the Holy Spirit came upon Mary — that is, Sophia and the power of the Highest. This is the creative art, and it was given so that what the Spirit had given Mary might be shaped.

Let those men, then, pursue these questions among themselves, and let anyone else do the same, if it pleases him to look into such things. Valentinus, however, adds this: that the offenses belonging to the Aeons inside the Pleroma had been put right; that the offenses belonging to the Ogdoad — that is, to Sophia outside the Pleroma — had been put right as well; and that the offenses belonging to the Hebdomad had been put right too. For the Demiurge had been taught by Sophia that he is not himself God alone, as he had supposed, and that there is another besides himself. Taught by Sophia, he was brought to recognize the one above him. She schooled him, and initiated him, and instructed him in the great mystery of the Father and of the Aeons, and he divulged it to no one. This, he says, is what God says to Moses: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and my name I did not make known to them.” That is: I did not declare the mystery, or explain who God is, but I kept to myself in secret the mystery I had heard from Sophia. [z]

So when the offenses of those above had been put right, it followed, by the same logic, that the offenses down here had to be put right as well. That is why Jesus the Savior was born of Mary — to set right what had gone wrong here, just as the Christ who had been sent out afterward from above by Nous and Aletheia had corrected the passions of Sophia, that is, of the miscarriage outside the Pleroma. And again, the Savior who was born of Mary came to set right the passions of the soul.

So on their account there are three Christs: first, the one sent out afterward by Nous and Aletheia along with the Holy Spirit; second, the Shared Fruit of the Pleroma, husband of Sophia who was outside — and she too is called Holy Spirit, though she ranks below the first; and third, the one born of Mary for the restoring of this world of ours.

I think the heresy of Valentinus, which comes from Pythagoras, has now been set out well enough — more than enough. Having explained his opinions, it seems right to leave off refuting his system. Plato, then, when he is laying out mysteries about the universe, writes to Dionysius in something like these words: [ac]

“I must speak to you in riddles, so that if the letter meets with some accident in its pages, by sea or by land, whoever reads what falls into his hands will not understand it. For it is like this. All things stand about the King of all; everything is for his sake, and he is the cause of everything beautiful. The second things are about the second, and the third about the third. But about the King and the things I have spoken of, there is nothing of that kind. “After this the soul is eager to learn what sort these things are, looking at what is akin to itself, and none of it is enough. This, son of Dionysius and Doris, is that question of yours, and it is the cause of every evil — or rather, the anxiety about it is born in the soul, and unless a man gets rid of it he will never really reach the truth. “But hear what is astonishing in this matter. There are men who have heard these things — men equipped for learning, equipped for remembering, men able in every way to test a thing and draw a conclusion — and they are by now old men who study such matters. And they say that what once seemed believable now seems unbelievable, and that what once seemed unbelievable now seems the opposite. So while you turn the eye of examination toward these inquiries, be careful that you never come to regret these things being let out unworthily. For this reason I have written nothing about these points; there is no treatise of Plato’s about them, and there never will be. What has been said here is Socrates’, a man remarkable for goodness even while he was young.”

Valentinus fell in with these remarks and made “the King of all,” the one Plato mentioned, the first principle of his own system, calling him Pater, and Bythos, and Proarche over the rest of the Aeons. And where Plato says “what is second about things that are second,” Valentinus takes as second all the Aeons inside Horos, and Horos itself. And where Plato says “what is third about what is third,” he has made third the whole arrangement outside Horos and the Pleroma.

Valentinus has set this arrangement out very briefly in a psalm, beginning from below rather than, as Plato does, from above. It runs like this:

That is the opinion he formed on such points. Flesh, on their account, is matter, hung from the soul of the Demiurge. Soul flashes out from air — that is, the Demiurge emerges from the spirit outside the Pleroma. Air springs from aether — that is, Sophia, who is outside, is sent out from what lies inside Horos, and from the whole Pleroma. And fruits are produced from Bythos — that is, the whole sending out of the Aeons comes from the Father. So much, then, for the opinions Valentinus advanced. It remains for us to explain the teachings of the men who came out of his school, though every follower of Valentinus holds different opinions.