The Fig Tree and the Iota

These are the contents of the eighth book of the Refutation of All Heresies.

What the opinions of the Docetae are, and that they have built the doctrines they assert out of natural philosophy. How Monoimus trifles, giving his attention to poets and geometers and arithmeticians. How Tatian’s system has grown out of the opinions of Valentinus and Marcion, and how he has framed his own doctrines from that source. Hermogenes, however, helped himself to the teachings of Socrates, not to those of Christ. How those go wrong who insist on keeping the Passover on the fourteenth day. What the error of the Phrygians is, who suppose that Montanus and Priscilla and Maximilla are prophets. What the conceit of the Encratites is, and that their opinions have been formed not out of the holy Scriptures but out of themselves and out of the Gymnosophists among the Indians.

Most of these men make no use of the Lord’s advice. The beam is in their own eye, and they announce that they see when in fact they are laboring under blindness. So it seems to us worth doing not to keep silent about what they hold. Our aim is that the refutation we make may shame them into seeing for themselves how the Savior advised a man first to take out the beam, and only then to look clearly at the speck in his brother’s eye. In the seven books before this one we have explained the doctrines of most of them fully enough. Now we will not keep silent about the opinions that follow from those either. In this way we will display how abundant the grace of the Holy Spirit is, and we will refute the men who suppose they have arrived at a settled doctrine when the settling is only in appearance. These people have named themselves the Docetae, and they put forward the following opinions. [d]

They hold that God, the first of all, is like the seed of a fig tree: altogether tiny in size, but infinite in power — a lowly bulk, past counting in multitude, and lacking nothing at all when it comes to bringing things to birth. This seed is a refuge for the terrified, a covering for the naked, a veil for modesty, and the fruit that was looked for — the fruit he came looking for three times, he says, and did not find. That, he says, is why he cursed the fig tree: because he did not find on it that sweet fruit, the fruit that was looked for.

And since the divine being is, on their account — to put it briefly — of this sort and this size, that is, small and minute, the world, as they see it, was made in something like the following way. When the fig tree’s branches turned tender, leaves budded first, as anyone can see, and after them the fruit; and inside the fruit the infinite, uncountable seed of the fig tree is stored up. So we hold, they say, that three things come first from the seed of the fig tree: the stem, which is the fig tree itself; the leaves; and the fruit, the fig, as we said above. In this way, he says, three Aeons have been produced, and they are the first principles that come from the original source of the universe. And Moses did not keep silent about this, when he said that there are three words of God — “darkness, gloom, storm; and he added no more.” For God, he says, made no addition to the three Aeons; in every way these have been enough for the beings that have been brought to birth, and they are enough still. God himself, though, stays by himself, far off from the three Aeons.

When each of these Aeons had received a starting point for coming to be, it grew, as I said, little by little, and was enlarged by degrees, and at last became perfect. And they think that what is counted at ten is perfect. So when the Aeons had become equal in number and in perfection, they made up, in their opinion, thirty Aeons in all, each of them reaching its full perfection in a Decad. The three are distinct from one another and hold one rank in relation to one another, differing in position only, since one is first, another second, another third of these. But position gave them different amounts of power. The one who got the place nearest the first God — who is, so to speak, a seed — had more power to bring things forth than the rest, since he, the immeasurable one, measured himself out tenfold in bulk. The one who stands second in position to the first God, being the one no man can take in, took himself in sixfold. But the one who is now third in position is carried off to an infinite distance, because his brothers had spread so far. And when this third Aeon had thought himself out three times over, he ringed himself round with what was like an everlasting chain binding him together.

And they suppose that this is what the Savior means when he says, “A sower went out to sow; and what fell on the fine, good ground bore fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” That, he says, is why the Savior spoke the words, “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear” — because these things are not for everyone’s ears. [j]

All these Aeons — the three, and all the infinite Aeons that come from them without limit — are male and female at once. So after they had all been increased and enlarged and had sprung from that one first seed, they came into agreement and union, and they all ran together into a single Aeon. And in this way, out of one virgin, Mary, they fathered a shared offspring, a Mediator — that is, the Savior of all who are in the middle state. In every way he is equal in power to the seed of the fig tree, except that he was born, while that first seed, the one the fig tree grew from, was never born.

So when those three Aeons had been furnished with every virtue and every holiness, as these teachers suppose, and the only Son as well — for he alone was born from those infinite Aeons, out of the three that had a direct part in his birth, since three immeasurable Aeons of one mind fathered him — then the whole of the nature that the mind grasps was formed with nothing lacking. And all those eternal beings that the mind grasps made up light. But the light was not shapeless, or idle, or in need of help from any other power. In proportion to the multitude of those infinite Aeons, brought forth without limit on the pattern of the fig tree, the light holds within itself infinite kinds of the various living creatures native to that quarter of creation; and it shone down on the chaos that lay beneath. And when this chaos was lit up all at once and given shape by those varied kinds from above, it took on solidity, and it received all those kinds from on high out of the third Aeon, who had made himself threefold.

But this third Aeon saw all his own distinctive marks seized together by the darkness underneath. He knew what the power of darkness was, and he knew the simplicity and the plenty of light as well, and he would not let his shining marks from above be carried off for long by the darkness below. He did the opposite: he set a firmament beneath the Aeons. So after he had made it firm below, “he separated the darkness from the light, and he called the light above the firmament day, and the darkness he called night.” When all the infinite kinds of the third Aeon, as I said, were caught and held in this lowest darkness, the shape of the Aeon himself, such as I have described him, was stamped upon them along with everything else of his. That shape is a life-giving fire, born out of light, and from it the Great Archon came. About this Archon Moses says, “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.”

Moses speaks of this fiery God as having spoken out of the bush — the batos — that is, out of the darkish air. For the whole stretch of air that lies under the darkness is batos, a thing that can be passed through, a passage for light. Moses used the word batos, he says, because all the kinds of light come down from above by way of the air, which they can pass through. And in just the same way the word of the Lord that comes to us out of the bush — that is, out of the air — is made out. A voice that carries a meaning is a beating of air, and without air no human speech can be made out. And it is not only the word that comes to us out of the bush, that is, the air, that gives us law and lives beside us as a fellow citizen. Smells and colors too show us what they are through the air.

So this fiery god, once he had become fire out of light, went on to make the world in the way Moses describes. He himself has no real being of his own, and so he uses the darkness as his substance, and he never stops outraging those eternal marks of light from above that the darkness beneath has seized. Up to the time when the Savior appeared, then, a wide deception of souls held sway, and it came from the god of fiery light — that is, from the Craftsman. For the kinds are called souls because they are coolings-off from the Aeons above, and they go on in darkness. And when they are changed from bodies into bodies, they stay under the Craftsman’s guard. [s]

And you can see that this is so, he says, from Job, where the words run: “And I am a wanderer, going from place to place and from house to house.” And you can learn it too, they say, from the Savior’s words: “And if you are willing to accept it, this is Elijah who was to come. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” But through the Savior this transfer of souls from body to body was brought to a stop, and faith is announced for the forgiveness of sins.

In something like this way the only Son, looking at the forms of the Aeons above that had been carried down from on high into darkish bodies, wanted to come down and set them free. But he came to know that not even the Aeons can bear to look at the Fullness of all the Aeons all at once; that, struck with terror, they suffer destruction, since they are perishable; and that the size and splendor of the power overwhelms them. So he drew himself in — like an enormous flash of lightning packed into a very small body, or rather like a beam of sight squeezed under the eyelids — and in that state he goes out as far as heaven and the blazing stars. And there he gathers himself back under the lids of vision whenever he wishes. The light of sight does the same thing: it is everywhere, and it makes everything visible, and yet we cannot see it. All we see are the eyelids; and the corners of the eye, a tissue that is broad and winding and very fibrous; and the membrane of the cornea; and under that the pupil, shaped like a berry, netted and round — and whatever other coats belong to the light of the eye, wrapped in which it lies hidden.

In this way, he says, the only Son, the eternal Child from above, dressed himself in a shape to match each single Aeon of the third Aeon; and while he was inside the Triacontad of Aeons, he came into this world just as we have described him — unnoticed, unknown, obscure, and disbelieved. So that he might be clothed in the outer darkness as well — and by darkness he means flesh — an angel traveled down with him and brought the good news to Mary, he says, as it stands written. And the child was born from her, as it stands written. And the one who came from above put on what had been born, and he did everything just as it stands written of him in the Gospels. He washed in the Jordan, and when he was baptized he received in the water a figure and a seal of the body born of the virgin. The point of it was this: when the Archon condemned his own thing of clay to death — that is, to the cross — the soul that had been fed inside the body born of the virgin could strip that body off and nail it to the tree. By means of that body the soul would triumph over the rulers and the authorities, and would not be found naked, but would put on, in place of that flesh, the other body that had been sketched out in the water when he was being baptized. This, he says, is what the Savior means: “Unless a man is born of water and spirit, he will not enter the kingdom of heaven, because what is born of the flesh is flesh.”

So from the thirty Aeons he took on thirty forms. And that is why the eternal one lived thirty years on the earth: each Aeon was shown, in his own way, during his own year. And the souls are all those forms that have been seized, each by one of the thirty Aeons; and each soul is made so as to make out the Jesus who shares its own nature. That is the nature the only Son, the eternal one, took on out of the everlasting places. But those places are different from one another. So just that many heresies go looking for Jesus, each outdoing the next. Every one of these heresies has its own Jesus, and he is seen differently as the place differs toward which, he says, each soul is carried and hurries. Each soul supposes that the Jesus seen from its own place is alone its own kinsman and fellow citizen. At first sight it recognizes him as its own brother, and the rest as bastards. Those, then, whose nature comes from the places below cannot see the forms of the Savior that are above them. But those who are from above, he says, from the Decad in the middle and the most excellent Ogdoad — and that, the Docetae say, is where we come from — have known Jesus the Savior not in part but whole. And those from above are the only perfect ones; all the rest are perfect only in part.

This much, I think, is enough for sound minds if they are to come to know the tangled and unsteady heresy of the Docetae. The men who have ventured arguments about matter that cannot be reached and cannot be taken in have named themselves Docetae. Some of them, we consider, are behaving foolishly — not in seeming, we would say, but in fact. At any rate we have shown that a beam of that very matter is being carried about in their eye, in the hope that they may somehow be able to make it out. And if they cannot make it out, let them at least not blind anyone else. The truth is that the sophists among the Greeks worked out much of what these men teach long ago, as anyone who takes the trouble can find out. These, then, are the opinions the Docetae put forward. And we will not keep silent about what Monoimus holds either. [ac]

Monoimus the Arab stood a long way off from the glory of the grand-sounding poet. He supposes that there is a Man something like the one the poet calls Oceanus, when he puts it this way: [ad]

Putting this into other words, Monoimus says that Man is the universe. And the universe is the source of all things — unborn, imperishable, eternal. The son of the Man just spoken of, he says, is born and open to suffering, and he is brought to birth outside of time, unwilled, and without being marked out beforehand. For such, he says, is the power of that Man. And with power like that in him, the son was born quicker than thought or will. And this, he says, is what is said in the Scriptures: “He was, and he was born.” The meaning is this. Man was, and his son was born — just as one might say, Fire was, and light was born together with the fire, outside of time, unwilled, and without being marked out beforehand.

And this Man is a single Monad, uncompounded and undivided, and at the same time compounded and divisible. In every way it is friendly and in every way at peace; in every way it quarrels and in every way it fights with itself; unlike, and like. It is a kind of musical harmony that holds all things in itself — as many as a man might name, and as many as he might leave out when he is not attending — and it shows all things and gives birth to all things. This is Mother, this is Father: two immortal names.

As an illustration, he says, take the one iota, that one stroke, as the greatest image of the perfect Man. And that one stroke is a Monad, uncompounded, simple, and pure, which gets its composition from nothing at all — and yet it is compounded too, many-shaped, branching into many divisions, and made of many parts. That one undivided stroke, he says, is the single stroke of the letter iota, with many faces and countless eyes and numberless names; and it is an image of that perfect and invisible Man.