The Redemption and Simon Magus

Their tradition about the Redemption is, as it happens, invisible and beyond understanding — it is the mother of things that cannot be grasped or seen. And because it keeps shifting, there is no way to give a simple, single account of it: every one of them hands it down however his own inclination prompts him. So there are as many schemes of “redemption” as there are teachers of these secret opinions. When we come to refute them, we will show in the proper place that men of this sort have been driven on by Satan to deny the baptism that is new birth into God, and so to renounce the faith altogether. [a]

They hold that those who have reached perfect knowledge must be born anew into the power that is above all things. Otherwise there is no getting in past the Pleroma, since it is this new birth that carries them down into the depths of Bythus. The baptism instituted by the visible Jesus, they say, was for the forgiveness of sins, but the Redemption brought in by the Christ who came down upon him was for perfection. The first, they claim, is of soul; the second is spiritual. John’s baptism was announced with repentance in view, but the Redemption by Jesus was brought in for the sake of perfection. This is what he means, they say, when he says, “And I have another baptism to be baptized with, and I am hurrying eagerly toward it.” They also maintain that the Lord added this Redemption for the sons of Zebedee, when their mother asked that one of them might sit at his right hand in his kingdom and the other at his left, and he said, “Can you be baptized with the baptism I am to be baptized with?” Paul too, they declare, has often set out in plain words the redemption that is in Christ Jesus — and this, they claim, is the very thing they hand down in all these varied and contradictory forms.

Some of them get a bridal couch ready and perform a kind of secret ceremony over the people being initiated, saying certain set words over them, and they call what they are doing a spiritual marriage, made after the likeness of the pairings above. Others take them to water and baptize them, saying these words: “Into the name of the unknown Father of the universe — into Truth, the mother of all things — into him who came down on Jesus — into union and redemption and fellowship with the powers.” Others repeat certain Hebrew words, so as to bewilder those being initiated all the more thoroughly: “Basema, Chamosse, Baenaora, Mistadia, Ruada, Kousta, Babaphor, Kalachthei.” The interpretation they give of these terms runs like this: “I call upon what is above every power of the Father, which is called light and good Spirit and life, because you have reigned in the body.”

Others again set the Redemption out this way: the name that is hidden from every deity and dominion and truth, which Jesus of Nazareth put on in the lives of the light of Christ — of Christ, who lives by the Holy Spirit, for the angelic redemption. The name of restoration stands like this: “Messia, Uphareg, Namempsoeman, Chaldaeaur, Mosomedaea, Acphranoe, Psaua, Jesus Nazaria.” The interpretation of these words is as follows: “I do not divide the Spirit of Christ, nor the heart, nor the power above the heavens that shows mercy. May I have the enjoyment of your name, Savior of truth!” Those are the words of the initiators. But the one being initiated answers: “I am established and I am redeemed. I redeem my soul from this age and from everything that belongs to it, in the name of Iao, who redeemed his own soul into redemption in Christ who lives.” Then the bystanders add these words: “Peace be to all on whom this name rests.” After this they anoint the initiate with balsam, for they claim that this ointment stands for the sweet scent that is above all things.

But there are some of them who say that bringing people to water is unnecessary. They mix oil and water together and put this mixture on the heads of those who are to be initiated, using expressions of the sort we have already given, and they maintain that this is the Redemption. They too are in the habit of anointing with balsam. Others, however, reject all these practices. They hold that the mystery of the unspeakable and invisible power ought not to be carried out by visible, perishable creatures, and that what belongs to beings beyond thought, without bodies, out of reach of the senses ought not to be handled by things that have bodies and can be sensed. In their view the knowledge of the unspeakable Greatness is itself the perfect Redemption. Since both the defect and the passion flowed out of ignorance, they say, the whole substance formed that way is undone by knowledge; and so knowledge is the redemption of the inner man. This is not something bodily, since the body perishes; and it is not of soul either, since the soul is the offspring of the defect and is, so to speak, the lodging of the spirit. The Redemption must therefore be spiritual. They affirm that the inner, spiritual man is redeemed by means of knowledge, and that once they have the knowledge of all things they stand in need of nothing more. That, they say, is the true Redemption.

Others still go on redeeming people right up to the moment of death, putting oil and water on their heads — or the ointment mentioned above mixed with water — and saying the invocations already named over them at the same time. The point is that the people in question should become impossible for the rulers and powers to seize or even to see, so that their inner man may go up out of sight, leaving the body behind among the created things of this world while the soul is sent on ahead to the Demiurge. And they instruct them that when they reach the rulers and powers they are to use these words: “I am a son from the Father — the Father who was there before all, and a son in him who was there before all. I have come to look at all things, both what is my own and what belongs to others — though strictly speaking they are not other people’s but Achamoth’s, who is female by nature and made these things for herself. For I take my being from him who was there before all, and I am going back again to my own place, the place I came out from.” By saying these things, they claim, he escapes the powers. He then goes on to the companions of the Demiurge and addresses them like this: “I am a vessel more precious than the female who made you. If your mother does not know where she came from, I know myself, and I am aware where I am from, and I call upon the incorruptible Sophia, who is in the Father and is the mother of your mother — your mother, who has no father and no husband. A female sprung from a female made you, and she did not know her own mother; she imagined she was the only one there was. But I call upon her mother.” And they declare that when the Demiurge’s companions hear this they are thrown into confusion and turn on their own origin and on their mother’s family. But he goes off to his own place, having thrown off his chain — that is, his soul-nature. These, then, are the particulars that have reached us about their “redemption.” But since they differ so widely among themselves in both teaching and tradition, and since the ones recognized as most recent work at inventing some new opinion every day and producing what nobody ever thought of before, it is a difficult matter to describe all their opinions.

The rule of truth that we hold is this: there is one God Almighty, who made all things by his Word, and who shaped and formed everything that exists out of what did not exist. Scripture says as much: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm, and all their power by the breath of his mouth.” And again: “All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made.” Nothing is stated as an exception and nothing is subtracted. The Father made all things through him, whether visible or invisible, objects of sense or objects of thought, things temporary — because of a certain character given to them — or things eternal. And these eternal things he did not make by angels, or by any powers separated off from his Ennoea. For God needs none of these things. He is the one who by his Word and Spirit makes and arranges and governs all things and calls everything into being; he is the one who formed the world, since the world is made of all things; he is the one who fashioned man; he is the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, above whom there is no other God, no first principle, no power, no pleroma. He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as we will prove. [m]

Holding to this rule, then, we will easily show — for all the great variety and number of their opinions — that these men have wandered off from the truth. Almost all the different sects of heretics do admit that there is one God; but then, by their ruinous teachings, they turn that truth into something else, just as the nations do through idolatry, and so they prove themselves ungrateful to the one who created them. What is more, they despise God’s own handiwork and speak against their own salvation, becoming their own harshest accusers and false witnesses against themselves. Yet unwilling as they may be, these men will one day rise again in the flesh, to confess the power of the one who raises them from the dead — though they will not be counted among the righteous, because of their unbelief. Detecting and convicting all the heretics is a tangled task of many shapes, and our design is to answer them all according to their own particular characters. So we have judged it necessary, first of all, to give an account of their source and root, in order that by getting to know their most exalted Bythus you may understand what sort of tree it is that has produced fruit like this.

Simon the Samaritan was that magician of whom Luke, the disciple and follower of the apostles, says: “But there was a certain man named Simon, who had been practicing magical arts in that city and leading the people of Samaria astray, claiming that he himself was somebody great. They all paid attention to him, from the least to the greatest, and said, ‘This is the power of God, which is called great.’ They had regard for him because for a long time he had driven them out of their senses with his sorceries.” This Simon, then, pretended to believe. He supposed that the apostles themselves worked their cures by the art of magic and not by the power of God; and when they filled with the Holy Spirit, through the laying on of hands, those who had come to believe in God through the Christ Jesus whom they preached, he suspected that this too was done by some greater skill in magic. So he offered the apostles money, thinking that he might get this power of giving the Holy Spirit to anyone he chose. And Peter answered him in these words: “May your money perish with you, because you thought the gift of God could be bought with money. You have no part or share in this matter, for your heart is not right in the sight of God. I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of wrongdoing.” He did not trust God one bit more for that. He set himself eagerly to contend against the apostles, so that he might himself seem to be some marvel, and he threw himself with still greater zeal into the study of the whole art of magic, the better to bewilder and overpower crowds of people. This was how he went on in the reign of Claudius Caesar, who is also said to have honored him with a statue on account of his magical power. Many glorified this man as though he were a god, and he taught that it was he himself who had appeared among the Jews as the Son, but had come down in Samaria as the Father, and had gone to the other nations as the Holy Spirit. In short, he presented himself as the loftiest of all powers — the very Being who is Father over all — and he let himself be called by whatever title people were pleased to use. [s]

Now this Simon of Samaria, the source from which every kind of heresy takes its origin, put his sect together out of the following materials. He had bought a certain woman named Helena out of slavery in Tyre, a city of Phoenicia, and he used to carry her about with him, declaring that this woman was the first conception of his mind, the mother of all, through whom, in the beginning, he had conceived in his mind the making of angels and archangels. This Ennoea, he said, leaped out from him; and understanding what her father intended, she went down to the lower regions and gave birth to angels and powers, by whom, he declared, this world was made. But once she had produced them, they held her back out of jealousy, since they were unwilling to be looked on as the offspring of anyone else. As for Simon himself, they knew nothing at all about him; but his Ennoea was held prisoner by those powers and angels she had produced. She suffered every kind of insult at their hands, so that she could not go back up to her father. She was even shut up in a human body, and for ages she passed in succession from one female body to the next, as from vessel to vessel. She was, for example, in that Helen over whom the Trojan war was fought — the Helen for whose sake Stesichorus was struck blind, because he had cursed her in his verses, and then, when he repented and wrote what are called palinodes, singing her praise, was given his sight back. So, passing from body to body and suffering insults in every one of them, she became at last a common prostitute; and she was the one meant by the lost sheep.

This was why he had come: to win her back first and set her free from her slavery, and then to bring salvation to men by making himself known to them. For since the angels were governing the world badly, each of them coveting the chief power for himself, he had come to put matters right. He had come down transformed and made to look like the powers and rulers and angels, so that he might appear among men to be a man, though he was not one — and so it was only thought that he had suffered in Judea, when he had not suffered at all. The prophets, moreover, spoke their predictions under the inspiration of the angels who made the world; which is why those who put their trust in Simon and Helena pay the prophets no attention any longer, but, being free, live however they please. For men are saved by his grace, he taught, and not on account of anything right that they have done. Deeds are not right in the nature of things, but only by accident, because that is how the angels who made the world thought fit to arrange them — their aim, in laying down rules like these, being to bring men into slavery. And so he pledged that the world would be dissolved, and that those who belonged to him would be set free from the rule of the ones who made it.

So the priests of these mysteries live loose lives and practice magical arts, each as far as he is able. They use exorcisms and incantations. Love potions and charms are eagerly pressed into service, and so are the beings they call paredri — attendant spirits — and oniropompi, senders of dreams, along with whatever other strange arts they can get hold of. They also have an image of Simon made in the likeness of Zeus, and one of Helena in the shape of Athena, and these they worship. In short, they take their name from Simon, the author of these utterly irreverent teachings: they are called Simonians. And it is from them that “knowledge, falsely so called” got its start, as anyone may learn even from their own statements. This man’s successor was Menander, a Samaritan by birth as well, and he too was thoroughly expert in the practice of magic. He affirms that the primary Power remains unknown to everyone, but that he himself is the one who has been sent out from the presence of the invisible beings as a savior, for the deliverance of mankind. The world was made by angels, whom, like Simon, he maintains to have been produced by Ennoea. And by means of the magic he teaches, he says, he gives a knowledge that lets a man overcome the very angels who made the world; for his disciples obtain the resurrection by being baptized into him, and can die no more, but remain in possession of immortal youth.