Three Hundred Sixty-Five Heavens

Out of these men came Saturninus, who was from the Antioch near Daphne, and Basilides. They took their chances when the chances came, and put out two different systems of teaching — Saturninus in Syria, Basilides at Alexandria. Like Menander, Saturninus taught one Father whom nobody knows, who made angels, archangels, powers, and authorities. The world and everything in it were made by a company of seven angels. Man too was the work of angels. A shining image had flashed out below them from the presence of the supreme power, and when they could not keep hold of it — he says — because it shot straight back up again, they urged one another on: “Let us make man after our image and likeness.” So man was formed; but he could not stand upright, because the angels had no such power to give him, and he squirmed along the ground like a worm. Then the power above took pity on him, since he had been made in its own likeness, and sent out a spark of life. That set him on his feet, knit his joints together, and made him live. And so, Saturninus says, when a man dies this spark of life goes back to the things of its own kind, and the rest of the body breaks down into the elements it came from. [a]

He also lays it down as a settled truth that the Savior was unborn, without a body and without shape, and was only supposed to be a visible man. He held that the God of the Jews was one of the angels; and since all the powers wanted to do away with his Father, Christ came to destroy the God of the Jews and to save those who believe in him — that is, those who have the spark of his life in them. He was the first man to say that the angels formed two kinds of human beings, one bad and one good. And since the demons help the worst of them, the Savior came to destroy evil men and the demons, and to save the good.

They also say that marriage and the having of children come from Satan. Many in his school keep off meat as well, and by that counterfeit self-control they draw crowds away after them. They hold, too, that some of the prophecies were spoken by the angels who made the world and some by Satan — whom Saturninus makes out to be an angel himself, the enemy of the world’s makers, and of the God of the Jews above all.

Basilides, wanting to look like a man who has found something loftier and more convincing, spins his teaching out to an enormous length. He says that Nous was born first from the unborn Father; from Nous, Logos; from Logos, Phronesis; from Phronesis, Sophia and Dynamis; and from Dynamis and Sophia the powers and rulers and angels, whom he calls the first angels. By these the first heaven was made. Then other powers streamed out from these and made a second heaven like the first. When others again had been formed out of those, corresponding exactly to the ones above them, these framed a third heaven; and from the third, downward, came a fourth generation of descendants; and so on in the same fashion, until — they declare — there were more and more rulers and angels, and three hundred and sixty-five heavens. That is why the year holds the same number of days as there are heavens.

The angels who hold the lowest heaven, the one we can see, made everything there is in the world, and divided up the earth and the nations on it among themselves. Their chief is the one taken to be the God of the Jews. Because he wanted to bring the other nations under his own people, the Jews, all the other rulers stood against him and opposed him; and that is why every other nation was hostile to his nation.

But the Father, who was never born and has no name, saw that they would be destroyed, and sent his own firstborn Nous — the one who is called Christ — to set free from the power of the world’s makers those who believe in him. So he appeared on earth as a man, among the nations belonging to these powers, and did miracles. But he did not suffer death himself. A man of Cyrene named Simon was forced to carry the cross in his place, and Jesus changed Simon’s appearance so that he would be taken for Jesus; and so Simon was crucified, through their ignorance and their mistake, while Jesus took on the form of Simon, stood by, and laughed at them. Since he was a bodiless power, the Nous of the unborn Father, he could change his shape as he pleased; and so he went up to the one who had sent him, mocking them, because they could not lay hold of him and he was invisible to them all.

So the people who know these things have been set free from the rulers who made the world. It is not our duty, they say, to acknowledge the man who was crucified, but the one who came in the form of a man, and was thought to be crucified, and was called Jesus, and was sent by the Father, so that by this arrangement he might undo the works of the world’s makers. Therefore, he declares, anyone who acknowledges the crucified one is still a slave, and still under the power of the beings who formed our bodies; but the man who denies him has been set free from them, and understands the arrangement made by the unborn Father.

Salvation belongs to the soul alone, since the body by its own nature decays. He says as well that the prophecies came from the powers who made the world, and that the law in particular was given by their chief, the one who led the people out of the land of Egypt. He makes nothing of food sacrificed to idols: he counts the question of no consequence and eats such food without hesitating. He treats the use of other things too, and the practice of every kind of lust, as a matter of complete indifference.

These men also practice magic. They use images, spells, invocations, and every other meddling art of that kind. They coin names as well, as though they were angels’ names, announcing that some of them belong to the first heaven and others to the second; and then they labor to set out the names and origins and angels and powers of all three hundred and sixty-five heavens they have imagined. They claim, too, that the foreign name in which the Savior came down and went up is Caulacau.

So the man who has learned all this, and knows all the angels and where they came from, becomes invisible to the angels and all the powers, and beyond their reach, exactly as Caulacau was. And as the Son was unknown to everyone, so they too must be known by no one. They know everyone and pass through everything, while they themselves stay invisible and unknown to all. As they put it: “You — know everyone; but let nobody know you.” For this reason people who hold such a view are ready to take back what they have said — or rather, it is impossible for them to suffer for the sake of a mere name, since they are just like everybody else. The crowd cannot understand these matters; only one in a thousand can, or two in ten thousand. They say they are no longer Jews and are not yet Christians, and that it is not at all fitting to speak of their secrets openly, but right to keep them hidden by silence.

They map out the positions of the three hundred and sixty-five heavens in the same way the mathematicians do; they take over the mathematicians’ theorems and carry them across into their own kind of teaching. Their chief, they hold, is Abraxas — and that is why that word holds inside itself numbers adding up to three hundred and sixty-five.

Carpocrates and his followers hold that the world and everything in it were made by angels far inferior to the unborn Father. They hold that Jesus was the son of Joseph and was just like other men, except in this one respect: because his soul was steady and clean, he remembered perfectly the things he had seen in the sphere of the unborn God. For that reason a power came down on him from the Father, so that by it he could escape the makers of the world. That power, they say, passed through them all, stayed free at every point, and went back up to him — and to the powers, which in the same way took to themselves the things like themselves. They go on to say that the soul of Jesus, though brought up in the practices of the Jews, looked on them with contempt, and that this is why he was given faculties by which he destroyed the passions that live in men as a punishment. [m]

So any soul that is like the soul of Christ can despise the rulers who made the world, and in the same way receives power to accomplish the same results. This notion has swollen their pride so far that some of them announce they are like Jesus, while others, mightier still, maintain that they are better than his disciples — Peter and Paul, say, and the rest of the apostles, whom they reckon in no way inferior to Jesus. Their souls, they claim, came down from the same sphere his did, and so they despise the world’s makers as he did, are counted worthy of the same power, and go back again to the same place. And if anyone has despised the things in this world more than he did, that man proves himself greater than Jesus.

They practice magic arts and spells too, philters and love-potions, and they resort to attendant spirits and dream-sending demons and other foul things, declaring that they have power to rule, even now, over the princes and shapers of this world — and not only over them, but over everything in it. Satan has sent these men out, as he sends out the pagans, to bring the church into disgrace, so that in one way or another people who hear what they say will imagine that we are all like them and turn their ears away from the preaching of the truth; or else, seeing what they do, will speak evil of every one of us, when in fact we have nothing in common with them, not in teaching, not in morals, not in our daily conduct. But they live shameless lives, and to cover their godless teaching they misuse the name of Christ as a screen for their wickedness — so that “their condemnation is just,” when they receive from God the payment their works deserve.

Their madness runs so unchecked that they say everything irreligious and godless is in their power, and that they are free to practice it; for in their view things are evil or good only by human opinion. So they think souls must pass from body to body until they have had experience of every kind of life and of every kind of action — unless a man can head off the need for any further lives by a single one, doing all of it once for all, and just as thoroughly. And by all of it I mean the things we do not dare either to speak of or to hear, that we must not even let into our thoughts, and that we would not believe of anyone, if such a thing were so much as raised about one of our own townsmen. The point, as their own writings put it, is that their souls should try every kind of life, so that at their departure nothing at all is left undone. They insist on this, in case some one thing should still be missing from their release, and they should be forced to be born in a body again.

They claim that this is why Jesus spoke the following parable: “While you are with your opponent on the way, do everything you can to be rid of him, or he will hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and the officer will throw you into prison. I tell you the truth, you will not get out of there until you have paid the very last quadrans.” The “opponent,” they say, is one of the angels who are in the world, the one they call the Devil; and they hold that he was made for exactly this purpose, to lead the souls that have perished out of the world to the Supreme Ruler. They call him the chief of the world’s makers, and they say he hands such souls over to another angel who serves him, to be shut up in other bodies; for the body, they declare, is the “prison.” And the words “you will not get out of there until you have paid the very last quadrans” they take to mean that nobody escapes the power of the angels who made the world: he has to pass from body to body until he has had experience of every kind of action that can be practiced in this world, and when nothing at all is missing any longer, then his freed soul will fly up to that God who is above the angels, the makers of the world. By this route, too, all souls are saved — their own souls, which guard against any delay and take part in every sort of action within a single lifetime, and those others which are set free by passing from body to body, once they have carried out and completed what is required in every form of life they are sent into, so that at last they are no longer shut inside a body.

And so, if godless, unlawful, forbidden acts are committed among them, I can no longer find any ground for believing that they really are such acts. In their writings we read the following, the explanation they give of their own views: that Jesus spoke in secret to his disciples and apostles, privately, and that they asked for permission and obtained it, to hand on what they had been taught to others who should be worthy and believing. We are saved, they say, by faith and love; everything else is by nature neither one thing nor the other, and is reckoned good or evil only by people’s opinion, there being nothing really evil by nature.

Some of them use an outward mark, branding their disciples inside the lobe of the right ear. Marcellina came out of this group. She arrived in Rome while Anicetus was overseer there, and holding these teachings she led great numbers astray. They call themselves Gnostics. They also keep images, some of them painted and others made out of various materials, and they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at the time when Jesus was living among them. They put wreaths on these images and set them up along with images of the philosophers of the world — that is, with images of Pythagoras and Plato and Aristotle and the rest — and they have other ways of honoring them as well, exactly as the pagans do.

Cerinthus, again, was a man trained in the wisdom of the Egyptians. He taught that the world was not made by the first God, but by a certain Power a long way off from him and far below that Ruler who is supreme over the universe, a Power that knows nothing of the one who is above all things. He made out that Jesus was not born of a virgin, but was the son of Joseph and Mary by the ordinary course of human birth, though he was more righteous, more sensible and wiser than other men. After his baptism, he said, Christ came down on him in the form of a dove from the Supreme Ruler, and from then on he announced the unknown Father and did miracles. But at the end Christ left Jesus; then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ, being a spiritual being, remained beyond suffering. [x]

Those who are called Ebionites agree that the world was made by God, but what they hold about the Lord is much the same as what Cerinthus and Carpocrates hold. They use only the Gospel according to Matthew, and they reject the apostle Paul, maintaining that he abandoned the law. As for the prophetic writings, they try to expound them in a rather peculiar way. They circumcise, they keep up the customs the law lays down, and their way of life is so Jewish that they even bow toward Jerusalem as though it were the house of God.

The Nicolaitans are the followers of that Nicolas who was one of the seven first appointed by the apostles to serve as deacons. They lead lives of unrestrained indulgence. What sort of men they are is pointed out very plainly in the Revelation of John, where they are shown teaching that it is a matter of indifference to commit adultery and to eat food sacrificed to idols. That is why the Word has spoken of them like this: “But you have this in your favor: you hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.”