A Stain in the Pleroma

So the question to be asked is why God arranged things as he did; the making of the world is not to be handed over to anyone else. Everything is to be spoken of as prepared beforehand by God in such a way that it should be made exactly as it has been made — and shadow and emptiness are not to be conjured into existence. Where, I ask, did this emptiness of theirs come from? If it was in fact produced by the one they call the Father and originator of all things, then it is equal in honor to the rest of the Aeons and related to them, perhaps even older than they are. And if it came from the same source they did, it must be like the one who produced it in nature, and like the ones produced alongside it. Then it follows, of absolute necessity, that the Bythus they speak of, along with Sige, is like emptiness in nature — that is, that he really is empty — and that the rest of the Aeons, being emptiness’s brothers, have nothing solid in them either. [a]

But if it was not produced that way, then it must have sprung from itself and given birth to itself. In that case it is exactly as old as the Bythus they call the Father of all, and emptiness turns out to share both the nature and the honor of the one they call the universal Father. There is no third possibility: either something produced it, or it produced itself out of itself. Now if emptiness really was produced, then the one who produced it — Valentinus — is empty himself, and so are his followers. And if it was not produced but gave birth to itself, then the thing that is genuinely empty is the likeness and the brother and the equal in honor of the Father Valentinus proclaimed; and it is older than the remaining Aeons of Ptolemaeus himself and Heracleon and all the rest who hold the same opinions, dating from far earlier and standing higher in honor than they do.

Suppose, though, that they are driven to despair on these points and fall back on this: that the Father of all contains all things and that there is nothing whatever outside the Pleroma (since anything outside it would of necessity be bounded and hemmed in by something greater than itself); that when they say “outside” and “inside” they mean knowledge and ignorance, not distance in space; and that the whole creation we know — made by the Demiurge, or by the angels — stands inside the Pleroma, inside what the Father contains, held by that greatness no words can measure, the way the center is held inside a circle or a stain inside a piece of cloth. Very well. Then in the first place, what sort of being is this Bythus, who lets a stain sit in his own bosom and lets someone else create and produce inside his own territory against his will?

Acting that way would convict the whole Pleroma of having gone bad, since it could have cut off that defect at the start, along with the emanations that came out of it, and refused to allow creation to be formed in ignorance, or in passion, or in defect. Anyone who can put a defect right afterward, and wash a stain out, could have seen to it much earlier that no such stain was ever found among his belongings in the first place. Or else, if at the start he allowed the things that were made to be as they are because they could not in fact be formed otherwise, then they must go on in that same condition forever. For how can things that could not be set right at first be set right later on? And how can people say they are called to perfection, when the very beings they trace their own origin to — the Demiurge himself, or the angels — are declared to exist in a state of defect?

And if, as they maintain, the supreme being was kind enough to take pity on human beings at last and grant them perfection, he ought to have pitied the makers of humanity first and granted perfection to them. Then human beings too would truly have shared in his compassion, being made perfect by makers who were perfect themselves. If he pitied the work of these beings, he should have pitied the beings themselves long before, and not have let them fall into such appalling blindness.

Their talk about shadow and emptiness, in which they say our own creation was formed, comes to nothing as well, if the things they are talking about were created inside the territory the Father contains. For if they hold that their Father’s light is such that it fills everything inside him and lights it all up, how can any emptiness or shadow exist inside a territory that is contained by the Pleroma and by the Father’s light? They would have to point to some place inside the Propator, or inside the Pleroma, that is not lit and belongs to nobody, where the angels or the Demiurge made whatever they pleased. And it will be no small space, either, if a creation on this scale is to be imagined as having been formed in it. So of absolute necessity they will have to imagine, inside the Pleroma — inside this Father of theirs — some place that is void, shapeless, and full of darkness, where the things that were made were made. But on that assumption their Father’s light stands accused, as though it could not light up and fill the things that are inside him. So when they claim that these things are the fruit of defect and the work of error, they are bringing defect and error inside the Pleroma, right into the Father’s own bosom.

The remarks I made a little while ago answer those who assert that this world was formed outside the Pleroma, or under a “good God”; such people, together with the Father they speak of, will be cut off entirely from what lies outside the Pleroma — which is where, at the same time, they must finally come to rest. As for those who maintain instead that this world was formed by certain other beings within the territory the Father contains, every point already noticed rises up to show how absurd and incoherent they are. They will be forced either to acknowledge that everything inside the Father is bright, full, and active, or to accuse the Father’s light of being unable to light up all things — or else, since a portion of their Pleroma is described in this way, to confess that the whole of it is void, chaotic, and full of darkness. [f]

And they bring charges against everything else that was made, as though it were merely temporary — or, if lasting, then still made of dust. But the Aeons ought to be regarded as beyond the reach of charges like these, since they are inside the Pleroma; otherwise the same charges fall equally on the whole Pleroma. And so the Christ they speak of turns out to be the author of ignorance. For by their own account, once he had given shape — so far as substance goes — to the Mother they imagine, he threw her outside the Pleroma; that is, he cut her off from knowledge. The one who separated her from knowledge is therefore the one who actually produced ignorance in her. How then could that same person hand the gift of knowledge to the rest of the Aeons, the ones produced before him, and at the same time be the author of his own Mother’s ignorance? For he put her outside the reach of knowledge when he threw her outside the Pleroma.

What is more: if they explain being inside and outside the Pleroma as meaning knowledge and ignorance, as some of them do — since the one who has knowledge is inside the thing that knows — then they must grant that the Savior himself, the one they title All Things, was in a state of ignorance. For they hold that it was on coming out beyond the Pleroma that he gave shape to their Mother, Achamoth. So if they assert that whatever is outside knows nothing at all, and the Savior went out to give shape to their Mother, then he was outside the knowledge of all things — that is, he was in ignorance. How could he pass knowledge on to her when he himself was outside knowledge? For they declare that we, too, are outside the Pleroma, since we are outside the knowledge they have.

And once more: if the Savior really did go out beyond the Pleroma to look for the sheep that was lost, and the Pleroma is the same thing as knowledge, then he put himself outside knowledge — that is, into ignorance. They must take one position or the other. Either they grant that what is outside the Pleroma is outside it in place, and then everything said earlier rises up against them; or they mean by “inside” knowledge and by “outside” ignorance, and then their Savior, and Christ long before him, must have been formed in ignorance, since both went out beyond the Pleroma — that is, beyond knowledge — in order to give shape to their Mother.

These same arguments can be turned, in the same way, against everyone who in any fashion maintains that the world was formed by angels, or by anyone at all other than the true God. For the charges they bring against the Demiurge, and against the things that were made material and temporary, in truth fall back on the Father — if it is really the case that the very things formed in the bosom of the Pleroma began in time to be dissolved, and did so by the Father’s permission and good pleasure. The immediate maker, then, is not the real author of this work, since he thought he was forming it very good. The real author is the one who allows and approves that the products of defect and the works of error should have a place among his own belongings, and that temporary things should be mixed in with eternal, corruptible with incorruptible, and the things that share in error with the things that belong to truth.

But if these things were formed without the permission or approval of the Father of all, then the being who made them inside a territory that properly belongs to the Father, and did it without his leave, must be more powerful, stronger, and more kingly than he is. And if, as some say, their Father permitted these things without approving of them, then he gave that permission because of some necessity, and he was either able to stop it or unable. If he was unable, he is weak and powerless; if he was able, he is a deceiver, a hypocrite, and a slave of necessity, since he does not consent and yet allows it as though he did. And having let error start in the first place and go on growing, he tries at a later date to destroy it — when many have already perished miserably because of that first defect.

It is not fitting, however, to say of the God who is over all — free and answerable to no one — that he was a slave to necessity, or that anything takes place by his permission and against his wish. Otherwise they make necessity greater and more kingly than God, since whatever has the most power stands above everything else. He ought to have cut off the causes of this supposed necessity at the very beginning, and not to have let himself be boxed in and forced to give way to it by permitting anything unworthy of him. It would have been far better, far more consistent, and far more godlike to cut off the very principle of such a necessity at the start, than to try afterward, as if moved by regret, to root out the results of necessity once they had grown that far. And if the Father of all is a slave to necessity and must yield to fate, tolerating unwillingly the things that are done and yet powerless to act against necessity and fate — like Homer’s Zeus, who says about necessity, “I gave you this willingly, and yet with an unwilling heart” — then by this reasoning the Bythus they speak of turns out to be the slave of necessity and fate.

And how, again, could the angels, or the maker of the world, have been ignorant of the supreme God, when they were his property, his creatures, and were contained by him? He may well have been invisible to them because he is so far above them; but he could not possibly have been unknown to them, because of his providence. Even granting what they say, that these beings were separated very far from him by being lower in nature, still his rule reached over all of them, and they were bound to know their ruler — and to know this in particular, that the one who created them is Lord of all. For his invisible being is mighty, and it gives every one of them a deep grasp and perception in the mind of how powerful, indeed how all-powerful, his greatness is. So although “no one knows the Father except the Son, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and those to whom the Son will reveal him,” every being does know this one fact at least, because the reason planted in their minds moves them and shows them that there is one God, the Lord of all. [o]

That is why all things have been placed, by common consent, under the sway of the one who is called the Most High and the Almighty. By calling on him, even before our Lord came, people were rescued from the most wicked spirits, from every kind of demon, and from every sort of rebel power. This happened not because earthly spirits or demons had seen him, but because they knew that the God who is over all exists. At the calling of his name they trembled — as every creature trembles, and every principality and power and every being with any energy at all under his government. Take a parallel. Do people living under the empire of the Romans not know perfectly well, from feeling his rule, who it is that holds the chief power in the state, even though they have never seen the emperor and are far separated from him by both land and sea?

How then could it be that the angels, who are above us in nature, or even the being they call the maker of the world, did not know the Almighty, when even dumb animals tremble and give way at the calling of his name? And just as all things are subject to the name of our Lord, though they have not seen him, so they must be subject to the name of the one who made and established all things by his word, since it was no other than he who formed the world. That is why the Jews to this day put demons to flight by this very adjuration: because all beings are afraid at the calling of the name of the one who created them.

So if they shrink from saying that the angels are less rational than dumb animals, they will find that the angels, though they had not seen the God who is over all, were bound to know his power and his sovereignty. It will look truly ridiculous if they maintain that they themselves, who live on the earth, know the God over all whom they have never seen, and yet will not allow that the being who on their own account formed them and the whole world — although he lives in the heights and above the heavens — knows the things that they themselves, living down below, are acquainted with. Unless, perhaps, they mean to maintain that Bythus lives in Tartarus, under the earth, and that this is how they came to a knowledge of him before the angels whose home is on high.

This is the abyss of madness they rush into: pronouncing the maker of the world void of understanding. They truly deserve pity, since with such utter folly they affirm that he knew neither his own Mother, nor her seed, nor the Pleroma of the Aeons, nor the Propator, nor what the things were that he himself made; but that these are images of the things inside the Pleroma, the Savior having worked secretly to have them formed that way, in honor of the things above.