Ropes of Sand

So it is unreasonable in the highest degree to take no account of the one who truly is God, the one to whom everything bears witness, and to spend our inquiry instead on whether there is above him some other being — a being that has no existence at all and that no one has ever proclaimed. They themselves are the witnesses that nothing has ever been plainly said about him. They take the parables of Scripture, which are open to being searched out whatever form the words come in, and transfer them, with wretched success, to the being they have thought up for themselves; and it is obvious from that very move that they are now producing another god, one nobody was looking for before. For in trying this way to explain the ambiguous passages of Scripture — passages that are ambiguous not because they point to another god, but as regards the arrangements the true God has made — they have manufactured a second god. As the common saying goes, they are weaving ropes of sand, and they are tying a weightier question onto a lighter one. No question can be settled by another question that is itself waiting to be settled. Nobody with any sense explains one ambiguity by another, or riddles by a bigger riddle. Things of that kind get their solution from what is plain, consistent and clear. [a]

But these men, while they work at explaining passages of Scripture and parables, bring forward a weightier question, and an irreverent one: whether there really is another god above the God who was the Creator of the world. They are in no position to settle the questions they raise — how could they be? They hang an important question on a lesser one, and so plant in their speculations a difficulty that cannot be resolved. For the sake of knowing “knowledge” itself — while never learning the plain fact that the Lord came to the baptism of truth when he was thirty years old — they irreverently despise the God who was the Creator and who sent him for the salvation of mankind. And so that they may be thought capable of telling us where the substance of matter comes from, they have piled up a heap of empty talk — all because they will not believe that God, as it pleased him, by the exercise of his own will and power, formed everything that now exists out of what did not exist before. In this they show plainly what their unbelief amounts to: they do not believe in what really exists, and they have fallen away into what has no existence at all.

They tell us that everything wet came from the tears of Achamoth, everything shining from her smile, everything solid from her grief, everything that moves from her fright — and that this is the lofty knowledge that makes them better than everyone else. How can such things be taken as anything but contemptible, and truly ridiculous? They will not believe that God, who is powerful and rich in every resource, created matter itself, since they do not know how much a spiritual and divine being can accomplish. Yet they do believe that their Mother, whom they style “a female from a female,” produced out of those feelings of hers the whole vast material substance of creation. They ask where the Creator got the substance of creation. They never ask where their Mother — whom they call the Enthymesis and the impulse of the Aeon who went astray — got such a quantity of tears, or sweat, or grief, or whatever else produced the rest of matter.

To trace the substance of created things back to the power and will of him who is God of all is both believable and worth accepting. It agrees with reason as well, and about a belief like that it can fairly be said that “what is impossible for men is possible for God.” Men cannot make anything out of nothing, but only out of material already there; and God is far above men on exactly this point, that he himself called the substance of his creation into being when before that it had no existence. But to claim that matter was produced from the Enthymesis of a straying Aeon; that the Aeon was then separated far off from her own Enthymesis; and that her suffering and her feeling, apart from her, became matter — that is unbelievable, mindless, impossible, and will not stand.

They do not believe that the God who is above all formed the whole varied range of creation by his Word, in his own domain, exactly as it pleased him — that he is the maker of all things, like a wise architect and a king of the greatest power. What they believe instead is that angels, or some power separate from God and ignorant of him, formed this universe. Going that way, refusing to credit the truth and wallowing in falsehood, they have lost the bread of real life and fallen into emptiness and a pit of shadow. They are like Aesop’s dog, which dropped the bread it had and snapped at the shadow of it, and so lost the food. It is easy to prove from the Lord’s own words that he acknowledges one Father, the Creator of the world and the one who formed man, the God whom the law and the prophets proclaimed; that he knows no other; that this One is truly God over all; and that the adoption as sons which belongs to that Father, and which is eternal life, comes about through the Lord himself, who confers it on all the righteous. [f]

But these men enjoy attacking us. True to their character as fault-finders, they come at us with points that tell nothing at all against us, throwing up in opposition a mass of parables and trick questions. So I have thought it well to turn it around, and first of all to put to them the following inquiries about their own teachings, to show how improbable those teachings are and to put a stop to their nerve. After that I intend to bring forward the Lord’s own words, so that they will not only be left with no means of attacking us, but — being unable to give any reasonable answer to the questions put to them — will see that their whole plan of argument has been destroyed. Then either they will come back to the truth, humble themselves, give up their endless fantasies, make amends to God for the blasphemies they have uttered against him, and receive salvation; or, if they persist in the conceited system that has taken hold of their minds, they will at least be forced to change the kind of argument they use against us.

First, then, a remark about their Triacontad, their group of thirty. The whole of it collapses remarkably from both sides at once: it comes out both short and over-full. They say the Lord came to be baptized at the age of thirty in order to point to it — but that claim in fact overturns their entire argument. Take the shortfall first. To begin with, they count the Propator in among the other Aeons. But the Father of all ought not to be counted along with things that were produced: the unproduced with the produced, the unbegotten with the born, the one whom no one takes in with what is taken in by him — which is exactly why he cannot be taken in — the one who has no figure with what has a definite shape. Since he is above the rest, he ought not to be numbered with them; and certainly not so that one who cannot suffer and does not go astray should be reckoned in with an Aeon who did suffer and did go astray. In the book immediately before this one I showed that they count the Triacontad from Bythus down to Sophia, the Aeon they describe as the one who went astray, and I set out their names there as well. But if he is not counted, then on their own showing there are no longer thirty Aeons produced. There are only twenty-nine. [g]

Next take the first thing produced, Ennoea, whom they also call Sige, and from whom they say Nous and Aletheia were sent out. They go wrong on both counts. A person’s thought — Ennoea — and his silence — Sige — cannot be conceived of apart from the person himself, nor sent out beyond him so as to have a shape of their own. But if they claim that Ennoea was not sent out beyond him and remained one with the Propator, why then do they count her along with the other Aeons — the ones who are not one with the Father and for that very reason do not know how great he is? Suppose, though, that she was united with him; let us take that case too. Then it follows of absolute necessity that from a joined and inseparable pair, which makes up only one being, the thing produced must itself come out joined and inseparable, so as not to be unlike the one who sent it out. And if that is so, then Nous and Aletheia, just like Bythus and Sige, will be one and the same being, always clinging together. Since neither can be conceived of without the other — as water cannot be conceived of without wetness, or fire without heat, or a stone without hardness, these being bound up together so that one cannot be separated from the other but always exists alongside it — Bythus must in the same way be united with Ennoea, and Nous with Aletheia. Logos and Zoe in turn, having been sent out by a pair united like that, must themselves be united and make up only one being. And by that same reasoning Anthropos and Ecclesia, and indeed every remaining pair of Aeons produced, ought to be united and always to exist alongside each other. For on their view a female Aeon must stand beside a male one, since she is, so to speak, his own affection put forth.

That being so, and those being the opinions they announce, they go on without blushing to teach that the youngest Aeon of the Duodecad, whom they also call Sophia, suffered apart from any union with her partner, whom they call Theletos, and on her own, with no help from him, gave birth to an offspring they name “a female from a female.” They rush into such utter frenzy that they hold two flatly opposite opinions about the same point. For if Bythus is always one with Sige, Nous with Aletheia, Logos with Zoe, and so on with the rest, how could Sophia either suffer anything or produce anything without union with her partner? And if she really did suffer apart from him, it necessarily follows that the other pairs also admit of coming apart and being separated — a thing I have already shown to be impossible. So it is impossible that Sophia suffered apart from Theletos, and once again their whole system of argument is overthrown. For it is from that suffering, which they say she went through apart from union with her partner, that they derive all the rest of material substance, staging it like the plot of a tragedy.

Suppose they brazenly maintain, in order to save their vain imaginings from ruin, that the other pairs too were pulled apart and separated from one another on account of this last pairing. Then in the first place they are resting on something impossible. How can they separate the Propator from his Ennoea, or Nous from Aletheia, or Logos from Zoe, and so on with the rest? And how can they themselves maintain that these beings tend back toward unity and are in fact all at one, if the very pairs inside the Pleroma do not keep their unity but are separate from one another — separate to such a degree that they both suffer and do the work of generation without any union with each other, just as hens lay without a rooster?

Next, their first and firstborn Ogdoad is overthrown as follows. They have to admit that Bythus and Sige, Nous and Aletheia, Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ecclesia each dwell in the same Pleroma. But Sige, silence, cannot exist in the presence of Logos, speech; nor again can Logos show himself in the presence of Sige. The two are mutually destructive, just as light and darkness cannot possibly exist in the same place: if light prevails there can be no darkness, and if darkness, no light, since wherever light appears darkness is put to flight. In the same way, where Sige is there can be no Logos, and where Logos is there certainly can be no Sige. But if they say that Logos exists only within, unspoken, then Sige will exist within too, and will be destroyed by the inner Logos just the same. And that he really is not merely conceived of in the mind is shown by the very order in which they say their Aeons were produced. So let them stop declaring that the first and chief Ogdoad is made up of Logos and Sige together. They must, of necessity, throw out either Sige or Logos — and then their first and chief Ogdoad is at an end. For if they describe the pairs of Aeons as united, their whole argument falls to pieces: if they were united, how could Sophia have generated a defect without union with her partner? But if they maintain that each of the Aeons, as produced, possesses a substance peculiar to itself, then how can Sige and Logos show themselves in the same place? So much, then, for the shortfall.

Now their Triacontad is overthrown on the side of excess by the following considerations. They present Horos — whom they call by a variety of names, which I listed in the preceding book — as having been produced by Monogenes just like the other Aeons. Some of them hold that Horos was produced by Monogenes; others say he was sent out by the Propator himself, in his own image. They say further that a production was formed by Monogenes, namely Christ and the Holy Spirit, and they do not reckon these in the number of the Pleroma, nor the Savior either, whom they also declare to be Totum, the All. Now it is evident even to a blind man that not merely thirty productions were sent out, as they maintain, but four more along with the thirty. For they reckon the Propator himself in the Pleroma, and those too who were produced in succession one from another. Why is it, then, that these others are not reckoned as existing with them in the same Pleroma, since they were produced in the same manner? What just reason can they give for not counting in with the other Aeons either Christ, whom they describe as produced by Monogenes according to the Father’s will, or the Holy Spirit, or Horos, whom they also call Soter, Savior — or even the Savior himself, who came to bring help and form to their Mother? Is it as though these latter were weaker than the former, and so unworthy of the name of Aeons or of a place in their number? Or as though they were higher and more excellent? How could they be weaker, when they were produced to establish the others and set them right? And they cannot possibly be superior to the first and chief Tetrad, which also produced them, for the Tetrad itself is reckoned in the number just mentioned. So either these beings too ought to have been numbered in the Pleroma of the Aeons, or else the group that bears that title should be stripped of the honor of being called Aeons at all.

Their Triacontad, then, is brought to nothing, as I have shown, on the side of shortfall and on the side of excess alike. With a number like that, any excess or any shortfall at all makes the number untenable — how much more variations as large as these. It follows that what they maintain about their Ogdoad and their Duodecad is a mere fable that cannot stand. Their whole system falls to the ground as well, once its very foundation is destroyed and dissolved into Bythus — that is, into what has no existence. From now on, then, let them look for some other reasons why the Lord came to be baptized at the age of thirty; and let them explain some other way the Duodecad of the apostles, and the woman who suffered from a flow of blood, and all the other points they labor over so madly and so uselessly.