Proof Texts and Achamoth’s Tears

That, then, is the account they give of what took place inside the Pleroma. That is how they explain the disaster that came out of the suffering which seized the Aeon just named — the one who came within a hair of perishing, swallowed up in the universal substance, because she went prying after the Father. And that is how they explain her being pulled back together out of her agony by Horos, who is also Stauros, Lytrotes, Carpistes, Horothetes, and Metagoges. That is their account, too, of how the later Aeons came to be: first Christ and the Holy Spirit, both put forth by the Father after Sophia’s repentance, and then the second Christ, the one they also call Savior, who owes his existence to what all the Aeons contributed together. [a]

But they tell us this knowledge was never made public, since not everyone can take it in. The Savior revealed it in secret, through parables, to those fit to understand. It works like this. The thirty Aeons are pointed to, as we have already said, by the thirty years in which the Savior did nothing in public, and by the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Paul too, they claim, names these Aeons plainly and often, and even keeps them in order, when he says, “To all the generations of the Aeons of the Aeon.” And even we ourselves, they say, put these Aeons on display when we say at the thanksgiving, “To the Aeons of the Aeons” — that is, forever and ever. In short, wherever the word aiōn turns up, in the singular or the plural, they refer it straight to these beings of theirs.

The bringing forth of the Duodecad, their group of twelve Aeons, is shown, they say, by the Lord’s being twelve years old when he argued with the teachers of the law, and by the choosing of the apostles, since there were twelve of them. The remaining eighteen Aeons come out this way: the Lord, they say, went on talking with his disciples for eighteen months after he rose from the dead. They also say the eighteen are marked out unmistakably by the first two letters of his name, Iēsous — iota and eta. In the same way the ten Aeons are pointed to by the iota that begins his name, and that, they tell us, is why the Savior said, “Not one iota, not one stroke of a letter, will pass away until it is all fulfilled.”

They further hold that the suffering of the twelfth Aeon is pointed at by the desertion of Judas, who was the twelfth apostle, and by Christ’s having suffered in the twelfth month — for their view is that he preached for only one year after his baptism. The clearest sign of all, they say, is the woman with the flow of blood. She had suffered with it for twelve years, and when the Savior came she was healed by touching the edge of his cloak. That, they say, is why the Savior asked, “Who touched me?” He was teaching his disciples the secret of what had happened among the Aeons, and the healing of the Aeon caught in suffering.

For the woman ill twelve years stands, on their telling, for that power whose substance was stretching itself out and running off into the boundless. If she had not touched the Son’s garment — that is, Aletheia of the first Tetrad, who is what the hem stands for — she would have dissolved into the common substance. As it was, she stopped, and her suffering ended. The power that went out from the Son, the power they call Horos, healed her and cut the suffering away from her.

They claim as well that the Savior is shown to come from all the Aeons, and to be everything in himself, by this text: “Every male that opens the womb.” Being everything, he opened the womb of the enthymesis of the suffering Aeon after it had been thrown out of the Pleroma. This they also call the second Ogdoad, which we will come to shortly. And this, they say, is plainly why Paul wrote, “And he himself is all things”; and again, “All things are to him, and from him are all things”; and further, “In him dwells all the fullness of deity”; and yet again, “All things are gathered up by God in Christ.” That is how they read these passages, and any others like them to be found in Scripture.

They go on to show that this Horos of theirs, whom they call by so many names, has two powers: one that holds up, and one that cuts off. So far as he holds and supports, he is Stauros; so far as he divides and separates, he is Horos. Then they make the Savior point to this double power. The holding power, they say, is what he meant when he said, “Whoever does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple,” and again, “Take up the cross and follow me.” The separating power is what he meant when he said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

They hold that John meant the same thing when he said, “The winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will clean out the threshing floor and gather the wheat into his barn; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” By this, they say, he was setting out the power of Horos; for they explain that fan as the Cross, which burns up everything material as fire burns chaff, but cleans everyone who is saved as a fan cleans wheat. They claim, besides, that the apostle Paul himself mentions this cross when he writes, “The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” And again: “God forbid that I should boast in anything except in the cross of Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

That, then, is what they all say about their Pleroma and about how the universe was formed, straining to fit words that were well spoken to their own vicious inventions. And it is not only out of the Gospels and the apostles’ writings that they try to prove their opinions, by twisting the reading and cheating in the explanation. They handle the law and the prophets the same way, which are full of parables and figures that can often be pulled toward more than one meaning, depending on the kind of reading they are put through. Others of them, fitting such passages to their own fictions with great cunning, carry off from the truth anyone who does not hold firmly to one God, the Father Almighty, and to one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Here is what they say happened outside the Pleroma. The enthymesis of the Sophia above — the thing they also name Achamoth — was carried out of the Pleroma along with her suffering, and, as was bound to happen, it thrashed about violently in those places of darkness and emptiness. For she was shut out from light and from the Pleroma, without shape or outline, like a miscarriage, because she had received nothing from a father. But the Christ on high took pity on her. He stretched himself out through Stauros and past it, and gave her an outline — but an outline only in her substance, not one that carried knowledge. Having done that much, he drew his power back and returned, leaving Achamoth to herself, so that she would feel her own suffering at being cut off from the Pleroma and be moved to want better things, while she kept meanwhile a kind of scent of imperishability that Christ and the Holy Spirit had left in her. That is why she goes by two names: Sophia, after her father — for they speak of Sophia as her father — and Holy Spirit, from the Spirit who is with Christ. [u]

So, having been given form and having come to her senses, and abandoned at once by that Word who had been invisibly present with her — that is, by Christ — she strained to find the light that had left her. She could not do it; Horos blocked her. And as Horos held her back, he cried out, “Iao!” and that, they say, is where the name Iao comes from. Since she could not get past Horos, because of the suffering she was tangled in and because she alone had been left outside, she gave herself over to every kind of that many-sided suffering. She grieved, because she had not got what she wanted. She was afraid that life itself would fail her, as the light already had. And on top of it she was utterly at a loss. All of it went together with ignorance. Her ignorance was not like her mother’s — the first Sophia, an Aeon, who sank into it through suffering — but came from a nature set against knowledge from the start. And another kind of feeling came over Achamoth as well: the longing to turn back to the one who had given her life.

This gathering of feelings, they declare, was the stuff of the matter out of which this world was made. From her turning back came every soul in this world, and the soul of the Demiurge himself. Everything else began in her terror and her grief. From her tears came everything liquid; from her smile, everything that shines; and from her grief and bewilderment, all the bodily elements of the world. For one moment, they say, she would weep and wail at being left alone in the middle of darkness and emptiness; the next, thinking of the light that had left her, she would fill with joy and laugh; then terror would strike her; and then she would sink into shock and confusion.

And what comes of all this? No small tragedy — with every man among them staging it grandly out of his own imagination, one this way and another that, over which passion produced which element. They have good reason, it seems to me, for not caring to teach this to everyone in public, but only to those who can pay a high price to be let in on such deep mysteries. For these teachings are nothing at all like the ones our Lord spoke of when he said, “Freely you have received; freely give.” No — these are obscure, monstrous, deep mysteries, and only a man in love with falsehood will take the trouble to reach them. For who would not spend everything he owns to learn, in return, that the seas and the springs and the rivers and every liquid thing came from the tears of the enthymesis of the Aeon caught in suffering; that light broke out of her smile; and that from her bewilderment and shock the bodily elements of the world took shape?

I feel a certain urge to contribute a few suggestions of my own toward filling out their system. When I notice that some water is fresh — springs, rivers, rain, and the like — and some is salt, like the water of the sea, it occurs to me that all of it cannot have come from her tears, since tears are salt and nothing else. So it is clear that only the salt water comes from her tears. But presumably, in that violent agony and bewilderment of hers, she also broke into a sweat. And so, following their idea through, we may take it that springs and rivers and all the fresh water in the world come from that. It is hard to believe that both salt and fresh water came out of tears, when we know that all tears taste the same; the more likely account is that some water is from her tears and some from her sweat. And since there is also water in the world that is hot and sharp, you will have to work out for yourself where that came from and how. Such are some of the fruits of their hypothesis.

They go on to say that when the mother Achamoth had been through every kind of suffering and had barely got clear of it, she turned to beg the light that had left her — that is, Christ. But he had gone back into the Pleroma, and presumably did not want to come down out of it again, so he sent her the Advocate, that is, the Savior. The Father gave this one all power and put everything under his authority, and the Aeons did the same, so that “by him all things were created, visible and invisible, thrones, divinities, dominions.” He was then sent to her with the angels of his own generation. And they tell us that Achamoth, filled with awe, at first veiled herself out of modesty; but after a while, when she had looked at him with everything he brought, and had drawn strength from the sight, she ran forward to meet him.

He then gave her form in knowledge, and healed her sufferings, separating them from her — though not so as to put them out of mind altogether. They could not simply be wiped out, as in the earlier case, since they had already taken root and grown strong. All he could do was separate them and set them apart, and then mix and pack them together, turning them from bodiless suffering into unformed matter. By this he gave them the fitness and the nature to become solid masses and bodily structures, so that two substances should come out of it: one evil, from the passions, and the other able to suffer but arising from her turning back. And this is why they say the Savior in effect created the world. But once Achamoth was free of her suffering, she gazed in delight at the blazing sight of the angels who were with him; and in that ecstasy she conceived by them, and, they tell us, gave birth — offspring partly in her own likeness, and partly a spiritual offspring in the likeness of the Savior’s attendants.