God Has No Parts

Now I will show that the first stage of production, as they picture it, cannot stand. They hold that Nous and Aletheia were produced by Bythus and his Ennoea — and this can be shown to contradict itself. Nous is the thing that is itself first and highest, the principle and source, so to speak, of all understanding; while Ennoea, which arises out of him, is nothing but the mind’s stirring about some particular subject. So Nous cannot have been produced by Bythus and Ennoea. It would be nearer the truth for them to say that Ennoea was produced as the daughter of the Propator and this Nous. It is not Ennoea who gives birth to Nous, as they claim; Nous becomes the father of Ennoea. For how could Nous have been produced by the Propator, when he holds the first and chief place in that hidden and invisible movement of mind which is within him? Out of that movement come sense, and Ennoea, and Enthymesis, and the other things that are simply other names for Nous himself. As I have already said, they are only so many definite exercises of that one power upon some particular subject. [a]

We take these terms according to the length and breadth of their meaning, not as though the thing itself changed. The various exercises of thought are bounded by one and the same knowledge and are spoken of together under one name, the same understanding remaining within, and creating, and managing, and governing freely by its own power, and as it pleases, the things mentioned above.

The first exercise of that power upon anything is called Ennoea. When it lasts, and gathers strength, and takes possession of the whole soul, it is called Enthymesis. When this Enthymesis works on the same point for a long time and has, as it were, been tested, it is named sensation. When sensation is much developed, it becomes deliberation. And the increase and full development of deliberation becomes the weighing of a thought, which is judgment; and this, staying in the mind, is most properly called Logos, reason, and from it the spoken word proceeds. But all the exercises of thought I have named are fundamentally one and the same. They take their origin from Nous and receive different names according to their growth. It is like the human body, which is young, then in its prime, then old: it has received different names according to its growth and continuance, not because its substance changed or because any part of it was really lost. So it is with these workings of the mind. When a man contemplates something, he also thinks of it; when he thinks of it, he has knowledge of it; when he knows it, he considers it; when he considers it, he turns it over in his mind; and when he turns it over, he speaks of it. But, as I said, it is Nous who governs all of these, while he himself remains invisible. He utters speech of himself by means of the processes I have named, as if by rays going out from him — but he himself is not sent out by anything else.

All this may properly be said of human beings, since we are compound by nature and consist of a body and a soul. But those who claim that Ennoea was sent out from God, and Nous from Ennoea, and then Logos from these in turn, are to be blamed first for using the idea of production wrongly, and next for describing the affections and passions and mental habits of men while showing that they do not know God. By the way they talk, they attach to the Father of all what belongs to men — the same Father they declare is unknown to everyone. They deny that he himself made the world, so as not to charge him with being unable to prevent evil; and at the same moment they fit him out with human affections and passions. If they had known the Scriptures and been taught by the truth, they would have known past all doubt that God is not as men are, and that his thoughts are not like the thoughts of men. The Father of all is at an immense distance from the affections and passions that work among men. He is simple, not put together, without unlike parts, altogether like himself and equal to himself, since he is wholly understanding, wholly spirit, wholly thought, wholly intelligence, wholly reason, wholly hearing, wholly seeing, wholly light, and wholly the source of everything good — which is how religious and reverent people are accustomed to speak about God.

He is, however, above all these descriptions, and therefore cannot be described. He may quite properly be called an Understanding that takes in all things, but he is not on that account like the understanding of men. He may most properly be called Light, but he is nothing like the light we know. And so it is with everything else: the Father of all is in no degree like human weakness. We speak of him in these terms out of love; but as to his greatness, our thoughts about him go beyond such expressions. Now if even in human beings the understanding itself does not come about by being sent out, and the intelligence that produces other things is not separated from the living man while its motions and affections come into view, then much more will the mind of God — who is all understanding — never in any way be separated from himself; nor can anything in his case be produced as though by some other being.

For if he produced intelligence, then on their view the one who produced it must be understood as a compound and bodily being, so that God, who sent that intelligence out, is separate from it, and the intelligence that was sent out is separate from him. But if they say that intelligence was sent out from intelligence, then they cut the intelligence of God apart and divide it into pieces. And where has it gone? Where was it sent out from? Whatever is sent out from a place must of necessity pass into some other place. But what existed earlier than the intelligence of God, into which they say it was sent? And what an enormous region that must have been, able to receive and hold the intelligence of God! If instead they say the sending happened the way a ray goes out from the sun, then, just as the air lying under the ray and receiving it must have existed before the ray did, so by such reasoning they will be pointing to something already in existence, able to hold the intelligence of God and older than it, into which that intelligence was sent. It would follow that, as we see the sun — a small thing beside all that is — sending out rays from itself a great distance, so in the same way the Propator sent out a ray beyond himself and far away from himself. But what can be thought of as beyond God, or at a distance from him, into which he sent this ray?

If, on the other hand, they say that this intelligence was not sent out beyond the Father but inside the Father himself, then, in the first place, it is pointless to say that it was sent out at all. How could a thing be sent out if it stayed inside the Father? A sending out is the showing of what is sent out beyond the one who sends it. In the next place, if this intelligence has been sent out that way, then the Logos who springs from him will still be inside the Father, and so will the later emissions that come from Logos. In that case they cannot be ignorant of the Father, since they are inside him; and since they are all equally surrounded by the Father, none of them can know him any less than another according to the descending order of their emission. They must also all remain untouched by suffering in equal measure, since they exist in the bosom of their Father, and none of them can ever sink into decay or degradation.

For with the Father there is no decay — unless perhaps they mean that a smaller circle is held inside a great one, and inside that one another smaller still; or unless they say of the Father that, after the manner of a sphere or a square, he holds inside himself on every side the likeness of a sphere, or the production of the rest of the Aeons in the shape of a square, each one of them surrounded by the one above it in greatness and in turn surrounding the one below it in smallness; and that for this reason the smallest and last of all, having its place at the center and so being far removed from the Father, was genuinely ignorant of the Propator. But if they hold any such theory, they must shut their Bythus up inside a definite shape and space, so that he both surrounds others and is surrounded by them; for they will have to admit that there is something outside him that surrounds him. And the talk about what contains and what is contained will run on into infinity all the same, and all the Aeons will plainly turn out to be bodies shut up inside one another.

Further, they must confess either that he is empty space or that the whole universe is within him — and in that case all will share in the Father in the same degree. Just as, if someone makes circles in water, or round or square figures, all of them share water equally; and as figures framed in the air must share air, and those formed in light share light; so those who are inside him must all share the Father equally, and ignorance can have no place among them. Where, then, is this sharing in the Father who fills all things? If he has indeed filled all things, there will be no ignorance among them. On that ground their whole business of decay comes to nothing, and so does the production of matter and the shaping of the rest of the world, which they say drew their substance from passion and ignorance. But if instead they admit that he is empty space, then they fall into the worst blasphemy: they deny that he is spirit. For how can he be spirit, if he cannot fill even the things that are inside him?

Now what has been said about the sending out of intelligence applies in the same way against the school of Basilides, and against the rest of the Gnostics as well — the men from whom these Valentinians took over their ideas about emissions, and who were refuted in the first book. I have now plainly shown that the first production of Nous, that is, of the intelligence they speak of, is an opinion that cannot be held and cannot be true. Let us see how it stands with the rest of the Aeons. They hold that Logos and Zoe were sent out by Nous as the builders of this Pleroma. But they think of the sending out of Logos — that is, of the Word — on the model of human feelings, and they form rash guesses about God, as though they had discovered something wonderful in saying that Logos was produced by Nous. Everyone can see plainly that this may be said with good logic about men. But in him who is God over all, since he is all Nous and all Logos, as I said before, and has nothing in himself earlier or later than anything else, and nothing at odds with anything else, but remains altogether equal and alike and all of one kind — in him there is no longer any room for conceiving such a production in the order they have described.

A man is not wrong who says that God is all sight and all hearing — for in the way he sees, in that way he also hears, and in the way he hears, in that way he also sees. In the same way, the man who says that God is all intelligence and all word, and that in whatever respect he is intelligence, in that same respect he is word, and that this Nous is his Logos, will still have only an inadequate idea of the Father of all, but he will think far more fittingly about him than those who transfer the way a word is generated in men to the eternal Word of God, assigning him a beginning and a course of production, just as their own word has. And in what way will the Word of God — or rather God himself, since he is the Word — differ from the word of men, if he follows the same order and process of generation?

They have gone wrong about Zoe as well, holding that she was produced in the sixth place, when she ought to have come before all the rest, since God is life, and incorruption, and truth. These and the like have not been produced on a descending scale. They are names of the perfections that always exist in God, so far as it is possible and proper for men to hear and to speak about God. With the name of God these words agree: intelligence, word, life, incorruption, truth, wisdom, goodness, and the like. And no one can hold that intelligence is older than life, since intelligence is itself life; nor that life is later than intelligence, as though he who is the mind of all, that is, God, had at some time been without life. But if they say that life was indeed in the Father already, and was produced in the sixth place so that the Word might live, then surely on that reasoning it ought to have been sent out long before, in the fourth place, so that Nous might have life; and even before him it should have been with Bythus, so that their Bythus might live. To count Sige in with their Propator and assign her to him as his consort, and then not to number Zoe with them — is that not madness beyond all other madness?

Then there is the second production that proceeds from these Aeons, that of Anthropos and Ecclesia. Here their own fathers, who falsely call themselves Gnostics, quarrel among themselves, each man trying to make good his own opinion, and so convicting themselves of being nothing but thieves. They hold that it suits their theory of production better — as being, in fact, more like the truth — that the Word was produced by Man, and not Man by the Word; that Man existed before the Word; and that this Man is really the one who is God over all. And so it is, as I remarked before: they heap together every human feeling and exercise of mind and forming of intentions and uttering of words, with a kind of plausibility, and then lie against God with no plausibility at all. For while they ascribe to the divine reason the things that happen to men, and whatever they notice happening in themselves, they seem to people who do not know God to be saying something reasonable enough. And drawing their intelligence away by means of these human passions, while they place the origin and production of the Word of God in the fifth place, they claim that in doing so they are teaching wonderful mysteries, unspeakable and lofty, known to nobody but themselves. It was about these, they say, that the Lord said, “Seek, and you will find” — meaning that people should inquire how Nous and Aletheia came from Bythus and Sige, whether Logos and Zoe in turn take their origin from these, and then whether Anthropos and Ecclesia come from Logos and Zoe.