Old Fables, New Names

There is an account of how everything began that is a good deal closer to the truth than theirs, and more agreeable besides: the one Antiphanes, an old writer of comedies, gives in his Theogony. He speaks of Chaos as produced from Night and Silence; then of Love as springing from Chaos and Night; from Love, Light; and from Light, in his view, all the rest of the first generation of the gods. After these he brings on a second generation of gods and the making of the world, and then tells how mankind was formed by that second order of gods. These men have taken the fable over as their own and arranged their opinions around it, as though the arrangement had come about by some natural process, changing only the names of the things it speaks of and setting out the very same beginning for the generation and production of all things. For Night and Silence they substitute Bythus and Sige; for Chaos they put Nous; and for Love — by whom, says the comic poet, everything else was set in order — they have brought forward the Word. For the primary and greatest gods they have made their Aeons, and in place of the secondary gods they tell us of that creation by their mother which lies outside the Pleroma, and which they call the second Ogdoad. Like the writer I have mentioned, they announce to us that from this Ogdoad came the making of the world and the forming of man, and they insist that they alone are acquainted with these unspeakable and unknown mysteries. What is acted out everywhere in the theaters by comedians in the clearest of voices, they transfer to their own system, teaching it beyond question by the same arguments and merely changing the names. [a]

And it is not only the comic poets whose material they are caught putting forward as their own original work. They also collect the sayings of all those who did not know God, the men who are called philosophers; and stitching together, as it were, a coat of many colors out of a heap of shabby rags, they have by their fine-spun way of speaking got themselves a cloak that is not theirs at all. They do introduce a new sort of teaching, in the sense that a new sort of craft has been put in place of the old. Yet in reality it is both old and useless, since these very opinions have been sewn together out of ancient doctrines that reek of ignorance and irreligion.

Thales of Miletus, for instance, held that water was the generative and initial principle of all things. Now it makes no difference at all whether we say water or Bythus. Homer the poet, again, held the opinion that Oceanus, along with mother Tethys, was the origin of the gods; these men have transferred that idea to Bythus and Sige. Anaximander laid it down that infinity is the first principle of all things, holding within itself, as seed, the generation of them all, and out of this, he declared, the immense worlds were formed; this too they have dressed up afresh and referred to Bythus and their Aeons. Anaxagoras, who has also been nicknamed “the Atheist,” gave it as his opinion that living things were formed from seeds that fell down out of heaven onto the earth. This thought too these men have transferred to “the seed” of their Mother, which they maintain is themselves — and so they acknowledge at once, in the judgment of anyone who has sense, that they are the offspring of the irreligious Anaxagoras.

Again, they took the ideas of shadow and emptiness from Democritus and Epicurus and fitted them to their own views, following teachers who had already talked a great deal about the void and about atoms, calling the one “what is” and the other “what is not.” In just the same way these men call the things inside the Pleroma real existences, exactly as those philosophers called the atoms real, while they maintain that the things outside the Pleroma have no true existence, exactly as those men held about the void. So they have banished themselves — since here they are in this world, outside the Pleroma — into a place that does not exist. And when they maintain that the things down here are images of the things that truly exist above, they are once more quite plainly reciting the teaching of Democritus and Plato. For Democritus was the first to maintain that many different figures were stamped, as it were, with the forms of the things above and came down out of universal space into this world. Plato, for his part, speaks of matter, and the pattern, and God. These men, following those distinctions, have called what he calls ideas and pattern “the images of the things above”; and then, on the strength of a mere change of name, they boast of being the discoverers and inventors of this piece of made-up fiction.

This opinion of theirs too — that the Creator formed the world out of matter that already existed — was expressed before them by Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Plato, under their Mother’s inspiration, no doubt, as we are given to understand. Then take the opinion that everything necessarily passes away into the things it was formed out of, and that God is the slave of this necessity, so that he cannot give immortality to what is mortal or bestow incorruption on what is corruptible, but each thing passes into a substance like itself in nature. That is asserted by the men called Stoics, from the porch, and indeed by everyone who does not know God, poets and historians alike. Those heretics who hold the same faithless view have assigned to spiritual beings their own proper region, the one inside the Pleroma; to beings of soul, the middle space; and to bodily beings, the material region. And they assert that God himself can do nothing else, but that every one of the kinds of substance just mentioned passes away into the things of its own nature.

Then there is their claim that the Savior was formed out of all the Aeons, each one of them depositing in him, so to speak, its own particular flower. They bring forward nothing here that cannot be found already in Hesiod’s Pandora. What Hesiod says about her these men hint at about the Savior, presenting him to us as Pandoros, the All-gifted, as though each of the Aeons had bestowed on him whatever it possessed in the highest perfection. Again, their opinion that it makes no difference what a person eats or does, and their notion that the nobility of their nature keeps them from contracting the least defilement whatever they eat or perform — they got that from the Cynics, since they do in fact belong to the same fellowship as those philosophers. They also try to transfer to matters of faith that hairsplitting, over-subtle way of handling a question which is in fact a copy of Aristotle.

Again, their eagerness to trace this whole universe back to numbers they learned from the Pythagoreans. Those were the first to put forward numbers as the initial principle of all things, and to describe that initial principle of theirs as being both equal and unequal, and to hold that out of these two properties came both the objects of the senses and the things without matter. They held, too, that one set of first principles gave rise to the matter of things and another to their form; and they affirm that everything has been made out of these first principles, just as a statue is made out of its metal and its own particular shape. The heretics have adapted this to the things outside the Pleroma.

The Pythagoreans maintained that the principle of intellect is proportionate to the energy with which the mind, as a receiver of what can be grasped, presses its inquiries, until at last, worn out, it is resolved into the Indivisible and the One. They further affirm that Hen — that is, One — is the first principle of all things and the substance of everything that has been formed; and that from this proceeded the Dyad, the Tetrad, the Pentad, and the manifold generation of the rest. These things the heretics repeat word for word, with their Pleroma and their Bythus written in. From the same source, too, they work to bring into fashion those conjunctions that proceed out of unity. Marcus boasts of such views as if they were his own, and as if he were seen to have discovered something newer than anybody else, when all he does is set out the Tetrad of Pythagoras as the originating principle and mother of all things.

But I will simply put this to them. All those men I have named, whose language you have been shown to share, did they know the truth or did they not? If they knew it, then the Savior’s descent into this world was unnecessary. Why in that case did he come down? Was it to bring the truth that was already known to the knowledge of the people who knew it? If, on the other hand, those men did not know it, then how is it that you express yourselves in the same terms as men who did not know the truth, and still boast that you alone possess the knowledge that is above all things — when people who are ignorant of God possess it too? So by a complete turning of language on its head they call ignorance of the truth “knowledge.” Paul puts it well when he says that they deal in “novelties of speech belonging to a false knowledge.” For that knowledge of theirs really is found to be false.

If, however, they take a shameless line on these points and declare that men indeed did not know the truth, but that their Mother, the seed of the Father, proclaimed the mysteries of truth through such men, as she did through the prophets as well, while the Demiurge knew nothing about it, then my answer is this. First, the things that were foretold were not of such a kind that nobody could understand them; the men themselves knew what they were saying, and so did their disciples, and their disciples’ disciples after them. And second, if either the Mother or her seed knew and proclaimed the things that belong to the truth — and the Father is truth — then on their own theory the Savior spoke falsely when he said, “No one knows the Father except the Son.” Unless, of course, they maintain that their seed, or their Mother, is No-one.

So far, then, by giving human feelings to their Aeons, and by the fact that their language largely coincides with that of many who do not know God, they have been seen drawing a certain number of people away plausibly enough. They lead them on by the use of expressions the hearers are used to, into that sort of discourse which treats of everything: setting out the production of the Word of God, and of Zoe, and of Nous, and bringing the emanations of God, one after another, into the world. But the views they put forward next, with neither plausibility nor parade, are simply lies from beginning to end. It is like men who want to lure and catch animals of some kind: they set out the food the creatures are used to and draw them on little by little by the familiar diet, until at length they seize them; and once they have taken them captive they put them under the bitterest bondage and drag them along by force wherever they please. These men do the same. Gradually and gently, by their plausible speeches, they persuade others to accept the emission I have described, and then they bring forward things that do not hold together, and forms of the remaining emissions that are nothing like what anyone would have expected.

They declare, for instance, that ten Aeons were sent out by Logos and Zoe, while from Anthropos and Ecclesia there came twelve — though they have no proof, no testimony, no probability, nothing whatever of the sort to support it. And with equal folly and audacity they want it believed that from Logos and Zoe, who are Aeons, were sent out Bythus and Mixis, Ageratos and Henosis, Autophyes and Hedone, Acinetos and Syncrasis, Monogenes and Macaria; and that in the same way there were sent out from Anthropos and Ecclesia, who are Aeons, Paracletus and Pistis, Patricos and Elpis, Metricos and Agape, Ainos and Synesis, Ecclesiasticus and Macariotes, Theletos and Sophia.

The passions and the error of this Sophia — how she ran the risk of perishing through her inquiry into the Father’s nature, as they tell it, and what took place outside the Pleroma, and out of what sort of defect they teach that the Maker of the world was produced — I set out in the preceding book, describing the opinions of these heretics there with all diligence. I gave their views as well about Christ, whom they describe as having been produced after all these, and about Soter, who according to them derived his being from the Aeons that were formed inside the Pleroma. But I have had to mention their names here so that the absurdity of their falsehood may be made plain from the names themselves, and the confused character of the nomenclature they have devised. For they themselves take away from the dignity of their Aeons by such a crowd of names as this. They give out names that sound plausible and credible to the heathen, names like those of the twelve gods; and even these they will have to be images of their twelve Aeons. But the so-called images can produce names of their own far more seemly, and far more powerful in their etymology to point to something divine, than the supposed originals are.

But let us go back to the question already before us about the production of the Aeons. In the first place, let them tell us why the Aeons were produced in such a way that they touch nothing that belongs to creation. For they maintain that the things above were not made on account of creation, but creation on account of them, and that the former are not images of the latter, but the latter of the former. Since, then, they render a reason for the images — telling us that the month has thirty days on account of the thirty Aeons, and the day twelve hours, and the year twelve months, on account of the twelve Aeons inside the Pleroma, with more nonsense of the same kind — let them now tell us the reason for that production of the Aeons as well: why it was of such a kind, and why the first and firstborn Ogdoad was sent out rather than a Pentad, or a Triad, or a Septenad, or any other group defined by a different number. And how did it come about that from Logos and Zoe ten Aeons were sent out, and neither more nor fewer, while from Anthropos and Ecclesia twelve proceeded, when these might have been either more numerous or fewer? [v]

And then, with respect to the entire Pleroma, what reason is there for its being divided into these three — an Ogdoad, a Decad, and a Duodecad — and not into some other number altogether? And as to the division itself, why has it been made into three parts and not into four, or five, or six, or into some other number among those that have no connection with the numbers that belong to creation? For they describe the Aeons above as older than the created things below; those Aeons ought therefore to have the source of their being in themselves, a source that existed before creation and was not modeled after the pattern of creation, with everything agreeing exactly on that point.

The account we give of creation agrees with the regular order of things as they are, for our scheme is fitted to the things that have actually been made. But they, being unable to give any reason drawn from the things themselves about the beings that existed before creation and were perfected by themselves, must of necessity fall into the greatest perplexity. On the very points where they question us as though we knew nothing about creation, they themselves, when they are questioned in turn about the Pleroma, either fall back on plain human feelings or take refuge in the sort of talk that bears only on the harmony we can observe in creation — giving us answers about things that are secondary, when the question was about what they maintain is primary. For we are not questioning them about the harmony that belongs to creation, nor about human feelings.

We press them because they must admit, about that eight-formed, ten-formed and twelve-formed Pleroma of theirs, which they declare creation to be the image of, either that their Father shaped it in that figure emptily and thoughtlessly — and then they must charge him with turning out a misshapen thing, if he made anything without a reason — or else that the Pleroma was produced that way in accordance with the Father’s foresight, for the sake of creation, as though he had arranged its very substance symmetrically with that in view. But if that is so, then the Pleroma can no longer be regarded as having been formed on its own account, but for the sake of the creation that was to be its image and bear its likeness — just as the clay model is not molded for its own sake, but for the sake of the statue in bronze or gold or silver that is going to be made from it. And in that case creation will have the greater honor of the two, since it was for creation’s sake that the things above were produced.