Images of Images

But suppose they will not agree to any of these conclusions, since agreeing would let us show that they can give no account at all of how their Pleroma was produced. Then they are forced back on one last position: they must admit that above the Pleroma there was some other arrangement, more spiritual and more powerful, on whose model their Pleroma was formed. For if the Demiurge did not design out of himself the shape that creation actually has, but made it after the pattern of the things above, then where did their Bythus get the pattern of the things that existed before him? He is the one, after all, who arranged for the Pleroma to have a configuration of this kind. [a]

One of two things has to be true. Either the plan of creating lay in the god who made the world, so that by his own power and out of himself he got the model he shaped it by; or, if you move away from him to someone higher, then you will have to keep asking, over and over, where the one above him got the pattern of the things that have been made, and how many productions there were, and what the model itself was made of. But if it was in Bythus’s power to give the Pleroma a configuration like that out of himself, why was it not in the Demiurge’s power to form out of himself a world like the one that exists? And again: if this creation is an image of the things above, why should we not say that those things are in their turn images of others above them, and those of others again, and so go on assuming images of images without number?

This is the difficulty that confronted Basilides, once he had missed the truth altogether and imagined that he could escape the trap by an endless succession of beings, each formed from the one before. He announced that three hundred and sixty-five heavens were formed in succession, each after the likeness of the one before it, and that plain proof of them was to be found in the number of days in the year — as I said earlier. Above these, he said, stood a power that they also call the Unnameable, together with its ordering of things. Even so, he did not escape the trap.

For when he is asked where the highest heaven of all got the pattern of its configuration — the heaven from which he wants all the rest to be understood as formed by succession — he will answer: from the ordering that belongs to the Unnameable. And then he must either say that the Unspeakable formed it out of himself, or else find himself obliged to acknowledge that there is some further power above this being, from whom his Unnameable One derived the vast number of configurations that exist on his account.

How much safer a course, then, and how much closer to the fact, simply to admit at once what is true: that this God, the Creator who formed the world, is the only God; that there is no other God besides him; and that he received the model and the shape of the things that have been made from himself. The alternative is to wear ourselves out with a description that is both impious and circular, and then be forced at some point anyway to fix the mind on some one being and admit that the configuration of created things came from him.

The followers of Valentinus bring an accusation against us. They say that we stay down in the Hebdomad below, as though we could not lift our minds higher or take in the things above, and all because we will not accept their monstrous claims. But the followers of Basilides bring that very same charge against them in turn. The Valentinians, they say, keep circling around the things below, going no farther than the first and second Ogdoad; and they clumsily suppose that immediately after the thirty Aeons they have found the Father who is above all things, instead of pressing their inquiry on to that Pleroma which is above the three hundred and sixty-five heavens — which is more than forty-five Ogdoads.

And anyone at all could bring the same charge against them, by imagining four thousand three hundred and eighty heavens, or Aeons, since that is the number of hours the days of the year contain. And if someone then adds the nights as well, doubling the hours just mentioned, he may imagine that he has discovered a great crowd of Ogdoads and a kind of countless contrivance of Aeons. Setting himself up against the Father who is above all things, and reckoning himself more perfect than everyone else, he will bring the same charge against them all: that they cannot rise to the conception of such a multitude of heavens or Aeons as he has announced, but are either so deficient that they remain among the things below, or else stay in the space between.