Wisdom That Was Not Wise

How can it be anything but absurd that they also claim this Sophia — Wisdom — was caught up in ignorance, in degeneracy, and in passion? Such things are foreign to wisdom and contrary to it; they can never be qualities that belong to it. Wherever there is a failure of foresight and an ignorance of what course would be useful, there wisdom does not exist. So let them stop calling this suffering Aeon Sophia. Let them give up either her name or her sufferings. And let them stop calling their whole Pleroma spiritual, if this Aeon had a place inside it at a time when she was in such an uproar of passion. Even a soul in good health, to say nothing of a spiritual substance, would never pass through an experience like that. [a]

And again, how could her Enthymesis, going out from her along with the passion, have become a separate existence? A thought is understood in connection with some person; it can never have an isolated existence all by itself. A bad thought is destroyed and swallowed up by a good one, the way a state of disease is swallowed up by health. What sort of thought, then, came before the thought that was passion? This one: to investigate the Father and to consider his greatness. And what was she afterward persuaded of, so that she was restored to health? This: that the Father cannot be comprehended and cannot be found out. So it was not a right feeling that made her wish to know the Father, and that is why she became capable of suffering; but when she was persuaded that he cannot be searched out, she was restored to health. Even Nous himself, who was inquiring into the Father, stopped pressing his research any further — by their own account — once he learned that the Father cannot be comprehended.

How, then, could the Enthymesis separately conceive passions which were themselves her own affections? An affection necessarily belongs to an individual; it cannot come into being or exist apart by itself. But this opinion of theirs is not merely untenable. It is also opposed to what our Lord said: “Seek, and you will find.” For the Lord brings his disciples to completion by their seeking after the Father and finding him. But that Christ of theirs, the one up above, has brought his to completion by the fact that he ordered the Aeons not to seek after the Father, persuading them that however hard they labored they would not find him. And they claim that they themselves are perfect on the ground that they have found their Bythus, while the Aeons were made perfect by this, that the one they inquired after cannot be searched out.

Since, then, the Enthymesis herself could not exist separately, apart from the Aeon, they bring forward a still greater falsehood about her passion when they go on to divide it off and separate it from her, and declare that it was the substance of matter — as if God were not light, and as if there were no Word in existence who could convict them and overthrow their wickedness. For it is certainly true that whatever the Aeon thought, that she also suffered, and whatever she suffered, that she also thought. And on their own account her Enthymesis was nothing other than the passion of someone thinking how she might comprehend the incomprehensible. So the thought was the passion, since she was thinking about things that were impossible. How, then, could affection and passion be separated and set apart from the thought, so as to become the substance of so vast a material creation, when the thought herself was the passion and the passion the thought? Neither Enthymesis apart from the Aeon, then, nor the affections apart from Enthymesis, can possess substance separately — and so once more their system breaks down and is destroyed.

But how did it come about that the Aeon was both dissolved into her component parts and made subject to passion? She was beyond question of the same substance as the Pleroma, and the whole Pleroma was of the Father. Now any substance, when it is brought into contact with what is of its own nature, will not be dissolved into nothing, nor will it be in danger of perishing; it will rather continue and increase — fire in fire, spirit in spirit, water in water. But things of contrary natures do suffer when they meet, and are changed and destroyed. In the same way, if there had been a production of light, it would not suffer passion or run any danger in light like itself; it would rather glow with the greater brightness and grow, as the day does from the increasing brilliance of the sun. For they maintain that Bythus was the image of their father.

Whatever animals are alien in habit and strange to each other, or are opposed to each other in nature, fall into danger when they meet and are destroyed. But those that are accustomed to each other and of a harmonious disposition suffer no peril from being together in the same place; they rather secure both safety and life by it. If, therefore, this Aeon was produced by the Pleroma of the same substance as the whole of it, she could never have undergone change, since she was keeping company with beings like herself and familiar to her — a spiritual being among spiritual beings. Fear, terror, passion, dissolution and the like may perhaps occur through the struggle of contraries among creatures such as we are, who have bodies; but among spiritual beings, with the light spread through them, no such calamities can possibly happen. These men look to me to have given their Aeon the same kind of passion that belongs to the character in the comic poet Menander, who was himself deeply in love but hated by the one he loved. The people who invented opinions like this have had in mind the idea and the mental picture of some unhappy human lover, not of a spiritual and divine substance.

Besides, to meditate on how to search into the perfect Father, to desire to exist within him, and to have a comprehension of his greatness, could not entail the stain of ignorance or of passion — and on a spiritual Aeon at that. It would rather give rise to perfection, to freedom from suffering, and to truth. For they do not say that even they themselves, though they are only men, are caught up in a passion of perplexity by meditating on him who was before them, and by now, as it were, comprehending the perfect and being placed within the knowledge of him. They say instead that they arrive at the knowledge and the grasp of truth. They claim the Savior said “Seek, and you will find” to his disciples with this in view: that they should seek after the one whom they have conceived, by means of imagination, as being above the Maker of all — the Bythus who cannot be spoken of. And they want to be regarded themselves as “the perfect,” because they have sought and found the perfect One while they are still on earth. Yet they declare that the Aeon who was inside the Pleroma, a wholly spiritual being, by seeking after the Propator, by trying to find a place within his greatness, and by desiring to have a comprehension of the truth of the Father, fell down into passion — and such a passion that, if she had not met with that Power who upholds all things, she would have been dissolved into the general substance of the Aeons and so come to the end of her own existence.

Such presumption is absurd, and truly the opinion of men who are utterly destitute of the truth. For they themselves acknowledge, on their own system, that this Aeon is superior to them and of greater antiquity, when they claim that they are the fruit of the Enthymesis of the Aeon who suffered passion — so that this Aeon is the father of their mother, that is, their own grandfather. And to them, the later grandchildren, the search after the Father brings, so they maintain, truth and perfection and stability, deliverance from unstable matter and reconciliation to the Father. But on their grandfather this same search entailed ignorance, passion, terror and perplexity — and out of those disturbances they also declare that the substance of matter was formed. To say, then, that the search after the perfect Father and the investigation of him, and the desire for fellowship and union with him, were things entirely good for them, while to an Aeon from whom they also derive their origin these same things were the cause of dissolution and destruction — how can such assertions be viewed as anything but completely inconsistent, foolish, and irrational? Those who listen to these teachers truly blind themselves; and since they have blind guides, they justly fall along with them into the pit of ignorance that lies below them.