A Seed Without Substance

And what sort of talk is this about their seed? They say the Mother conceived it after the pattern of the angels who attend the Savior — shapeless, without form, and incomplete — and that it was deposited in the Demiurge without his knowing it, so that through him it might come to form and completeness in the soul he had, so to speak, been sown with. But this says, in the first place, that the angels who attend their Savior are themselves incomplete, with no figure and no form, if what was conceived after their appearance came out as anything of that kind. [a]

Next, when they say that the Creator knew nothing of the seed deposited in him, and knew nothing either of the seed he himself passed on to man, their words are empty and pointless, and there is no way at all of proving them. For how could he have failed to know it, if that seed had any substance and any properties of its own? If, on the other hand, it had no substance and no quality, and so was really nothing, then of course he did not know it. Things that have a motion of their own and a quality — heat, or speed, or sweetness, or a brightness that marks them off from other things — do not escape even human notice, since they come into what people do. How much less can they be hidden from God, the Maker of this universe. There is, however, one good reason why their seed was not known to him: it has no quality that is of use to anything, and none of the substance any action requires. It is, in plain fact, nothing at all.

It really seems to me that the Lord had opinions like these in view when he said, “For every idle word that people speak, they will give an account on the day of judgment.” For every teacher of this stamp, who fills people’s ears with idle talk, will stand at the throne of judgment and give an account of what he has imagined out of nothing and said falsely against the Lord. They have gone to such a height of nerve as to declare of themselves that, on account of the substance of their seed, they are acquainted with the spiritual Pleroma — the man who lives inside them, they say, reveals the true Father to them; for what is of soul-substance had to be trained by way of the senses. And yet, on their account, the Demiurge took the whole of this seed into himself when the Mother deposited it there, and still remained utterly ignorant of everything, with no understanding of anything belonging to the Pleroma.

And then they are the truly “spiritual” ones, they tell us, because a particle of the Father of the universe has been deposited in their souls — this although, by their own assertions, their souls are made of the same substance as the Demiurge himself. He received the whole of the divine seed from the Mother, once for all, and had it in him, and he still remained of soul-substance and had not the slightest understanding of the things above, the very things they boast that they themselves understand while they are still on earth. Does that not crown every absurdity there is? To imagine that one and the same seed brought knowledge and completeness to these men’s souls, while in the God who made them it produced nothing but ignorance, is an opinion that can be held only by men utterly frantic and wholly without common sense.

It is also a most absurd and groundless thing for them to say that the seed, by being deposited in this way, was brought to form and made to grow, and so was made ready to receive perfect reason. For there will be a mixture of matter in it — the very substance they hold to have come out of ignorance and defect — and that matter will prove more apt and more useful than their Father’s light was. On their account the seed, when it was born by the contemplation of that light, had no form and no figure, and it got its form, its appearance, its growth, and its completeness from this matter. If the light coming from the Pleroma was the reason a spiritual being had neither form nor appearance nor any size of its own, while its descent into this world added all of that and brought it to completion, then a stay down here — which they also call darkness — would look far more effective and far more useful than their Father’s light.

And how can it be anything but ridiculous to say that their Mother came within a hair of being snuffed out in matter, and was all but destroyed by it, and only escaped by straining outward with difficulty and leaping, so to speak, out of herself, with help from the Father — while her seed grew in that same matter, took a form, and was made fit to receive perfect reason? And this while it was “bubbling up” among substances unlike itself and foreign to it, when by their own declaration the earthly is opposed to the spiritual and the spiritual to the earthly. How, then, could “a small thing sent out,” as they call it, grow, take shape, and reach completeness in the middle of substances contrary to it and foreign to it?

There is a further question, on top of everything already said. When their Mother looked at the angels, did she bring the seed forth all at once, or only one at a time? If she brought the whole of it forth simultaneously and at one stroke, then what she produced cannot still be in an infant state, and its descent into the men now alive is superfluous. But if she brought it forth one at a time, then she did not form her conception after the figure of the angels she was looking at. She contemplated them all together, once for all, in order to conceive by them; so she ought to have brought forth, once for all, the offspring of the beings whose forms she had conceived by once for all.

And why was it that, looking at the angels along with the Savior, she conceived their images and not the image of the Savior, who is far more beautiful than they are? Did he not please her, and was that why she did not conceive after his likeness? How was it, too, that the Demiurge, whom they can call a being of soul-substance, and who on their account has a size and a figure of his own, was produced complete as far as his substance goes — while what is spiritual, which ought to be more effective than what is of soul-substance, was sent out incomplete, and had to come down into a soul so that it might get its form there and, becoming complete that way, be made fit to receive perfect reason?

If, then, it gets its form in plain earthly men of soul-substance, it can no longer be said to be after the likeness of the angels, whom they call lights, but after the likeness of the men down here. It will not have the likeness and appearance of angels, but of the souls in which it takes its shape — just as water poured into a jar takes the shape of that jar, and if it should happen to freeze in it, it will keep the shape of the vessel it was frozen in. For souls themselves have the figure of the body they live in; they have been fitted to the vessel they exist in, as I have said before. So if that seed of theirs is solidified down here and formed into a definite shape, it will have the figure of a man, not the form of the angels. How is it possible, then, for that seed to be after the images of the angels, when the form it has taken is the likeness of men?

And why, if it was spiritual by nature, did it need to come down into flesh at all? What is fleshly stands in need of what is spiritual, if it is going to be saved, so that it may be made holy in it and cleared of every impurity, and so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by immortality. But what is spiritual has no need whatever of the things down here. It is not we who do it good; it is it that improves us.

Their talk about this seed is shown up as false still more plainly, in a way that must be evident to everyone, by what they say next: that the souls which received seed from the Mother are superior to all others, and that this is why the Demiurge honored them and made them rulers and kings and priests. If that were true, then Caiaphas the high priest, and Annas, and the rest of the chief priests and teachers of the law and rulers of the people would have been the first to believe in the Lord, since on that showing they all shared in that kinship; and before any of them, Herod the king. But in fact neither he, nor the chief priests, nor the rulers, nor the eminent men of the people turned to him. It was those who sat begging by the roadside, and the deaf, and the blind, while the rest rejected and despised him — just as Paul declares: “For you see your calling, brothers: that there are not many wise men among you, not many noble, not many powerful; but God has chosen the things of the world that were despised.” Those souls, then, were not superior to others on account of any seed deposited in them, and it was not for that that the Demiurge honored them.

Enough has been said, then, to show that their system is weak and untenable, and a thing of pure imagination. As the common proverb has it, a man who wants to learn that the sea is salt does not have to drink it dry. Take a statue made of clay but colored on the outside so that it will be taken for gold, when it is really clay. Anyone who digs a small piece out of it and so lays the clay open will free those who are looking for the truth from a false opinion. In the same way I have laid open not one small part but the chief heads of their system, and have shown to everyone who does not wish to be led astray with his eyes open what is wicked, deceitful, alluring, and destructive in the school of Valentinus and in all the other heretics who handle the Demiurge so badly — the Fashioner and Former of this universe, who is in fact the only true God — and I have shown how easily their views are overthrown.

For who that has any intelligence, and holds even a small share of the truth, can put up with them when they affirm that there is another god above the Creator; and another only Son, and another Word of God, whom they describe as having been produced in a degenerate state; and another Christ, formed along with the Holy Spirit later than the rest of the Aeons; and another Savior, who they say did not come from the Father of all, but was a kind of joint production of those Aeons who were formed in that degenerate state, and was produced out of necessity because of that very degeneracy? So it is their opinion that if the Aeons had not fallen into ignorance and degeneracy, then neither Christ, nor the Holy Spirit, nor Horos, nor the Savior, nor the angels, nor their Mother, nor her seed, nor the rest of the fabric of the world would ever have been produced at all: the universe would have been a wasteland, stripped of the many good things that are in it.

So they are chargeable with irreverence not only against the Creator, whom they declare the fruit of a defect, but against Christ and the Holy Spirit as well, since they affirm that those two were produced on account of that defect — and the Savior likewise, produced after the defect was already there. And who will put up with the rest of their empty talk, which they cunningly try to fit to the parables, and by which they have plunged both themselves and those who believe them into the deepest depths of irreverence?