Judas and the Twelfth Aeon

That they apply both the parables and the Lord’s own actions to the system they have invented — improperly, and without logic — I prove as follows. They try to demonstrate the passion which they say happened to the twelfth Aeon from this: that the Savior’s passion was brought about by the twelfth apostle, and happened in the twelfth month. For they hold that he preached for only one year after his baptism. They claim the same thing was plainly set out in the case of the woman who suffered from a flow of blood. She suffered for twelve years, and by touching the hem of the Savior’s garment she was made well by that power which went out from him — a power which, they say, had already been in existence. For that Power who suffered was stretching herself outward and flowing away into immensity, so that she was in danger of dissolving into the general substance of the Aeons; but then, touching the primary Tetrad, which the hem of the garment stands for, she was brought to a stop, and her passion ceased. [a]

Then there is their claim that the passion of the twelfth Aeon is proved by what Judas did. How can Judas be compared with her, as an emblem of her? He was expelled from the number of the twelve and never restored to his place. But that Aeon, whose type they declare Judas to be, was restored — recalled to the position she had held — once she had been separated from her Enthymesis. Judas was stripped of his office and thrown out, and Matthias was appointed in his place, according to what is written: “And let another take his office of oversight.” So they ought to be maintaining that the twelfth Aeon was thrown out of the Pleroma, and that another was produced, or sent out, to fill her place — if, that is, Judas really points to her. And there is more. They tell us it was the Aeon herself who suffered, but Judas was the betrayer, not the sufferer. They themselves admit that it was the suffering Christ who came to the endurance of passion, and not Judas. How, then, could Judas — the betrayer of the one who had to suffer for our salvation — be the type and image of that Aeon who suffered?

But the truth is that Christ’s passion was not like the Aeon’s passion, and it did not happen under anything like the same circumstances. The Aeon underwent a passion of dissolution and destruction, so that the one who suffered was herself in danger of being destroyed. But the Lord, our Christ, underwent a real passion, not one that merely happened to fall out that way. Not only was he in no danger of being destroyed; he also set fallen man on his feet again by his own strength, and called him back to incorruption. Again, the Aeon underwent her passion while she was searching for the Father and was unable to find him; but the Lord suffered so that he might bring those who had wandered away from the Father back to the knowledge of him and into his fellowship. Searching into the greatness of the Father became for her a passion that led to destruction; but the Lord, by suffering and by giving the knowledge of the Father, granted us salvation.

Her passion, so they declare, produced a female offspring — weak, sickly, unformed, and good for nothing; but his passion gave rise to strength and power. For the Lord, by means of his suffering, “went up to the height, led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men,” and gave those who believe in him the power “to tread on serpents and scorpions, and on all the power of the enemy” — that is, of the leader of apostasy. By his passion our Lord destroyed death, scattered error, put an end to corruption, and did away with ignorance, while he brought life to light, revealed the truth, and made a gift of incorruption. But their Aeon, once she had suffered, established ignorance and brought forth a substance with no shape to it, out of which all material things have been produced: death, corruption, error, and the rest.

So Judas, twelfth in the order of the disciples, was not a type of the suffering Aeon; and neither was the Lord’s passion a type of hers. The two have been shown to be unlike each other and out of tune with each other at every point. And this holds not only for the matters I have already raised, but for the very number involved. That Judas the traitor is twelfth in order is agreed by everyone, since twelve apostles are named in the Gospel. But this Aeon is not the twelfth; she is the thirtieth. On the view under discussion, the Father’s will did not produce twelve Aeons only, and she was not sent out twelfth in order: they reckon her as having been produced in the thirtieth place. How, then, can Judas, who is twelfth in order, be the type and image of an Aeon who stands thirtieth?

But suppose they say that Judas, in perishing, was the image of her Enthymesis. Even this way the image bears no likeness to the truth it is supposed to answer to. For the Enthymesis was separated from the Aeon; afterward she received a shape from Christ; then she was given a share of intelligence by the Savior; and having formed everything outside the Pleroma after the image of the things inside it, she is said at last to have been received by them into the Pleroma, and — on their principle of pairing — to have been united to that Savior who was formed out of them all. But Judas, once cast away for good, never comes back into the number of the disciples; otherwise a different person would not have been chosen to fill his place. Besides, the Lord himself said about him, “Woe to the man by whom the Son of Man will be betrayed,” and, “It would have been better for him if he had never been born.” And he was called by him the son of destruction.

If, however, they say that Judas was a type of the Enthymesis — not as separated from the Aeon, but of the passion that was tangled up with her — then even this way the number twelve cannot be a fitting type of the number three. In the one case, Judas was cast away and Matthias appointed instead of him. In the other, the Aeon is said to have been in danger of dissolving and being destroyed, and then there are her Enthymesis and her passion besides; for they draw a sharp line between the Enthymesis and the passion. They present the Aeon as restored, the Enthymesis as acquiring form, and the passion, once separated from these two, as becoming matter. Since, then, there are these three — the Aeon, her Enthymesis, and her passion — Judas and Matthias, being only two, cannot be the types of them.

Suppose, again, they maintain that the twelve apostles were a type only of that group of twelve Aeons which Anthropos produced together with Ecclesia. Then let them produce ten more apostles as a type of the ten remaining Aeons, whom, they say, Logos produced with Zoe. For it makes no sense that the junior Aeons — inferior for that very reason — should have been set out by the Savior through his choice of the apostles, while their elders, and on that account their superiors, were not shown at all. If the Savior chose the apostles for this purpose, so that through them he might display the Aeons who are in the Pleroma, he might have chosen ten other apostles as well, and another eight before those, so as to set out the original and primary Ogdoad. As for the second Decad, he could not have shown any emblem of it, since the number of the apostles had already been made into a type. For after the twelve apostles, our Lord is found to have sent seventy others ahead of him — and seventy cannot possibly be the type of an Ogdoad, or of a Decad, or of a Triacontad. [l]

What is the reason, then, that the inferior Aeons are represented by means of the apostles, as I have said, while the superior ones, from whom the inferior derived their being, are not prefigured at all? But if the twelve apostles were chosen with this object, that the number of the twelve Aeons might be indicated by them, then the seventy ought to have been chosen as the type of seventy Aeons. In that case they would have to say that the Aeons are no longer thirty, but eighty-two. For the one who chose the apostles so that they might be a type of the Aeons existing in the Pleroma would never have made them types of some Aeons and not of others; he would have used the apostles to preserve an image and to display a type of all the Aeons that exist in the Pleroma.

And we must not pass over Paul in silence. We must demand of them which Aeon he was handed down to us as the type of — unless perhaps they say that he stands for the Savior who was compounded out of them all, who got his being from the collected gifts of the whole company, and whom they call All Things, as having been formed out of them all. The poet Hesiod put this strikingly when he called such a one Pandora — that is, “the gift of all” — for this reason, that the best gift in the possession of them all was gathered into him. His account of these gifts runs like this: Hermes put into them “words of fraud and deceit, and thieving ways,” so as to lead foolish men astray, and so that people would believe their lies.

For their Mother — that is, Leto — secretly stirred these men up, without the Demiurge’s knowledge, to pour out deep and unspeakable mysteries into itching ears. (She is called Leto, according to the meaning of the Greek word, because she stirred men up in secret.) And it was not only through Hesiod that their Mother arranged for this mystery to be declared. She used the lyric poet Pindar too, and very skillfully, when he tells the Demiurge the story of Pelops, whose flesh was cut in pieces by his father, and then collected, brought together, and compacted anew by all the gods. In this way, they maintain, she pointed to Pandora; and these men, whose consciences she has branded, declare the very same things, and so are shown to be of the same family and the same spirit as the rest.