The King and the Fox

When all the seed has come to full growth, they say, their mother Achamoth will leave the middle place and pass inside the Pleroma, and she will receive as her husband the Savior who sprang from all the Aeons — so that a pairing is made between the Savior and Sophia, that is, Achamoth. These two are the bridegroom and the bride, and the bridal chamber is the whole extent of the Pleroma. The spiritual seed, for their part, will be stripped of their souls, will become spirits of pure understanding, and will pass inside the Pleroma in a way nothing can stop and no one can see, to be given as brides to the angels who attend the Savior. The Demiurge himself will move up into the place of his mother Sophia, that is, the middle dwelling. The souls of the righteous will rest there too; but nothing of a soulish nature is let into the Pleroma. Once all this has happened, the fire that lies hidden in the world will blaze up and burn, and as it destroys all matter it will be put out along with it and exist no longer. Before the Savior came, they say, the Demiurge knew none of this. [a]

There are some among them who hold that the Demiurge also produced a Christ of his own, his own son, though of a soulish nature, and that the prophets spoke of him. This Christ passed through Mary the way water runs through a pipe. At his baptism the Savior who belonged to the Pleroma — the one put together by the combined work of everyone in it — came down on him in the form of a dove; and in him too was the spiritual seed that came from Achamoth. So, they say, our Lord kept the pattern of the first and original Tetrad, and was made up of four substances: of the spiritual, so far as he was from Achamoth; of the soulish, as coming from the Demiurge by a special arrangement, since he was formed in body with skill beyond words; and of the Savior, as regards the dove that came down on him.

He remained free of all suffering, since one who was at the same time beyond grasp and invisible could not possibly suffer. That is why the Spirit of Christ that had been placed inside him was taken away when he was brought before Pilate. They hold too that not even the seed he had received from the mother was subject to suffering; it also could not suffer, being spiritual and invisible even to the Demiurge himself. It follows, on their account, that what suffered was the soulish Christ, together with the body mysteriously formed by that special arrangement — so that through him the mother might display a pattern of the Christ above, the one who stretched himself out along Stauros and gave Achamoth her shape, so far as substance goes. All these events down here, they say, were copies of what took place above.

They further hold that the souls carrying Achamoth’s seed are better than the rest and are loved by the Demiurge more than the others — though he does not know the real reason, and imagines they are what they are because he favors them. That, they say, is why he handed them out to prophets, priests, and kings; and they claim that many things were spoken through the prophets by this seed, since its nature is so far above the rest. The mother too, they say, said a great deal about the world above, both through him and through the souls he made. Then they sort the prophecies into classes, holding that one set was uttered by the mother, a second by her seed, and a third by the Demiurge. In the same way they hold that some of what Jesus said came from the Savior, some from the mother, and some from the Demiurge — as we will show further on in this work.

The Demiurge knew nothing of what was higher than himself. The announcements made through the prophets did stir him up, but he thought little of them, putting them down now to one cause, now to another: to the prophetic spirit, which has a power of stirring itself; or to a mere man; or to some cunning trick of the lower sort of people. He stayed in that ignorance until the Lord appeared. But when the Savior came, they say, the Demiurge learned everything from him and gladly threw all his power in with him. They claim he is the centurion in the Gospel who said to the Savior, “I too am one who has soldiers and servants under my authority, and whatever I order, they do.” They hold, further, that he will go on running the world’s affairs as long as that is fitting and needed, and above all so that he may look after the Church — while all the time he is moved by knowing the reward laid up for him, that he will reach his mother’s dwelling.

So they picture three kinds of people — spiritual, material, and soulish — represented by Cain, Abel, and Seth. These three natures are no longer found together in one person; they now make up different kinds of people. The material goes, as you would expect, to ruin. The soulish, if it chooses the better part, comes to rest in the middle place; if it chooses the worse, it too passes into destruction. But the spiritual elements sown by Achamoth — trained and fed here in righteous souls from that time until now, because they were still weak when she gave them out — will at last reach their full growth and be given as brides to the angels of the Savior, while their soulish souls must rest forever with the Demiurge in the middle place. And subdividing the soulish souls again, they say that some are good by nature and others evil by nature. The good are those who become able to receive the seed; the ones evil by nature are those who can never receive it.

That, then, is their system — a system no prophet announced, which the Lord never taught, and which no apostle handed down — though they boast that they know it perfectly, better than anyone else. They gather their views from somewhere other than the Scriptures, and, as the common saying goes, they set about weaving ropes of sand. What they are trying to do is fit the Lord’s parables, the sayings of the prophets, and the words of the apostles to their own peculiar claims, with an air of probability, so that their scheme will not look entirely unsupported. In doing it they disregard the order and the connection of the Scriptures and, so far as they can, pull the truth limb from limb. By shifting passages, dressing them up anew, and making one thing out of another, they take in a great many people through this wicked skill of theirs, fitting the Lord’s own words to their opinions. [m]

Here is what they are doing. Suppose a skilled artist has made a beautiful portrait of a king out of precious stones. Someone else takes the likeness apart, rearranges the gems, and fits them together into the shape of a dog or a fox — and badly done at that. Then he insists that this is the beautiful portrait of the king that the skilled artist made, pointing to the very stones the first artist had fitted so admirably into the king’s image and the second has now moved, to bad effect, into the shape of a dog. By showing the stones he takes in the ignorant, who have no idea what a king looks like, and convinces them that this wretched likeness of a fox really is the beautiful image of the king. These people do the same. They stitch together old wives’ tales, and then take words, phrases, and parables wherever they find them, wrench them away from where they belong, and fit God’s own words to their groundless fictions. We have already said how far they go this way with what is inside the Pleroma.

Now for the things outside their Pleroma. Here are some samples of what they try to make the Scriptures say. They claim the Lord came in the last times of the world to suffer, so that he might point to the suffering that befell the last of the Aeons, and by his own end announce the end of the disturbance that had risen among them. They hold that the twelve-year-old girl, the daughter of the synagogue leader, whom the Lord came to and raised from the dead, was a figure of Achamoth — the one to whom their Christ gave shape by stretching himself out, and whom he led back to the awareness of the light that had left her. And they claim Paul said the Savior appeared to her while she lay outside the Pleroma like a child born too soon, when he wrote to the Corinthians, “And last of all he appeared to me too, as to one born too soon.” Again, they find the Savior’s coming to Achamoth with his attendants in the same letter, where he says, “A woman ought to have a veil on her head, because of the angels.” And that Achamoth drew a veil over herself out of modesty when the Savior came to her — Moses, they say, made that plain when he put a veil over his face.

Then they say the sufferings she went through were shown by the Lord on the cross. When he said, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” he showed simply that Sophia had been abandoned by the light and was held back by Horos from moving forward. Her anguish was shown when he said, “My soul is sorrowful to the point of death”; her fear by the words, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me”; and her bewilderment too when he said, “And what am I to say? I do not know.”

They teach that he pointed out the three kinds of people this way. The material, when he said to the man who asked, “Shall I follow you?” — “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” The soulish, when he said to the man who told him, “I will follow you, but let me first say goodbye to those at my house” — “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of heaven.” (This man they put in the middle class, and that other one too, who claimed to have done a great deal of what was right and yet refused to follow him, and was so overcome by riches that he never reached completion; this one it pleases them to place in the soulish class.) The spiritual, when he said, “Let the dead bury their dead; you go and preach the kingdom of God,” and when he said to Zacchaeus the tax collector, “Hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house” — these, they declared, belonged to the spiritual class.

They also say the parable of the leaven, which the woman is described as hiding in three measures of flour, brings the three classes to light. On their teaching the woman stands for Sophia; the three measures of flour are the three kinds of people, spiritual, soulish, and material; and the leaven is the Savior himself. Paul too, they say, set out the material, the soulish, and the spiritual very plainly — in one place, “As the man made of dust is, so also are those made of dust”; in another, “But the soulish man does not receive the things of the Spirit”; and again, “The spiritual man judges all things.” And that line, “The soulish man does not receive the things of the Spirit,” they claim was spoken about the Demiurge, who, being soulish, knew neither his mother, who was spiritual, nor her seed, nor the Aeons in the Pleroma. And when Paul said, “If the firstfruits are holy, so is the whole batch of dough,” they take him to have taught that the Savior received firstfruits of those he was going to save: “firstfruits” meaning what is spiritual, and “the batch of dough” meaning us, that is, the soulish Church — the batch they say he took up and mixed into himself, since he is the leaven.

Further: that Achamoth wandered outside the Pleroma, received form from Christ, and was searched out by the Savior — all this, they declare, he indicated when he said that he had come after the sheep that had gone astray. The straying sheep, on their account, is their mother, from whom they say the Church was sown. The straying itself is her stay outside the Pleroma in a state of shifting passion, from which they hold that matter took its origin. The woman who sweeps the house and finds the coin, they say, stands for the Sophia above, who, having lost her enthymesis, got it back afterward when everything was cleansed by the Savior’s coming; and so this substance too, on their account, was restored to the Pleroma.

They say too that Simeon, “who took Christ in his arms and thanked God and said, Master, now you are letting your servant go in peace, according to your word,” was a figure of the Demiurge, who on the Savior’s arrival learned that his own place was to change, and gave thanks to Bythus. They also assert that Anna, who is spoken of in the Gospel as a prophetess, and who after seven years with her husband spent all the rest of her life a widow until she saw the Savior and recognized him and spoke of him to everyone — that she pointed most plainly to Achamoth, who looked on the Savior and his companions for a little while, then lived out all the rest of the time in the middle place, waiting for him to come again and restore her to the partner who was hers. Her name too, they say, was pointed to by the Savior when he said, “And yet wisdom is proved right by her children.” Paul did the same when he said, “But we speak wisdom among those who are complete.” They also say Paul referred to the pairings inside the Pleroma, showing them all by means of one, when he wrote about the marriage union in this life like this: “This is a great mystery, but I am speaking about Christ and the Church.”

Further, they teach that John, the Lord’s disciple, pointed to the first Ogdoad. Their own words are these. John, the Lord’s disciple, wanting to set out where everything came from — how the Father produced the whole — lays down a starting point: the one first begotten by God, whom he calls both the only Son and God, in whom the Father put forth all things after the manner of a seed. By him the Word was produced, and in him the whole substance of the Aeons, to which the Word himself afterward gave form. Since, then, he is treating the first origin of things, he rightly begins his teaching from the beginning, that is, from God and the Word. And he puts it this way: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; he was in the beginning with God.” Having first distinguished these three — God, the Beginning, and the Word — he unites them again, so as to show the production of each of them, that is, of the Son and of the Word, and at the same time to show how they are joined to one another and to the Father. For the Beginning is in the Father and from the Father, while the Word is in the Beginning and from the Beginning. So he said rightly, “In the beginning was the Word,” for the Word was in the Son; “and the Word was with God,” for he was the Beginning; “and the Word was God,” naturally, since what is begotten of God is God. “He was in the beginning with God” — this clause discloses the order of production.

“All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made” — for the Word was the source of form and of beginning to all the Aeons that came into existence after him. But “what was made in him,” says John, “is life.” Here again he pointed to a pairing. All things, he said, were made through him, but in him was life. What is in him, then, is more closely tied to him than the things merely made through him: it exists along with him and is unfolded by him. And when he adds, “And the life was the light of men,” in naming Anthropos he pointed to Ecclesia as well by that one expression, so that by using a single name he might disclose the fellowship they have with each other in their pairing. For Anthropos and Ecclesia spring from Logos and Zoe. And he called Zoe the light of men because they are lit up by her, that is, given form and brought to light. Paul declares this in these words: “Everything that makes manifest is light.” So then, since Zoe made manifest and gave birth to both Anthropos and Ecclesia, she is called their light.

In this way, by these words, John revealed other things and the second Tetrad as well — Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ecclesia. And still further, he pointed to the first Tetrad. For, speaking about the Savior and declaring that everything beyond the Pleroma received form from him, he says that he is the fruit of the whole Pleroma. He calls him a “light shining in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it,” since, when he gave form to everything that had its origin in passion, he was not known by it. He also calls him Son, and Aletheia, and Zoe, and “the Word made flesh, whose glory,” he says, “we saw; and his glory was as that of the Only Son, given him by the Father, full of grace and truth.” (What John actually says is this: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of an only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”) In this way, then — on their account — he distinctly sets out the first Tetrad, when he speaks of the Father, and Charis, and Monogenes, and Aletheia. And in this way John tells of the first Ogdoad, the mother of all the Aeons; for he mentions the Father, and Charis, and Monogenes, and Aletheia, and Logos, and Zoe, and Anthropos, and Ecclesia. Such are the views of Ptolemaeus.