Names Made to Order

Let us now look at the unsteady opinions of these heretics — there are some two or three of them — and see how they fail to agree even when they are handling the same points, but put forward views that contradict one another, in the things themselves and in the names alike. The first of them, Valentinus, took the principles of the heresy called Gnostic and adapted them to the particular character of his own school, and taught as follows. He held that there is a certain Dyad, a twofold being, that no name can express; one part of it is to be called Arrhetos, the Unspeakable, and the other Sige, Silence. Out of this Dyad a second was produced, one part of which he names Pater and the other Aletheia. From this Tetrad in turn arose Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ecclesia. These make up the first Ogdoad. [a]

He says next that from Logos and Zoe ten powers were produced, as we mentioned earlier, and from Anthropos and Ecclesia twelve. One of these twelve separated from the rest, fell out of the condition it began in, and produced the rest of the universe. He also supposed two beings named Horos. One of them has his place between Bythos and the rest of the Pleroma, dividing the Aeons, who came into being, from the Father, who never did; the other separates their mother from the Pleroma. Christ, too, was not produced from the Aeons inside the Pleroma. He was brought forth by the mother after she had been shut out of it, out of her memory of better things — though not without a kind of shadow. Being male, he cut the shadow away from himself and returned to the Pleroma; but his mother, left behind with the shadow and stripped of her spiritual substance, gave birth to another son, the Demiurge, whom Valentinus also calls the supreme ruler over everything subject to him.

He asserts too that along with the Demiurge a left-hand power was produced, and on this point he agrees with the people falsely called Gnostics, whom we still have to discuss. Sometimes he holds that Jesus was produced by the one who was separated from their mother and joined to the rest, that is, by Theletos; sometimes that he sprang from the one who returned into the Pleroma, that is, from Christ; and at other times still that he came from Anthropos and Ecclesia. And he declares that the Holy Spirit was produced by Aletheia, to examine the Aeons and make them fruitful, entering into them unseen, and that in this way the Aeons brought forth the plants of truth.

Secundus, for his part, says that the first Ogdoad consists of a right-hand Tetrad and a left-hand Tetrad, and teaches that one of them is called light and the other darkness. But he holds that the power that separated from the rest and fell away did not come directly from the thirty Aeons, but from their fruits.

There is another man among them, a teacher of some reputation, who strained after something loftier and after a higher kind of knowledge, and explained the first Tetrad this way. He says: “There is a certain Proarche who existed before all things, beyond all thought, all speech, and all naming, whom I call Monotes, unity. Together with this Monotes there exists a power, which I in turn call Henotes, oneness. This Henotes and Monotes, being one, produced — yet not so as to bring it forth apart from themselves, as an emanation — the beginning of all things: an intelligent being, unbegotten and invisible, a beginning that language calls the Monad. With this Monad there exists a power of the same substance, which I in turn call Hen, One. These powers, then — Monotes and Henotes, the Monad and Hen — produced the rest of the company of the Aeons.”

Oh! Oh! Alas, alas! We may well let out these cries from the tragic stage at such a pitch of daring in the coining of names as this man has displayed, without a blush, in inventing a vocabulary for his system of falsehood. For when he declares: “There is a certain Proarche before all things, beyond all thought, whom I call Monotes; and again, along with this Monotes there exists a power which I also call Henotes” — nothing could be plainer than that he is confessing his own invention, and that he himself has given the names to his scheme of things, names no one else had ever proposed before him. It is plain, too, that he is the one who had nerve enough to coin them, so that if he had never appeared in the world the truth would still be without a name.

But in that case nothing stops anyone else from handling the same subject and fixing names like these. There is a certain Proarche, royal, beyond all thought, a power existing before every other substance and stretched out into space in every direction. Along with it there exists a power that I call a Gourd; and along with this Gourd there exists a power that I in turn call Utter Emptiness. This Gourd and this Emptiness, being one, produced — and yet did not simply produce, so as to be apart from themselves — a fruit, visible everywhere, edible and delicious, a fruit that language calls a Cucumber. Along with this Cucumber exists a power of the same substance, which I again call a Melon. These powers — the Gourd, Utter Emptiness, the Cucumber, and the Melon — brought forth the remaining crowd of Valentinus’s raving melons.

For if it is right that the language used about the universe be transferred to the first Tetrad, and if anyone may assign names as he pleases, who is going to stop us from adopting names like these instead? They are a good deal more believable than the others, they are in ordinary use, and everybody understands them.

Others again have called their first and firstborn Ogdoad by these names: first Proarche, then Anennoetos, third Arrhetos, and fourth Aoratos. Then out of the first, Proarche, there was produced, in the first and fifth place, Arche; out of Anennoetos, in the second and sixth place, Acataleptos; out of Arrhetos, in the third and seventh place, Anonomastos; and out of Aoratos, in the fourth and eighth place, Agennetos. This is the Pleroma of the first Ogdoad.

They maintain that these powers came before Bythos and Sige, so that they may look more perfect than the perfect and more knowing than the Gnostics themselves. To such people one may fairly call out, “You trifling sophists!” — since even about Bythos himself there are many contradictory opinions among them. Some declare that he has no consort, and is neither male nor female, and in fact nothing at all. Others affirm that he is male and female at once, giving him the nature of a hermaphrodite. Others again assign Sige to him as his wife, so that the first pairing may be formed.

But the followers of Ptolemy say that Bythos has two consorts, which they also name Diatheses, affections: Ennoia and Thelesis. For, as they claim, he first conceived the thought of producing something, and then willed it. So these two affections, or powers, Ennoia and Thelesis, had intercourse of a sort between themselves, and Monogenes and Aletheia were produced by their pairing. These two came forth as types and images of the Father’s two affections, visible representations of what was invisible: Nous, that is, Monogenes, of Thelesis, and Aletheia of Ennoia. Accordingly the image that came from Thelesis was male, and the one that came from Ennoia female. In this way Thelesis, will, became a kind of faculty of Ennoia, thought. For Ennoia was forever longing for offspring but could not by herself bring forth what she wanted; and when the power of Thelesis, the faculty of will, came upon her, then she brought to birth what she had been brooding over. [o]

These imagined beings — like Homer’s Zeus, who is pictured passing an anxious, sleepless night devising how to honor Achilles and destroy Greeks by the thousand — will not strike you, my dear friend, as having greater knowledge than the God of the universe has. As soon as he thinks, he also carries out what he has willed; and as soon as he wills, he also thinks what he has willed — thinking, then, when he wills, and willing when he thinks, since he is all thought, all will, all mind, all light, all eye, all ear, the one whole fountain of everything good.

Those among them, however, who are reckoned more skillful than the men just mentioned say that the first Ogdoad was not produced by stages, one Aeon sent out by another, but that all the Aeons were brought into existence at once by Propator and his Ennoia. Colorbasus states this as confidently as if he had been there at their birth. So he and his followers maintain that Anthropos and Ecclesia were not produced from Logos and Zoe, as others hold, but the other way around: Logos and Zoe from Anthropos and Ecclesia.

But they put it in another form as well. When the Propator conceived the thought of producing something, he received the name Father. Because what he produced was true, it was named Aletheia. When he wished to reveal himself, that was called Anthropos. Finally, when he produced those he had thought of beforehand, these were named Ecclesia. Anthropos, by speaking, formed Logos: this is the firstborn son. And Zoe followed upon Logos; and so the first Ogdoad was complete.

They also quarrel a great deal among themselves about the Savior. Some maintain that he was formed out of them all, and that this is why he was called Eudocetos, since the whole Pleroma was well pleased through him to glorify the Father. Others assert that he was produced from those ten Aeons alone that sprang from Logos and Zoe, and that on this account he was called Logos and Zoe, keeping his ancestors’ names. Others again affirm that he had his being from those twelve Aeons that were the offspring of Anthropos and Ecclesia, and that this is why he acknowledges himself Son of Man, as a descendant of Anthropos. Others still assert that he was produced by Christ and the Holy Spirit, who were brought forth to keep the Pleroma safe, and that this is why he was called Christ, keeping the name of the Father who produced him. And there are yet others among them who declare that the Propator of the whole, Proarche and Proanennoetos, is called Anthropos; that this is the great, hidden mystery — that the Power which is above all others and holds all things in its embrace is called Anthropos; and that this is why the Savior styles himself “Son of Man.”