Eve and Mary

An arrangement as great and as important as this, he did not bring about by means of things that others had made, but by his own — not by things that came into being out of ignorance and defect, but by things that took their substance from his Father’s wisdom and power. For he was not unjust, that he should covet what belonged to someone else; nor was he in need, unable by his own means to give life to what was his own and to use his own creation for the salvation of man. Indeed, the creation could not have held him up if what he had sent out from himself were the fruit of ignorance and defect. We have shown again and again that the Word of God made flesh was hung upon a tree, and even the heretics themselves admit that he was crucified. How, then, could the fruit of ignorance and defect hold up the one who holds within himself the knowledge of all things, and who is true and perfect? Or how could a creation hidden from the Father, and far removed from him, have held up his Word? And if this world was made by the angels — it makes no difference whether we suppose that they knew the God who is over all or that they did not — then, when the Lord says, “I am in the Father, and the Father in me,” how could a piece of angels’ workmanship have borne the weight of the Father and the Son at once? And how could a creation lying outside the Pleroma have held the one who holds the whole Pleroma? Since all of this is impossible and cannot be shown, the church’s preaching alone is true: that his own creation carried him — the creation that holds together by the power and the skill and the wisdom of God, which the Father holds up in a way no one can see, while it, in a way anyone could see, held up his Word. And this is true. [a]

For the Father carries both the creation and his own Word at once, and the Word whom the Father carries gives the Spirit to everyone as the Father wills. To some he gives in the way that belongs to creation, that is, what is made; to others in the way that belongs to adoption, that is, what is from God — namely, birth. And so one God the Father is proclaimed, who is over all and through all and in all. The Father is indeed over all, and he is the Head of Christ; the Word is through all things, and he is himself the Head of the church; the Spirit is in all of us, and he is the living water that the Lord gives to those who rightly trust him and love him, and who know that “there is one Father, who is over all and through all and in us all.” John too, the Lord’s disciple, bears witness to these things when he speaks in the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was nothing made.” And then he says of the Word himself: “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. He came to his own things, and his own people did not receive him. But to as many as did receive him, to them he gave power to become sons of God, to those who believe in his name.” And then, showing the arrangement that has to do with his human nature, John said: “And the Word was made flesh, and lived among us.” And going on, he says: “And we saw his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

So he points out plainly, to anyone willing to hear — that is, to anyone who has ears — that there is one God, the Father over all, and one Word of God who is through all, by whom all things have been made; and that this world is his and was made by him according to the Father’s will, and not by angels, nor by apostasy and defect and ignorance, nor by any power of Prunicus, whom some of them also call “the Mother,” nor by any other maker of the world who does not know the Father.

For the Creator of the world is truly the Word of God, and this is our Lord, who in these last times was made man. He exists in this world, and in a way that cannot be seen he holds together everything that has been made and is present throughout the whole creation, since the Word of God governs and arranges all things. And that is why he came to his own in a way that could be seen, and was made flesh, and hung upon a tree, so that he might sum up all things in himself. “And his own people did not receive him” — just as Moses declared this very thing among the people: “And your life will be hanging before your eyes, and you will not believe your own life.” So those who did not receive him did not receive life. “But to as many as received him, to them he gave power to become sons of God.”

For it is he who has power from the Father over all things, since he is the Word of God and true man. He is in touch with what cannot be seen in the way that mind is in touch with mind, and he lays down a law for what the senses can reach, so that all things should stay each in its own order. He reigns openly over the things that are seen and that belong to men, and he brings upon all a judgment that is just and deserved. David also points to this plainly when he says: “Our God will come openly, and will not keep silence.” Then he shows the judgment that is brought in by him: “A fire will burn before him, and around him a violent storm. He will call the heaven above, and the earth, to judge his people.”

So then, the Lord was plainly coming to his own things, and was being carried by the very creation that he himself holds up. He was gathering up into himself the disobedience that had happened at a tree, by his obedience upon a tree. And the deception was undone by which that virgin Eve, who was already promised to a man, was miserably led astray — undone by the truth an angel brought as good news to the Virgin Mary, who was also promised to a man. For just as the first was led astray by the word of an angel, so that she ran from God when she had broken his word, so the second, by an angel’s message, received the good news that she would carry God, and she obeyed his word. And if the first disobeyed God, the second was persuaded to obey God — so that the Virgin Mary might become the one called in to help the virgin Eve. And so, as the human race was bound over to death by a virgin, it is set free by a virgin: a virgin’s disobedience weighed out in the opposite scale against a virgin’s obedience. In the same way the sin of the first-formed man is set right by the setting right of the Firstborn, and the coming of the serpent is beaten by the harmlessness of the dove; and the ropes are untied by which we had been tied fast to death. [p]

The heretics are all of them untaught men, ignorant of the arrangements God has made and strangers to the plan by which he took our human nature; and since they blind themselves to the truth, what they say is in fact spoken against their own salvation. Some of them bring in another Father besides the Creator. Some say the world and its substance were made by certain angels. Others hold that it was fenced far off by Horos from the one they present as the Father — that it sprouted up of itself and was born out of itself. Others again say that it got its substance out of defect and ignorance, inside the things that the Father contains. Others despise the Lord’s coming in a form the senses could take in, since they will not allow that he came in flesh. Others, knowing nothing of the arrangement by which he was to be born of a virgin, insist that Joseph fathered him. Some go further still and say that neither their soul nor their body can receive eternal life, but only the inner man — and by the inner man they mean the understanding in them, which they rule to be the only thing that goes up to “the perfect.” Others hold, as I said in the first book, that while the soul is saved, their body has no share in the salvation that comes from God. In that first book I also set out what all these men suppose, and in the second I showed how weak and inconsistent it is.

Now all of these come a long time after the overseers to whom the apostles handed over the churches, a fact I took every pains to demonstrate in the third book. So it follows, naturally enough, that these heretics I have named, being blind to the truth and off the road, walk down all sorts of paths; and the tracks of their teaching are scattered here and there, with no agreement and no connection between them. But the path of those who belong to the church runs right round the whole world, since it holds the sure tradition that comes from the apostles, and it lets us see that the faith of them all is one and the same. For they all receive one and the same God the Father; they believe the same arrangement about the Son of God’s coming in the flesh; they know the same gift of the Spirit; they live by the same commands; they keep the same shape of order in the church; they look for the same coming of the Lord; and they wait for the same salvation of the whole man, that is, of soul and body. And beyond any doubt the church’s preaching is true and steady, since one and the same way of salvation is shown in it throughout the whole world. For the light of God has been entrusted to her, and so the wisdom of God, by which she saves everyone, “is sung of where the streets go out; in the open squares she speaks with confidence; on the tops of the walls she is proclaimed; and at the gates of the city she keeps on speaking.” For the church preaches the truth everywhere, and she is the seven-branched lampstand that carries the light of Christ. [u]

So those who desert the church’s preaching call the knowledge of the holy elders into question, without stopping to think how much more a man who fears God is worth — even a plain man with no standing at all — than a blasphemous and shameless sophist. And that is what all the heretics are, and everyone who imagines he has found something further out, beyond the truth. Following the things I have listed, going their way by different roads, out of tune and without sense, never holding the same opinions about the same things, they are blind men led by the blind, and they will deservedly fall into the ditch of ignorance that lies in their road — always seeking and never finding the truth.

So we ought to keep clear of their teachings, and take careful heed that we come to no harm from them; and we ought to run to the church, and be brought up in her lap, and be fed on the Lord’s Scriptures. For the church has been planted as a garden in this world; and so the Spirit of God says, “You may freely eat from every tree of the garden” — that is, eat from every Scripture of the Lord, but do not eat with a proud mind, and do not touch any heretical quarrel. For these men profess that they themselves have the knowledge of good and evil, and they set their own godless minds above the God who made them. So they form opinions about what lies beyond the limits of the understanding. That is also why the apostle says, “Do not be wise beyond what it is right to be wise, but be wise with sober sense” — so that by eating of these men’s “knowledge,” the knowledge that knows more than it should, we may not be thrown out of the garden of life. Into that garden the Lord has brought those who obey his call, “gathering up into himself all things that are in heaven and all things that are on earth.” The things in heaven are spiritual; the things on earth are the arrangement made in our human nature. These, then, are the things he gathered up into himself: joining man to the Spirit and settling the Spirit in man, he became himself the head of the Spirit and gave the Spirit to be the head of man; for it is through the Spirit that we see and hear and speak.