Let us now look also at the unstable, incoherent opinion of these men, who, being but two or three, do not say the same things concerning the same matters, but make assertions contrary both in the realities and in the names. For the first of them, Valentinus, having adapted the principles of the so-called Gnostic heresy to the particular character of his own school, declared thus: he laid down that there is an unnameable Dyad, of which one part is called the Ineffable and the other Silence (Sige). Then from this Dyad, he said, a second Dyad was brought forth, of which he names one part Father and the other Truth. And from this Tetrad were borne as fruit Logos and Life, Man and Church; and this is the first Ogdoad. And from the Logos and Life, he says, ten powers were brought forth, as we said before; and from Man and Church, twelve, of which one, having fallen away and come short, brought about the rest of the proceedings. He posited also two Limits (Horoi): one between Bythos and the rest of the Pleroma, separating the begotten Aeons from the unbegotten Father; the other separating their Mother from the Pleroma. And the Christ, he says, was not brought forth from the Aeons within the Pleroma, but was produced by the Mother—after she had come to be outside, in accordance with the remembrance of the higher beings—together with a certain shadow. And this Christ, being male, cut off the shadow from himself and ran back up into the Pleroma; but the Mother, left behind with the shadow and emptied of the spiritual substance, brought forth another son; and this is the Demiurge, whom he also calls the Almighty of the things below. He also taught that, brought forth together with him, was a left-hand ruler, similarly to those who are to be spoken of by us, the falsely-named Gnostics. And Jesus, he says, was at one time brought forth from him who was separated off from their Mother and mingled together with the All—that is, from the Desired One (Theletos); at another time from him who ran back up into the Pleroma—that is, from the Christ; and at another time from Man and Church. And the Holy Spirit, he says, was brought forth by the Church of Truth, for the examination and fruit-bearing of the Aeons, entering into them invisibly; through whom the Aeons bore as fruit the plants of truth.
Secundus says that the first Ogdoad consists of a right-hand Tetrad and a left-hand Tetrad, teaching that the one is called light and the other darkness; and that the power which fell away and came short is not from the thirty Aeons, but from their fruits. (One Secundus, becoming a contemporary of Ptolemy, says that there is a right-hand Tetrad and a left-hand Tetrad, and that the one is called light and the other darkness; and the power that fell away and came short he says came to be not from the thirty Aeons, but from their fruits.) Another of them, stretching himself out toward the more lofty and the more 'gnostic,' (describes) the first Tetrad thus: "There is, before all things, a certain Fore-beginning (Proarche), unconceived-before, ineffable and unnameable, which I number as Solitariness (Monotes). With this there co-exists a power, which I likewise name Oneness (Henotes). This Oneness and this Solitariness, being one, brought forth—without bringing forth—a beginning over all things, intelligible, unbegotten and invisible, which the discourse calls Monad. With this Monad there co-exists a power consubstantial with it, which I likewise name 'the One' (to Hen). These powers, then—Solitariness and Oneness, and the One—brought forth the remaining productions of the Aeons." Alas, alas, and woe, woe! For one may truly cry the tragic cry over such a calamity of those who have written these ridiculous things, over such name-coining and over such audacity, since, shameless in his lie, he has given names to his fiction; for in saying, "There is a certain Fore-beginning before all things, unconceived-before, which I call Monad-Solitariness," and again, "With this Monad-Solitariness there co-exists a power, which I likewise name Oneness," he has most plainly confessed that the things he has said are his own fabrication, and that he himself has assigned names to his fiction, names laid down by no one else before him. And it is plain that he himself has dared to coin these names; and if he had not been present in this life, the truth would have had no name. Nothing, then, prevents another also from defining names upon the same hypothesis in this way:
Others again of them have called the first and primordial Ogdoad by these names: first Fore-beginning (Proarche), then Inconceivable (Anennoetos), the third Ineffable (Arrhetos), and the fourth Invisible (Aoratos). And from the first, the Fore-beginning, there was brought forth, in the first and fifth place, a Beginning; from the Inconceivable, in the second and sixth place, the Incomprehensible (Akataleptos); from the Ineffable, in the third and seventh place, the Unnameable (Anonomastos); and from the Invisible, the Unbegotten (Agennetos)—the fullness of the first Ogdoad. These powers they wish to have existed before Bythos and Sige, that they may appear more perfect than the perfect and more gnostic than the Gnostics; to whom one might justly cry out: "Babbling sophists!" For even concerning Bythos himself there are among them many and differing opinions. For some say that he is without a consort, neither male nor female, nor indeed anything at all. Others say that he is male-female, attaching to him the nature of a hermaphrodite. Still others, being indifferently moved concerning this same Bythos, some say that he is without consort, neither male nor female, while others say that Silence (Sige), being female, is present with him, and that this is the first conjunction. And again others attach Silence to him as a bed-fellow, that there may come to be a first conjunction.