Collected Works 8 part 2/2

By that same laughter of joy the light shone forth. Of what a providence is this the benefit! It compelled her to laugh, in order that we might not always tarry in darkness. Nor need you be amazed that by her gladness so splendid an element beamed upon the world, when by her sadness too so necessary an instrument was lacking to the age. O laughter, the illuminator! O weeping, the waterer! And yet she could by now have dealt with a remedy against the horror of that place—for she would have dispelled all its obscurity as often as she wished to laugh—or that she might not be driven to supplicate her own deserters. For she turns to prayers, herself too, after a mother's manner, but Christ, who was now loath to set out beyond the Pleroma, appoints a vicar in his place.

the Paraclete Soter (this will be Jesus, the Father of all having bestowed on him the supreme power over all the Aeons, so as to subject them all to himself, that in him, according to the Apostle, all things might be created); him he sends forth to her, with an office and a retinue of coeval angels—you would believe it, even with twelve fasces. There, at his pompous arrival, Achamoth, straightway shaken, drew a veil over herself out of the first duty of veneration and modesty. Then she contemplates him and his fruitful array; with what powers she had thence conceived, she runs to meet him, 'Kyrie, chaire!' ('Lord, hail!'). Here, I suppose, he confirms her whom he has received and shapes her by knowledge now, and files her clean of all the injuries of passion—those not being separated off into extermination with the same negligence which had befallen in the falls of the mother.

But indeed he compounded her practised vices, made vicious by use, and thus, solidified in a mass, he fixed them apart into an incorporeal preparation of matter, changing them out of an incorporeal passion, imparting to them an aptitude and a nature whereby they might presently be able to arrive at rivalling equivalences of corporeal things, so that a twofold condition of substances might be set in order: of the vices, the very worst; of the conversion, the passible. This was the matter which set us at variance with Hermogenes and the rest who presume that God fashioned all things out of matter, not out of nothing. From here Achamoth, at last delivered from all her evils, behold, now makes progress and fruitfully advances into greater works.

For, warmed by the joy of so great a success out of her misfortune, and at the same time by the very contemplation of the angelic lights, being, so to speak, leavened—it shames me, but there is no other way to express it—she in a manner grew hot within, herself too, toward them, and straightway swelled up with a spiritual conception, after the very image which by the force of a rejoicing intent, itching with joy, she had drunk in and made her own. In the end she gave birth, and thereafter there came to be a trinity of kinds out of a trinity of causes: one material, which is from the passion; another animal, which is from the conversion; a third spiritual, which is from the imagination. By this authority—that of her three children, namely—being made more practised in the conduct of affairs, she resolved to form each of the kinds.

But the spiritual indeed she could not so touch, being herself also spiritual; for the fellowship of nature refused that things nearly equal and consubstantial should prevail one upon the other. With this mind she turned herself alone to the animal, the disciplines of Soter having been brought forth. And first—a thing which, with great horror of blasphemy, is both to be uttered and read and heard—she fashions this god of ours, the god of all except the heretics, the Father and Demiurge and King of all things which are after him—for they are from him; if indeed from him, and not rather from Achamoth herself, by whom secretly, without any perception of it and as if by an outer figurine's guiding-string, he was moved into every operation.

In short, out of this ambiguity of persons in the works, they have mixed for him the name of Metropator ('Mother-Father'), with distinct appellations for the rest according to the status and situation of the works: so that, of the animal substances which they assign to the right hand, they call him Father; but of the material ones which they consign to the left, they name him Demiurge; and King in common over the whole. But neither does the propriety of the names agree with the propriety of the works from which the names come, seeing that all these things ought to have been named from her by whom the affairs were being carried on—except that now they are not even from her!

For when they say that Achamoth devised the images in honour of the Aeons, they again wrest this onto Soter as the author, who worked through her, so that she indeed gave the image of the Father, invisible and unknown, though unknown and invisible to the Demiurge. But the same Demiurge she fashioned as an image of the Son, Nus; the Archangels, moreover, the Demiurge's work, represent the remaining Aeons. When I hear of such great images of the three, I ask—do you not now want me to laugh at the images of that most perverse painter of theirs: the female Achamoth as the image of the Father, and the Demiurge, ignorant of his mother—much more of the Father—as the image of Nus, who was not ignorant of the Father, and the angels as servants, effigies of their lords? This is to paint a mule from an ass, and to portray Ptolemy from Valentinus.

Therefore the Demiurge, set outside the limits of the Pleroma in the ignominious waste of an eternal exile, founds a new province, this world, the confusion being purged away and the diversity marked out of that double substance which had been thrust down, the animal and the material. Out of the incorporeal he builds bodies, heavy and light, uplifting and downward-tending, celestial and terrestrial. Then he bounds the sevenfold scene of the heavens themselves, with his own throne above; whence too it is called the Sabbath, from the hebdomad of his seat, and the Ogdoad is the mother Achamoth, from the argument of the primordial Ogdoad.

The heavens, moreover, they reckon to be 'intellectual' (noeroi), and sometimes they make them angels, just as also the Demiurge himself; just as also Paradise is a fourth Archangel, since they set this too above the third heaven, from whose power Adam took, when he dwelt there among the little clouds and little shrubs. Ptolemy remembered well enough the childish little tales, that fruits are born in the sea and fishes in the tree; and so in the heavenly regions too he presumed there to be nut-groves. The Demiurge works in ignorance, and therefore perhaps he does not know that trees ought to be planted only in the earth. Clearly the mother knew; why would she not suggest it, she who also administered his effect?

But why, while building so lofty a pinnacle for her son by those works which attest him, in the eyes of the Valentinians' fancies, to be at once Father and God and King, she was unwilling to be known also to himself—that I shall inquire afterwards. Meanwhile it must be held that Sophia is surnamed both Earth and Mother and (what you may laugh at the more) even Holy Spirit, as it were a male Earth. Thus they have conferred on her every honour proper to a female, I think even a beard—not to mention the rest. Otherwise the Demiurge was so far from being master of things—by the weakness, that is, of his animal census, whereby spiritual things came upon him—that, thinking himself the only one, he harangued: 'I am God, and beside me there is none.' Certainly, however, he knew that he had not existed before. Therefore he understood both that he had been made, and that the maker of a made thing is someone or other.

How then did he seem to himself to be alone, even if not certain, at least suspicious of some maker? Among them the infamy is more tolerable in the case of the devil, or because a baser origin admits it. For he is reckoned to be from the wickedness of that grief of hers, out of which they mark the begettings of the angels and demons and all spiritual wickednesses. And yet they affirm the devil too to be the work of the Demiurge, and they call him 'World-holder' (Cosmocrator, Munditenens), and they defend him as more knowing than his superiors—as spiritual by nature, rather than the Demiurge, who is animal. He deserves preferment at their hands, he for whose sake all heresies are procured. As for the citadels of the individual powers, they locate them within these bounds: on the highest summits presides the thirty-fold Pleroma, Horos marking the outermost line;

lower down he measures out that midmost region, Achamoth, treading upon her son; for beneath is the Demiurge in his hebdomad; more so the devil in this our world, which is compounded of elements and made corporeal, as was set forth above, out of the most useful falls of Sophia—since it would have had no air, no room for the reciprocation of the breath, that soft garment of all bodies, the judge of all colours, the instrument of the seasons, had not Sophia's sadness strained it out too, just as her fear strained out animals, and her conversion the Demiurge himself. By all these elements and bodies fire was fanned into a blaze; and since they have not yet published the original passion of Sophia which produced it, I will argue that it was shaken out by her little movements; for you would believe that in such great vexations she had even taken a fever.

Since they have such fabrications concerning God or the gods, what wonder that they have such concerning man? For the Demiurge, having contrived the world, sets his hands to man, and takes substance for him, not, they say, from this dry earth which we alone know—as though it had not, even if dry afterwards, nevertheless then, the waters having first been separated off, dried up with the mud still surviving—but from the invisible body of that matter, the philosophical one, namely, from its flowing and fluid part; and whence that was, I dare to guess, because it is nowhere: for if fluidity is a quality of a liquid, and every liquid flowed from Sophia's weepings, it follows that we should believe the mud to have consisted of the phlegm and rheum of Sophia, which are the dregs of her tears, just as mud is that which settles down from waters.

So the Demiurge moulds man, and animates him from his own breath. Thus he will be both 'earthy' (choicus) and 'animal,' made after the image and likeness, a fourfold thing: so that as image indeed the earthy is reckoned—being material, that is, although the Demiurge is not from matter; but as likeness the animal—for this the Demiurge also is. You have two. Meanwhile they say the carnal surface was afterwards woven over the earthy, and that this is the 'coat of skin' liable to sense. Now there was in Achamoth, from the substance of the mother Sophia, a certain property of spiritual seed, such as she herself was; this Achamoth had sequestered in her son the Demiurge, not even he being aware of it.

(Mark the ingenuity of this clandestine providence.) For to this end she had both deposited and hidden it, that when the Demiurge should presently impart the soul from his own breath into Adam, at the same time that spiritual seed too might be derived, as though through a channel of the soul, into the earthy man, and thus, fecundated in the material body as in a womb and there grown to maturity, might be found fit for receiving one day the perfect Word. And so, when the Demiurge commits the transmission of his own soul into Adam, the spiritual man lay hidden, inserted into his breath and at the same time introduced into the body; because the Demiurge no more knew of the seed of the mother than of the mother herself.

This seed they call the Church, the mirror of the heavenly Church and of Anthropos; and they reckon its census accordingly as being from Achamoth, just as the animal is from the Demiurge, the earthy from the substance of the arche ('beginning'), the flesh from matter. You have a new, that is, a fourfold Geryon. Thus too they divide the outcome for each: for the material, that is, the carnal, which they also call the left, an undoubted destruction; but for the animal, which they also call the right, a doubtful event, inasmuch as it wavers between the material and the spiritual and belongs to that side to which it shall have more inclined. As for the spiritual, they say it is sent forth into companionship with the animal, that it may be instructed together with it and exercised in the courses of life; for the animal had needed even sensible disciplines.

For this purpose too the furnishing of the world was foreseen, and for this the Saviour was manifested in the world, namely for the salvation of the 'animal' being. By yet another arrangement they will have that monstrous one to have put on the choicest portions of those substances whose sum he was destined to bring back to salvation: so that he received the spiritual indeed from Achamoth, but the animal Christ whom he presently put on from the Demiurge; while as for the bodily, formed out of animal substance yet built by a marvellous and unspeakable subtlety of reason, this he bore for a time for the sake of his mission, that he might, however unwillingly, be subject to being encountered, seen, touched, and even to dying. But there was nothing material in him, as being foreign to salvation—as though he had been necessary to any others than to those who lacked salvation.

And all this they contrive so that, by estranging the condition of our flesh from Christ, they may also cut it off from the hope of salvation. Now I return to the doctrine of the Christ into whom they insert Jesus with as great licence as that with which they stuff the spiritual seed into the animal along with an inflation, having invented I know not what force-meats both of their men and of their gods. There is also, they say, a Christ of the Demiurge's own, his natural son, that is to say animal, brought forth by him, proclaimed through the prophets, set forth in the questions of the prepositions—that is, brought forth through a virgin and not of a virgin, since, having been let down into the virgin, he passed through her in a transitory rather than a generative manner, through her and not of her, treating her not as a mother but as a passageway.

Upon this Christ, then, they say Jesus flew down at the sacrament of baptism in the likeness of a dove. There was also in Christ a seasoning of the spiritual seed from Achamoth, lest, forsooth, the rest of the stuffing should grow flabby. For, to fit the figure of the principal Tetrad, they cram him with four substances: the spiritual one of Achamoth, the animal one of the Demiurge, the bodily one that is unspeakable, and that of the Saviour—that is, the dove-like one. And the Saviour indeed remained in Christ incapable of suffering, unhurtable, unapprehendable. Then, when it came to the seizings, he departed from him at the arraignment before Pilate; and likewise the seed of the Mother admitted no injuries, being equally not subject, and not even known to the Demiurge himself.

But the animal and fleshly Christ does suffer, as a delineation of the higher Christ who, in forming Achamoth by a substantial and not a merely cognitive form, had leaned upon the Cross, that is, upon Horos. Thus everything rises up into images—plainly they themselves too are imaginary Christians. Meanwhile the Demiurge, still ignorant of all things—although he too will make some proclamation through the prophets, yet not even understanding this work of his own (for they divide the prophetic patronage as well between Achamoth, the seed, and the Demiurge)—when he received tidings of the Saviour's coming, ran up in haste and exultantly with all his forces—the centurion of the Gospel—and, enlightened by him about all things, learns also his own destiny, namely that he is to succeed to the Mother's place.

Thus thenceforth, free from care, he follows out the dispensation of this world—and above all for the sake of protecting the Church—for as long a time as was needful. I will now gather up from their scattered statements, so as to conclude, what they have laid down concerning the ordering of the whole human race. Having professed a threefold nature at the beginning, yet united in Adam, they thereafter divide it through the individual properties of the kinds, having found occasion for this sort of distinction in the very posterity of Adam, which is itself divided into three by moral differences. Cain, Abel, and Seth—the fountains, in a manner, of the human race—they turn into just so many arguments of nature and of judgement: the 'choic,' degenerate as to salvation, they reduce to Cain; the 'animal,' left to a middling hope, they set alongside Abel;

the 'spiritual,' predestined to certain salvation, they lay up in Seth. So too they distinguish souls themselves by a double property, good and evil according to the choic state derived from Cain and the animal state from Abel. For the spiritual state, derived from Seth, they superadd by way of adventitious grace, as now no longer nature but indulgence, being that which Achamoth rains down from the higher regions into the good souls, that is, those enrolled in the animal census. For the choic kind, that is, evil souls, can never receive the things that pertain to salvation; for they have pronounced its nature unchangeable and beyond all reforming.

This grain, then, of the spiritual seed, small and tiny in the sowing but great in the cultivating, is increased and advanced by faith, as we said above; and by this very thing the souls so outstripped the rest that the Demiurge, then in ignorance, made much of them. Out of their tally, therefore, he was accustomed to choose men both for kings and for priests; and these souls, if now too they lay hold of the full and perfect knowledge of these silly tales, will—now that they have been 'naturified' by the kinship of the spiritual condition—obtain a certain salvation, nay, one due to them in every way. And therefore they think that neither works are necessary for them, nor do they observe any duties of discipline, evading even the necessity of martyrdom by whatever interpretation they please.

For this rule, they say, is prescribed to the animal seed: that the salvation which we do not possess by the privilege of our status we should work out by the merit of our conduct. For to us, who are of imperfect knowledge inasmuch as we know not Theletus, there falls the enrolment of this seed—and indeed it is reckoned to their abortion (which is their mother!). But for us, forsooth, woe if we should overstep into any yoke of discipline, if we should grow numb in the works of holiness and righteousness, if we should choose to make confession somewhere else, I know not where, and not under the powers of this world before the tribunals of the governors. But they, on the contrary, may claim their nobility both from the passivity of their life and from a diligent pursuit of transgressions, since their own Achamoth flatters them, seeing that she too made progress by transgressing.

For, in honour of the exalted marriages above, it is proclaimed among them that the sacrament of cleaving to one's 'consort,' that is, one's female, must ever be meditated upon and celebrated. Otherwise one is degenerate and no lawful son of the truth who, dwelling in the world, has not loved a female nor joined himself to her. And what will the eunuchs do whom we see among them? It remains to speak of the consummation and the dispensation of the reward: when Achamoth shall have pressed the whole mass of her seed and shall have begun to gather it into the granary, or when, having brought it to the mill and ground it to flour, she shall have hidden it away in a saving lump until the whole be leavened together, then the consummation will press on.

Therefore, first of all, Achamoth herself, from the region of the Middle, from the second story, will be transferred to the height, restored to the Pleroma. At once that patched-together Saviour will spring forth—the Bridegroom, that is; the two will become a new wedlock—he will be in the Scriptures the bridegroom, and the Pleroma the bridal. For you may well believe that, where there is migrating from place to place, even the Julian laws come into play. Just so, on the stage, the Demiurge too will then change from the heavenly Hebdomad into the upper regions, into what is now the empty upper chamber of the Mother, knowing her now yet no longer seeing her. For if it was so, he would always have preferred to remain ignorant. But the human race will pass into this outcome: those of the choic and material mark, wholly into destruction, because all flesh is grass. And the soul is mortal, in their view, except one that has found salvation by faith.

The souls of the righteous, that is, ours, will be conveyed to the Demiurge into the receptacles of the Middle—we give thanks, we shall be content to be reckoned with our god by an animal census. Nothing is admitted into the palace of the Pleroma save the spiritual swarm of Valentinus. There, then, first of all, the men themselves are stripped, that is, the inner men; and to be stripped is to lay aside the souls with which they seemed to be clothed, and to give them back to their Demiurge—the very souls they had turned away from him. But the spirits themselves will become wholly intellectual, subject neither to detention nor to sight, and so are received invisibly into the Pleroma. By stealth, if it is so. What next? They will be distributed to the angels, the attendants of the Saviour. As sons, you suppose? No. But as servants? Not even that.

But as images? Would that it were even this. As what, then, if it is not shameful to say it? As brides! Then those Sabines, ravished, will make sport among themselves over their marriages. This was the reward of the spiritual ones, this the prize of believing. Fables so useful, that Marcus or Gaius, bearded in this flesh and stern in this soul, a husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather—assuredly, so far as suffices, a male—will in the bridal chamber of the Pleroma be by an angel . . . I have already said it by keeping silent; and perhaps you may bring forth some newest Aeon. For these nuptials to be duly conducted, in place of torch and bridal veil, then, I suppose, that hidden fire will burst forth, and having laid waste the whole substance and itself too being reduced to ashes together with all things, it will end in nothing—and there will be no more fable.

But let me not be rash in having betrayed, even in mockery, so great a mystery. I must beware lest Achamoth, who would not have herself known even to her son, should rage, lest Theletus should be angry, lest Fortunata should be embittered. And yet I am a man of the Demiurge; thither must I turn aside, where after departure one is not clouded over at all, where one is rather clothed upon than stripped, where, even if I am stripped of my sex, I am reckoned among angels—neither an angel nor an 'angela'; where no one shall do anything to me whom he shall not even then find to be a male.

Finally, as a sort of encore after so great a fable, I will bring forward also those things which—lest they should clash with the order and scatter the reader's attention by interruption—I have preferred to defer to this place, being commended in one way and another by the more improving disciples of Ptolemy. For there arose from his very school disciples surpassing their master, who would fasten a double consort upon their own Bythos: Thought and Will. For Thought alone was not enough, since by it he could have produced nothing. Out of the two, most easily, was brought forth the second couple, Monogenes and Truth—Truth a female after the image of Thought, Monogenes a male after the image of Will. For the force of Will, as that which supplies effect to Thought, holds the rank of masculinity.

Others, more modest, mindful of the honour of the Godhead, that they might strip from it even the disgrace of a single spouse, preferred to assign no sex at all to Bythos; and perhaps for this reason they pronounce this lord—here not a god—to be of neither gender. Others, on the contrary, say he is both male and female, lest, among the men of Luna alone, Fenestella the commentator of annals should reckon there to be a hermaphrodite. There are those who defend for Bythos not the primacy but the last place, sending ahead before all things an Ogdoad derived indeed from a Tetrad, but by other names as well. For first they set up Proarche, secondly Anennoeton, thirdly Arrheton, fourthly Aoraton.

Thus from Proarche there proceeded, in the first and fifth place, Arche; from Anennoetos, in the second and sixth place, Acataleptos; from Arrhetos, in the third and seventh place, Anonomastos; from the Invisible, in the fourth and eighth place, Agennetos. By what reasoning it is arranged that each should be born in two places, and those so far apart, I would rather not know than learn. For what right principle is there in things so perversely put forth? How much better were those who, having removed all this tedium out of the way, would have no Aeon derived from another by grades, built truly like the Gemonian steps, but—as they say, the napkin once thrown down—had that eight-yoked band struck off at a single stroke from the Forefather and his Ennoea. From the very motion of things, in short, they bear their names: when, they say, he thought to bring forth, this was called Father;

when he brought forth, because he brought forth truly, this was called Truth. When he willed to prove himself, this was pronounced Man. And those whom he had pre-thought, when he brought them forth, then that was named Church. Man uttered the Word, and this is the firstborn Son; and to the Word there was added Life, and the first Ogdoad was concluded. But this tedium is exceedingly petty. Receive now other mountebank contrivances of a more distinguished master among them, who, by his own pontifical authority, laid down the ruling after this manner: 'There is (he says) before all things a Proarche, unthinkable and unspeakable and unnameable, which I name Monotes. With this there will be another power, which I also call Henotes.'

Monotes and Henotes—that is, Soleness and Oneness—being one, brought forth, without bringing forth, the beginning of all things, intellectual, unbegettable, invisible, which the Word called the Monad. To this there is present a consubstantial power which he calls Union. These powers, therefore—Soleness, Oneness, Singularity, Union—propagated the remaining emissions of the Aeons. O what a difference! Let Union and Oneness and Singularity and Soleness be changed however you may designate them—it is one. Now Secundus is more human because more brief, dividing the Ogdoad into two Tetrads, into a right and a left, into light and darkness, only that he will not have that skittish and defective power derived from any of the Aeons, but from the fruits that come from the substance.

Concerning the Lord Jesus himself, now, how great a diversity is split off! These construct him out of the little flowers of all the Aeons; those contend that he consisted of ten alone, whom the Word and Life brought forth—whence upon him too the titles of Word and Life would have met. Others say he was rather of twelve, of the offspring of Man and Church, and therefore was of old proclaimed the Son of Man. Others say he was fabricated by Christ and the Holy Spirit, who were provided for the establishing of the community, and thence an heir of the paternal appellation. There are those who would have the Son of Man to be called so from no other source than that the Father himself, for the great mystery of the name, presumed to call himself Man—so that you may hope for what more from the faith of a god of god, to which you are now made equal.

Such devices sprout up superabundantly among them out of the overflow of the maternal seed. And thus the swelling doctrines of the Valentinians have now run wild into the forests of the Gnostics. HERE ENDS THE BOOK OF TERTULLIAN AGAINST THE VALENTINIANS.