Against the Valentinians

​Meanwhile it must be held that Sophia is surnamed both Earth and Mother, and, what you would laugh at more, even Holy Spirit, as if a male. Thus they conferred all masculine honor upon a female; I suppose even a beard, not to mention the rest. Otherwise, the Demiurge was so far from being master of things—scilicet on account of the weakness of his animal status, so as to approach spiritual things—that, thinking he was alone, he harangued: “I am God, and beside me there is none.” And yet he certainly knew that he had not existed previously. Therefore he both understood that he had been made, and that there was some maker of what had been made. How then did he seem to himself to be alone, even if not certain, at least suspecting some maker?

​The infamy among them regarding the devil is more tolerable, or because his origin is received as more filthy. For he is deputed to the wickedness of her grief, from which they note the generation of angels and demons and all spiritual wickednesses. And yet they also assert that the devil is the work of the Demiurge, and call him Ruler of the World, and defend him as more knowing of the higher things, as being spiritual by nature, than the Demiurge, who is animal. He well deserves preference from them, for whom all heresies are procured.

​But they locate the strongholds of individual powers within these limits: in the highest summits presides the thirtyfold Pleroma, with Horos marking the outermost line. Below him, Achamoth measures out the middle region, treading upon her son. For the Demiurge is placed beneath in his Sevenfold. The devil rather fits with us in this world, co-elemented and co-corporified, as has been set forth above. From Sophia’s most useful disasters, whereby she would not even have had air— the space for breathing, the tender clothing of all bodies, the indicator of all colors, the organ of times—if Sophia’s sadness had not strained out this also, just as fear strained out the animals, and her conversion the Demiurge himself. Into all these elements and bodies, fire was fanned. Since they have not yet published the original passion of Sophia for this fire, I shall meanwhile argue that it was shaken out from her slight feverish agitations. For you might believe that she, in such great vexations, even had a fever.

​Since such things are fashioned about God or the gods, what sort of fictions are there about man? For the Demiurge, having constructed the world, turns his hands to man, and takes his substance, they say, not from this dry earth which we alone know—as if, although dry afterwards, it had not been damp even then, the waters having been separated beforehand, with the remaining mud—but from the invisible body of matter, namely of that philosophical kind, from its fluid and fusible part, which I dare to estimate whence it was, because it is nowhere. For if fusible and fluid are qualities of liquid, and all liquid flowed from Sophia’s tears, it follows that we must believe the mud consisted of Sophia’s phlegm and rheum, which are likewise the dregs of tears, just as the mud which settles is the dregs of waters. Thus the Demiurge fashions man and animates him with his own breath. Thus he will be both of clay (choicus) and animal, made after the image and likeness, a fourfold thing, so that the clay-made is indeed deputed as the image—namely the material, although the Demiurge is not of matter—and the likeness as the animal; for this also is the Demiurge. You have two meanwhile. They say that a carnal surface was afterwards woven over the clay-made, and this is the tunic of skin, subject to sense.