Against the Valentinians

​What remains is concerning the consummation and the distribution of the reward. When Achamoth has pressed the whole mass of her seed, then has begun to gather it into the barn, and then has hidden it, brought to the mills and ground into flour, in the leather pouch of the dough, until the whole is thoroughly mixed, then the consummation will be imminent. Therefore, first of all, Achamoth herself will be transferred from the region of the middle, from the second story, into the highest place. Her who is restored to the Pleroma, that composite Savior, namely the bridegroom, immediately receives, and both will become a new marriage—this in the Scriptures will be ‘the bridegroom and the bride’—and the Pleroma will be the bridal chamber. For you would believe that, where migration is made from place to place, the Julian laws also intervene. As if from a stage, the Demiurge also will then change from the heavenly Hebdomad to the higher regions, into the now vacant dining-room of his mother, knowing her now, yet not seeing her. For if it were so, he would have preferred to remain always ignorant.

​But the human race will go to this end: everything of the clay-made and material stamp will go into destruction, because ‘all flesh is grass’. And the soul is mortal among them, except that which has found salvation through faith. The souls of the righteous, that is ours, will be transferred to the Demiurge, into the receptacles of the middle region —we give thanks; we shall be content to be classed with our God—where nothing of the psychic register is admitted into the palace of the Pleroma, except the spiritual swarm of Valentinus. There, therefore, first of all, the men themselves, that is, the inner men, will be stripped— now, to be stripped is to lay aside the souls with which they seemed to be clothed—and they will restore them to their Demiurge, while they themselves, as spirits, will become entirely intellectual, subject neither to detention nor to sight, and thus invisibly they will be received into the Pleroma. Stealthily, if it is so. What then? They will be distributed to the angels, the attendants of the Savior. As sons, do you think? Not one. But as attendants? Not even that. But as images? Would that it were at least this! Into what then, if it is not shameful to say? Into brides. Then they will play at marriages among themselves like the abducted Sabine women. This will be the reward of the spiritual, this the prize of believing. What useful fables! so that Marcus or Gaius, bearded in this flesh, and in this soul a stern husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, certainly—what is sufficient—a male, in the bridal chamber of the Pleroma by an angel—by keeping silent I have already said it—and perhaps he may give birth to some Aeon Onesimus. For these marriages to be properly celebrated, instead of a torch and a bridal veil, then, I believe, that secret fire will burst forth, and having devastated the entire substance, and all things being reduced to ashes, it will also end in nothingness, and there will be no more fable. But lest I be rash, who have betrayed so great a mystery even by mocking it. I must fear lest Achamoth, who wished not to be recognized even by her son, should go mad, lest Theletus grow angry, lest Fortunata be embittered. And yet, I am a man of the Demiurge: thither I must turn aside after my departure, where there is no marrying at all, where I have to be clothed upon rather than stripped, where, even if I am stripped, I am assigned to my own sex, to the angels neither as a male angel nor as a female angel. No one will do anything to me, whom they will find even then to be a male.

​I will finally produce, as if an after-piece after so great a fable, also those things which I preferred to defer to this place, lest they should interrupt the order and distract the reader’s attention by an insertion, which are differently set forth by the correctors of Ptolemy. For there have arisen from his school disciples superior to their master, who would attribute a double marriage to their Bythus: Thought and Will. For Thought alone was not sufficient, by which he could have produced nothing. From these two was most easily produced the second marriage, Monogenes and Truth; indeed, Truth as a female after the image of Thought, and Monogenes as a male after the image of Will. For the power of will, inasmuch as it provides effect to thought, obtains the status of masculinity.