Against the Valentinians

​Others, more modest, remembering the honor of the divinity, so that they might tear away from him even the disgrace of having a single consort, preferred to assign no sex to Bythus, and perhaps they pronounce ‘this god’ in the neuter gender, not ‘he is god’. Others, on the contrary, rather say he is both male and female, lest Fenestella, the commentator of annals, should think Hermaphroditus exists only among the people of Luna.

​There are those who do not maintain even the priority of Bythus, but rather his posteriority, placing the Ogdoad before all things, derived indeed from the Tetrad itself, but under other names. For first they establish Proarche, second Anennoetus, third Arrhetus, fourth Aoratus. From Proarche, therefore, there proceeded in the first and fifth places Arche; from Anennoetus, in the second and sixth places, Acataleptus; from Arrhetus, in the third and seventh places, Anonomastus; from the Invisible, in the fourth and eighth places, Agennetus. By what reason this is arranged, so that individual things are born in two places and indeed with such gaps between them, I prefer to be ignorant rather than to learn. For what rectitude do things have that are produced so perversely?

​How much better are those who, having removed all this tediousness from the midst, wished no Aeon to be structured one from another indeed through steps like the Gemonian stairs, but rather, as the saying goes, ‘at the casting of the handkerchief’ once and for all, cast that eight-fold yoke from the Propator and his Ennoea. Finally, they bear names from the very movement of affairs. ‘When,’ they say, ‘he thought to produce, for this reason he was called Father; when he produced, because indeed he produced, this was called Truth. When he wished himself to be proved, this was pronounced Man. But those whom he foreknew when he produced, then the Church was named.’ Man sounded forth Word—and this is the first-born son—and to Word was added Life, and the first Ogdoad was concluded. But this is a small tediousness.

​Receive other inventions, with your mind now tamed, of a more distinguished master among them, who from his pontifical authority decided in this manner: ’There is,’ he says, ‘before all things Proarche, unthinkable and ineffable and innominable, which I name Monotes. With this was another power, which itself I also call Henotes. Monotes and Henotes, that is Solitude and Unity, when they were one, produced, without producing, the intellectual, unborn, invisible beginning of all things, which discourse called Monad. To this is present a consubstantial power, which he calls Union. These powers therefore: Solitude, Unity, Singularity, Union, propagated the remaining productions of the Aeons.’ Oh, what a difference! Let Union and Unity and Singularity and Solitude be interchanged, in whatever way you designate them: they are one.

​Secundus, now more reasonable, as he is briefer, dividing the Ogdoad into two Tetrads, into a right and a left, into light and darkness, only that he does not wish to derive that leaping and defective power from any of the Aeons, but from the fruits... that they may come from the substance. ​Concerning the Lord Jesus himself, indeed, how great a diversity is split! These construct him from the flowerets of all the Aeons; those contend that he consisted of only ten, whom Word and Life produced, whence also the titles of Word and Life concurred in him; others rather from twelve, from the offspring of Man and Church, and therefore that he was pronounced ‘Son of Man’ ancestrally; others that he was fashioned by Christ and the Holy Spirit, who were provided for stabilizing the universe, and thence he was the heir of the paternal appellation. There are those who conceived that ‘Son of Man’ was to be said from no other source than because they presumed that the Father himself was called Man for the great mystery of the name. And what more can you hope for concerning the faith in that god to whose name you are made equal? Such geniuses overgrow among them from the redundancy of the mother’s seed. And thus the growing doctrines of the Valentinians have now degenerated into the forests of the Gnostics.