Against the Valentinians

​For behold, the second tetrad, Word and Life, Man and Church, which had borne fruit to this number for the glory of the father, desiring, they too, to offer some such thing to the father from their own, bubble forth other offspring, likewise conjugal through the coupling of each nature. On this side, Word and Life pour forth a decade of Aeons together; on that side, Man and Church pour forth two more, equaling the parents, because they themselves, the two of them with those ten, make up as many as they procreated. I now return the names of those whom I called a decade: Bythios and Mixis, Ageratos and Henosis, Autophyes and Hedone, Acinetos and Syncrasis, Monogenes and Macaria. On the other hand, the duodenary number will be these: Paracletus and Pistis, Patricos and Elpis, Metricos and Agape, Aeinus and Synesis, Ecclesiasticus and Macariotes, Theletus and Sophia. I am forced here to bring forward from a similar example what these names signify. In the schools of Carthage, there was a certain very tedious Latin rhetorician, Phosphorus by name. When he was declaiming on the brave man, he said, “I come to you, excellent citizens, from battle with my victory, with your happiness, enlarged, glorious, fortunate, greatest, triumphal.” And the students immediately shouted “pheu” (alas!) to the family of Phosphorus. You have heard of Fortunata and Hedone and Acinetos and Theletus: shout “pheu” to the family of Ptolemy. This will be that secret Pleroma, the fullness of a thirty-fold divinity. Let us see what the privileges of these numbers are, of the quaternary, the octonary, the denary, and the duodenary. In the meantime, in the thirty-fold number, all fecundity fails—the strength, power, and generative desire of the Aeons are castrated—as if there were not still so many combinations of numbers remaining, and no other names from the school. For why are not fifty and a hundred also procreated? Why are they not also named Sterceiae and Syntrophi?

​But this also is a respect of persons, that only Nus among them all enjoys the knowledge of the immense father, rejoicing and exulting, while they indeed are mourning. Clearly Nus, as far as in him lay, had both wished and attempted to communicate to the rest also what he knew, how great and how incomprehensible the father was. But the mother Sige intervened, she namely, who prescribes silence even to her own heretics, although they say it was done by the father’s nod, who wished all to be kindled into a desire for him. And so, while they were tormenting themselves within themselves, and burning with a silent desire to know the father, a crime was almost committed. For of those twelve Aeons whom Man and Church had brought forth, the youngest Aeon—let the solecism look to itself, for her name is Sophia—broke forth, through her lack of self-control, without the partnership of her spouse Theletus, to inquire after the father, and contracted a kind of vice, which had indeed begun in those others who were around Nus, but had drifted into this one, that is, into Sophia, just as vices born elsewhere in the body are accustomed to breathe out their ruin into another member. But indeed, under the pretext of love for the father, rivalry was prevailing against Nus, who alone rejoiced in the father. But as Sophia, striving after impossible things, was in vain and was overcome by the difficulty and stretched out by her passion, she was within a hair’s breadth of being swallowed up by the force of sweetness and toil, and dissolved into the remaining substance; nor would she have ceased otherwise than by perishing, had she not by a good fate run against Horos (Limit) —he too has a certain power: he is the foundation of the universe and its guardian from without—whom they also call Cross, and Redeemer, and Harvester. Thus Sophia, delivered from danger and at last persuaded to turn aside from her search for the father, became quiet, and cast out all her thought (enthymesis) along with the passion that had additionally happened to her.