文集 第 8 章 第 1/2 段

CHAPTER 1. The Valentinians, plainly a most numerous college among the heretics, because they are for the most part apostates from the truth and are prone to fables and are not restrained by discipline, care for nothing more than to conceal what they preach—if indeed they preach who conceal. The office of guarding is the office of conscience. Confusion is preached while religion is asserted. For those Eleusinian mysteries too, itself a heresy of the Attic superstition, are shameful in what they keep silent. For this reason also they first torment the approach and initiate longer before they seal, since they make men 'epopts' only after five years, that they may build up an opinion by the suspense of the knowledge and thus seem to display so great a majesty as they had prebuilt up desire for it. Then follows the office of silence;

what is found late is guarded attentively; but the whole godhead in the inner shrines, the whole sighing of the epopts, the whole seal upon the tongue—an image of the male member is revealed. But an allegorical arrangement, holding forth a name to be venerated as of nature, obscures the sacrilege under the patronage of a forced figure and excuses the outrage by false images. Accordingly, these whom we now mark out as heretics, configuring their most vain and most base fictions with holy names and titles and arguments of true religion—with an easy fondness, from the occasion of the divine abundance, because from many things many things may follow—have made their Valentinian pandering an Eleusis: holy by great silence, heavenly by taciturnity alone.

If you inquire in good faith, with set countenance and lifted eyebrow they say, 'It is deep.' If you test them subtly, through two-tongued ambiguities they affirm a common faith. If you show that you know, they deny whatever they acknowledge. If you contend at close quarters, with cunning simplicity they scatter your slaughter of them. Not even to their own disciples do they entrust things before they have made them their own. They have an artifice whereby they persuade before they teach. But truth persuades by teaching; it does not teach by persuading. CHAPTER 2.

And so we are marked as 'simple' among them, as if this only and not also 'wise'—as though wisdom must at once depart from simplicity, whereas the Lord enjoins both together: 'Be prudent as serpents and simple as doves.' Or if we are for that reason unwise because we are simple, are they then for that reason not simple because they are wise? But most harmful are those who are not simple, as most foolish those who are not wise. And yet I would rather have my share taken with the better fault, if it must be. It is better to be less wise than worse, to err than to deceive. Moreover, the face of God is beheld in the simplicity of seeking, as Wisdom herself teaches—not indeed the Wisdom of Valentinus, but of Solomon. Then, infants offered testimony to Christ by their blood;

were they boys who cry out at the cross? They were neither boys nor infants, that is, they were not simple; and the apostle too bids us become boys again according to God, so that as infants in malice through simplicity, we may thus at last be wise in our understanding; at the same time he gave the order of wisdom's flowing out of simplicity. In sum: the dove has been wont to point out Christ, the serpent to tempt; she is from the very beginning the herald of the divine peace, he from the very beginning the plunderer of the divine image. Thus simplicity alone will more easily be able both to know God and to display him, prudence alone rather to shake and to betray. CHAPTER 3.

Let the serpent therefore hide himself as much as he can, and twist his whole prudence into the windings of hiding-places, dwell deep, thrust himself into a dark hole, unroll his coils through winding turns; let him proceed tortuously and not the whole of him at once, a light-shunning beast; but our dove's very house is simple, always on the heights and open and toward the light. The figure of the Holy Spirit loves the East, the figure of Christ. Truth blushes at nothing save only to be hidden, since it will shame no one to lend his ears to it, to recognize as God him whom nature has already committed to him, whom he daily perceives in all his works—this alone being less known, that he did not think him unique, that he named him in a number, that he adored him in others.

Otherwise, to urge from their crowd yet another throng, to transfer men from the domestic principate to the unknown, to twist them back from the manifest to the hidden—this is to make faith stumble on the very threshold. And now, if one be initiated even into the whole fable, will he not recall something of the sort—that in his infancy, amid the difficulties of sleep, he heard from his little nurse about the towers of the Lamia and the combs of the Sun? But he who shall have come to the faith from another awareness, if he finds so many names of Aeons, so many conjugal pairs, so many offspring, so many exits, so many events—felicities and infelicities of a scattered and cut-up divinity—will he hesitate to pronounce on the spot that these are the fables and endless genealogies which the apostle's spirit, these heretical seeds even then sprouting, hastened to condemn beforehand?

Rightly therefore not simple, rightly only prudent, are they who neither easily bring forth such things nor openly defend them, and do not even fully teach all whom they teach. Cunningly indeed, if shameful things; but inhumanly, if honorable. Yet we simple ones know all things. In short, we have armed this first wedge of the encounter as the discloser and marker of their whole conscience, and we augur this first victory, because what is hidden at so great expense—merely to display it, even, is to destroy it. CHAPTER 4. We know full well, I say, their very origin, and we know why we call them Valentinians, though they may seem not to be: for they have departed from their founder—yet the origin is by no means erased, even if it perchance be changed: the very change is a testimony.

Valentinus had hoped for the episcopate, because he was strong both in genius and in eloquence; but indignant that another obtained the place by the prerogative of martyrdom, he broke away from the church of the authentic rule. As minds stirred up for precedence are wont to be inflamed with the presumption of vengeance, having turned to assailing the truth and having lighted upon the path of a certain old opinion, he sketched out a way for Colorbasus. Afterward Ptolemaeus entered upon it, distinguishing the names and numbers of the Aeons into personal substances, but determined outside God—which substances Valentinus had enclosed within the very summit of divinity (as senses and affections, movements). Heracleon too drew from thence certain tracks, and Secundus and Marcus the magician. Theotimus labored much about the images of the law.

Thus there is now nowhere a Valentinus, and yet there are Valentinians, who are such through Valentinus. Alone to this day at Antioch, Axionicus consoles the memory of Valentinus by keeping his rules intact. But otherwise it is permitted to attach oneself to this heresy only as far as it is the daily custom of the she-wolf to fashion her form anew. And why not, since they thus reckon each one's own spiritual seed within him? If they have constructed something new, they at once call presumption 'revelation,' and their own wit a 'charisma,' and not unity but diversity. And therefore we foresee that, their solemn dissimulation being laid aside, most of them are divided on certain points.

Even in good faith they will say, 'This is not so,' and 'This I take otherwise,' and 'This I do not acknowledge.' For the face of their rules is renewed by variety; it has also the colors of ignorances. CHAPTER 5. But for me the boundary was with the archetypes, the principal masters, not with the affected leaders of their passive disciples. Nor shall we anywhere be said to have ourselves invented the materials, which already so many men, distinguished for holiness and eminence—not only our predecessors but contemporaries of the heresiarchs themselves—have both set forth and beaten back in most thoroughly furnished volumes: as Justin, philosopher and martyr; as Miltiades, the sophist of the churches; as Irenaeus, the most curious explorer of all doctrines;

as our own Proculus, a dignity of virgin old age and of Christian eloquence—men whom, in every work of faith, I would wish to attain to as also in this one. Or if heresies are wholly non-existent, so that those who repel them may be thought to have invented them, then the apostle will be lying, the herald of them. But if they do exist, they will be no other than those which are here treated. No one is reported so idle as to invent materials merely for the sake of having something for his pen. CHAPTER 6. Therefore in this little book, wherein we send ahead only a demonstration of that arcane matter, lest the fog from names so foreign and forced and compacted and ambiguous overwhelm anyone, I shall first make clear how we intend to use them: for of some the interpretation from the Greek does not readily correspond to the ready form of the name;

of some the genders do not agree even as to sex; of some the knowledge is more usual in the Greek. And so for the most part we shall set down the Greek; the significations will be present along the margins of the pages, nor indeed shall the Greek be lacking to the Latin, but will be noted above in the lines, so that this may be a mark of the personal names, on account of their ambiguities which they share with another signification. Although I have deferred the heaping-up, professing meanwhile only the narration, yet wherever the unworthiness deserves to be branded, it will not be by a merely piercing sampling that the assault is made. Reckon it, reader, a playful skirmish of the encounter before the battle; I shall show, but not press home, the wounds. And if somewhere it be laughed at too, the very materials will be satisfied. Many things are so worthy to be refuted that they must not be dignified by gravity.

Festivity properly yields to vanity. It befits truth also to laugh, because it rejoices, and to make sport of its rivals, because it is secure. Care must of course be taken that its laughter be not laughed at, should it prove unworthy. But wherever the laughter is deserved, it is a duty. And so I will begin in this manner. First of all the poets, Ennius the Roman, spoke plainly of 'the highest garrets of heaven,' by the name of an elevated site, or because he had read in Homer of Jupiter feasting there. But it is a marvel how many super-heights of heights and how many sublimities of sublimities the heretics have hung up, hoisted up, and spread out for the dwelling-place of each one's own god.

Even for our Creator these Ennian garrets are arranged in the form of little chambers, with attic upon attic built one above another, and to each god there is allotted as many flights of stairs as there have been heresies. The world has become a tenement-house. You would think it a Felicula Island, with I know not how many storeys of heavens stacked somewhere. There too, on the topmost tiles, dwells the god of the Valentinians. In substance indeed they call him a 'perfect Aeon' (aion teleion); but as a person, 'Forefather' (propator) and 'First-beginning' (proarche), and also Bythos ('Depth')—which was hardly fitting for one dwelling in the heights. They define him as unbegotten, immeasurable, infinite, invisible, and eternal, as though they proved him at once to exist if only they define him such as we know he ought to be. Thus let it also be said that he existed before all things.

But that he exists, I demand as proof; and in a matter of this kind I mark nothing more than this: that those are found to come after all things who are said to have existed before all things—and that indeed not of their own doing. So then, let this Bythos have been, through infinite ages past, in the utmost and deepest quiet, in the fullest repose of a placid and—so to speak—stupefied divinity, such as Epicurus enjoined. And yet to this being, whom alone they will have as god, they give a second person in himself and with himself, Ennoia ('Thought'), whom they moreover name Charis ('Grace') and Sige ('Silence'). And perchance in that highly commended quiet it occurred to him to be moved at last, of himself, to bring forth a beginning of things. This, in the manner of seed, he deposits, as they will have it, in the generative places of the womb of his own Sige. She at once receives it, is made pregnant, and gives birth (assuredly in silence)—Sige.

And whom does she bring forth? Nus ('Mind'), most like the Father and equal to him in all things. In fact he alone suffices to grasp that immeasurable and incomprehensible greatness of the Father. So he too is called both Father and Beginning of all things and, properly, Monogenes ('Only-begotten'); and yet not properly, since he is not acknowledged as the only one. For along with him there proceeded a female whose name is Aletheia ('Truth'). He is Monogenes because he was begotten first—by how much more fittingly might he be called Protogenes ('First-begotten')! Therefore Bythos and Sige, Nus and Aletheia, are set forth as the first team of four of the Valentinian faction, the womb and origin of all. For at that same place Nus at once received the office of his own emission, and himself sends forth out of himself Logos ('Word') and Zoe ('Life')—which, if it was not there before, was surely not in Bythos either; and what a thing it is that there should not have been Life in God!

But this offspring too, sent forth toward the beginning of the whole and the shaping of the entire Pleroma, bears fruit: it begets Anthropos ('Man') and Ecclesia ('Church'). You have an Ogdoad, a double Tetrad, from the pairings of males and females—the cells, so to speak, of the primordial Aeons, the fraternal wedlocks of the Valentinians' gods, the census of all sanctity and heretical majesty, a throng—I know not whether of crimes or of divinities—but certainly the fountain of the remaining fecundity. For behold, the second Tetrad, Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ecclesia, since it had sprouted for the glory of the Father, being eager for this number and themselves too to offer something of their own to the Father, bubble forth other offspring—likewise conjugal, through the coupling of each nature:

on this side Logos and Zoe together pour forth a decad of Aeons; on that side Anthropos and Ecclesia, going two better and matching their parents, since they themselves being two together with those make ten—as many as they themselves have begotten. I now render the names of those I called the decad: Bythios and Mixis, Ageratos and Henosis, Autophyes and Hedone, Acinetos and Syncrasis, Monogenes and Macaria. On the other hand these will be the group of twelve: Paracletos and Pistis, Patricos and Elpis, Metricos and Agape, Aeinous and Synesis, Ecclesiasticos and Macariotes, Theletos and Sophia. Here I am compelled to bring forth from a parallel example what these names call for: in the schools of Carthage there was a certain most frigid Latin rhetorician, Phosphorus by name.

When he was declaiming about a brave man, he said: 'I come to you, most excellent citizens, from the battle with my Victory, with your Felicity—Enlarged, Glorious, Fortunate, Greatest, Triumphant.' And at once the schoolboys of Phosphorus's household cry out 'pheu!' You have heard of Fortunata and Hedone and Acinetos and Theletos; cry out 'pheu!' for the household of Ptolemy. This will be that secret Pleroma, the fullness of a thirty-fold divinity. Let us see what are the privileges of these numbers—of the four, the eight, and the twelve. Meanwhile, at the number thirty all fecundity fails; the generative force and power and lust of the Aeons is castrated—as though there did not still remain such great cohesions of numbers, and no other names left over from the schoolroom.

For why are not fifty and a hundred also begotten? Why are not Sterceiae and Syntrophi also named? But this too is a respecting of persons, that this Nus alone of all enjoys the knowledge of the immeasurable Father, rejoicing and exulting, while the rest of course grieve. Clearly Nus, both as far as in him lay and as he had wished and attempted, would have communicated to the others also what he knew—how great and how incomprehensible the Father is. But the mother Sige intervened—she, forsooth, who prescribes silence even to her own heretics—although they say it was done by the nod of the Father, who willed all to be kindled into desire of himself. And so, while they are wasted away within themselves, while they burn with a silent longing to know the Father, a crime was almost committed.

For out of those twelve Aeons whom Anthropos and Ecclesia had produced, the Aeon youngest in birth—let the solecism be overlooked, for the name is Sophia ('Wisdom')—by an incontinence of her own, without the society of her consort Theletos, breaks out into inquiring after the Father, and contracts the germ of a fault which had indeed begun in those others around Nus, but had derived into this one, that is, into Sophia—just as faults, elsewhere born in the body, are wont to breathe out their own destruction into another member. Nay indeed, under the pretext of love for the Father, an emulation was getting the upper hand of Nus, who alone rejoiced in the Father. But as Sophia, striving after impossibilities, was frustrated and is overcome by the difficulty and stretched out with longing;

she came within a little, through the force of sweetness and labour, of being devoured and dissolved into the remaining substance. Nor would she have ceased otherwise than by perishing, had she not by good fortune run into Horos ('Boundary')—for to him too there belongs a certain force: he is the foundation, the external guardian of that whole universe—whom they also call Cross (Stauros) and Redeemer (Lytrotes) and Reaper (Carpistes). Thus Sophia, snatched from peril and slowly persuaded away from her rash investigation of the Father, grew quiet and laid aside her whole Enthymesis ('Intention,' the passionate impulse) together with the passion which had accrued besides. But some have dreamt otherwise of Sophia's outcome and restoration: that after her vain attempts and the casting down of her hope she was disfigured (by pallor, I suppose, and leanness and neglect).

For she of course grieved that the Father was no less denied her than lost. Then, in that grief, out of herself alone, by no work of any wedlock, she conceived and brings forth a female. Do you marvel at this? Even the hen has been allotted to bring forth of her own, and they say too that vultures are all females. And yet, being a mother without a male, and fearing at last that an end also might press upon her, being at a loss to reason out her mischance, being anxious about its concealment—remedies there were nowhere: for where now were the tragedies and comedies from which to borrow a form for setting forth what had been born short of decency? While the matter is in evil case, she takes it up, turns to the Father, but having striven in vain and her strength failing her, she has recourse to prayers. For the whole kindred entreat on her behalf, and above all Nus. (What wonder?)

(In the cause of so great an evil?) Yet no outcome of Sophia's went idle: all her troubles are at work, since that struggle of hers then reached to the origin of matter. Ignorance, dread, and grief become substances. There at last the Father, moved at some point, puts forth—through Monogenes Nus—that Horos of whom we spoke above, in his own image, female-male, since they also thus vary concerning the Father's sex. Moreover they add that Horos is also called Metagoge ('Leader-round,' the Circler) and Horothetes ('Boundary-setter').

By his working, they preach, Sophia was both restrained from unlawful pursuits and purged of her evils, and thereupon confirmed and restored to her wedlock; and she herself indeed remained in the census of the Pleroma, but her Enthymesis together with that appendage, the passion, was banished by Horos, crucified, and made to be outside of him—the evil, as they say, put outside the door. Yet they declare that spiritual substance to be a kind of natural impulse of the Aeon, but formless and shapeless, inasmuch as it had apprehended nothing, and therefore a feeble fruit and pronounced a female.

Therefore, after Enthymesis had been exiled and her mother Sophia brought back to her consort, that Monogenes, that Nus, being now quite at leisure from care and foresight for the Father, in order to consolidate things and to fortify the Pleroma and now to make it fast, lest any such shock should strike it again, produces a new coupling, Christ and the Holy Spirit—I should reckon it most base, of two males—or else the Holy Spirit will be a female, and the male is wounded by a female. For one office is given to these: to procure the harmonious arrangement of the Aeons; and from the partnership of this office there arise straightway two schools, two chairs, a kind of inauguration of the dividing of the teaching of Valentinus.

It belonged to Christ to introduce to the Aeons the nature of their wedlocks—you see what a fine thing!—and the notion of the Unbegotten, and to make them fit to beget in themselves the knowledge of the Father: namely, that it is not possible to grasp or comprehend him, and finally that one cannot come into possession of him by sight or by hearing except through Monogenes. And yet I will put up with their learning to know the Father in such a way—lest we too learn even that! I shall rather brand the perversity of the doctrine, that they were being taught that the incomprehensible in the Father was the cause of their own perpetuity, but the comprehensible in him was the ground of their begetting and formation. For by this arrangement it is insinuated, I think, that it is expedient that God not be apprehended, since his being unapprehensible is the cause of perpetuity.

But the apprehensible is the cause not of perpetuity but of nativity and formation, of those who lack perpetuity. Now they constitute the Son as the apprehensible aspect of the Father; how nevertheless he is to be apprehended, Christ, when brought forth, taught. But it was proper to the Holy Spirit that, all being made equal in zeal for the teaching, they might know how to render thanksgiving and might be led into true rest. And so all are made equal both in form and in knowledge, all being made what each one is; no one is anything different, because to another all are alike. All are melted back into Nus, into the Anthropoi, into the Theleti, the females likewise into the Sigas, into the Zoas, into the Ecclesiae, into the Fortunatae—so that Ovid would have destroyed his Metamorphoses had he known today of a greater one.

Thereupon they are refreshed and made firm and composed into rest out of the truth, and with great fruit of joy they sing hymns to the Father in concert. He too was diffused with gladness, and rightly so at his sons and grandsons singing so well. Why should he not be diffused with all pleasantness, the Pleroma being set free? What shipmaster does not rejoice, even with a loss of dignity? We see daily the wantonness of sailors' joys. And so, as sailors ever exult at the whip-round, some such thing the Aeons too do; now all are one even in form, not to say in mind, and, the new brothers and masters Christ and the Holy Spirit also coming together with them, whatever best and most beautiful thing each one flourished with, they contribute into the common stock. In vain, I think;

for if, by the aforesaid equalization, all were one, the notion of a whip-round had no place—which usually consists in the charm of variety. All were contributing the one good which they all were; concerning the manner, perhaps, there may have been some reckoning, or concerning the form of that very equalization. Therefore out of the collected 'bronze,' as they say, in honour and glory of the Father, they compound the most beautiful star of the Pleroma and its perfect fruit, Jesus. Him they surname Soter ('Saviour') and Christ and Logos after his fathers, and now 'All Things,' as being constructed out of the plucked flowers of all: Aesop's Jackdaw, Hesiod's Pandora, the Dish of Accius, the Hotchpot of Nestor, the Miscellany of Ptolemy. How much more fitly might he be named, after certain Oscan buffoons, 'Snatch-all-from-every-pot' by such idle inventors of names.

But that they might adorn so great a figurine on the outside as well, they bring forth for him angels as satellites, of like kind; if of the same kind as one another, it can be so; but if of the same substance as Soter—for I have found the wording ambiguous—what then will be his eminence among satellites that are his equals? This order, then, contains the first profession alike of the Aeons that were born and married and begotten: Sophia's most perilous fall out of desire of the Father; Horos's most timely help; the expiation of Enthymesis and the conjoined Passion; the tutorship of Christ and the Holy Spirit; the guardian reformation of the Aeons; the peacock-splendour of Soter; the levied attendance of the Angels. What remains, you say? Farewell, and give your applause.

Nay rather, what remains, say I, is: get you instruction, and throw it away. For the rest, these things are said to have run their course within the assembly of the Pleroma, as the first scene of the tragedy; but the other, beyond the curtain, is the tragic strutting—outside the Pleroma, I mean. And yet this exit is still under the bosom of the Father, within the circuit of Horos the guardian; what would it be like outside, in that liberty where God is not? For Enthymesis, or now Achamoth—which name from here on I have written down as the one untranslatable one—when she was flung out, with the vice of her indivisible passion, into places alien to the light, which is a matter of the Pleroma, into that vacuum and void of Epicurus, is wretched even as regards place. Certainly she has no form nor any face, being of course a defective and abortive birth.

While things stand thus, Christ is inclined from the upper regions, and is led down through Horos to the abortion, that he might form it, by his own powers, with a form of substance only, not also of knowledge. And yet it is left with some little property: this was the odour of incorruptibility, whereby, possessed of it, it might sustain itself for its mischance in the longing after better things. Having discharged this office of mercy, not without the society of the Holy Spirit, Christ runs back into the Pleroma. It came to pass that names too accrued from the various bounties: it was Enthymesis from the act, Achamoth—whence it is still inquired—, it emanates as Sophia from the mother, and as Holy Spirit from the angel. She receives from Christ, by whom she had at once felt herself abandoned, a longing. And so she herself too sprang forth to seek his light.

But if she had not known him at all, since he had worked invisibly, how did she seek his light as unknown, along with himself? Nevertheless she made the attempt, and perhaps would have apprehended it, had not that same Horos who had come so timely to her mother now met the daughter so inopportunely, that he even cried out over her 'Iao!'—as it were 'Forward, citizens!' or 'the faith of Caesar!' Hence 'Iao' is found in the Scriptures. Thus, driven back from going further and unable to fly over the Cross, that is, Horos—because she had not been trained as any Laureolus of Catullus—she began, as one abandoned, as one entangled in that manifold and perplexed passion of hers, to be afflicted with every kind of it: with grief, that she had not accomplished her undertaking; with fear, lest as of the light so also of life she should be bereft; then with ignorance.

But not as her mother, for the latter was an Aeon, whereas this one, according to her condition, is worse, with yet another wave rising up—that of her conversion, namely, toward Christ, by whom she had been given life, and toward this very conversion she was tempered. Come now, let the Pythagoreans learn, let the Stoics recognize, let Plato himself learn, whence he derived the matter which they will have to be unbegotten, and its origin and substance for all this fabric of the world—which not even that Mercury Trismegistus, master of all natural philosophers, thought out. You have heard of conversion, another kind of passion. From this every soul of this world is said to have come into being, even that of the Demiurge himself, that is, of our God. You have heard of grief and fear; from these the rest were begun; for from her tears the whole nature of the waters flowed.

From this one may reckon what an issue she gave forth, with how many kinds of tears she flooded. She had salt tears too, and bitter and sweet and hot and cold drops, and bituminous and rusty and sulphurous, and of course poisonous ones too—so that from thence sweated the Nonacris which killed Alexander, and from thence flowed off the water of the Lyncestae which makes men drunk, and from thence dissolved the Salmacis which makes males effeminate. Achamoth peeped out heavenly showers, and we too take care to store up in our cisterns even others' woes and tears. Likewise from her consternation and dread the corporeal elements were drawn. And yet, amid so great a state of solitude, amid so great a spectacle of destitution, she sometimes laughed, whenever, recalling the Christ she had beheld, she remembered him.