[79] οὐκ ἀλόγως ὑπομνησθήσομαι.
[80] τὰ κορυφαιότατα τῶν αὐτοῖς ἀρεσκομένων.
[81] The Codex has Σολομῶν—evidently a copyist’s mistake. Cf. Plato, Timæus, § 7.
[82] Not necessarily the Supreme Being. Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, I, 8, says, “God is one, and beyond the One, and above the Monad itself.”
[83] A fairly common form of Zoroaster. The quotation is probably from the “Chaldean Oracles” so-called.
[84] Diogenes Laertius, Book VIII, c. 19 quotes from Alexander’s Successions of Philosophers that Pythagoras in his Commentaries put first the monad, then the undefined dyad, and said that from these two numbers proceeded, from numbers signs, from signs lines, from lines plane figures, from planes solids, and from solids perceptible bodies consisting of the four elements, fire, water, earth and air.
[85] Miller would substitute νομιστέον for προστιθέμενον.
[86] These verses are said by Cruice to be in Sextus Empiricus, but I have not been able to find them in any known writings of that author.
[87] νοητά, as opposed to αἰσθητά.
[88] Cf. Matt. v. 18.
[89] These “accidents” are enumerated by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, Book IV, and more briefly in his Organon. He does not there acknowledge any indebtedness to Pythagoras.
[90] συνέχει.
[91] φιλία, not ἀγάπη. Macmahon translates “friendship.”
[92] i. e. the “Fashioner” = one who makes things out of previously existing material, but does not create them ex nihilo.
[93] διανομή, a word peculiar apparently to the Pythagoreans. Jowett translates it “regulation.”
[94] ἀπορῥαγάδας, a word unknown in classical Greek, which should by its etymology mean “chinks” or “rents.” I have taken it as a mistake for ἀπορῥήματα, which is found in Plutarch.
[95] Not Pythagoras, but Plutarch, de Exilio, § 11. He attributes it to Heraclitus.
[96] The reference seems to be to the Phaedrus, t. 1, p. 89 (Bekker).
[97] Or “practise philosophy”: but Hippolytus always uses the word with a contemptuous meaning.
[98] τὰς ἀρχάς. Evidently a mistake for τοὺς ἄρχοντας.
[99] Hippolytus in the interpretation of these sayings seems to have followed Diogenes Laertius.
[100] Ἀριθμητής.
[101] So Shu the Egyptian God of Air was figured between Earth (Seb) and Heaven (Nut).
[102] Roeper would read τὸν μέγαν ἐνιαυτὸν ἀπεργάζεται κόσμου, “completes the Great Year of the world.”
[103] Ἄθηλυς, “without female.”
[104] Σιγή, “Silence.” Cf. the Orphic cosmogony which makes Night the Mother of Heaven and Earth by Phanes the First-born, who contains within himself the seeds of all creatures (Forerunners, I, 123).
[105] The attribution of this monistic doctrine to Valentinus is found for the first time here. Irenæus and Tertullian both make him say that Sige is the spouse of the Supreme Being.
[106] οὐσία. Here as elsewhere in this chapter, save where an obvious pun is intended, to be translated as in text, and not “substance,” which is generally the equivalent of ὑπόστασις.
[107] φιλέρημος γὰρ οὐκ ἦν.
[108] Νοῦν καὶ ἀλήθειαν. Here as elsewhere with the names of Aeons, the English equivalent of the Greek name is first given, and, in later repetitions, the Greek name transliterated into English.
[109] Λόγον καὶ Ζωήν.
[110] Ἄνθρωπον καὶ Ἐκκλησίαν.
[111] τέλειος used in its double sense of “perfect” and “complete.”
[112] ὁ Λογος μετὰ τῆς Ζωῆς. The curious conception by which the two partners in a syzygy are regarded as only one being is very marked throughout this passage.
[113] ἀγεννησία; “unbegottenness” would be a closer translation, but is uncouth in this connection. Cf. I, p. 147 supra.
[114] Βυθὸς καὶ Μίξις, Ἀγήρατος καὶ Ἕνωσις, Αὐτοφυὴς καὶ Ἡδονή, Ἀκίνητος καὶ Σύγκρασις, Μονογενὴς καὶ Μακαρία. For the first name Irenæus (I, i. 1, p. 11, Harvey), has Bythios, thereby making the substantive into an adjective. So Epiphanius, Haer. XXXI (p. 328, Oehler). This is doubtless correct.
[115] Παράκλητος καὶ Πίστις, Πατρικὸς καὶ Ἐλπίς, Μητρικὸς καὶ Ἀγάπη, Ἀείνους καὶ Σύνεσις, Ἐκκλησιαστικὸς καὶ Μακαριστός, Θελητὸς καὶ Σοφία. The Codex is here very corrupt, and for Ἀείνους we may, if we please, read Αἰώνιος, “Everlasting,” and for Μακαριστός, Μακαριότης, “Blessedness.” As the name of the male partner in each syzygy is an adjective and that of the female a substantive it is probable that the two are intended to be read together, as e. g. “Profound Admixture,” and the like.
[116] Sophia, who plays a great part in the Jewish Apocrypha, is almost certainly a figure of the prototypal earth like Spenta Armaiti, her analogue in Mazdeism. Cf. the quotation from Genesis which follows immediately.
[117] οὐσία. Here “substance” and “essence” would have the same meaning, and the first-named word is used only to avoid ambiguity.
[118] Gen. i. 2.
[119] Exod. xxxiii. 3.
[120] Ἔκτρωμα.
[121] Ἐπιπροβληθεὶς οὖν ὁ Χριστὸς καὶ τὸ Ἅγιον Πνεῦμα. Christ and the Holy Spirit are therefore treated as a syzygy and, as it were, a single person.
[122] μονογενές.
[123] τὸ ὑστέρημα: “the Void,” the converse and opposite of the Pleroma or “Fulness.”
[125] So that the first work of the Mission of Jesus was the freeing of the whole universe—not only our earth—from the evil which had entered into it.
[126] ὑποστάτους οὐσίας; “underlying beings.” Here we have the two ideas of hypostasis, or “substance” in its etymological meaning, and “essence,” or “being,” side by side.
[127] ψυχικὴν οὐσίαν, i. e. the stuff of which the soul is made.
[128] Ps. cxi. 10; Prov. i. 7; ii. 10.
[129] That is Jehovah, the God of the Jews. Hebdomad as including the seven “planets.”
[130] Deut. ix. 3.
[131] The “below,” Ὑποκάτω, and “above,” ὑπεράνω, seem to have become inverted; but as I am not sure whether this is the scribe’s mistake or not, I have left the text as it is. If we consider (as we must) that the heaven of Sophia is the highest and those of the seven worlds below it like steps of a ladder, we have the conception of Sophia, her son Jaldabaoth, and his six sons, current among the Ophites as shown in Book V above. The figure of Sophia as a “day” is at once an instance of the curious habit among the Gnostics of confusing time and space, and an allusion to the O.T. name of “Ancient of Days.”
[132] I have sought to show elsewhere (P.S.B.A., 1901, pp. 48, 49) in opposition to the current explanations that this name, properly written Beelzebuth, is at once a sort of parody of Jabezebuth or “Jehovah (Lord) of Hosts,” and the name given to the “ruler of demons” by the parallelism which, as in Zoroastrianism, makes each good spirit have its evil counterpart of similar name.
[133] προβεβήκασιν. So in Homer (Iliad, VI, 125). Cruice translates “provenerunt,” Macmahon reading apparently προβεβλήκασιν, “there has been projected.”
[134] Gen. ii. 7.
[135] 1 Cor. ii. 14. In the preceding passage taken apparently from Eph. iii. 14 either the Gnostic author or Hippolytus has taken some strange liberties with the received Text, which see.
[136] It is plain, therefore, that the Valentinians rejected these parts of the O.T.
[137] John x. 8.
[138] The τὸ μυστήριον τὸ ἀποκεκρυμμένον ἀπὸ τῶν αἰώνων καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν γενεῶν of Coloss. 1. 26 seems to be what is aimed at.
[139] ἅτε δὴ ἀπὸ τοῦ Δημιουργοῦ λελαλημένα; “inasmuch as they certainly had been uttered by the Demiurge alone,” Macmahon.
[140] τέλος ἔλαβεν, “received the finishing touch.”
[141] διὰ Μαρίας τῆς Παρθένου. A manifest allusion to the well-known Gnostic doctrine that Jesus took nothing from His Mother but came into being through her ὡς διὰ σωλῆνος, “as through a pipe or conduit.”
[142] Luke i. 35. Ὕψιστος, “the Highest,” was according to M. Camont (Suppl. Rev. instr. publ. en Belgique, 1897) the name by which the God of Israel was known throughout Asia Minor in pre-Christian times.
[143] καὶ τοῦ Ὑψίστου. These words are not in the Codex.
[144] τὴν δὲ οὐσίαν ... παράσχῃ. Again “essence” would etymologically be the better word, but “substance” is used as more familiar to the English reader.
[145] διδασκαλία. It is significant of the position held by Valentinus’ teaching in the Christian community that the Valentinians are often spoken of by the Fathers as a school of thought rather than a schismatic Church like that founded by Marcion.
[146] γέγωνε τῷ ψυχικῷ. So in Manichæism, the Living Spirit goes towards the Land of Darkness, where the First Man is entombed after his defeat by Satan, and “cries in a loud voice, and this voice was like a sharp sword and discovered the form of the First Man,” who is thereupon drawn up out of the Darkness and raised to the upper spheres where dwells the Mother of Life. Cf. Forerunners, II, pp. 294, 300, n. 1, and 302, n. 1, and Theodore bar Khôni and other authors there quoted.
[147] Rom. viii. 11; the words in brackets are not in the received text.
[148] Gen. iii. 19.
[149] So Cruice. Miller’s text has Ἀρδησιάνης.
[150] ἡ δημιουργικὴ τέχνη, “the process of fashioning.”
[151] διώρθωτο. So that Valentinus was the first to advance the theory which we find later among the Manichæans that this earth of ours, instead of being the centre of the universe, was in fact the lowest and most insignificant of all the worlds, and that salvation only came to it after the greater universe had been reformed—an extraordinary conception on the part of one who must have held, like his contemporaries, geocentric views in astronomy.
[152] Ex. vi. 2, 3.
[153] κατὰ τὴν αὐτὴν ἀκολουθίαν. Here as elsewhere in the text, ἀκολουθία has the meaning of imitation.
[154] ἰσόζυγος.
[155] ἐπανόρθωσιν, “re-rectification”!
[156] What follows is from Plato’s Second Epistle, which is thought to have been written after Plato’s return from his third voyage to Syracuse, and is perhaps rather less suspect than the other Platonic epistles. Yet the chances of interpolation are so great that no stress can be laid on the genuineness of any particular passage.
[157] This passage alone is sufficient to make one doubtful as to the Platonic authorship. If Plato really wanted to keep his doctrine secret, the last thing he would have done would be to call the attention of the chance reader to the fact.
[158] Burges translates: “But about a second are the secondary things and about a third the third.”
[159] Nearly two pages are here omitted from the Epistle.
[160] Possibly an allusion to the Platonic theory that all learning is remembrance.
[161] Τὰ δὲ νῦν λεγόμενα Σωκράτους. “Said of him” or “said by him”? The passage is quoted by the Emperor Julian and by Aristides.
[162] So that Hippolytus’ attempt to show that Valentinus plagiarized from Plato resolves itself into an imaginative interpretation of a purposely obscure passage in an epistle which is only doubtfully assigned to Plato. That Valentinus like every one educated in the Greek learning was influenced by Plato is likely enough, but that there was any conscious borrowing of tenets is against probability.
[163] προαρχή τῶν ὅλων Αἰώνων.
[164] That Valentinus is said to have written psalms, see Tertullian, de Carne Christi, I, c. xvii, xx, t. ii, pp. 453, 457 (Oehl.).
[165] Of the sources from which the author of the Philosophumena drew this account of Valentinus’ doctrine, much has been written. Hilgenfeld in his Ketzergeschichte des Urchristenthums, and Lipsius in the article “Valentinus” in Smith & Wace’s D.C.B., agree that its main source is the writings of Heracleon. Cruice, Études sur les Philosophumena, on the other hand, thinks it largely composed of extracts from a work of Valentinus himself, entitled Sophia. Salmon (Hermathena, 1885, p. 391), while not committing himself to a definite pronouncement as to the writer quoted, says that Hippolytus undoubtedly quoted from a genuine Valentinian treatise, and that this last is above the suspicion of forgery with which he is inclined to view other quotations in the Philosophumena.
[166] The notice of the followers, real or supposed, of Valentinus which occupies the remainder of Book VI adds little to our previous knowledge of their doctrines, being taken almost verbatim from the work of Hippolytus’ teacher, St. Irenæus. It is noteworthy, however, that although the Table of Contents promises us an account of (among others) Heracleon, nothing is here said of him, although that shrewd critic of the Gospels was thought worthy of refutation by Origen some fifty years later. Yet Hippolytus mentions Heracleon as being with Ptolemy a leader of the Italic School of Valentinians which seems to dispose of the theory advanced by Lipsius (Smith & Wace’s D.C.B., s. v. “Valentinus”) that Heracleon was the author from whom Hippolytus took his account of Valentinus’ own doctrine. Of Secundus nothing more is known than is set down in the text, while the “Epiphanes” here mentioned is thought by some to be not a name, but an adjective, so that the passage would read “a certain illustrious teacher of theirs.” This was certainly the reading of Irenæus’ Latin translator, who renders the word by “clarus.” Is this a roundabout way of describing Heracleon? As to this see Salmon in D.C.B., s. v. “Heracleon.”
[167] ἀποστᾶσαν καὶ ὑστερήσασαν. Evidently Sophia is meant.
[168] ἀρχή.
[169] Μονότης.
[170] Ἑνότης.
[171] προήκαντο μὴ προέμεναι, protulerunt non proferendo ex se, Cr. So Irenæus, I, xi. 3, p. 104, H. In his note Harvey says that the passage implies that Henotes and Monotes “put forth as the original cause the Beginning, but so as that the Beginning was eternally inseparable from their unity.”
[172] Irenæus makes ὁ λόγος, “the Word,” the speaker. So Tertullian, adv. Val., “quod sermo vocat.” But it seems more natural to refer the speech to Epiphanes or “the Illustrious Teacher.”
[173] Προαρχή, Ἀνεννόητος, Ἄρῥητος and Ἀόρατος. The three first names, however, are not in the text but are restored from Irenæus, I, v. 2, p. 105, H.
[174] These four new names are: Ἀρχή, Ἀκατάληπτος, Ἀνωνόμαστος and Ἀγέννητος.
[175] Of Ptolemy we know a little more than we do of Secundus, a letter by him to his “fair sister Flora” being given by Epiphanius (Haer. XXXIII.) which shows a system not inconsistent with that described in the text. Unlike Valentinus himself he gives the Father a spouse, or rather two.
[176] διαθέσεις, perhaps “states.” Cr. and Macmahon translate “dispositions.”
[177] Hippolytus here suddenly changes from Thelesis to Thelema. But there is no discoverable difference in the meaning of the two words.
[178] Words in [ ] from Irenæus.
[179] This Marcus is practically only known to us from the statements of Irenæus, from which the accounts in the text and in the later work of Epiphanius are copied. Salmon’s argument (D.C.B., s. v. “Marcus”) that Marcus taught in Asia Minor or Syria, and that Irenæus himself only knew his doctrines from his writings and the confessions of his Gaulish followers on their conversion to Catholicism seems irrefutable. There is no reason to doubt Irenæus’ statement here repeated that Marcus was a magician, nor the generally accepted statement of modern writers on Gnosticism that he was a Jew. This last deduction is supported by his use of Hebrew formulas, of which Irenæus gives many examples, including one beginning “βασημαχαμοσση” which appears to be “In the name of Achamoth,” the Hebrew or Aramaic equivalent of the Greek Sophia. A more cogent argument is that his identification of the Gnostic Aeons with the letters of the Greek alphabet and their numerical values is, mutatis mutandis, exactly correspondent to that of the so-called “practical Cabala” of the Jews which was re-introduced into Europe in the tenth to twelfth centuries, but which probably goes back to pre-Christian times and is ultimately derived from the decayed relics of the Chaldæan and Egyptian religions. On the other hand, Irenæus’ classing of Marcus among the “successors” or followers of Valentinus is much more open to question. The reverence he shows for the books of the Old Testament and for the Pentateuchal account of the Creation, which is indeed the foundation of the greater part of the system of the Cabala, is inconsistent with the views of Valentinus, who as we have seen (n. on p. 33 supra) must logically have rejected the inspiration of the Old Testament altogether. St. Jerome (Ep. 75, ad Theod., I, 449), says indeed that Marcus was a Basilidian, and although we have too little of Basilides’ own writings to check this statement, it is not impossible that the nomenclature of the Aeons, which is the chief point in which Valentinus and Marcus coincide, was common to all three heretics, and perhaps drawn from a source earlier than them all. The language of the formulas given by Irenæus but not reproduced by Hippolytus, in several instances bear a strong likeness to that of the Great Announcement attributed in the earlier part of this Book to Simon Magus.
[180] εὺχαριστῶν.
[181] αἱματώδη δύναμιν, “the potentiality of blood”?
[182] ἐλεγχόμενος. The word shows that by “refutation” the author generally means “exposure.”
[183] He has not done so, unless in some part which has been lost.
[184] ἐδίδου.
[185] Γνῶσις.
[186] ὑγραῖς οὐσίαις. Here οὐσία is used in the English sense of “substance.” No such substances are mentioned in Book IV as it has come down to us.
[187] The wine used in the Marcosian Eucharist was evidently mixtum, not merum. Some effervescent powder is indicated.
[188] ἐξαφανίσας; Cr. translates seduxit.
[189] εὐκόλους ... πρὸς τὸ ἁμαρτάνειν. Cf. the doctrine of certain Antinomian sects that “God sees no sin in His elect.”
[190] Ἀπολύτρωσις, perhaps “Ransom.”
[191] πανούργημα.
[192] In one of the documents of the Pistis Sophia, (p. 238, Copt) a “mystery” to be spoken “into the two ears” of an initiate about to die is described. The idea was evidently to provide him with a password which would enable him to escape the “punishments” of the intermediate state, and is to be traced to Egyptian beliefs.
[193] ἐπ’ ἐσχάτων, perhaps “to the utmost.”
[194] ἀφορμαί. In the Philosophumena, the word nearly always bears this construction.
[195] οἱ ἐντυχόντες.
[196] ἀεὶ ἀρνεῖσθαι. Cf. the “Geist der stets verneint” of Goethe.
[197] συγκεχωρήσθω.
[198] “His attempted heresy.”
[199] Like the rest of this section and most of this chapter, Hippolytus here follows Irenæus verbatim. Why the apparition of the Tetrad should be more supportable in female than in male shape can only be guessed; but the frequent personification of the Great Goddess of Western Asia may have had something to do with it.
[200] οὗ πατὴρ οὐδεὶς ἦν, “whose father was no one”—a curious expression in place of the more concise ἀπάτωρ.
[201] καὶ ἦν ἡ συλλαβὴ αὐτοῦ στοιχείων τεσσάρων, “and taken together it was of four letters.” He is punning here on the double sense of στοιχεῖον as meaning both “letter” and “element.” In the Magic Papyrus of Leyden which calls itself “Monas, the 8th (book?) of Moses,” there is a curious account of how the light and the rest of creation were brought into being by the successive words or rather the laughter of the Creator. Cf. Leemans, Papyri Græci, etc., Leyden, 1885, II, pp. 83 ff.
[202] γράμματα.
[203] χαρακτῆρα, “impress,” or character as we might say Greek characters or script. The different meanings of στοιχεῖα, γράμματα, and χαρακτήρ are here well marked.
[204] So Irenæus.
[205] τὴν ἀποκατάστασιν. This Return to the Deity was, as has been shown above, the great preoccupation of all these Gnostic sects. They may have borrowed it from the Stoic philosophy. Cf. Arnold, Roman Stoicism, p. 193.
[206] The primitive Church attributed great power to the ritual utterance of the word Amen. Thus Ignatius’ second Epistle to the Ephesians: “There was hidden from the ruler of this world the virginity of Mary, and the birth of our Lord, and the three mysteries of the shout ... and hereby ... magic began to be dissolved and all bonds to be loosed and the ancient kingdom and the error of evil, is destroyed” (Cureton’s translation, London, 1845, p. 15); but Lightfoot would read κήροξις, “proclamation,” for κραυγή, “shout.” In the Pistis Sophia the word Amen is used to denote a class of Powers concerned apparently with the organization of the Kerasmos or semi-material world and called sometimes “the Three” and sometimes “the Seven Amens.”
[207] τοὺς [φθόγγους]. The word in brackets is not in the Codex, but is supplied from the corresponding passage in Irenæus.
[208] πρόσωπον, a word which, as Hatch noted, is used for the character or part played by an actor in a drama. Matt. xviii. 10 is here evidently alluded to.
[209] Cf. the Stoic theory of λόγοι σπερματικοί or “seed-Powers,” for which, see Arnold, op. cit., p. 161.