Excerpts from Theodotus

Excerpts from Theodotus

Introduction

Excerpts from Theodotus

Introduction

There are texts that survive not because they were celebrated, not because they were copied into grand libraries or preserved in gilded manuscripts, but because someone, somewhere, found them too important to let disappear entirely. The fragments attributed to Theodotus belong to this category — rescued at the margins of a larger work, embedded within the writings of Clement of Alexandria, and passed down to us in a form that is partial, fragmentary, and yet somehow electric with meaning. To read these excerpts today is to press your ear against a wall and hear, faintly but unmistakably, the sound of an entire civilization of spiritual thought that was nearly lost to history.

The world that produced these fragments was one of extraordinary intellectual ferment. The first and second centuries of the Common Era were not merely a time of political upheaval, though the Roman Empire certainly provided that in abundance. They were a period during which the deepest questions of human existence — Who are we? Where did we come from? Why do we suffer? What happens when we die? — were being asked with unprecedented urgency and sophistication. Into this crucible of inquiry came a movement we now call Gnosticism, and within that movement, the school of Valentinus produced some of the most intricate, daring, and philosophically rich theological speculation the ancient world ever generated.

Theodotus himself is a figure we know almost nothing about in biographical terms. He was a Valentinian teacher, probably active in the eastern Mediterranean during the second century CE, and his teachings were recorded — or perhaps paraphrased, excerpted, or partially refuted — by Clement of Alexandria, the great Christian intellectual who lived roughly between 150 and 215 CE. Clement's relationship with the material he preserves is complex and fascinating: he is simultaneously drawn to it and critical of it, engaged with its philosophical sophistication and yet determined to mark its boundaries as heterodox. The result is a document of layered voices, a palimpsest in which Valentinian cosmology and Clementine theology coexist in productive tension, sometimes harmonizing and sometimes clashing in ways that illuminate both traditions.

What Clement preserved — whether intentionally or as a byproduct of his extensive engagement with the Valentinian school — amounts to a window into a theological system of remarkable depth and coherence. The fragments deal with questions that remain urgently relevant: the nature of the divine, the origins of the material world, the meaning of baptism and ritual, the fate of the soul after death, the role of spiritual knowledge in human liberation, and the cosmic drama in which every human life is embedded. These are not antiquarian curiosities. They are live questions, and the answers proposed in these fragments are startlingly sophisticated.

To understand why these excerpts matter, it is necessary to understand something about the broader Valentinian project. Valentinus himself, who taught in Rome around the middle of the second century, was by all accounts a thinker of extraordinary gifts. Even his opponents — and he had many — conceded his brilliance. He developed a theological system that attempted to reconcile the transcendence of the divine with the evident imperfection of the material world, a problem that has troubled religious thinkers in every tradition. His solution was to posit a complex hierarchy of divine emanations, a pleroma or 'fullness' of divine being, from which the material world emerged through a kind of cosmic accident or transgression. This framework allowed his followers to take seriously both the reality of suffering and the ultimate goodness of the divine — a theological achievement that deserves far more credit than it has typically received.

Theodotus, as represented in these fragments, works within this Valentinian framework but brings his own emphases and elaborations. His particular concerns seem to cluster around several themes: the nature of the spiritual seed within human beings, the mechanics of salvation and the role of the savior figure, the significance of baptism and the eucharist, the relationship between fate and freedom, and the ultimate destiny of different classes of souls. These are not arbitrary topics. They represent the pressure points of second-century Christian theology, the places where the tradition was under the greatest strain and where the need for sophisticated answers was most acute.

The question of fate, for instance, was not merely an abstract philosophical puzzle in the ancient world. It was a live existential concern, bound up with astrology, with the widespread belief that the stars governed human destiny, and with the deeply felt need to understand why some people seemed to flourish while others suffered without apparent cause. The Valentinian answer to this question — worked out in considerable detail in the fragments attributed to Theodotus — is both philosophically interesting and pastorally responsive. It takes the astrological framework seriously, acknowledges the real power of cosmic forces over human life, and then argues that the spiritual person, through knowledge and through the sacraments, can transcend these deterministic forces. This is not escapism; it is a sophisticated engagement with one of the deepest problems of human existence.

Similarly, the treatment of baptism in these fragments is far more theologically rich than the simple ritual washing that the word might suggest to a modern reader. For Theodotus and his tradition, baptism is a cosmic event, a moment at which the spiritual person is liberated from the power of fate and enrolled in a different order of being. The ritual is embedded in a vast cosmological narrative, and understanding that narrative is essential to grasping what the ritual means and why it matters. This is theology doing exactly what theology at its best should do: connecting the intimate and the cosmic, the personal and the universal, the momentary act and the eternal significance.

Reading these fragments today requires a certain kind of patience and a willingness to inhabit a very different conceptual world. The modern reader, shaped by centuries of a very different kind of Christianity and by the rationalist critique of religion that has accompanied modernity, may initially find the cosmological framework strange, even bewildering. There are aeons and emanations, syzygies and the pleroma, a demiurge and a savior, seeds of light and regions of darkness. The vocabulary is unfamiliar, and the conceptual architecture is elaborate. But this strangeness is itself instructive. It reminds us that the forms of Christianity we consider normal or natural are in fact the products of specific historical choices, and that the tradition was once far more diverse, far more philosophically adventurous, and far more willing to engage with the full complexity of human experience than later orthodoxy would permit.

The recovery of Gnostic texts, accelerated enormously by the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt in 1945, has transformed our understanding of early Christianity. We now know that what we call Gnosticism was not a single movement but a diverse family of related movements, each with its own texts, teachers, rituals, and cosmological visions. The Valentinian school was one of the most sophisticated of these movements, and the fragments preserved from Theodotus are among the most important primary sources we have for understanding it. They deserve to be read not as footnotes to the history of heresy but as major documents in the history of human thought.

This volume presents those fragments in a form designed to make them accessible to the serious reader who may not have extensive background in ancient theology or Gnostic studies. The goal is not to simplify or to domesticate the material — its strangeness is part of its value — but to provide enough context and guidance that the reader can engage with it on its own terms, can follow the arguments, feel the force of the concerns, and appreciate the elegance of the solutions proposed. What awaits the reader is not easy reading, but it is profoundly rewarding reading, the kind that changes how you see not just the ancient world but the perennial questions of human existence.

The World That Made These Texts

To fully appreciate what these fragments represent, we need to spend some time in the world that produced them — a world very different from our own in its surface features but recognizably human in its anxieties, its aspirations, and its hunger for meaning. The Mediterranean world of the second century CE was, in many respects, a world in crisis. The Pax Romana provided political stability and economic integration across an enormous geographic area, but beneath this stability ran deep currents of spiritual unease. Traditional religion — the civic cults, the Olympian gods, the rituals that had organized public life for centuries — was losing its hold on the educated classes. Philosophy had for centuries provided an alternative framework for the serious person, but philosophy itself was fragmenting into competing schools, each with its own claims to truth.

Into this environment came a remarkable proliferation of new religious movements, mystery cults, philosophical sects, and syncretic traditions that drew on elements from across the ancient world — Greek philosophy, Jewish scripture, Egyptian religion, Persian cosmology, Babylonian astrology. The early Jesus movement was one among many such movements, and it was by no means clear in the second century that it would eventually emerge as the dominant religious force in the Western world. What is clear is that in this period, the Jesus movement itself was extraordinarily diverse, with different communities holding very different beliefs about the nature of Jesus, the meaning of his death and resurrection, the relationship between the God of the Hebrew scriptures and the God proclaimed by Jesus, and the ultimate destiny of the human person.

The Valentinian school emerged within this context of diversity and competition. Valentinus, who may have come from Egypt and who certainly received a sophisticated philosophical education, arrived in Rome around 136 CE and established himself as a teacher of considerable reputation. He and his followers developed a theological system that was, in its own terms, a grand synthesis — an attempt to bring together the best insights of Platonic philosophy, the narrative resources of Jewish scripture and early Christian tradition, and the experiential claims of mystical religion into a coherent and comprehensive account of reality. The system they developed was not, as their opponents sometimes claimed, a simple dualism that rejected the material world as evil. It was something far more subtle: an account of how the material world emerged from a divine fullness through a process of error and limitation, and how that same divine fullness is at work within the material world to bring about its redemption and restoration.

The concept of the pleroma — the divine fullness — is central to this system and to the fragments we will be reading. The pleroma is the realm of divine being in its completeness, a realm populated by pairs of divine powers called aeons, each pair representing a complementary aspect of the divine nature. This is not polytheism in any simple sense; it is rather an attempt to think through the internal complexity of the divine, to take seriously the intuition that the divine is not a simple, undifferentiated unity but a rich, differentiated fullness of being. The cosmological drama that the Valentinians narrate — in which one of the aeons, Sophia or Wisdom, transgresses the order of the pleroma and thereby sets in motion the creation of the material world — is a mythological way of addressing a genuine philosophical problem: how does a perfect divine fullness give rise to an imperfect material world?

The answer proposed by the Valentinian system is that the material world is not directly created by the highest divine principle but by a secondary figure, the demiurge, who acts in ignorance of the higher divine reality. This figure, identified in many Gnostic texts with the God of the Hebrew scriptures, is not evil in himself but is limited, ignorant of the higher divine reality, and therefore responsible for a creation that reflects his limitations. Within this imperfect creation, however, there are seeds of the divine light — spiritual elements that descended from the pleroma and that are present within certain human beings, awaiting the moment of their awakening and return. The role of the savior, in this system, is precisely to awaken these seeds, to provide the knowledge — gnosis — that enables the spiritual person to recognize their true origin and destiny.

This framework has sometimes been criticized as elitist, as positing a spiritual aristocracy of those who possess the divine seed over against those who do not. The criticism has some force, but it misses something important. The Valentinian system is also a response to the deeply felt human experience of alienation — the sense that we do not belong in this world, that we are somehow strangers in a strange land, that the world as we find it does not correspond to our deepest intuitions about what reality should be. This experience is not confined to any particular social class or intellectual level; it is one of the most widespread and persistent features of human consciousness. What the Valentinian tradition offers is a sophisticated mythological framework for understanding and working through this experience, a framework that takes it seriously rather than dismissing it.

The social world of the Valentinian communities was also more complex and interesting than the stereotype of Gnostic elitism might suggest. These communities gathered for worship, celebrated sacraments, engaged in biblical interpretation, and debated theological questions with great seriousness. They produced texts — gospels, apocalypses, hymns, theological treatises — that engaged with the full range of human experience. The fragments of Theodotus give us a glimpse into this world, into the theological conversations that were happening within these communities and the questions that exercised their most serious thinkers. Reading them, we are not reading the productions of a marginal cult but of a vital and sophisticated religious tradition that was, for a time, a serious competitor for the allegiance of thoughtful people across the Mediterranean world.

The eventual suppression of Valentinianism and the broader Gnostic movement by the emerging catholic church was not simply a matter of truth defeating error. It was a complex historical process involving theological argument, social pressure, political power, and the gradual consolidation of institutional authority. The heresiologists — writers like Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian of Carthage, and Hippolytus of Rome — mounted sustained campaigns against the Valentinians and other Gnostic groups, campaigns that were often as much about establishing the authority of the emerging episcopal hierarchy as about resolving genuine theological disputes. The fact that these campaigns were ultimately successful should not lead us to conclude that the suppressed traditions were without merit. History is not always won by the best ideas.

Clement of Alexandria, who preserved the fragments we are about to read, occupies an interesting position in this landscape. He was a committed Christian intellectual who believed that the best of Greek philosophy and the revelation of Christ were ultimately compatible and mutually illuminating. He was sympathetic to the Valentinian school in some ways — he respected their philosophical sophistication and their engagement with scripture — but he was also determined to maintain the boundaries of what he considered orthodox Christianity. His preservation of the Theodotus material is thus a complex act: he is engaging seriously with a tradition he ultimately rejects, and in doing so, he preserves evidence that allows us to understand that tradition far better than we otherwise could. We owe him a debt that transcends his own intentions.

How to Read What Follows

Approaching the fragments themselves requires a particular kind of intellectual hospitality — a willingness to suspend familiar categories and inhabit, even temporarily, a very different way of thinking about the world and the self. This is not a demand for credulity or for the abandonment of critical judgment. It is rather an invitation to the kind of imaginative engagement that all serious reading of unfamiliar traditions requires. The payoff for this engagement is considerable: these fragments illuminate not just an obscure corner of ancient religious history but some of the deepest and most persistent questions of human existence.

One of the first things the reader will notice is the pervasive role of cosmological narrative in these fragments. For the Valentinian tradition, cosmology is not an optional extra, a speculative addition to the core message of salvation. It is integral to the whole enterprise. You cannot understand what salvation means, or why it is needed, or how it works, without understanding the story of the cosmos — how it came to be, what went wrong, and what the divine is doing to set things right. This narrative approach to theology is actually quite ancient and quite profound. It recognizes that human beings are story-dwelling creatures, that we understand our lives and our world through narrative, and that the deepest truths about existence are often best conveyed not through abstract propositions but through stories that engage the imagination and the emotions as well as the intellect.

The cosmological narrative embedded in these fragments is rich and complex, involving the emanation of divine powers from a primal source, the transgression of Sophia and its consequences, the creation of the material world by the demiurge, the descent of spiritual seeds into matter, and the work of the savior to awaken and redeem these seeds. Each element of this narrative is theologically motivated — that is, each element is there because it addresses a specific problem or answers a specific question. Learning to read the narrative in this way, asking at each point what problem this element is designed to solve, is one of the most productive approaches to the material.

The fragments also contain a great deal of reflection on ritual, particularly on baptism and on what happens to the soul at the moment of death and after. This ritual dimension is important and should not be skipped over in the rush to get to the more obviously philosophical material. For the Valentinian tradition, ritual is not merely symbolic in the thin modern sense of the word — a gesture that points to something more real than itself. Ritual is a genuine participation in cosmic realities, a moment at which the boundaries between the material and the spiritual are temporarily dissolved and the deeper order of things becomes accessible. Understanding this view of ritual is essential to understanding what the fragments are saying about baptism, about the eucharist, and about the various spiritual practices that the Valentinian community engaged in.

The treatment of the soul and its journey is another theme that runs throughout the fragments and that deserves careful attention. The Valentinian tradition inherited from Platonism a rich vocabulary for thinking about the soul — its nature, its relationship to the body, its pre-existence and its post-mortem destiny. But this inheritance was transformed by the specifically Christian and specifically Gnostic elements of the tradition. The soul in these fragments is not simply the immortal rational principle of Platonic philosophy; it is a spiritual entity with a history, a being that has descended from a higher realm and that carries within itself the memory, however dim, of its divine origin. The journey of the soul is thus a journey of remembrance as much as a journey of ascent — a gradual recovery of what was always already there but had been obscured by the conditions of material existence.

The question of fate and freedom, which we touched on earlier, deserves special mention as a theme that the modern reader will find particularly engaging. We live in a world that has its own version of this ancient problem. Genetics, neuroscience, social determinism, algorithmic prediction — all of these represent modern forms of the ancient intuition that human behavior and human destiny are shaped by forces beyond individual control. The Valentinian response to the ancient version of this problem — the astrological determinism that was so pervasive in the second-century Mediterranean world — is not a simple denial of determinism but a sophisticated account of how spiritual knowledge and practice can create a space of freedom within a determined world. This response is philosophically interesting in its own right, and it resonates with some of the most serious contemporary thinking about the relationship between determinism and freedom.

There is also, running through the fragments, a persistent concern with the question of different kinds of human beings and their different spiritual destinies. The Valentinian tradition famously distinguished between three types of human beings: the pneumatic or spiritual, the psychic or soul-endowed, and the hylic or material. This tripartite anthropology has often been criticized, as we noted earlier, as elitist and exclusionary. But it is worth reading it more carefully before rendering judgment. The distinction is not primarily a social or moral one — it is not saying that some people are better than others by virtue of their birth or their social position. It is rather a theological claim about the different ways in which the divine presence can be present within human beings, and about the different paths by which different kinds of people can approach the divine. Whether or not one accepts the framework, the underlying concern — with the diversity of human spiritual experience and the different forms that genuine religious life can take — is both legitimate and important.

As you move through the fragments, you will encounter passages of great beauty alongside passages of considerable difficulty. The beautiful passages — and there are many — have a quality of visionary intensity that is quite unlike anything else in ancient literature. They are attempting to describe realities that are by definition beyond ordinary human experience, and they do so with a kind of poetic boldness that is genuinely moving. The difficult passages require patience and a willingness to re-read, to sit with uncertainty, to allow meaning to emerge gradually rather than demanding immediate clarity. Both kinds of passages reward sustained attention.

The scholarly apparatus provided in this volume — the introductions, notes, and commentary — is designed to support this kind of sustained attention without replacing it. The goal is to provide enough context that the reader can engage directly with the text, not to interpose a layer of interpretation between the reader and the primary material. The fragments themselves are the thing; everything else is scaffolding. At some point, the scaffolding should be set aside and the reader should simply be in the presence of these extraordinary texts, listening to what they have to say.

What they have to say, ultimately, is something about the human condition in its most fundamental dimensions. These fragments are not primarily about the second century, though they are irreducibly products of that time and place. They are about the experience of being a conscious creature in a world that seems both wonderful and broken, both suffused with meaning and resistant to it. They are about the longing for a home that we cannot quite remember but cannot quite forget. They are about the conviction that the light within us is real, that it has a source, and that it will find its way back to that source. Whether or not one shares the specific theological framework within which these convictions are expressed, the convictions themselves are recognizably human, and the seriousness and sophistication with which they are explored in these fragments is something to be genuinely admired.

The reader who comes to these pages with an open mind and a willingness to be challenged will find, I believe, that the engagement is richly rewarding. Not because these fragments provide easy answers to the questions they raise — they do not — but because they ask the questions with such precision and such depth that the very act of following their argument sharpens our own thinking and deepens our own engagement with what it means to be human. That, in the end, is what the best religious and philosophical writing always does, and by that standard, these fragments from the Valentinian tradition stand as genuine classics of the human spirit, worthy of the serious attention this volume invites you to give them.

Excerpts from Theodotus

Those around Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace of fire, as they praise God, say: "Bless the Lord, O heavens; praise and exalt Him forever;" then, "Bless the Lord, all you angels;" then, "Bless the Lord, all you waters above the heavens." In this way the Scriptures assign the heavens and the waters to the class of pure powers, as is shown in Genesis. Fittingly, then, since the word "power" carries a variety of meanings, Daniel adds, "Let every power bless the Lord;" and further, "Bless the Lord, sun and moon;" and, "Bless the Lord, all you stars of heaven. Bless the Lord, all you who worship Him; praise and glorify the God of gods, for His mercy endures forever." This is written in Daniel, on the occasion of the three young men offering praise in the furnace.

"Blessed are You, who look upon the depths as You sit upon the cherubim," says Daniel, in agreement with Enoch, who said, "And I saw all kinds of matter." For the abyss, which is in its very nature boundless, is bounded by the power of God. These material essences, from which the separate genera and their species are produced, are called abysses; for one would not call water alone the abyss, even though matter is allegorically called water, the abyss.

"In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth" — both terrestrial and celestial things. That this is so, the Lord confirmed when He said to Hosea, "Go, take yourself a wife of fornication, and children of fornication, because the land, committing fornication, shall depart from the Lord." For He is not speaking of the element of earth itself, but of those who dwell upon it — those who have an earthly disposition.

That the Son is the beginning, or head, Hosea teaches plainly: "And it shall come to pass that in the place where it was said to them, 'You are not my people,' they shall be called the children of the living God. And the children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together in the same place, and they shall set over themselves one head, and they shall come up out of the land; for great is the day of Jezreel." For the one a person believes, that one he chooses. But one believes the Son, who is the head; and so Hosea adds: "But I will have mercy on the sons of Judah, and will save them by the Lord their God." Now the Savior who saves is the Son of God. He is therefore the head.

The Spirit says through Hosea, "I am your Instructor;" and, "Blow the trumpet upon the hills of the Lord; sound it upon the high places." And is not baptism itself — which is the sign of regeneration, an escape from matter through the teaching of the Savior — like a great rushing stream, ever surging forward and carrying us along? The Lord accordingly leads us out of disorder and illumines us by bringing us into a light that casts no shadow and is no longer material.

This river and sea of matter two prophets cut asunder and divided by the power of the Lord, the waters being bounded through both divisions. They were famous leaders, through whom the signs were believed, and they carried out the will of God, so that the righteous person might pass through matter and come out beyond it. Upon one of these commanders was also bestowed the name of our Savior.

Regeneration is by water and spirit, as was all creation: "For the Spirit of God moved upon the abyss." For this reason the Savior was baptized — not because He Himself needed it, but in order to consecrate the whole water for those who were being regenerated. Thus it is not the body alone, but the soul, that we cleanse. Baptism is accordingly a sign of the sanctifying of our invisible part, and of the straining away from the new and spiritual creation of the unclean spirits that have become mixed up with the soul.

"The water above the heaven." Since baptism is performed by water and the Spirit as a protection against a twofold fire — that which lays hold of what is visible, and that which lays hold of what is invisible — and since there is of necessity both an immaterial element of water and a material one, it is a protection against both kinds of fire. The earthly water cleanses the body; but the heavenly water, being immaterial and invisible, is an emblem of the Holy Spirit, who purifies what is invisible, as the water of the Spirit purifies the soul as the other purifies the body.

God, out of goodness, has mingled fear with kindness. For He supplies to each person what is beneficial for them, as a physician does for a sick patient, or a father for a wayward child: "For he who spares the rod hates his son." The Lord and His apostles walked in the midst of fear and hardship. When affliction comes upon a righteous person, it is either the Lord rebuking him for a sin previously committed, or guarding him against what lies ahead, or not using His power to prevent an assault from without — all for some good end to that person and to those around him, and for the sake of example.

Those who dwell in a corrupt body are like people sailing in a rotting ship: they do not lie back at ease, but are constantly praying, stretching their hands out to God.

The ancients were deeply troubled unless they always had some suffering in the body. They feared that if they did not receive in this world the punishment for the sins that, in great numbers and through ignorance, accompany those who live in the flesh, they would have to endure the full penalty all at once in the world to come. They therefore preferred to undergo curative treatment here. What is truly to be dreaded, then, is not external disease but sin, for which disease comes — and disease of the soul, not of the body: "For all flesh is grass," and bodily and outward goods are temporary; "but the things that are unseen are eternal."

As for knowledge, some of it we already possess; the rest we firmly hope to attain by means of what we do possess. For we have not attained everything, nor do we lack everything. We have received, as it were, a pledge of the eternal blessings and of the ancestral riches. The provisions for the Lord's way are the Lord's beatitudes. For He said: "Seek — and seek earnestly — the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you; for the Father knows what things you have need of." In this way He limits not only our occupations but our anxieties. For He says: "You cannot, by taking thought, add anything to your stature." God knows well what it is good for us to have and what it is good for us to lack. He wishes, therefore, that we empty ourselves of worldly cares and be filled with what is directed toward God. "For we groan, desiring to be clothed with that which is incorruptible, before putting off corruption." For when faith is shed abroad, unbelief is confounded. The same is true of knowledge and righteousness. We must therefore not only empty the soul but fill it with God. For there is no longer evil in it, since that has been made to cease; yet neither is there good, since it has not yet received good. But what is neither good nor evil is nothing. "For to the swept and empty house" — if none of the blessings of salvation has been placed within it — returns the unclean spirit that dwelt there before, bringing with him seven other unclean spirits. We must therefore, after emptying the soul of what is evil, fill with the good God that which is His chosen dwelling-place. For when the empty rooms are filled, the seal follows, so that the sanctuary may be guarded for God.

By two and three witnesses every word is established — by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, by whose witness and help the commandments we have been given ought to be kept.

Fasting, in its literal meaning, is abstinence from food. Now food makes us neither more righteous nor less righteous. But mystically it shows us this: just as life in each person is sustained by nourishment, and the absence of nourishment is a sign of death, so too we ought to fast from worldly things, that we may die to the world, and afterward, by partaking of divine sustenance, live to God. Above all, fasting empties the soul of matter and makes both soul and body pure and light, ready to receive the divine words. Worldly food, then, is the former life and its sins; but divine food is faith, hope, love, patience, knowledge, peace, and temperance. For "blessed are they who hunger and thirst after" God's "righteousness, for they shall be filled." It is the soul, not the body, that is capable of this kind of craving.

The Savior showed the believing apostles that prayer is stronger than faith in the case of a demoniac whom they could not heal, when he said that such things are accomplished by prayer. One who has believed has received forgiveness of sins from the Lord; but one who has attained knowledge, inasmuch as he no longer sins, obtains from himself the forgiveness of what remains.

Just as cures, prophecies, and signs are performed through human agents, with God working in them, so also is Gnostic teaching. For God displays his power through human beings. The prophecy rightly says, "I will send to them a man who will save them." Accordingly he sends forth prophets at one time and apostles at another, to be saviors of humanity. Thus God does good through the agency of human beings. For it is not that God can do some things and cannot do others — he is never powerless in anything. Nor are some things done with his will and some against it, some things done by him and some by another. He even brought us into being through human means, and trained us through human means.

God made us when we had no prior existence. For if we had existed before, we would have to know where we were, and how and why we came here. But if we had no prior existence, then God is the sole author of our creation. Just as he made us when we did not exist, so now that we are made, he saves us by his own grace — if we show ourselves worthy and receptive. If we do not, he will allow us to pass to our proper end. For he is Lord of both the living and the dead.

Consider the power of God — not only in the case of human beings, in bringing them into existence out of nothing and causing them once brought into being to grow through the natural stages of life, but also in saving those who believe, in a way suited to each individual. He changes hours, times, fruits, and elements. For this is the one God, who has measured both the beginning and the end of events in a manner fitting to each one.

Advancing from faith and fear to knowledge, a person learns to say "Lord, Lord" — but not as a slave. He has learned to say "Our Father." Having been freed from the spirit of bondage, which produces fear, and having advanced through love to adoption, he now reveres from love the one he formerly feared. For he no longer abstains from what he ought to abstain from out of fear, but out of love clings to the commandments. "The Spirit itself," it is said, "bears witness when we cry, Abba, Father."

The Lord redeems us with his precious blood, freeing us from our old and bitter masters — that is, our sins — on account of which the spiritual powers of wickedness ruled over us. Accordingly he leads us into the liberty of the Father, as sons who are co-heirs and friends. "For," says the Lord, "those who do the will of my Father are my brothers and fellow-heirs." "Call no man, therefore, your father on earth." For those who rule are on earth. But in heaven is the Father, from whom the whole family, both in heaven and on earth, takes its name. Love governs willing hearts, but fear governs the unwilling. One kind of fear is base; but the other, leading us like a guide toward what is good, brings us to Christ and is saving.

Now if one forms a conception of God, it by no means corresponds to his true worthiness. For what can the worthiness of God be? But let a person conceive, as far as is possible, of a great and incomprehensible and most beautiful light — inaccessible, encompassing all good power and all noble virtue; caring for all, compassionate, passionless, good; knowing all things, foreknowing all things, pure, sweet, radiant, and stainless.

Since the movement of the soul is self-originated, the grace of God demands from it what the soul itself possesses — willingness as its own contribution to salvation. For the soul wishes to secure its own good, which the Lord, however, is the one who gives it. The soul is not without sensation, to be carried along passively like a body. Having is the result of taking, and taking is the result of willing and desiring; and holding on to what one has received requires the exercise of care and ability. For this reason God has endowed the soul with free choice — so that he might show it its duty, and that the soul, by choosing, might receive and retain.

Just as the Lord spoke and healed through his body, so also he formerly worked through the prophets, and now works through the apostles and teachers. For the Church is the instrument of the Lord's power. It was for this reason that he took on humanity — so that through it he might carry out the Father's will. At all times, the God who loves humanity clothes himself with human form for the salvation of human beings — in former times with the prophets, and now with the Church. For it is fitting that like should minister to like, in order to bring about a like salvation.

For we are of the earth. Caesar is the prince of this present age, whose earthly image is the old self, to which the earthly person has returned. To him, then, we are to render the earthly things, which we bore in the image of the earthly, and the things of God to God. For each one of the passions is upon us like a letter, a stamp, and a sign. But the Lord marks us with a different stamp, with other names and letters — faith in place of unbelief, and so on through all the rest. Thus we are translated from what is material to what is spiritual, "having borne the image of the heavenly."

25. John says: "I indeed baptize you with water, but there comes after me one who baptizes with the Spirit and fire." Yet he baptized no one with fire. Some, however, as Heracleon says, marked with fire the ears of those who were sealed, understanding in this way the apostolic saying: "His fan is in his hand, to purge his threshing floor; he will gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." The expression "by fire" is thus joined to "by the Spirit," since he separates the wheat from the chaff — that is, from the material husk — by the Spirit, just as chaff is separated by being fanned by the wind. So too the Spirit possesses a power of separating material forces. Since some things are produced from what is unproduced and indestructible — namely, the germs of life — the wheat is stored away, and the material part, so long as it is joined to the superior part, remains; when separated from it, it is destroyed, for it had its existence only in dependence on another thing. The separating element, then, is the Spirit, and the destroying element is the fire — and this is to be understood as material fire. But since what is saved is like wheat, and what grows in the soul is like chaff, and the one is incorporeal while what is separated is material, to the incorporeal he opposes spirit, which is rarefied and pure — almost more so than mind itself — and to the material he opposes fire, not as something evil or wicked, but as something strong and capable of cleansing away evil. For fire is understood as a good and powerful force, destructive of what is base and preserving of what is better. It is for this reason that fire is called wise by the prophets.

26. So too, when God is called "a consuming fire," this is because the name and image chosen signify not wickedness but power. For just as fire is the most potent of the elements and masters all things, so God is all-powerful and almighty — able to hold, to create, to make, to nourish, to cause growth, and to save, having power over both body and soul. As fire is superior to the other elements, so the Almighty Ruler is superior to gods, powers, and principalities. The power of fire is twofold: one aspect conduces to the production and maturing of fruits and living creatures, of which the sun is the image; the other tends toward consumption and destruction, as with earthly fire. When God is called a consuming fire, then, he is called a mighty and irresistible power, to which nothing is impossible, and which is able to destroy.

Concerning such a power the Savior also says, "I came to send fire upon the earth," indicating a power that purifies what is holy but is destructive, as they say, of what is material — and, as we would say, disciplinary. Fear belongs to fire, and diffusion to light.

27. The more ancient teachers did not write, partly because they did not wish to divide their attention between the careful transmission of what they taught and the additional labor of committing it to writing, and partly because they did not spend the time meant for reflection on what was to be said in the act of writing it down. Perhaps also they were convinced that the work of composition and the work of teaching did not belong to the same cast of mind, and so they yielded that task to those with a natural gift for it. When a speaker speaks, the stream of words flows freely and impetuously, and you may catch it up as it comes. But what is always tested by readers, subjected to strict examination, is thought worthy of the utmost care, and is, so to speak, the written confirmation of oral instruction — the voice carried forward to posterity by means of written composition. For what was entrusted to the elders, speaking now through writing, uses the writer's hand to pass itself on to those who will read it. As the magnet, repelling other matter, attracts iron alone by reason of affinity, so books, though many read them, draw to themselves only those who are capable of understanding them. For the word of truth is to some "foolishness," and to others a "stumbling block," but to a few "wisdom." So also is the power of God found to be. But let the Gnostic be far from envy. It is for this reason that he weighs whether it is worse to give to the unworthy or to withhold from the worthy, and out of his abundant love he risks communicating not only to everyone who is qualified, but sometimes even to one who is unworthy yet asks persistently — not on account of the request itself, but because the petitioner's insistence bends his mind toward faith through earnest and repeated entreaty.

28. There are those who call themselves Gnostics and yet are more envious of those within their own community than of outsiders. The sea is open to all, yet one swims, another sails, and a third fishes; the land is common, yet one walks, another ploughs, another hunts, someone else works the mines, and another builds a house. So too, when Scripture is read, one person is helped toward faith, another toward moral life, and a third is freed from superstition through the knowledge of things. The athlete who knows the Olympic stadium strips for training, competes, and wins, tripping up his opponents who contend against his disciplined method and fighting the contest through to the end. For knowledge is necessary both for the training of the soul and for seriousness of conduct, making the faithful more active and keen observers of things. As there is no believing without basic instruction, so there is no real understanding without knowledge.

29. What is useful and necessary for salvation — such as knowledge of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and also of our own soul — is wholly indispensable, and it is at once beneficial and necessary to arrive at a reasoned account of these things. For those who have taken the lead in doing good, wide experience is also advantageous, so that nothing which others may know with precision and learning escapes their notice. The study of heterodox teaching, moreover, provides another exercise for the inquiring soul, and keeps the disciple from being seduced from the truth, since he has already had practice in sounding out on every side the warlike instruments of argument.

30. The life of the Gnostic is pure from every evil deed, thought, and word — not only free from hatred, but beyond envy and hatred, beyond all evil-speaking and slander.

31. In length of days, a man is not to be counted happy simply because he has lived long, but because, through the way he has lived, he has become worthy of living forever. He has caused pain to no one, except when instructing the wounded in heart by means of the word — like a healing honey that is at once sweet and sharp. Above all, then, the Gnostic preserves what is seemly together with what is rational. For passion has been cut away and stripped from the whole soul, and he now lives and moves with what is noblest — a soul made pure and set free for adoption.

32. Pythagoras thought that whoever first gave things their names ought to be regarded not only as the most intelligent of the wise, but as the oldest. We must therefore search the Scriptures carefully, since they are acknowledged to be expressed in parables, and from their names we must track down the thoughts which the Holy Spirit, in speaking of things, teaches by imprinting his mind, so to speak, upon the expressions. In this way the words used with various meanings, subjected to careful investigation, may be explained, and what lies hidden beneath many layers may, when handled and studied, come to light and shine forth. Lead, after all, turns white as you rub it, producing white lead from black. So too does knowledge, shedding its light and brightness on things, show itself to be in truth the divine wisdom — the pure light that illumines those whose sight is clear, leading them to a sure vision and comprehension of truth.

33. Lighting our torch, then, at the source of that light, drawn to it by passionate desire and striving as much as possible to be assimilated to it, we become men full of light — true Israelites. For he called those his friends and brothers who by desire and pursuit aimed at likeness to the Divine.

34. Pure places and meadows have received the voices and visions of holy presences. And every person who has been perfectly purified will be counted worthy of divine teaching and of power.

35. I know that the mysteries of knowledge are a laughing-stock to many, especially when they are not dressed up in sophisticated figurative language. And even the few are startled by them at first, as when a light is suddenly brought into a room full of people sitting in the dark. But afterward, growing used and accustomed to them, and trained in reasoning, they are as if gladdened and exulting with delight, and they praise the Lord. For just as pleasure consists in release from pain, so knowledge consists in the removal of ignorance. Those who are most deeply asleep believe they are most fully awake, held fast by vivid and compelling dream-visions; and those who are most ignorant believe they know the most. But blessed are those who rouse themselves from this sleep and confusion, and lift their eyes to the light and the truth.

36. It is therefore equally necessary for one who wishes to have a student who is teachable and has blended faith with aspiration, to exercise himself and study constantly on his own, examining the truth of his ideas; and when he believes himself to be right, to move on to questions about related matters. For young birds make their first attempts at flight while still in the nest, exercising their wings.

37. Gnostic virtue everywhere makes a person good, gentle, harmless, free from pain, blessed, and ready to associate in the best way with all that is divine and in the best way with other people — at once a contemplative and an active image of God, turned by love into a lover of what is good. For what is good, as it is contemplated and grasped by wisdom, is here carried into effect through self-control and righteousness and faith, practicing in the flesh an angelic ministry and hallowing the soul in the body as in a place that is clear and unstained.

38. Against Tatian, who says that the words "Let there be light" are a supplication: if God is supplicating the supreme God, how does he say, "I am God, and beside me there is none else"? We have said that there are punishments for blasphemies, for nonsense, and for outrageous expressions — punishments and corrections administered by reason.

39. He also said that women are punished on account of their hair and adornments by the Power set over such matters — the same Power that gave Samson his strength in his hair, and that punishes women who use the adornment of their hair to lure others into fornication.

40. Just as people are made good by the outflow of good, so too are they made bad. The judgment of God is good — the distinguishing of the believing from the unbelieving, and the prior judgment that keeps one from falling into a greater judgment, this prior judgment being correction.

41. Scripture says that infants who are abandoned are delivered to a guardian angel, and that through him they are trained and raised. "And they shall be," it says, "as the faithful in this world who live to a hundred years of age." This is why Peter also says in the Revelation: "And a flash of fire, leaping from those infants, strikes the eyes of the women." For the just shines forth like a spark in a reed, and will judge the nations.

42. "With the holy you will be holy." "According to your praise your name is glorified" — God being glorified through our knowledge and through the inheritance. So too it is said, "The Lord lives," and "The Lord has risen."

43. "A people I did not know has served me" — by covenant I did not know them, alien sons who desired what belonged to another.

44. "Magnifying the salvations of his king." All the faithful are called kings, brought to royalty through inheritance.

45. Long-suffering is sweeter than honey — not because of the long-suffering itself, but because of the fruit it bears. Now the person of self-control is free from passion in the sense that he restrains the passions, though not without effort. But once the habit is formed, he is no longer merely a person of self-control, for he has come under the influence of a single habit and of the Holy Spirit.

46. The passions that are in the soul are called spirits — not spirits of power, since in that case a person under the influence of passion would be a whole legion of demons, but spirits because of the impulse they communicate. For the soul itself, taking on through its various states one kind of wickedness after another, is said to receive spirits.

The Word does not tell us to give up property, but to manage it without becoming attached to it, and when something happens to it, not to be distressed or grieved, and not to be driven by the desire to acquire more. Divine Providence calls us to keep away from possessions held with passion, and from all inordinate attachment, and it turns back those who are still living in the flesh from such things.

Peter says in the Apocalypse that aborted infants will share the better fate. They are entrusted to a guardian angel so that, by receiving knowledge, they may obtain the better dwelling place, having undergone the same experiences they would have had if they had lived in the body. The others will obtain salvation simply, as beings who have been wronged and are pitied, and they will remain without punishment, receiving this as their reward.

Peter says in the Apocalypse that the milk of women, flowing from the breasts and thickening, produces tiny creatures that feed on flesh, and running back into the women, consume them. This teaches that punishments arise from sins. He says these creatures are produced from sins, just as it was for their sins that the people were sold into captivity. And for their lack of faith in Christ, as the apostle says, they were bitten by serpents.

An ancient teacher said that the embryo is a living thing. The soul, after being prepared for conception through a process of cleansing, enters the womb, introduced by one of the angels who preside over generation and who knows the proper time for conception. This angel moves the woman toward intercourse. When the seed is deposited, the spirit within the seed is, so to speak, taken up and assumed into conjunction in the process of formation. He cited as proof the fact that when angels bring glad tidings to barren women, they introduce souls before conception has occurred. And in the Gospel, the babe leapt as a living thing. The reason some women are barren is that the soul which unites to enable the deposit of seed is not introduced in a way that secures conception and generation.

"The heavens declare the glory of God." The heavens are understood in various senses — both those defined by space and revolution, and those defined by covenant, which represent the immediate activity of the first-created angels. For the covenants brought about a more particular appearance of angels: the covenant with Adam, the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham, and the covenant with Moses. Moved by the Lord, the first-created angels exercised their influence upon the angels attached to the prophets, regarding the covenants as the glory of God. Moreover, the things done on earth by angels were done by the first-created angels to the glory of God.

It is the Lord who is principally called the Heavens, and then the First-created angels, and after these also the holy men who lived before the Law — the patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets — and then the apostles as well. "And the firmament shows his handiwork." David applies the term "firmament" to God, who is passionless and immovable, just as elsewhere the same David says, "I will love you, O Lord, my strength and my refuge." Accordingly, the firmament itself displays the work of his hands — that is, it shows and makes manifest the work of his angels. For he displays and makes known those whom he has made.

"Day unto day utters speech." Just as the heavens have various meanings, so also does day. Now speech is the Lord, and he is also frequently called day. "And night unto night shows forth knowledge." The devil knew that the Lord was to come, but he did not believe that he was God, and so he tempted him in order to find out whether he was powerful. It is said that he left him and departed from him for a season — that is, he postponed the discovery until the resurrection. For he knew that the one who was to rise was the Lord. The demons likewise suspected this; they had also suspected that Solomon was the Lord, and they knew he was not when he sinned. "Night unto night" — all the demons knew that the one who rose after the passion was the Lord. And Enoch had already said that the angels who transgressed taught men astronomy and divination and the rest of the arts.

"There are no speeches or words whose voices are not heard," neither of days nor of nights. "Their sound has gone forth unto all the earth." He has transferred the discourse to the saints alone, whom he calls both heavens and days.

The stars are spiritual bodies that communicate with the angels set over them and are governed by them. They are not the cause of the things that come to pass, but are signs of what is taking place, and will take place, and has taken place — in the case of changes in the atmosphere, of fruitfulness and barrenness, of pestilence and fevers, and in the case of human affairs. The stars do not in the least degree exert causal influence; they indicate what is, and will be, and has been.

"And in the sun he has set his tabernacle." There is a transposition here, for the passage is speaking of the second coming. We must therefore read what is transposed in its proper sequence: "And he, as a bridegroom issuing from his chamber, will rejoice as a giant to run his way. From heaven's end is his going forth, and there is no one who shall hide himself from his heat" — and then, "He has set his tabernacle in the sun."

Some say that he deposited the Lord's body in the sun, as Hermogenes holds. And by "his tabernacle," some mean his body, others the Church of the faithful.