Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| The Demiurge Works Away at Creation, as the Drudge of His Mother Achamoth, in Ignorance All the While of the Nature of His Occupation. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter XX—The
Demiurge Works Away at Creation, as the Drudge of His Mother Achamoth,
in Ignorance All the While of the Nature of His Occupation.
The Demiurge therefore, placed as he was without the
limits of the Pleroma in the ignominious solitude of his eternal exile,
founded a new empire—this world (of ours)—by
clearing away the confusion
and distinguishing the difference between the two substances which
severally constituted it,6816
6816 Duplicis
substantiæ illius disclusæ. | the animal and the
material. Out of incorporeal (elements) he constructs bodies, heavy,
light, erect6817 and stooping,
celestial and terrene. He then completes the sevenfold stages of heaven
itself, with his own throne above all. Whence he had the additional
name of Sabbatum from the hebdomadal nature of his abode; his mother
Achamoth, too, had the title Ogdoada, after the precedent of the
primeval Ogdoad.6818
6818 Ogdoadis
primogenitalis: what Irenæus calls “the first-begotten
and primary Ogdoad of the Pleroma” (See our Irenæus,
Vol. I.; also above, chap. vii. p. 506.) | These heavens,
however, they consider to be intelligent,6819
and sometimes they make angels of them, as indeed they do of the
Demiurge himself; as also (they call) Paradise the fourth archangel,
because they fix it above the third heaven, of the power of which Adam
partook, when he sojourned there amidst its fleecy clouds6820 and shrubs.6821
Ptolemy remembered perfectly well the prattle of his boyhood,6822
6822 Puerilium
dicibulorum. | that apples grew in the sea, and fishes on
the tree; after the same fashion, he assumed that nut-trees flourished
in the skies. The Demiurge does his work in ignorance, and
therefore perhaps he is unaware that trees ought to be planted only on
the ground. His mother, of course, knew all about it: how is it, then,
that she did not suggest the fact, since she was actually executing her
own operation? But whilst building up so vast an edifice for her son by
means of those works, which proclaim him at once to be father, god and,
king before the conceits of the Valentinians, why she refused to let
them be known to even him,6823
6823 Sibi here must
refer to the secondary agent of the sentence. | is a question which
I shall ask afterwards.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|