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| Further Explanation of the “Sonship.”
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Chapter XIII.—Further Explanation of the
“Sonship.”
When, therefore, according to these (heretics),
the entire world and super-mundane entities were finished, and (when)
nothing exists labouring under deficiency, there still remains in the
(conglomeration of) all germs the third Sonship, which had been left
behind in the Seed to confer benefits and receive them. And it
must needs be that the Sonship which had been left behind ought
likewise to be revealed and reinstated above. And His place
should be above the Conterminous Spirit, near the refined and imitative
Sonship and the Non-Existent One. But this would be in accordance
with what has been written, he says: “And the creation
itself groaneth together, and travaileth in pain together, waiting for
the manifestation of the sons of God.”833
Now, we who are spiritual are
sons, he says, who have been left here to arrange, and mould, and
rectify, and complete the souls which, according to nature, are so
constituted as to continue in this quarter of the universe.
“Sin, then, reigned from Adam unto Moses,”834
as it has been written. For the
Great Archon exercised dominion and possesses an empire with limits
extending as far as the firmament. And He imagines Himself alone
to be God, and that there exists nothing above Him, for (the reason
that) all things have been guarded by unrevealed Siope. This, he
says, is the mystery which has not been made known to former
generations; but in those days the Great Archon, the Ogdoad, was King
and Lord, as it seemed, of the universe. But (in reality) the
Hebdomad was king and lord of this quarter of the universe, and the
Ogdoad is Arrhetus, whereas the Hebdomad is Rhetus. This, he
says, is the Archon of the Hebdomad, who has spoken to Moses, and
says: “I am the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and I
have not manifested unto them the name of God”835
(for so they wish that it had been
written)—that is, the God, Arrhetus, Archon of the Ogdoad. All the
prophets, therefore, who were before the Saviour uttered their
predictions, he says, from this source (of inspiration). Since,
therefore, it was requisite, he says, that we should be revealed as the
children of God, in expectation of whose manifestation, he says, the
creation habitually groans and travails in pain, the Gospel came into
the world, and passed through every Principality, and Power, and
Dominion, and every Name that is named.836
And (the Gospel) came in reality,
though nothing descended from above; nor did the blessed Sonship retire
from that Inconceivable, and Blessed, (and) Non-Existent God.
Nay, (far from it;) for as Indian naphtha, when lighted merely837
from a considerably long distance,
nevertheless attracts fire (towards it), so from below, from the
formlessness of the conglomeration (of all germs), the powers pass
upwards as far as the Sonship. For, according to the illustration
of the Indian naphtha, the Son of the Great Archon of the Ogdoad, as if
he were some (sort of) naphtha, apprehends and seizes conceptions from
the Blessed Sonship, whose place of habitation is situated after that
of the Conterminous (Spirit). For the power of the Sonship which
is in the midst of the Holy Spirit, (that is,) in, the midst of the
(Conterminous) Spirit, shares the flowing and rushing thoughts of the
Sonship with the Son of the Great Archon.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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