§ 1.
But if they will not assent to either of these statements, because they will be refuted by us, not being able to render a reason of the aforesaid production of their Pleroma,1 they will be driven and shut up into a confession of some other order of things above their Pleroma, more spiritual and of more absolute authority, according to which their Pleroma was shaped out. For if the Fabricator did not of himself form the outline of the Creation so and so, but after the figure of the things above: from whom did that same Being whom they call The Deep, who of course wrought out the Pleroma to be of that figure—from whom did He receive the form of the things which were made before Himself? Thus the mind must either stay itself upon that God Who made the world, that of His own power and from Himself He received the model of the world’s formation: or if a man once swerve from this, there will be always need of inquiry, whence He Who is above the Creator had His pattern of the things which are made;—what was the number of emanations, and what the very archetypal substance. But if the Deep had power of himself to frame such and such an image for the Pleroma, why had not the Fabricator just as much power of himself to make the world in the same way? Again therefore [I ask], If the Creation is an image of those other existences, what hinders our saying that those are images of what is above them, and those above them again of others, and so to cast ourselves into endless images of images?
§ 2.
This was the case with Basilides; who having fallen far short of the truth, yet thought to escape the aforesaid difficulty by an infinite series of things made in turn by one another: asserting as he did 365 heavens framed one by another in the way of succession and resemblance, and the token of them to be the number of days in the year, as we before said: and over these the Virtue which they call Unnameable, and the order adopted by the same. Yet neither so did he avoid the said difficulty. For if you ask him, “Whence has that heaven, which is above all, from which in succession he will have the others to be made, whence has it the pattern of its formation?”—he will say, “From the order which the Unnameable one adopted.” And he will either say that the Unnameable one made it of Himself, or he will be forced to allow that there is some other power above Him, from which his Unnameable one received this great model of the things which He hath ordered.
§ 3.
How much safer, then, and more accurate, at once from the beginning to confess, that which is indeed true, that this God, the Framer, Who made such a world, is God alone, and there is none besides Him, Himself of Himself receiving the pattern and figure of the things which are made:—than to be compelled in very weariness, after such a range and round of impiety, to settle the mind upon some one Being, and to own that of Him is the formation of things made!
§ 4.
For in truth what the Valentinians impute to us, saying that we “linger in the lowest Seven,”2 as though we raised not our mind on high, nor perceived the things above, because we do not receive their prodigious talk: this very same is laid to their charge by Basilides and his set, as though they were yet wallowing in the lower parts, as far as the first and second Ogdoad, and ignorantly thought that after thirty Æons they had presently found the Father Who is above all, not tracing Him onwards by thought into the Pleroma which is above the 365 Heavens, into more than the 45th Ogdoad. And these again one might justly blame, if one devised 4380 Heavens, or Æons, because the days of our year have so many hours. And if one add those of the nights too, doubling the aforesaid hours, imagining that he has invented a great crowd of fresh Ogdoads, and I know not what innumerable matter of Æons, in lieu of Him Who is Father over all, and this with a blind notion that he is himself more perfect than all:—still to all the rest he will impute the same errors; viz., that they attain not to the height of that multitude of heavens, or Æons, which he himself named, but falling short abide either in the lower or in the middle spaces.