LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOM 113
From the depth come crops,
from the womb comes a child.^10Valentinian thought, as intimated in the poetic fragment from Valentinos,
is based upon bythos or bathos, divine depth. In the words of the Gospel of
Truth, the person of knowledge, the gnostic revealer, "has turned many from
error. He went before them to their own places, from which they departed
when they erred because of the depth of him who surrounds every place,
whereas there is nothing which surrounds him." Again, later in the Gospel of
Truth, "This is the perfection in the thought of the father and these are the
words of his reflection. Each one of his words is the work of his will alone, in
the revelation of his word. Since they were in the depth of his mind, the word,
who was the first to come forth, caused them to appear, along with an intellect
which speaks the unique word by means of a silent grace."
From depth emanates the pleroma of divinity, organized as (at least) fif-
teen pairs of beings, or couples, for a total of (at least) thirty eternal realms
(aeons). All are suspended, all are held in the fullness of the divine, as the
poem of Valentinos shows. While different names are assigned to the eternal
realms in the different versions of the Valentinian scheme of things, the first
two groups of four (tetrads) are most prominent. The resultant realm of eight
(ogdoad), according to Irenaeus, looks like this:
depth and thought (ennoia)
or grace
or silence
mind (nous) and truth
or only child (monogenes)word (logos) and life (zoe)
human being and churchA number of these eternal realms resemble the eternal realms in the Secret
Book of John and other Sethian texts, as does Sophia, the last of the Valentin-
ian eternal realms. Through ignorance or error Sophia falls from grace and
disturbs the divine order, and two other eternal realms, Christ and holy spirit,
- Hippolytus> Refutation of All Heresies 6.37.7.