[27] Reading ἀπειράκις ἀπείρων (ὄντων) for the ἀπειράκις ἀπείρως of Cruice’s text.
[28] Cruice’s emendation. The Codex has γνώμην ἴσην, “equal opinion”? Schneidewin, νώματος αἶσαν.
[29] Here we have Simon’s cosmogonical ideas set out for the first time in something like his own words. He seems to postulate the existence of a Logos who makes the Six Powers or Roots and who is himself present in them all. This does not appear to differ from the view of Philo, for which see Forerunners, I, 174, or Schürer’s Hist. of the Jewish People there quoted.
[30] Νοῦς καὶ Ἐπίνοιαν, Φωνὴ καὶ Ὄνομα, Λογισμὸς καὶ Ἐνθύμησις. The last name is the only one that presents any difficulty, although every heresiologist but Hippolytus gives the female of the first syzygy as Ἔννοια. Ἐνθύμησις is translated Conceptio by Cruice, “Reflection” by Macmahon. It seems as if it here meant “desire” in a mental, not a fleshly, sense; but as this word has a double meaning in English, I have substituted for it “Passion.” Hereafter the Greek names will be used.
[31] This daring idea that the Logos, the chief intermediary between God and matter in whom all the lesser λόγοι and powers were contained, as Philo thought, must himself either return to and be united to God or else be lost in matter and perish, is met with in one form or another in nearly all later forms of Gnosticism. It is this which makes the redemption of Sophia after her “fall” so prominent in the mythology of Valentinus, while its converse is shown in the First Man of Manichæism conquered by Satan and groaning in chains and darkness until released by the heavenly powers and placed in some intermediate world to wait until the last spark of the light which he has lost is redeemed from matter. It seems to be the natural consequence of Philo’s ideas, for which see Schürer’s Hist. of the Jewish People (Eng. ed.) II, ii. pp. 370-376. Whether these did not in turn owe something to Greek stories of mortals like Heracles and Dionysos deified as a reward for their sufferings is open to question. Cf. Forerunners, vol. I.
[32] Justinus also used this quotation from Isaiah i. 2, although in abbreviated form. See supra, Vol. I. p. [179]. The A.V. has “nourished and brought up” for “begotten and raised up,” and “rebelled against” for “disregarded.”
[33] So Philo according to Zeller and Schürer, (op. cit., p. 374) understands by the Logos “the power of God or the active Divine intelligence in general.” He designates it as the “idea which comprises all other ideas, the power which comprises all powers in itself, as the entirety of the supersensuous world or of the Divine powers.”
[34] Gen. ii. 2.
[35] The Sethiani also quote this. See supra, Vol. I. p. 165.
[36] So Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 9, makes Wisdom or Sophia say, “He created me from the beginning before all the world,” and Proverbs viii. 23, “I was set up from everlasting,” but neither passage is here directly quoted.