Refutation of All Heresies, Vol. 2

written before it. All the unbegotten things, then, he says, are in potentiality, not in activity, like the art of grammar or geometry. If, then, one should encounter the fitting word and doctrine, and the bitter should be changed into sweet—that is, the spears into reaping-hooks and the swords into ploughshares Reference to Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3—the child will not be chaff and sticks for a fire, but a perfect fruit made in the likeness of, as I have said, and equal to, the Unbegotten and Boundless Power. But should he remain only a tree and not make a perfect fruit fashioned in complete resemblance, he will be removed. For the axe is near, he says, to the roots of the tree. Every tree, he says, which does not make fair fruit is cut down and cast into the fire. Reference to Matthew 3:10 and Luke 3:9

17. There is, then, according to Simon, that blessed and incorruptible thing hidden in everything, potentially not actively, which is "He who Stood, Stands, and will Stand." It stood above in the Unbegotten Power, it stands below amid the rush of the waters having been begotten in likeness, and it will stand on high beside the blessed Unbegotten Power if it is made in his perfect semblance. For there are, he says, three who have stood, and unless there are three p. 259. Aeons who have stood, then the Unbegotten One—who according to them is borne over the water, who by resemblance has been fashioned again perfect and heavenly, and who in one thought alone is more lacking than the Unbegotten Power—is not in its proper place. This is what they say:

“I and thou, thou one before me, I after thee, am I.”

This, he says, is one power, divided above and below, begetting itself, increasing itself, seeking itself, finding itself, being its own mother, its own father, its own sister, its own spouse, its own daughter, its own son, a mother-father In the original Greek, metropator, being one root of the universals.

And that the beginning of the generation of things begotten is from fire, he understands in this fashion: In all things whatever which have birth,