in love, but an object of hatred [to his beloved]. For those who have invented such opinions have rather had an idea and mental conception of some unhappy lover among men, than of a spiritual and divine substance. 6. Moreover, to meditate how to search into [the nature of] the perfect Father, and to have a desire to exist within Him, and to have a comprehension of His [greatness], could not entail the stain of ignorance or passion, and that upon a spiritual Æon; but would rather [give rise to] perfection, and impassibility, and truth. For they do not say that even they, 385 though they be but men, by meditating on Him who was before them,—and while now, as it were, comprehending the perfect, and being placed within the knowledge of Him, —are thus involved in a passion of perplexity, but rather attain to the knowledge and apprehension of truth. For they affirm that the Saviour said, “Seek, and ye shall find,” to His disciples with this view, that they should seek after Him who, by means of imagination, has been conceived of by them as being above the Maker of all—the ineffable Bythus; and they desire themselves to be regarded as “the perfect;” because they have sought and found the perfect One, while they are still on earth. Yet they declare that that Æon who was within the Pleroma, a wholly spiritual being, by seeking after the Propator, and endeavouring to find a place within His greatness, and desiring to have a comprehension of the truth of the Father, fell down into [the endurance of] passion, and such a passion that, unless she had met with that Power who upholds all things, she would have been dissolved into the general substance [of the Æons], and thus come to an end of her [personal] existence. 7. Absurd is such presumption, and truly an opinion of men totally destitute of the truth. For, that this Æon is superior to themselves, and of greater antiquity, they themselves acknowledge, according to their own system, when they affirm that they are the fruit of the Enthymesis of that Æon who suffered passion, so that this Æon is the father of their mother, that is, their own grandfather. And to them, the later grandchildren, the search after the Father brings, as they maintain, truth, and perfection, and establishment, and deliverance from unstable matter, and reconciliation to the Father; but on their grandfather this same search entailed ignorance, and passion, and terror, and perplexity, from which [disturbances] they also declare that the substance of matter was formed. To say, therefore, that the search after and investigation of the perfect Father, and the desire for communion and union with Him, were things quite beneficial to them, but to an Æon, from whom also they derive their origin, these things were the cause of dissolution and destruction, how can such assertions be otherwise viewed than as totally inconsistent, foolish, and irrational? Those, too, who listen to these teachers, truly blind themselves, while they possess blind guides, justly [are left to] fall along with them into the gulf of ignorance which lies below them. 994 Chapter XVIII.—Sophia was never really in ignorance or passion; her Enthymesis…