Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
That whoever transfers this argument to another, must of necessity be undone by it. But if none of them are willing to agree, because they will be refuted by us as having no way to render a cause for such an emission of their Pleroma, they will be compelled to conclude by confessing that above their Pleroma there is some other disposition, more spiritual and more sovereign, according to which their Pleroma was shaped. For if the Demiurge did not fashion the form of creation from himself, but perfected the being of the Pleroma according to the patterns of the things above, from whom did he receive the form of the things made before him? For it is necessary either to hold to the view that the God who made the world received the pattern of the world's fashioning from his own power and from himself; or, if anyone moves away from this, there will always be a necessity of asking whence the one who is above him received the shaping of the things that were made, and what the number and substance of the emissions was that enabled him to perfect such a shaping of the Pleroma by himself. In that case, why was it not permitted to the Demiurge to have made such a world from himself? Again, then, if their fashioned image is a copy, what prevents one from saying that those things above them are likewise images of things still above them, and those above them in turn images of others, and so on into infinity —
This was the fate of Basilides too, since he never touched on the truth at all, and imagined that by an endless chain of things generated each from the last he could slip past such a difficulty; for he taught that a total of three hundred sixty-five skies came into being one after another in a like manner, and offered as demonstration the count of days making up a year, as we noted earlier; and set above these a power, which his followers likewise term unnameable, together with its arrangement — yet even so he did not slip past such a difficulty. For should one press him as to whence the pattern for shaping arrived at that topmost sky, from which he holds all the rest to have arisen in sequence, he will answer: from the arrangement belonging to the Unnameable One. And he must then either claim the Unnameable One fashioned it out of his own resources, or he will be forced to concede that yet another power stands over even this one, and that from it the Unnameable One obtained a shaping so vast for what belongs to him.
How much sounder and more prudent it is, then, to admit right away, from the outset, what is true — that this God who fashions, who built such a world, is the sole God, and there exists no other God apart from him; that he drew from his own resources both the pattern and the shaping of the things made — rather than, after so much impiety and wandering in circles, growing exhausted and finally being driven to settle on some single opinion, only then confessing the shaping of what was made. Concerning what they lay to our charge, being of another kind. For this very accusation which Valentinus's followers level against us — that we linger in the hebdomad below, as though never raising our thought upward, nor grasping the realities above, since we refuse their grotesque fables — this same accusation is leveled by the Basilidians in turn, as though they, still anchored in their intent on the lower things, up through the first and second eightfold set, and after thirty Aeons, vainly imagine they have at last laid hold of the Father who stands over everything, without ever probing in thought that fullness lying beyond the three hundred sixty-five skies, itself beyond forty-five sets of eight. And some other party will rightly turn the reproach back on these, for dreaming up four thousand three hundred skies or Aeons, reasoning that this equals the hours contained across the days of a year; and should one further add the nights, doubling that same hour-count, and so imagine he has uncovered a vast crowd of eightfold sets and some uncountable, intricately arranged host of Aeons, fancying himself thereby more consummate than the one who is Father of everything above everything — the identical charge will land on every one of them alike; for the throng of skies or Aeons that each of them proclaims will never suffice to reach his height, and yet, falling short even among the things below, they remain mired in the middle.