Simon Magus | Page 4

thereby also continually undergoing indignity, last of all even stood for hire in a brothel; and she was the "lost sheep."
3. Wherefore also he himself had come, to take her away for the first time, and free her from her bonds, and also to guarantee salvation to men by his "knowledge." For as the Angels were mismanaging the world, since each of them desired the sovereignty, he had come to set matters right; and that he had descended, transforming himself and being made like to the Powers and Principalities and Angels; so that he appeared to men as a man, although he was not a man; and was thought to have suffered in Judaea, although he did not really suffer. The Prophets moreover had spoken their prophecies under the inspiration of the Angels who made the world; wherefore those who believed on him and his Helen paid no further attention to them, and followed their own pleasure as though free; for men were saved by his grace, and not by righteous works. For righteous actions are not according to nature, but from accident, in the manner that the Angels who made the world have laid it down, by such precepts enslaving men. Wherefore also he gave new promises that the world should be dissolved and that they who were his should be freed from the rule of those who made the world.
4. Wherefore their initiated priests live immorally. And everyone of them practises magic arts to the best of his ability. They use exorcisms and incantations. Love philtres also and spells and what are called "familiars" and "dream-senders," and the rest of the curious arts are assiduously cultivated by them. They have also an image of Simon made in the likeness of Jupiter, and of Helen in that of Minerva; and they worship the (statues); and they have a designation from their most impiously minded founder, being called Simonians, from whom the Gn?sis, falsely so-called, derives its origins, as one can learn from their own assertions.
iii. Clemens Alexandrinus (Stromateis, ii. 11; vii. 17). Text: Opera (edidit G. Dindorfius); Oxoniae, 1869.
In the first passage the Simonian use of the term, "He who stood," is confirmed, in the latter we are told that a branch of the Simonians was called Entychitae.
iv. Tertullianus, or Pseudo-Tertullianus (De Praescriptionibus, 46). Text: Liber de Praes., etc. (edidit H. Hurter, S.J.); Oeniponti, 1870. Tertullianus (De Anima, 34, 36). Text: _Bibliothec. Patr. Eccles. Select._ (curavit Dr. Guil. Bruno Linder), Fasc. iv; Lipsiae, 1859.
In the Praescriptions the passage is very short, the briefest notice possible, under the heading, "Anonymi Catalogus Heresum." The notice in the De Anima runs as follows:
For Simon the Samaritan also, the purveyor of the Holy Spirit, in the Acts of the Apostles, after he had been condemned by himself, together with his money, to perdition, shed vain tears and betook himself to assaulting the truth, as though for the gratification of vengeance. Supported by the powers of his art, for the purpose of his illusions through some power or other, he purchased with the same money a Tyrian woman Helen from a place of public pleasure, a fit commodity instead of the Holy Spirit. And he pretended that he was the highest Father, and that she was his first suggestion whereby he had suggested the making of the Angels and Archangels; that she sharing in this design had sprung forth from the Father, and leaped down into the lower regions; and that there, the design of the Father being prevented, she had brought forth Angelic Powers ignorant of the Father, the artificer of this world; by these she was detained, not according to his intention, lest when she had gone they should be thought to be the progeny of another. And therefore being made subject to every kind of contumely, so that by her depreciation she might not choose to depart, she had sunk to as low as the human form, as though she had had to be restrained by chains of flesh, and then for many ages being turned about through a succession of female conditions, she became also that Helen who proved so fatal to Priam, and after to the eyes of Stesichorus, for she had caused his blindness on account of the insult of his poem, and afterwards had removed it because of her pleasure at his praise. And thus transmigrating from body to body, in the extreme of dishonour she had stood, ticketed for hire, a Helen viler [than her predecessor]. She was, therefore, the "lost sheep," to whom the highest Father, Simon, you know, had descended. And after she was recovered and brought back, I know not whether on his shoulders or knees, he afterwards had respect to the salvation of men, as it were by the liberation of those