The Procreation of the Aeons

1. [...] and just as the acts of wonder by the silences are eternal generations and intellectual offspring, so the qualities of the Word are spiritual emanations.

2. Because they pertain to speech, both [acts of wonder] and qualities are seeds and thoughts of his offspring, and living, eternal roots that appear as self-originating offspring, existing as minds and spiritual offspring for the glory of the Father.

3. [Being] spirits and minds, sound and speech are unnecessary, it being unnecessary to perform [an act] to obtain what they wish to [have done].

4. Instead, based on the pattern of [the Father’s] own existence, [those] who originate from him beget anything they wish.

5. And he has child[ren], the one of whom they think, and of whom they speak, and toward whom they move, and the one in whom they subsist, and the one to whom they sing hymns to glorify him; because this is their power of procreation, resembling those from whom they originated, congruent with their shared help, given that they help each other as do those who are unbegotten.

6. The Father, in accord with his exalted place above the Totalities, being unknown and ungraspable, possesses a greatness and scale that if revealed suddenly, immediately, would destroy all the lofty beings among the aeons who had originated from him.

7. He, therefore, restrained his strength and his infinite resources that comprise his being, [remaining] unspeakable and unnameable, exalted above all mind and all speech.

8. This is, though, the one who stretched himself out, and what he stretched out formed a foundation and a place and a dwelling for the universe, one of his names being the One by Whom, because he is the Father of All.

9. By his labor for the existing ones, he sowed into them the thought to search for him.

10. The wealth of their [...] is that they grasp that he exists and that they inquire into what was existent.