Tertullian

“ I am sorry from my heart that Plato has been the caterer to all these heretics. For in the Phædo he imagines that souls wander from this world to that, and thence back again hither; whilst in the Timæus he supposes that the children of God, to whom had been assigned the production of mortal creatures, having taken for the soul the germ of immortality, congealed around it a mortal body,—thereby indicating that this world is the figure of some other. ”

“ Now, to procure belief in all this—that the soul had formerly lived with God in the heavens above, sharing His ideas with Him, and afterwards came down to live with us on earth, and whilst here recollects the eternal patterns of things which it had learnt before—he elaborated his new formula, μαθήσεις ἀναμνήσεις, which means that “learning is reminiscence;” ”

“ Carpocrates, indeed, claims for himself so extreme an amount of the supernal qualities, that his disciples set their own souls at once on an equality with Christ (not to mention the apostles) ; and sometimes, when it suits their fancy, even give them the superiority—deeming them, forsooth, to have partaken of that sublime virtue which looks down upon the principalities that govern this world. ”