Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON QUESTIONS AND PARABLES. It is utterly unreasonable, then, passing over him who truly is God and who has testimony from all, to inquire whether there is someone above him who is not, and who has never been announced by anyone. For since plainly nothing at all has been said of him — and they themselves bear witness to this — it is clear that by wrongly twisting the parables that are in question (parables whose own manner of expression is itself disputed) to fit the one they have invented, they are now generating someone else who was never before sought at all. For by their wish to resolve ambiguous Scriptures — not, indeed, ambiguous as though a God other than our Creator should be imagined, as the heretics assert, who blaspheme the God who is and fashion for themselves an idol of one who is not — by knotting together another God, they add a greater question to a lesser one. But no question at all is resolved by another thing equally in question, nor is an ambiguity resolved by another ambiguity, nor riddles by a greater riddle; rather, such things receive their solution from what is plain, consistent, and clear.
These men, in seeking to resolve the Scriptures and parables, introduce another, greater and impious question — whether, namely, above the Maker of the world there is another god — and thereby resolve nothing (for how could they?), but tie a great question onto a small one, fastening in an unsolvable knot. For while wishing it to be known that the Lord came to the baptism of truth at thirty years of age, and failing to learn from this the very fact that it was this same God the Maker who dispatched him for mankind's salvation, they impiously despise him; and thinking they can explain whence the substance of matter came, not believing that God, out of things that were not, made — as he willed — all the things that were made to exist, using his own will and power for the substance, they have gathered together empty words, truly showing their own unbelief: for by not believing the things that are, they have fallen into that which is not. AS TO THE CLAIM THAT THE SUBSTANCE OF MATTER SLIPPED FROM ACHAMOTH. That a moist substance came forth from her tears, a luminous one from her laughter, a solid one from her grief, and a mobile one from her fear, and that in these she is proud and puffed up — how are these things not worthy of derision, and truly ridiculous? These men do not believe that matter itself, being as it is powerful and rich in all things, was created by God, not knowing how great the power of a spiritual and divine substance is; yet they believe that their 'mother,' whom they call a female born of a female, from the passions aforesaid gave forth so vast a substance of created matter; and while they ask whence the Maker got the substance for his creation, they do not ask whence there came to their 'mother' — the one they term Enthymesis, impulse of a straying Aeon — so many tears, sweats, griefs, or the rest of that outflow of matter.
To attribute the substance of the things that were made to the might and purpose of the God of all things is credible, acceptable, consistent, and would be well said in this respect: that he is better than men, in that he himself devised the matter of his own workmanship, whereas men can indeed make something, but only out of matter already lying at hand, while God, before there was anything at all, himself brought matter into being. But to say that matter was put forth from the Enthymesis of a wandering Aeon, and that the Aeon is far removed from his own Enthymesis, and that this suffering and this affection lay outside that very substance of hers, is both incredible and foolish, impossible and inconsistent.