Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
One of the ancient comic poets, Antiphanes, said something far more plausible and pleasing about the origin of the universe in his Theogony. He says that Chaos was brought forth from Night and Silence; then from Chaos and Night came Love; and from Love, light; and thereafter, according to him, everything else belonging to that earliest brood of deities. Following on from this initial company he brings in a further, later brood of gods and the shaping of the cosmos, and thereafter recounts, out of that later divine company, how man was fashioned. [Editorial note: an ancient commentator observes that Antiphanes was unaware of the Hesiodic verses he cites, and that Irenaeus's argument here corresponds closely to the tenets of the earliest, Orphic-style Greek cosmogony as it appears, for example, in Hesiod's Theogony, in Aristophanes' Clouds, in Damascius' On First Principles, and elsewhere — for instance Hesiod's account, according to which Chaos existed first, and from Chaos came Erebus and black Night, who through Erebus begot Aether and Day; Earth, out of Air, brought forth Heaven; and from these, without intercourse, came Cronos and Rhea, from whom sprang Zeus and all the gods of the second generation; compare Aristotle, Metaphysics A.] So it is that the men we speak of, taking this fable for themselves, have made it out to be a kind of natural philosophy, merely changing the names, while showing forth the very same beginning and emission of all things: in place of Chaos, they set the Deep [Bythos]; in place of Love — through whom, the comic poet says, all the rest was arranged — they have drawn in the Word. And in place of the first and greatest gods, they have fashioned Aeons; and in place of the second gods, they tell of the arrangement of their mother who is outside the Pleroma, calling her the second Ogdoad; and from her, just as the poet does, they announce the fashioning of the world and the forming of man, claiming that they alone know mysteries beyond telling and beyond knowing — mysteries which are everywhere acted out on the stage by the most splendid-voiced play-actors, who carry the very same matter over into their own plots, indeed teach with the very same plots, only changing the names. [Editorial note: those who do not know God, and who are called philosophers —] these men gather up such things and, stitching together a kind of patchwork out of many and very poor scraps, have prepared for themselves a false surface with a subtle style of speech: putting forward what looks like a new teaching, only because it has now been substituted by a new art, but which is in fact old and useless, since it is stitched together from old doctrines that reek of ignorance of God and irreligion. Thales of Miletus [Editorial note: compare, on Thales in general, Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen; also compare Diogenes Laertius, and, closest to Irenaeus's own words, Zeller again] said that the beginning and origin of the universe was water. And to say water is the same as to say the Deep. The poet Homer, too, taught that Ocean was the origin of the gods, and Tethys their mother; and these are exactly what the heretics have transposed into their Bythos and Sige. Anaximander, again, laid down as the beginning of all things that which is boundless, holding within itself, as a kind of seed, the origin of all things, out of which he says innumerable worlds come to be; and this too they have transfigured into their Bythos and into their Aeons. [Anaximenes(?), badly damaged in the source] taught that living creatures came to be from seeds falling out of heaven onto the earth; and this very thing they have transposed into the seed of their Mother, saying that this seed is themselves. Straightaway they have also put together a great deal of talk, bordering on that of the philosophers, about the void and about atoms — terming the first thing "being" and naming the second, "what has no being." These men do likewise: they call whatever lies within the Pleroma "being," exactly as the philosophers term the atoms; while whatever lies outside the Pleroma they label "non-being," exactly as the philosophers term the void. So they have assigned themselves, in this world — since they are outside the Pleroma — to the place that is not! And what they say — that these things here are images of those things above — again plainly repeats the opinion of Democritus and of Plato. For Democritus was the first to say that many and various shapes, stamped from the totality of things, have come down into this world; whereas Plato, in turn, speaks of matter together with pattern and God as the source. These men, taking their cue from that, have called the shapes of that pattern "images of the things that are above," and, merely by changing the name, boast that they themselves are the inventors and makers of this fanciful fiction of images.
And as for their saying that the Fashioner made the world out of matter lying ready at hand — Anaxagoras, and Empedocles, and Plato before them, were the first to say this; for Plato, as is well known, held that there are three things — God, matter, and the forms of things, which he calls "ideas." [Editorial note: compare Aëtius, De placitis; Justin, Cohortatio] — it is plain to see that these men too were "inspired," as it were, by their own Mother. And as to their saying that this necessity was brought into being, and that God is a slave to this necessity, such that he cannot bestow immortality on what is mortal, nor incorruption on what is corruptible, but that each thing must withdraw into a substance akin to its own nature — this is affirmed also by those called Stoics, from the Porch, and by all in general who do not know God, both poets and writers of prose. These men, sharing the same unbelief, have assigned to spiritual beings their own region, that which is within the Pleroma; to animal (soul-possessing) beings, the middle region; and to material beings, that which is earthly — and beyond this they affirm that God can do nothing, but that each of the things named must withdraw to what is of its own substance.
And as to their saying that the Savior was made up out of all the Aeons, each one of them contributing to him as it were the flower of itself, this brings forward nothing new beyond Hesiod's Pandora. What Hesiod says of her, these men insinuate of the Savior, bringing him in as a kind of Pandora — as though each of the Aeons had bestowed upon him whatever best thing it possessed. As for their own indifferent view about foods and about other observances, and their belief that they can in no way be defiled at all, on account of their noble birth, whatever they eat or do — this they took over from the Cynics, since they share the same covenant with them in this respect. And their word-splitting and subtlety over questions, though it belongs to Aristotle, they try to smuggle into the faith. As to their wishing to reduce this whole universe into numbers, this they took over from the Pythagoreans, who were the earliest to lay down numbers as the origin of all things, and the beginning of the numbers themselves as the even and the odd, and from these they derived the things perceptible to sense and the things without sense. [Editorial note: compare Diels; on the Cynics compare Tatian; a like charge against Aristotle is brought by Justin, Cohortatio; how badly the Philosopher — i.e. Aristotle — was regarded in Irenaeus's own day, Hippolytus repeatedly attests, complaining, in language echoing Irenaeus, of the corrupt subtleties of eloquence brought into the Church.] — of these, they say, one kind are the beginnings of substance, the other of sensation and being; and out of these first principles they say all things are perfected, just as a statue is made out of bronze and out of its shaping. This is what they have fitted to those beings that are outside the Pleroma. And as the beginnings of sensation they named that in which the perceiving sense of what was first apprehended searches, until, grown weary, it comes together into the One and the Indivisible. And that the beginning of all things, and the substance of the whole generation, is the One, and the Five, and the manifold generation of the rest — this is exactly what they say, word for word, about the Fullness of their system and about Bythos; whence also they try to bring in, from the notion of the One, those conjunctions — which Marcus, as though it were his own discovery, boasting of it as something newer than the rest had found, set forth as Pythagoras's Tetrad, explaining it as the origin and mother of all things. We shall say to them, then: did all these men we have named, with whom you are shown to be saying the very same things, know the truth, or did they not know it? If indeed they did know it, then the Savior's descent into this world was superfluous. For why should he have come down? Was it in order to bring into the knowledge of men who already knew it, the truth that was already known? But if they did not know it, then, since you say the very same things as men who did not know the truth, on what ground do you boast that you alone possess the knowledge that is above all things — a knowledge which even those who do not know God likewise possess? By an inversion of terms, then, they call ignorance of the truth "knowledge" [gnosis]; and Paul rightly speaks of "the novelties of empty words... of knowledge falsely so called" [Editorial note: cf. 1 Tim. 6:20] — for their so-called knowledge has indeed been found to be false. But should they grow bolder still and claim, further, that mankind was in fact ignorant of the truth, while their Mother, working through such men, proclaimed truth's mysteries by way of the paternal seed, just as she did through the prophets, while the Demiurge remained ignorant — then, in the first place, the things thus foretold are not such as could not be understood by anyone at all: for the very men who spoke them knew what they were saying, as did their disciples and those who came after them. And further, if either the Mother or the seed knew and declared the things that belonged to the truth — the truth being the Father — then the Savior, according to them, must have lied when he said, "No one has known the Father except the Son." For if the Father was known either by the Mother or by her seed, then that saying, "No one has known the Father except the Son," is overturned — unless they mean to say that their own seed, or their Mother, is nobody! And so far, then, [Editorial note: on this whole matter compare Tertullian, De praescriptione; Ambrosiaster on 1 Corinthians and elsewhere; Augustine on 1 John, and other commentators] through human feelings and through saying things similar to what many who do not know God have said, they have plausibly seemed to draw certain persons away, luring them by means of the very things they were accustomed to, and thereby setting forth their account of the birth of the Word who is over all things — and still further, even Perceptions and Emissions of God acting as midwives to one another; but the things which they have invented out of these, without any likelihood or proof, are all lies drawn from other lies. Just as men who set out familiar food, in order to entice some animal to be caught, coax it gently with the food it is used to until it takes the bait — and then, once they have it in their power, bind it most bitterly and drag it off by force wherever they please — so too these men, by degrees taming their hearers, persuading them through plausible talk to accept the aforesaid emission, then bring in things that have neither fittingness nor any semblance of the other emissions imagined: from the Word and Life, they say, ten Aeons were emitted, and from Man and Church, twelve — and for none of these have they any proof, nor any testimony, nor any likelihood, nor anything at all of the sort, but idly and just as it happens, they name them: Paracletus and Faith, Patricus and Hope, Metricus and Love, Ainos and Understanding, Ecclesiasticus and Blessedness, Theletus and Wisdom.
As for the sufferings of this Sophia, and her error, and how she was in peril of perishing on account of her search for the Father, as they say, and her toil outside the Pleroma, and out of what kind of defect they teach that the Fashioner of the world was emitted — these we have set forth with all diligence in the book before this one, recounting the opinions of the heretics; and how Christ, whom they say was emitted after all these Aeons, and the Savior, had their being from those Aeons that came into existence out of the defect. We now, of necessity, call these names to mind again, so that, using them, we may show clearly just how absurd their falsehood is, and how muddled their invented terminology. For they themselves rob their own Aeons of dignity by such names, borrowing, from the pagans, plausible and credible-sounding names belonging to those called the twelve gods — whom they too wish to be images of the twelve Aeons — names that are far more fitting and more suggestive, in their derivation and their bearing, of divinity, than the names they themselves have given.