Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
HOW THEY EXPLAIN THE PARABLES Thus, joining together into one the generation of the Aeons, the straying of the sheep, and its recovery, those who reduce everything to numbers dare to proclaim it mystically, saying that all things consist of the monad and the duad; and counting upward from the monad through four, they thereby produce the decad. For one, two, three, and four, taken together, yield the number ten, the number of the Aeons. Again, the duad, proceeding from itself up to the episemon (the numeral-sign for six) -- that is, two, four, and six -- points to the duodecad. And again in like manner from the duad there arises that in which are the ogdoad, the decad, and the duodecad. They call the duodecad, because it has the episemon following upon it, "the passion," on account of the episemon. And for this reason, they say, when a certain defect occurred with respect to the number twelve, the wanton sheep went astray, since an apostasy took place from the duodecad. In like manner they declare that one power, departing from the duodecad, perished; and that this is the woman who lost the drachma, lit the lamp, and found it. So too the remaining numbers in the parable of the drachma generate the number ninety-nine, since nine times eleven makes ninety-nine. For which reason they also say that the word "Amen" contains this same number.
I shall not be too weary to relate to you also their other interpretation, so that you may see the fruit of their teaching from every side. For they hold that the letter Eta, together with the episemon, is the ogdoad, since it stands in the eighth place from Alpha; and again, reckoning the number of the letters themselves without the episemon, and adding them up as far as Eta, they show the triacontad, thirty. For if one begins from Alpha and ends at Eta, reckoning the number of the letters but removing the episemon, and then adding together the increasing value of the letters, he will find the number thirty. For up to the letter Epsilon the sum is fifteen; then, when the value belonging to the seventh letter is added to these, it makes twenty. And when Eta, which is the eighth, is added to these, it completes the wonderful triacontad. From this, they claim, it follows that the ogdoad mothers the whole company of thirty Aeons. Since, then, the number thirty is composed as a unity out of three powers, this same number multiplied three times makes ninety -- and here they bring in their sacred names and letter-symbols for God (the divine names rendered in Hebrew characters, now largely illegible in this copy). And this triad, multiplied by itself, produced nine. Thus the ogdoad produced the number ninety-nine. And because the twelfth Aeon, departing, left the region above, they say that, accordingly, the type of this is set forth in the shape of the letters of the Word: for the eleventh letter (that is, Lambda) has the value thirty, and is set forth as an image of the arrangement above; since, reckoning from Alpha without the episemon, the number of the letters, added together with their increasing values as far as this letter, makes the number ninety-nine. And that Lambda, standing eleventh in order, went down in search of its like, so as to complete the number one hundred, and, having found it, was made complete -- this, they say, is evident from the very shape of the letter. For Lambda, as it were coming in search of its like, finding it, and drawing it into itself, filled up the twelfth place, since the letter Mu is made up of two Lambdas. For this reason too, they say, in escaping by means of this knowledge to the ninety-ninth place -- that is, to the place of diminishment, the type of the left hand -- it was carried across into the right hand.
As you go through all this, my dearest friend, I know very well that you will laugh a great deal at such foolishness of theirs, so puffed up with its own supposed wisdom. Yet they deserve to be mourned, who set forth so great a religion of God, and the greatness of his truly ineffable power, and such great dispensations of God, by means of Alpha and Beta and numbers so cold and so violently forced. And as many as fall away from the Church and give their assent to these old wives' fables are truly condemned by their own selves -- the very ones whom Paul bids us to regard, marking off, as it were, the merely natural ("psychic") by the left hand and the spiritual by the right, as we have noted the usage elsewhere in both profane and sacred writers -- to avoid after a first and second admonition. For John, the Lord's disciple, extended condemnation of them even further, refusing to let us so much as say "Hail" to them: "For whoever bids them hail," he says, "shares in their most wicked works." And rightly so: for the Lord says, "There is no rejoicing for the ungodly." And these are impious beyond all impiety, who claim that he who fashioned sky and earth, the sole all-powerful God beside whom no other God exists, was himself produced out of a defect, a defect which in turn sprang from a prior defect -- with the result, on their account, that he now stands forth as the offspring of a third defect. This opinion we must justly spit upon and utterly condemn, and we ought to flee far away from such people; and the more they insist upon these things and delight in their own inventions, the more we should recognize that they are all the more agitated by the most wicked spirits of the ogdoad. (Here the manuscript preserves, badly damaged, a Greek phrase repeating the same charge: that he who made sky and earth, God alone and all-powerful, grants the impious "no peace" -- interpreted by them as sprung from Enthymesis and from Sophia, whom they also call "she who is to be called neither peace nor salvation": this very defect, they say, belongs to the Pleroma.) Just as those who have fallen into a fit of frenzy sometimes laugh all the more, and think themselves well, and do everything as though they were sane -- indeed, as though more than sane -- the worse off they in fact are; so too these men: the more they are thought to be wise, the more, in enervating themselves and shooting beyond the mark, they show that they are not wise at all. For the unclean spirit of ignorance, going out, and then finding them empty -- given over not to God but to worldly questions -- takes to itself seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and, making their thinking foolish, as though they could discover the things that are above God, has fittingly, in a scheme designed for their exclusion, deposited in them an ogdoad of the most wicked spirits of ignorance.