Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
THAT IT IS NOT CREDIBLE THAT THE THINGS HERE ARE THE SHADOW OF THEIR PLEROMA. If they say that these things here are the shadow of the things above — as some of them venture to claim — so that in this sense they are images, it will then be necessary for them also to confess that the things above are bodies. For it is bodies that cast a shadow, not things that are spiritual, since nothing spiritual can be darkened by anything. But even if we grant them this — which is indeed impossible — that spiritual and luminous things can cast a shadow, into which they say their mother descended, still, since those things are eternal, the shadow produced from them would likewise remain everlasting, and the things here would not pass away but would remain together with the things that cast the shadow upon them. But if the things here do pass away, then those things too, of which these are the shadow, must necessarily pass away as well; whereas if those things remain, their shadow also remains.
But if they say it is called a shadow not because it is overshadowed by something, but because it is far separated from those things, then they thereby accuse the smallness and weakness of their paternal light — as though it did not reach as far as these things, but failed to fill up what is empty and to dissolve the shadow, even though nothing hinders it from doing so. For, according to them, their paternal light will be turned into darkness and blinded, and will fail in these places of emptiness, since it lacks the power to fill up the universe entire. So let them stop claiming, then, that their Bythos is the Pleroma, the fullness, of all things, since he has neither filled up nor illuminated that which is empty and shadow; or else let them abandon the notion of shadow and emptiness altogether, since their paternal light fills all things.
Therefore nothing can exist outside the first Father — that is, the God who is above all things, or the Pleroma — into which they say the Aeon who suffered the passion of Enthymesis (Thought) descended, in such a way that it would be bounded and circumscribed by something outside itself, and the Pleroma itself, or the first God, would thereby be contained. Nor can there be a void, or a shadow to receive it, since the Father already exists before it, lest his light should fail and be bounded within a void. It is unreasonable, indeed impious, to invent a place where the one whom they call Forefather and First-Beginning, the Father of all things and of this Pleroma, reaches its limit and comes to a close. Nor, moreover, is it permitted to claim that within the Father's own bosom some other being fashioned so vast a creation, whether with his consent or without it, for the reasons already given. For it is equally impious and senseless to say that so vast a creation was fashioned by angels, or by some emanation ignorant of the true God, working within the things that belong to him; nor is it possible that things earthly and material came to be beneath their Pleroma, since the whole of it is spiritual; nor even on their own showing — since they say the Aeons are few, of like form, and one — is it possible that things of manifold and mutually contrary constitution should have come to be from them. [Here the source text is joined by a run of editorial apparatus — a note on the recurring sense of 'emanation' elsewhere in the work, and a gloss suggesting the phrase 'the Father already existed before' means rather that the Father is too strong to fail — which cannot be rendered as continuous prose and is passed over.] THAT THEIR SHADOW AND VOID ARE SHOWN TO BE FALSE. But their talk of the shadow of the Cenoma (that is, of the Void) has proved false in every respect. Thus the void has been shown to be their invention, and their doctrine unstable; and as for the void, those who attend to it are truly caught in...