Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Let us next look over the remainder too — the arrangement of their fullness, and above all what touches on the first eightfold set — matters riddled with contradiction and difficulty, given how senseless they are, even while we probe things that have no real existence; yet we undertake this out of necessity, both since the task has been laid upon us as our charge, and since we desire that everyone should arrive at a true grasp of the matter, and since you yourself requested from us many varied grounds for their overthrow.
The question, then, is by what manner the remaining Aeons came to be emitted. Were they joined to their emitter the way sunbeams stay joined to the sun; or did each come forth actively and on its own, existing apart and bearing its own distinct form, the way a man begets a man, and a beast a beast? Or perhaps by sprouting, the way branches grow out from a tree? And did they possess a substance unlike his own? And did their emission happen all together, making them equal in age to each other; or did it unfold in stages, with some coming earlier and others later? And were they sent forth plain and uniform, alike and equal to one another in every respect, in the manner spirits and lights are emitted; or composite and varied, differing among themselves in their parts?
But if indeed each of them was emitted effectively and according to its own generation, after the likeness of men, then either the generations of the Father will be of the same substance as him and similar to their begetter, or they will appear dissimilar, and one must confess that they are of some other substance. And if they are generations of the Father similar to the one who emitted them, then the things that were emitted will remain impassible, just as the one who emitted them; but if they are of some other substance, one capable of passions, whence comes this dissimilar substance within that Pleroma of incorruption? Moreover, according to this reasoning each of them will be understood as separately divided from the other, as men are, not mixed or united one with another, but each of them shaped in a discrete form and a bounded outline, and in a definite quantity of magnitude — things which are proper to a body, and not to spirit. They can no longer, then, call it a spiritual Pleroma, nor call themselves spiritual, if, like men, they each have their own proper and separate shape.
But if, as light kindled from light, the Aeons were emitted from the Logos, and the Logos from Nous, and Nous from Bythos — as, for example, torch from torch — then, though they may perhaps differ from one another in generation and in magnitude, yet since they are of the same substance as the source of their emission, either they all remain impassible, or their Father too will share in their passions. For the torch that was kindled later has no other light than that which was in the one before it. Wherefore also their lights, when brought together into one, run back into their original union, so that there becomes one light which existed from the beginning. And which one is younger and which older cannot be discerned either in the light itself (for it is one whole light) nor in the torches themselves that received the light (for they, according to the substance of their material, share one and the same time, since the material of the torches is one and the same); but only in respect of kindling, because one was kindled a little before, and another only now. The blemish, then, of the passion that comes through ignorance will either come upon their whole Pleroma equally, since they are of the same substance, and the Forefather himself will be involved in the blemish of ignorance — that is, ignorant of himself; or else all the lights within the Pleroma will remain equally impassible. Whence, then, does passion come upon the younger Aeon, if the paternal light, from which all the lights were established, is by nature impassible? And how can any of the Aeons be called younger or older, when the whole Pleroma is one light? And if anyone should call them stars, they will nonetheless appear to share the same nature throughout. For if a star differs from a star in brightness, but not in quality nor in substance — the substance according to which a thing is either passible or impassible — then either all of them, since they are of the paternal light, must by nature be impassible and immutable; or all of them, together with the paternal light, are passible and capable of change and corruption.
The identical reasoning applies even should they claim that the Aeons' emission sprang from the Logos as branches sprout from a tree, given that the Logos derives his own begetting from their Father: for every one of them proves to share the Father's substance, varying from each other solely in size, not in kind, and rounding out the Father's magnitude, much as fingers round out a hand. If, then, the Father lies open to passion and ignorance, then necessarily so do those Aeons begotten out of him. Yet if it is irreverent to pin ignorance and passion on the Father over all, how can they claim an Aeon liable to passion issued from him — and, pinning that same irreverence on God's own Sophia, how will they claim to be pious themselves? But should they instead claim the Aeons issued as rays do from the sun, since all share one substance and one origin, then either every one of them shares in passion alongside their emitter, or every one stays free of passion. They cannot, from such an emission, admit some are free of passion while others are liable to it. If, then, they claim all are free of passion, they collapse their own case. For how could the lesser Aeon suffer, if none were liable to passion? But if they claim all took part in this passion — as some venture to say, that it truly originated with the Logos, yet its transmission traced back to the Mind of the Forefather — then, by tracing the passion back that far, they end up admitting that both the Forefather's Mind and the Father himself were caught up in passion. For the Father is not, like some composite creature, distinct from Nous — as we showed earlier, Nous and the Father are one and the same, each truly being the other. It follows, then, that the one who is Logos issuing from him — or instead, that very Nous, seeing he is also Logos — must be complete and untouched by passion; and that what is emitted from him, sharing his very substance, must likewise be complete and untouched by passion, forever resembling the one who sent it forth.
Demonstration that the Logos was not put forth in a diminished state. The Logos, then, was not, as though he held some third rank in the order of generation, kept ignorant of the Father, as these men teach — a notion which might perhaps sound plausible where the begetting of men is concerned, since men often fail to recognize their own parents; but where the Father's own Logos is concerned, it is wholly unthinkable. For since he exists within the Father, he is acquainted with the one in whom he dwells — that is, he does not lack self-knowledge — and so the emissions issuing from him, being his powers and forever attending him, will not lack knowledge of their emitter, no more than a ray lacks knowledge of the sun. God's Sophia, then, the one dwelling within the Pleroma, being of such an emission — called, as they term him, the Only-begotten of the Forefather's Nous — cannot be imagined to have collapsed through passion and conceived ignorance of this sort. It is the Wisdom of Valentinus, however, being of the devil's own emission, who is capable of collapsing wholly into passion and yielding the depth of ignorance as her fruit. For since they themselves testify about their own mother, calling her the offspring of an Aeon gone astray, there is no further need to ask why the offspring of such a mother forever wallow in the depths of ignorance. Apart from these emissions, I myself can no longer make out what other sort they might name; nor, despite our long and thorough dispute with them on such points, have they ever been caught offering any further distinguishing mark of an emission — they say only this much, that each was sent forth, and that each recognized solely his own emitter, remaining ignorant of the one before that — yet they never go on to demonstrate the manner of their sending forth, or how such a thing could occur among spiritual beings. For wherever they turn, they will be caught out, exposed as blind to sound reasoning about the truth, to the point of asserting that the Word, sent forth from their Forefather's Nous, was sent forth in a diminished condition. For Nous, they claim, though perfect and begotten of the perfect Bythos, was nonetheless powerless to render his own emission perfect, but instead blind regarding the Father's greatness and understanding; and they claim the Savior signified this mystery through the man born blind, since the Word had likewise been sent forth blind out of the Only-begotten Aeon — that is, in ignorance — thereby inventing ignorance and blindness to lay against the Word of God, who, on their account, holds second place among the emissions from the Forefather. Remarkable sophists indeed, probing the depths of an unknown Father and narrating the heavenly secrets the angels themselves long to glimpse, only to conclude that the Word, sent forth out of the Nous belonging to that Father who surpasses all, was sent forth blind — that is, without knowledge of the very Father who emitted him! And how, you supremely empty sophists, could that Father's Nous — or rather the Father in his own person, seeing that he is Nous, complete in every respect — have sent forth his Logos as a flawed and sightless Aeon, when he might just as easily have sent forth along with him full knowledge of the Father? For just as you claim Christ, though born later than the rest, was sent forth complete, how much more, then, ought the Logos, senior to him in age, have been sent forth complete by that same Nous, and not sightless — nor would he, in turn, have sent forth Aeons even more sightless than himself, until at last your Sophia, kept perpetually sightless, produced so vast a store of evils. How, according to the heretics, the Father is the cause of this evil. And it is your own Father who bears the blame for this wickedness: you claim the immensity and might of the Father are what cause the ignorance, comparing him to Bythos and pinning that name on the Father none may name. But if ignorance counts as an evil, and you hold that every evil sprouted from it, and you claim its cause lies in the Father's immensity and might, then you make him out to be the crafter of evils. For you claim the evil's cause is simply that he could not be beheld, owing to his vastness. Yet if it truly lay beyond the Father's power to reveal himself at the outset to those he had made, he stands blameless, powerless as he was to lift the ignorance weighing on those who followed him. But supposing that later — once that ignorance, having swelled alongside the unfolding emissions, had taken root among the Aeons — he proved able to lift it, through Jesus, the Pleroma's flawless fruit, its loveliest adornment and star, then all the more, had he willed it earlier, he could, by refusing that ignorance any chance to exist, have kept it from ever arising. Given, then, that he made himself known once he chose to — not merely to the Aeons but also to those men living in the last age — and given that, refusing to reveal himself at the outset, he stayed hidden, it follows on your own premises that the ignorance's cause is nothing but the Father's own choosing. For had he foreseen that matters would unfold this way, why did he not, before they occurred, sever their ignorance at the root, rather than treating it afterward as though repenting, through Christ's emission? For the knowledge he conveyed to everyone through Christ, he might have conveyed far sooner through the Logos, who was likewise the firstborn Only-begotten. Or if, foreseeing it, he chose that these things happen, then ignorance's works endure without end and never perish. For whatever was made according to your Forefather's choosing must persist alongside the choosing of the one who chose it; or if such things do perish, then his choosing too must perish along with them — the very choosing by which he willed them into being. For why, once instructed, did the Aeons find their rest and gain flawless understanding, namely that the Father cannot be grasped or comprehended? They might have possessed this understanding before ever falling into their passions: for the Father's immensity suffered no diminishment among those who understood from the outset that he cannot be grasped or comprehended. For if he went unknown on account of his boundless immensity, then on account of his boundless love he ought to have preserved those born of him free from passion from the very start; nothing stood in the way of it, and it would rather have served them better to have understood from the outset that the Father cannot be grasped or comprehended.