Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Chapter 26. Demonstration that it is by love that one is built up. It is therefore better and more useful to be like the simple and unlearned, who, by knowing little, do not come close to God through love — rather than, by seeming learned and experienced in many things, to be found blaspheming against one's own Lord, fabricating another God as Father. And for this reason Paul cried out: Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Not that he was condemning true knowledge of God — for otherwise he would have accused himself first — but because he knew that certain people, puffed up on the pretext of knowledge, drift away from loving God, and on that basis imagine themselves perfect while putting forward an imperfect Demiurge; cutting off their arrogance arising from such knowledge, he said: Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Now there is no greater puffing-up than for someone to suppose himself better and more perfect than the one who made him, and formed him, and gave him the breath of life, and granted him this very existence. It is better, then, as I have said before, for someone to know nothing at all — not even a single reason why any one of the things that were made was made — and yet to believe in God and to remain in love toward him, than to be puffed up through such knowledge and to drift from the love that gives man life; and to seek no other object of knowledge than Christ Jesus, God's own Son, who suffered crucifixion on our behalf, rather than falling into impiety through the subtleties and trivialities of endless questioning.
For what if someone, puffed up a little by these efforts, because the Lord declared that every single hair upon your head has been counted, should wish to pry curiously into the tally of hairs on each person's head, and to hunt for the reason why this man carries so many and that man so many, since people do not all share one identical total, but countless thousands of differing counts turn up, because some have larger heads and others smaller, and some always have thick hair while others have thin, and still others very little hair at all — let those who think they have discovered the number of hairs make the attempt. Or again, if someone, because the Gospel says, Do two little sparrows not go for a single coin? yet not a single one of them drops to earth apart from your Father's consent, should wish on this account to count up all the sparrows caught everywhere every day, in every region, and to seek the reason why yesterday so many were caught, the day before so many, and today so many again, and should attach the number of sparrows to his argument — does he not utterly deceive himself, and drive those who agree with him into great madness, since people are always ready to think that in such matters they have discovered something beyond what even their teachers found?
But what if someone should ask us whether the whole number of everything that has been made and that is being made is known to God, and whether each of these things has received, according to his providence, the quantity proper to itself; and if we agree and confess that absolutely nothing among things already made, things now being made, and things still to come is hidden from God's knowledge, but that each thing has received and receives, through his providence, its own condition, order, number, and quantity, and that nothing at all has been made or is being made pointlessly or merely as it happens, but with great fitness and lofty awareness, and that there is an admirable and truly divine reasoning able to discern such things and to declare their proper causes — then, having received from us this testimony and agreement, suppose he proceeds to count the grains of sand and the pebbles of the earth, and the billows of the ocean, and the stars strewn across heaven, and to devise causes for the number he supposes he has found? Will he not justly be declared, by all who have sense, to be laboring in vain, and to be a raving and irrational man? And the more he occupies himself with such questions beyond others, and the more he supposes himself to have discovered more than others — calling the rest ignorant, unlearned, and merely animal because they will not take up his vain labor — the more insane and stupid he is, as if struck by a thunderbolt, yielding nothing to God, but through the knowledge he supposes himself to have found, changing God himself, and hurling his own opinion against the greatness of the Maker.