Irenaeus

138 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy

is why Irenaeus continues with the Lord Jesus Christ as the Word made flesh. That very

Word gave the prophets the power to foretell the whole plan of God by which we might

“serve him in holiness and justice all our days” (Luke 1:75).

Irenaeus continues in haer. IV.20.5 in the direction suggested by his mention of the

prophets, where he notes that

the prophets foretold that God would be seen by human beings—as the Lord

said, “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). But

according to his greatness [magnitudinem] and inexpressible glory, “no one will

see God, and live.” For the Father cannot be contained. But according to love

[dilectionem] and humanity,^21 and because he can do all things, to those who

love him he grants even this, namely, to see God, which is what the prophets

prophesied, because “things impossible to human beings are possible to God.”

A human being cannot see God on its own. But he voluntarily will be visible to

human beings, to whom he wills and when he wills and how he wills.

This is not merely knowledge that there is a divine creator, but something much
more generous: a way to see this God. Not only a way to see God and live—which
the prophets said was impossible to human beings—but a complete inversion of their
warning: where before, no one could see God and live, now, the vision of God is life for
human beings^22 (haer. IV.20.7). The vision of God which is metaphysically impossible
secundum magnitudinem, and which the prophets themselves (who could see better
than most) warned would be fatal if by any chance it occurred, is granted secundum
dilectionem; and dilectio here refers not just to God’s benevolent love for people but the
love with which people love God back, a relationship of love. A completely new range of
possibilities arises in the heart of love, possibilities inconceivable in the realm of meta-
physics. This knowledge in and according to love is, for Irenaeus, the true knowledge
of God, the true Gnosis, and it is the church people who know about it and live by it.
Let us return to what Irenaeus tells us about the Gnostic Pleroma and the unfor-
tunate Sophia. Back in haer. II.6.1, Irenaeus had questioned how, in the hypothetical
spiritual Pleroma, God could have remained unknown: “He could indeed be invis-
ible to them according to eminence [eminentiam], but hardly unknown, on account
of providence [providentiam].” Like many of Irenaeus’s remarks in Book Two, this one
has an ironic edge; while the other Aeons ahould have had some sense of the invisible
Father from the order of their Pleroma, that order was not planned out well enough so
as to forestall the fall of Sophia. This is not exactly our dialectic of greatness and love,
but it resembles it in form and may be how Irenaeus could describe that dialectic when
love is not available.
Early in his exposition of Gnostic doctrines (haer. I.2.1-2), Irenaeus says that Mind
(or Nous), who alone knew the Father, wanted to “communicate the Father’s greatness”
to the rest.

But at the Father’s wish, Silence restrained him, because she wanted them all

to rise to a notion and a desire of seeking their aforesaid Propator. And indeed