Slusser—The Heart of Irenaeus’s Theology 139
the rest of the Aeons likewise silently yearned to see the ultimate source of their
seed and to know their root that has no beginning.But the last and youngest Aeon of the Dodecad that was emitted by Man and
Church, namely, Wisdom, was much more impetuous and suffered passion
without being joined with her partner Theletos. This [passion] started among
those around Mind and Truth but ended up with this misled [Aeon], allegedly
out of love but really audacity, on account of not being able to have fellowship
with the perfect Father, as Mind does. The passion was searching for the Father,
for she wanted (they say) to comprehend his greatness [magnitudinem]. Then
she was unable, because the deed was impossible, and was in very great anguish
on account of the greatness of the abyss, and the Father’s untraceability, and her
affection [στοργήν] for him.The account goes on, but I shall pause here, because the factors most relevant
to the argument of this paper are in what I have quoted. The Father’s greatness and
height and incomprehensibility are certainly there, but the closest thing to love lies
in Wisdom’s daring but doomed desire to know God. Her ambition may have been
noble in its way, but it all goes for naught, because the Gnostic Father has great-
ness but no love. As Irenaeus charges in haer. II.17.10, the Gnostics have made the
Father’s greatness and power the cause of the ignorance of the rest of the Aeons, and
hence the author of evils.
Observe Irenaeus’s strategy in attacking the Gnostic view of things. He does not
say that they are wrong about the transcendence of the true, the high God; on the
contrary, he exalts that transcendence in language like theirs. The Gnostics cannot
claim to proclaim a higher, purer divinity than the church people have. But Irenaeus
insists that those attributes of transcendence apply to the creator Demiurge, who is
therefore the high God, and no divinity beyond the creator can be posited that would
be still more transcendent. On the transcendence of the creator versus the transcen-
dence of the Pleroma, that is, on God’s magnitudo, church people and Gnostics play
to a draw. The reason why the church people outstrip the Gnostics in their knowl-
edge of God is that they know that God is also loving and recognize and believe the
works of that love.
All the rest of Irenaeus’s wonderful theology, whether he came up with it him-
self, learned it from Justin, or came by it some other way, makes its full sense only in
terms of this overarching vision. Knowledge of the creator God is possible to ordinary
creatures, not because the creator is a puny, less than spiritual being, but because the
immeasurably great creator God loves everything in creation and therefore gives that
knowledge even to us human beings through the Word made flesh and the Spirit of
wisdom, according to the measure of the divine love.