Irenaeus

160 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy

and besides me there is no other,” but this is only because he is not very bright, and is
unaware that the better quality aspects of creation are actually the work of his mother.^8
Second, earthly women are not the ones who have created the theological problem.
Eve, in transgressing Ialdabaoth’s (the creator God’s) commandment, is the victim of
a divine power-struggle between Ialdabaoth and his mother, and although her action
has immediately unpleasant consequences (in this version of the myth), the fruit that
she persuades Adam to eat teaches them both to know the Power who is above all
things.^9 Thirdly, women can hold positions of power in the Gnostic churches, at least
among the group that is led by Irenaeus’s contemporary Marcus. Women are called on
to give thanks over the mixed cup, and to prophesy.^10
But it is just as easy to argue that this Gnostic news is not as good for women as it
seems. The highest God of all the aeons is still, after all, male.^11 The evils of the world
are still caused, ultimately, by a female—the youngest aeon, Sophia, who conceives an
unrealistic desire to know the highest aeon.^12 And, if there is any truth in Irenaeus’s
account, Marcus and perhaps also his associates traded in sexual and financial exploi-
tation in return for his attentions to women.^13
I will leave more detailed discussion of Gnostic views of gender, of the female and
of women to Gnosticism scholars. For the remainder of this paper, I want to look at
how Irenaeus responds to the three areas of implicit appeal to women I have identified
in Gnosticism as he presents it: feminine images of the divine, the theological exculpa-
tion of Eve, and female ministry in the church.
All that Irenaeus is prepared to say about the Divine comes from the tradition he
believes himself to have received: the books of scripture from the old and new dispen-
sations which he regards as authoritative, and the straight edge represented by the Rule
of Truth which teaches him how to adjust the sayings of scripture against one another.
The straight edge, given to Christians at baptism, is belief in one God, Father almighty,
and in one Jesus Christ the Son of God (I.3.6); the Holy Spirit is included in other
versions of the Rule which Irenaeus uses. On the basis of this, he allows two feminine
principles room in his theology: Wisdom and the church.
Wisdom (Sophia), of course, is a key term in the thought of Irenaeus’s opponents.
In Ptolemy’s thought, she is the youngest of the thirty aeons, the one who triggers the
events leading to creation. For this reason, there is perhaps a certain nervousness in
Irenaeus’s handling of this figure. But Wisdom takes part in or assists at creation in
a number of Old Covenant writings, and as such Irenaeus accepts her as part of the
tradition. According to his straight edge, she must be identifiable either with Father
or Son or Holy Spirit. Other theologians would identify her with the Son, the Word of
God; Irenaeus identifies her with the Holy Spirit.^14
The Holy Spirit would be grammatically feminine in Hebrew or Syriac, but in Ire-
naeus’s own Greek she is neuter, and in the Latin of the city where he lives, masculine.
Mostly, he keeps to the term Spirit, or Holy Spirit, rather than Wisdom (or, indeed,
Paraclete), except where drawing specifically on the Old Covenant scripture passages
that use the term Wisdom, and he does nothing to develop any feminine quality in
speaking either of Wisdom or the Holy Spirit. But God the Father is meanwhile often
described in terms reminiscent of a mother, nourishing newly made humanity, caring