P. Parvis—Who Was Irenaeus: An Introduction to the Man and His Work 17quasi-historical account—rather than as a poetic and indirect reflection on the nature
of ultimate reality. That is in essence what Irenaeus does, and does very effectively. He
begins his great refutation of the heresies with the version of gnostic myth associated
with the school of Ptolemy, which was a spin-off of the highly influential system of Val-
entinian Gnosticism (Hae r. I.1.1—8.5). There are, according to Ptolemy, thirty “aeons”
that are at once separable cosmic entities and aspects of the fullness of divine being. As
separable entities, they are arranged in quasi-sexual pairs and cascade down hierarchi-
cally from Bythos (“depth” or “abyss”) at the top to Sophia (“Wisdom”) at the bottom
and as such play their various roles in the great drama of a pre-cosmic fall that leads
to the tragic creation of our material world and the fragmentation and differentiation
of spiritual being. But as aspects of divine reality, they together constitute the pleroma
(“fullness”) of divine being and each expresses or represents a facet of that mysterious
and transcendent reality.
Irenaeus provides massive philosophical and scriptural refutation of the Gnostic
myths, though he is also convinced that merely setting out their content will expose
them as self-evident nonsense. And he can enjoy himself in the process, as when he
parodies portentous-sounding Valentinian terminology with a myth of his own—the
myth of the great primal aeon Gourd—inevitably reminiscent, for devotees of the car-
toon strip Peanuts, of the Great Pumpkin whose return each Halloween was awaited
so faithfully by Linus. In any event, Gourd with his companion Super Emptiness emits
Cucumber and Melon, from whom all the lower melons descend. “If,” Irenaeus asks
tartly, “it’s right to postulate names however you please, what’s to stop us from using
words”—like Gourd, Cucumber, and Melon—“that are far more plausible and actually
in use and understood by everybody?” (Hae r. I.11.4).
It is effective rhetoric and, as Irenaeus gets his teeth into parodying Valentinian
language, actually quite funny. But a Valentinian would scarcely recognize it as getting
at what he was in fact trying to say.
The problem is that the gnosis to which gnostics lay claim is really something much
more like “insight” than simple factual or quasi-factual knowledge. The Gnostic came
to an epiphanic understanding of his or her place in the grand scheme of things—a
spark of the divine trapped in a material body in a material world that is both distaste-
ful and ultimately meaningless and without purpose. It is a view of reality for the radi-
cally alienated, and it should perhaps occasion little surprise that it came to appeal to
so many of the lonely and frightened men and women of the rapidly growing cities of
the second century of our era.The Writings of Irenaeus
Eusebius enumerates eight works of Irenaeus and quotes excerpts from four of them.
(There is an annotated list—The Writings of Irenaeus—at the beginning of this vol-
ume.) Only two have come down to us and neither in the original Greek. His mag-
num opus, in five books, which we call Against the Heresies and which he called
Refutation and Overthrow of Falsely-Named Knowledge, survives as a whole only in
an ancient Latin version,^17 and even that is not quite complete. There are extensive
fragments in Greek and Armenian, and the whole of books IV and V is preserved in