Faith and Gnosis
Faith and Gnosis
If God is unbounded being, the world cannot be something that ‘fell’ from Him to be outside Him. And if He is the perfection of self-possessed freedom, the world cannot be a natural ‘emanation’ from His being. The Gnostics tried to explain the origin of the world, the origin of matter, in terms of a series of transitions between the Groundless One and us. Christianity replaced this with the idea of the creature’s direct relationship, stark yet serene, with the eternal God. We cannot distance ourselves from Him, nor can the existence of creation be ‘derived’ from anywhere or be explained as necessary.
Now if the world is in God, it is impossible for Him to be absolutely hidden from it. Creatureliness, by its very boundaries and limitedness, reveals the existence of Him who is Creator and Lord. But this ‘knowledge’ of His existence demands of the creature the fundamental act of faith, that is to say, a humble, trusting, free submission to the Lord who eludes every attempt at capture.
Gnosticism refuses to make this fundamental act. It wants to get to know all of God’s mysteries by its own powers. However surprising it may seem, it does appeal to the Scriptures, and so it is forced to posit a secret tradition, coming down from Jesus and the apostles, alongside the official proclamation of God for the simple. However, the attempt to take hold of God by force inevitably falls into the ‘void’ (the supreme God is, of course, mere ‘silence’ beyond the Word of revelation), and so the struggle of the ‘eternal quest’ is prized more highly than the bliss of discovery.
Irenaeus shows the secret wisdom of his opponents to be nothing but arrogance and folly, and convicts it of contradiction. This contradiction, which makes Gnosticism the forerunner of later ‘dialectical’ thought, is resolved in Christianity in the fundamental relationship of analogy between God and the world. Man, composed of body and soul, is made in the ‘image and likeness of God’, who towers above him in (greater) unlikeness.
The world is in God
(38) They must admit that the Father is a ‘void’, or that everything within Him equally partakes in the Father. It is like making circles, or round or square figures, in water; they will all equally partake of water. Or again, shapes formed in the air necessarily partake of air; those formed in light, of light. The same must be true of the Aeons within the Father; they must all partake of the Father, ignorance having no place among them. What else can be meant by partaking of the Father who fills all things? If He really fills all things, there can be no room for ignorance.
This demolishes their whole theory of the ‘work of degeneracy’, about the production of matter and the rest of the world’s creation being due essentially to passion and ignorance. If, on the other hand, they admit that their Father is a void, they fall into the greatest blasphemy; they deny His spiritual nature. For how can He be a spiritual being, if He cannot fill even the things within Him?
II 13, 7
(39) We were created along with those things contained by Him. It is He of whom Scripture says, ‘And God formed man, taking clay of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life’ (cf Gen 2:7). It was not angels, then, who made or formed us. Angels could not make an image of God, nor could some ‘power’ remotely distant from the Father of all, nor could anyone except the true God. Nor did God need any of these to carry out what He had decided beforehand within Himself should be done. As if He did not have His hands! For the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, were always with Him. Through Them and in Them He freely and spontaneously created all things.
IV 20, 1
(40) ‘From the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, my name will be glorified among the Gentiles’ (Mal 1:10) . . . Now what other name is glorified among the Gentiles than that of Our Lord, by whom the Father is glorified, and man is glorified? He calls it His own name, because it is His own Son’s name, and man was made by Him. If a king painted a picture of his son, he would be right to call it his own for two reasons: first, because it is a picture of his son, and secondly, because he himself painted it.
IV 17, 6
(41) How could either the angels or the ‘Maker of the World’ [of the Gnostics] have been ignorant of the supreme God, seeing that they were His property and His creatures, and were contained by Him? He may have been invisible to them because of His supereminence, but because of His providence, by no means could He have been unknown to them. By descent, they may have been, as the heretics say, very far from Him, but since His sovereignty extended over all, they ought to have known their Sovereign, and this above all they should have seen: that He who created them is Lord of all. For God, invisible by nature, is mighty, and confers on all a great mental intuition and perception of His most mighty, yes, almighty greatness. Therefore, though ‘no one knows the Father except the Son, nor the Son except the Father, and those to whom the Son has revealed Him’ (cf Matt 11:27), yet all beings know this fact at least, because reason, implanted in their minds, moves them, and reveals to them that there is one God, the Lord of all.
Consequently, all things are subject to the name of Him who is the Most High and Almighty. By calling upon Him, even before the coming of Our Lord, men were saved from evil spirits, from all demons, and from every apostate power. I do not mean that these earthly spirits or demons had seen Him, but they did know of the existence of Him who is God over all, at whose invocation they trembled, as does all creation.
II 6, 1-2
(42) Creation shows its Creator, and what is made suggests its Maker.
II 9, 1
The knowledge of God as faith in God
(43) What is He like? How great is He? Since He who ‘works all in all’ (cf 1 Cor 12:6) is God, He is invisible and inexpressible to all He has made, but by no means unknown. For all creatures learn from His Word that there is one God and Father, who contains all things in Himself and grants existence to all, as it says in the Gospel: ‘No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made Him known’ (John 1:18).
(44) To give the impression that they can explain the origin of matter, [the Gnostics] have collected a multitude of vain discourses, thereby proving their unbelief. They do not believe that, as He willed, God out of nothing created all things that they might exist (cf Wisd 1:14), using as ‘matter’ only His will and power. They do not believe in what really exists, and have fallen into belief in what does not exist.
II 10, 2
(45) All those who hoped in Him believed in Him, all those, that is, who had foretold His coming and served His saving plans.
IV 27, 2
(46) To believe in Him is to do His will . . . Through the Word made visible and palpable, the Father was revealed. And though all did not in the same way believe, they nonetheless saw the Father in the Son. . . All see and speak of the Son and the Father, but not all believe.
IV 6, 5-6
(47) Not only in works, but also in faith, God has safeguarded the freedom and self-determination of man.
IV 37, 5
The arrogance of Gnosticism
Their ridiculous theory of creation
(48) They tell us that moist substance proceeded from the tears of Achamoth, lucid substance from her smile, solid substance from her sadness, mobile substance from her fear. Here, they say, puffing themselves up, is the highest wisdom. In fact, it deserves nothing but contempt; it is truly ridiculous. Ignorant of the power of a spiritual and divine substance, they do not believe that God, who is mighty and rich in all things, created matter. Instead, they believe that their ‘Mother’, whom they call ‘woman from woman’, produced the vast matter of creation out of the passions mentioned above! They ask where the Maker obtained the matter of creation. But they do not ask where their ‘Mother’ of theirs . . . obtained all those tears, all that sweat and sadness, and all the other material things she emitted!
But to ascribe the reality of created things to the power and will of the God of all is credible, acceptable, and coherent. It can rightly be said: ‘What is impossible with men is possible with God’ (Luke 18:27). Men cannot make anything out of nothing, but only out of already existing matter. God, however, is superior to men, because He calls into being the matter of His creation when previously it did not exist.
II 10, 3-4
The presumption of absolute knowledge
(49) [The Gnostic] regards himself as greater and of higher authority than the prophetic spirit, though he is but a man.
I 13, 4
(50) They explain the birth of God’s Word, of Him who is Truth and Life, indeed Intellect; they act as midwife to the emanations from the Godhead.
II 14, 8
(51) We who still live on earth do not yet sit beside God’s throne . . . As long as we are on earth, as St. Paul says, ‘we know in part and prophesy in part’ (cf 1 Cor 13:9). If, then, we only know in part, we ought to leave all difficult questions to Him who in part gives us His grace. . . In trying to investigate things which are above us and at present beyond our reach, we become so arrogant that we treat God like a book to be opened and act as if we had already found the unfindable. We talk stupidly about emanations and claim that God, the Maker of all things, derived His substance from ‘degeneration’ and ‘ignorance’, thereby using a godless argument against God.
II 28, 7
(52) Perfect redemption, they say, is knowledge of the unspeakable majesty.
I 21, 4
(53) [Like the Jews] they claim to observe more than is prescribed, as if they preferred their own zeal to God Himself.
IV 11, 4
(54) But we are not more zealous than God, and we cannot be above the Master.
IV 31, 1
(55) If they are superior to Him, their deeds should prove it!. . . The words of Scripture, ‘Seek and you will find’ (Matt 7:7), were spoken, according to their interpretation, so that they should find themselves to be superior to the Maker of the world. They say that they are greater and better than God, calling themselves ‘pneumatic’, spiritual, and the Maker of the world ‘psychic’, animal. For this reason, they say, [at the end of time] they will rise above God and enter the Pleroma, while God remains in the intermediate place. So, then, let them prove by their works that they are superior to the Creator! . . .
However, the Maker of the world is the Spirit of God and not a ‘psychic’ being, otherwise He would never have created spiritual things. If He is ‘psychic’, let the heretics tell us who made spiritual things. They have no proof to show that this was done by the conception of their ‘Mother’, which is what they say they are. Far from being able to produce a spiritual entity, they cannot even create a fly or gnat or some other pitiful little creature independently of that natural process through which animals have been and are still produced by God, that is to say, by the deposition of seed in those that are of the same species. Nor did the ‘Mother’ make anything by herself, because they say that she produced the Maker of the world and Lord of the universe. They call Him who is Maker and Lord of the universe ‘psychic’, but themselves they call ‘pneumatic’, yet they are not makers of a single thing, nor lords of anything outside of themselves, not even of their own bodies! What is more, these people who call themselves ‘spiritual’ and ‘superior to the Creator’ often, against their will, suffer much bodily pain.
II 30, 2 and 8
The collapse of Gnosticism
Eternal quest
(56) ‘Progress’ is alleged to be finding another Father beyond the one proclaimed from the beginning, and then, beyond the one supposed to have been discovered in second place, a third, and beyond the third a fourth, and then another, and then another . . . The person who thinks himself ‘progressive’ in this sense will never rest in one God. Driven from Him Who Is he turns backwards, and sets off on an eternal ‘quest’ for God. But he will never find Him. He will just swim for ever in an abyss of ‘incomprehensibility’—unless, converted and repentant, he returns to the place from which he was cast out, and confesses and believes in the one God, the Father, the Creator, announced by the law and the prophets and borne witness to by Christ.
IV 9, 3
(57) All heretics are like this. They imagine that they have found something higher than the truth . . . They set off on all kinds of uncertain paths, holding now one opinion, now another, on the same subject! They are like the blind who lead the blind and rightly fall into the ditch of ignorance at their feet. They are always seeking, but they never find the truth . . . Their thoughts soar above the permitted measure of thought. That is why the apostle says: ‘Do not think more loftily than you ought to think, but think prudently’ (cf Rom 12:3), He is warning us not to taste the knowledge of the Gnostics, which ‘thinks more loftily than it ought to think’, and leads to our banishment from the ‘paradise of life’.
V 20, 2
Evasive silence
(58) They have huge disagreements on a single point, conflicting opinions about the same Scriptures. When one and the same passage is read out, they all knit their brows and shake their heads and say that, of course, it is a very profound text, that not everyone can grasp the great thoughts it contains, and that silence is therefore the chief thing among the wise. In fact, their silence must be a replica of the ‘Silence’ above! And so they go their separate ways, ways as many as their numbers, spawning all these opinions about the same subject, carrying their subtleties deep within themselves.
When they do eventually agree among themselves about what is foretold in the Scriptures, we shall still confute them. Meanwhile, with their wrong opinions, with their manifest failure to agree about the same set of words, they refute themselves. We, however, follow as our teacher the one and only true Lord and take His words as our rule of truth.
IV 35, 4
The ‘God beyond God’ is unrelated to anything
(59) Alienated from the truth, they are bound to wallow in total error, to be tossed to and fro by it. At different times they think different things about the same subject. They never have a settled opinion. They want to be verbal sophists rather than disciples of the truth. They are not built on a rock, but on sand, sand containing a multitude of stones.
And so they manufacture a multitude of gods. Their excuse is always that they are ‘seekers’. In fact, they are blind, and they will never be able to find anything. For they blaspheme the Creator, Him who is truly God, who gives the power to find. They imagine that above God they have found another god, or another ‘pleroma’, or another ‘economy’. Therefore, the light which comes from God does not enlighten them, because they have dishonoured and despised God. They regard Him as paltry, because in His love and immense kindness He has come within reach of human knowledge. Of course, this is not knowledge according to His greatness or substance, for that is something no one has ever measured or handled. No, I am talking about the the knowledge by which we know that He who made and formed us, who breathed into us the breath of life, who nourishes us by means of creation, establishing all things by His Word, ordering them in His Wisdom, that it is He who is the only true God. They, however, dream of a non-existent deity above Him, so that they will be regarded as having discovered the ‘great God’, whom no one can know, who does not communicate with the human race, who does not direct the affairs of earth. In other words, they have discovered the god of Epicurus, who does nothing for himself or for anyone else, a god without providence.
III 24, 2
The Contradiction of Gnosticism
(60) [Sophia’s]1 idea of seeking the perfect Father, her desire to penetrate and comprehend him, could not involve ignorance or passion—not in a spiritual Aeon! No, it meant rather perfection and impassibility. After all, they themselves are only human beings, and yet when they apply their minds to the One before them, when in some way they already comprehend Him and are established in their knowledge of Him, they do not say that they are in a passion of perplexity, but rather in the knowledge and apprehension of the truth. They claim that when the Saviour said the words ‘Seek and you will find’ to his disciples, he meant that they should search for the One whom the Gnostics’ imagination has placed above the Creator of all things—the ineffable ‘Groundless One’. They claim to be perfect themselves, because, even while still on earth, in seeking they have found the Perfect One. And yet they say that the totally spiritual Aeon who dwells within the Pleroma, by seeking the Forefather, by trying to penetrate his greatness, by yearning to know the truth of the Father, fell into passion, into such a passion, in fact, that, had the Power who upholds all things not intervened, she would have been dissolved into the universal substance and annihilated.
II 18, 6
(61) The Passion of Christ is not like the passion of the Aeon, nor did it take place in similar circumstances. The Aeon suffered a passion of dissolution and destruction, so much so that she who suffered was in danger of being corrupted. But Christ our Lord suffered a strong and unflinching Passion. Not only was He Himself not in danger of being corrupted, He also strengthened corrupted man with His power and called him back to incorruption. The Aeon suffered her passion while seeking the Father, whom she was incapable of finding, whereas our Lord suffered in order to bring back to the knowledge and presence of the Father those who had strayed.
II 20, 3
(62) ‘Seek and you will find.’ The Lord makes His disciples perfect in their seeking and in their finding of the Father. By contrast, the ‘superior Christ’ [of the Gnostics] makes them perfect by ordering the Aeons not to seek the Father on the grounds that, however hard they try, they will not find Him. So the Gnostics call themselves perfect for having found their ‘Groundless One’, while the Aeons are perfect because they have been persuaded that the One they seek is unsearchable!
II 18, 3
Humility and the knowledge of God
(63) At this point someone may raise the objection: ‘Is it without reason and by chance that the imposition of names, the election of the apostles, the activity of the Lord, and the arrangement of created things are what they are?’ To this we say, ‘Certainly not! It is with great wisdom and delicate care that God confers proportion and harmony on what He has made, both the things of old and all that His Word has accomplished in the latest times.’ People should not link all these with the number thirty,2 but rather with the meaning or reason which underlies them. We cannot investigate God by means of numbers and syllables and letters; they are too many and various to make that a reliable way of proceeding. Someone may construct a valid theory out of numbers, but these same evidences can then be applied abusively against the truth; they can be turned in many different directions. No, what we have to do is correlate the numbers themselves, and the things which have been made, with the solid truth which underlies them. It is not the rule which comes from the numbers, but the numbers which come from the rule. God does not come from creatures; no, creatures come from God. Everything comes from one and the same God.
Created things, in their great number and diversity, fit beautifully and harmoniously into the creation as a whole. And yet, when viewed individually, they appear discordant and opposed to each other, just as the sound of the lute makes a single harmonious melody out of many and opposite notes by means of the intervals between them. The lover of truth must not be deceived, therefore, by the interval between the different notes, nor imagine that this note was the work of one artist and author, and that note due to another, nor think that one person fitted the treble, another the bass, and yet another the tenor strings. He must not forget that one and the same Artist was responsible for the wisdom, justice, goodness, and munificence of the whole work. And those who listen to the melody ought to praise and glorify the Artist, and admire the tension of some notes, appreciate the relaxation in others, enjoy the moderation of those between the two extremes. Recalling that some things are symbols, they will consider what it is that each thing points to and what causes it. But they will never alter the rule, nor stray from the Artist, nor abandon faith in the one God who made all things, nor blaspheme our Creator.
When someone fails to find the cause of all that he is investigating, he should recall that man is infinitely inferior to God . . . Man, you are not uncreated, and you have not existed from eternity with God, as His own Word has done. No, by His overflowing goodness you received the beginning of your existence, and have gradually learned from the Word the dispositions of the God who made you.
So keep your knowledge in its proper place. In ignorance of the good, do not try to rise above God Himself, for He cannot be surpassed. Do not look for anything above the Creator, for you will not find it; your Maker is without limits. And do not dream up some other Father above God, as if you had taken all His measurements, as if you had explored His entire creation, as if you had considered His whole depth and length and height. Your dreaming will come to nothing. Thinking against nature, you will become foolish. And if you persist, you will fall into insanity, regarding yourself as loftier and better than your own Creator, imagining that you can pass through and beyond the realms of God.
II 25, 2-4
God’s incomprehensible grandeur known because of His love
(64) God is above all [earthly names], and therefore inexpressible. He can well and rightly be called an all-comprehending intellect, but He is not like the intellect of men. He is most accurately described as light, but He is nothing like the light that we know. In fact, in every respect, the Father of all is unlike the littleness of men. Although, because of His love, we can use these words to speak of Him, we know, because of His greatness, that He is above them.
II 13, 4
(65) As regards His grandeur, we cannot know God, for it is impossible to measure the Father. But as regards His love (for that is what leads us through the Word to God), those who obey Him are evermore learning that there is such a great God.
IV 20, 1
(66) As regards His grandeur, He is unknown to all who have been made by Him, for no one has ever scaled the heights of God, neither the ancients nor the men of today. But as regards His love, He is evermore known through the One through whom He made all things. This is His Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the last times became man among men, in order to join the end to the beginning, that is, man to God. That is why the prophets, receiving the prophetic charism from the same Word, foretold His coming in the flesh, which, by the Father’s good pleasure, has accomplished the blending and communion of God and man. From the beginning, the Word of God foretold that God would be seen by men and hold converse with them upon earth (cf Baruch 3:38). He would speak with them and be present to His own creation, thus saving it. He would become perceptible by it, thus ‘freeing us from the hands of all who hate us’ (Luke 1:71), that is to say, from every spirit of wickedness, and causing us to ‘serve Him in holiness and justice all the days of our life’ (ibid., vv. 74-75), in order that man, having embraced the Spirit of God, might pass into the Father’s glory.
IV 20, 4
(67) As regards His grandeur and indescribable glory, ‘no one shall see God and live’ (cf Ex 33:20), for the Father is incomprehensible. But as regards His love and kindness towards men, and because He can do all things, He grants to those who love Him the privilege of seeing Him. The prophets foretold this, for ‘what is impossible to men is possible to God’ (Luke 18:27). Man by his own powers cannot see God, but if He so wills it, God can be seen by men: by whom He wills and when He wills and as He wills.
IV 20, 5
Love is the way to God
(68) St. Paul says that . . . without love for God, there is no value in knowledge, nor in the understanding of mysteries, nor in faith, nor in prophecy. They are all hollow and vain without love. He says that it is love which makes man perfect, and that he who loves God is perfect in this world and in the world to come. We shall never cease to love God, but the more we behold Him, the more we shall love Him.
IV 12, 2
(69) Love is the most excellent gift, more precious than knowledge, more glorious than prophecy, superior to all the other charisms.
IV 33, 8
Ultimately, God can be known only through God
(70) ‘No one has ever seen God. The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Bather, He has made Him known’ (John 1:18). From the beginning, the Son is the revealer of the Father, since from the beginning He is with the Father. At the fitting time, and for our profit, He has shown the human race, in a rational and harmonious way, the prophetic visions, the diversity of graces, His own ministrations, and the glorification of the Father. For where there is rationality, there is harmony, and where there is harmony, there is a fitting time, and where there is a fitting time, there is profit. That is why the Word became the dispenser of His Father’s grace for the profit of men. It was for them that He accomplished such great dispositions, showing God to men, presenting man to God. He safeguarded the invisibility of the Father, lest man become the despiser of God, and so that he might always have something towards which he could advance. At the same time He made God visible to men through many dispensations, lest man, wholly bereft of God, should cease to exist. For the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.
IV 20, 6-7
(71) How can God be unknown if He is known by [the Gnostics]? Whatever is known, even by just a few, is not unknown. The Lord did not say that the Father and the Son could not be known at all, for in that case His coming would have been pointless. [‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him’ (Matt 11:27)]. Why did He come here? To tell us: ‘Do not seek God, because He is unknowable, and you will never find Him’? That is what Christ is supposed to have said, according to the lies of the Valentinians, to these Aeons of theirs. It is utter nonsense! What the Lord really taught is this: no one can know God unless God teaches him; in other words, without God, God cannot be known. What is more, it is the Father’s will that God be known.
IV 6, 4
(72) No one can know the Father without the Word of God, that is to say, unless the Son reveals Him, nor can one know the Son without the good pleasure of the Father (cf Matt 11:26f).
IV 6, 3
(73) The Son leads men to the Father, but the Father reveals to them the Son.
III 13, 2
From Old Covenant to New
(74) This is why the Jews strayed from God: they did not accept His Word, imagining they could know God through the Father Himself without the Word, that is to say, without the Son.
IV 7, 4
(75) The precepts given them by Moses for slavery and as a sign have been abolished [by the Lord] through the new covenant of freedom. But the laws which are natural and common to all, the laws befitting free men, He has increased and widened. Lavishly, ungrudgingly, He has granted men to know God the Father through adoption and to love Him wholeheartedly . . . But He has also increased fear, for sons should have more fear and more love for the Father than slaves.
IV 16, 5
(76) Read the prophets carefully, and you will find that all the actions, all the teaching, all the sufferings of the Lord have been foretold by them. Now it may be that the question will come into your mind: Did the Lord bring us anything new by His coming? The answer is this: He brought us all newness by bringing Himself, who had been foretold.
IV 34, 1
(77) He promised to give very much to those who now bear fruit, but through the gift of His grace, not by the changing of our knowledge. For the Lord remains the same, and the same Father is revealed. Thus, by His coming, one and the same Lord has bestowed on those who lived later a greater gift of grace than the one He granted in the old dispensation.
IV 11, 3
(78) Everything became new when the Word, in a new dispensation, came in the flesh to win back to God man who had gone off from God. Thus men were taught to worship, not a different God, but the same God in a new way.
III 10, 2