Christ at the Crux: The Mediation of God and Creation in Christological Perspective

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Irenaeus and the Gnostic Option

Monism, Duality, and the Two Hands of God

(A Trinitarian Concept of Mediation)

For the only consistent position outside of Christianity is that of pantheism,

the taking of oneself out of existence by way of recollection into the eternal,

whereby all existential decisions become mere shadow-play

beside what is eternally decided from behind.

—Sören Kierkegaard

[T]hat God creates means that there is other reality than God and that it is really other than he. So begins Robert Jenson’s systematic development of the doctrine of creation.¹ Similarly, Eric Osborn has expressed near-consensus among scholars by identifying the primary characteristic of Gnostic² thought as cosmic dualism wherein matter and spirit are sharply opposed.³ The main task of this chapter will be to consider an element of the trend in which the former properly Christian duality has come to be neglected as guilty by association with the unholy latter—characteristically Gnostic—dualism. Irenaeus of Lyons should serve us well in this regard as he is unique in the tradition as one familiar with both key terms in the discussion. He is at once the one largely responsible for developing the ontology that has equipped Jenson for his observation, and the one who did so within the context of precisely the same Gnosticism to which Osborn is referring with his.

As a theologian whose thought has been characterized by one commentator as relatively clear at the outlines and at the same time fuzzy in its details, Irenaeus may be particularly susceptible to the tendency for modern readers to peer down at him as if at their own reflection in the water at the bottom of a deep well.⁴ To complicate matters further the precise nature of second century Gnosticism is presently a subject of so much scholarly attention that one can hardly use the term at all without a lengthy explanation for the absence of inverted comas at either end of it.⁵ That said, and although Irenaeus is no longer regarded as an authority on the content and finer contours of Gnostic thought, he did, I will argue, analyze their theology with brilliant accuracy. Despite the immense variety and incredibly labyrinthine nature of Gnostic theology, Irenaeus saw in it repeated conceptual patterns and large-scale logical connections. Indeed, we might say he studied Gnostic theology systematically. If this is a fair claim—and if Richard Norris has correctly represented Irenaeus’ dispute with the Gnostics as perhaps the classical statement of Christian belief in terms of the problems and conceptions native to the rational theology of the Greeks⁶—we have a sizeable, but highly significant task ahead of us.

One of the most important arguments to be made in this chapter is the one least likely to meet with widespread approval and for this reason ought to be said up-front: the Gnostics to which Irenaeus responded were not wrong about the gospel because they distinguished spirit from matter and God from world too sharply, but because they distinguished them insufficiently. Although Irenaeus did indeed take great pains to reunite all that was separated by the dualizing Gnostics, more importantly, he was able to see that the driving force behind the Gnostic impulse to divide was an ontology that was impotent to distinguish. Simply put, Gnostic thought is fundamentally monistic.

To support such a claim we will need to gain some perspective on Gnostic theology by climbing with Irenaeus above their terminological fog⁷ and trying to see larger movements in the course of their thought as a whole. What we will find is a recurring tendency to tell the cosmological story in terms of a fall and return to the One. Kurt Rudolph makes the crucial observation: [Gnostic] dualism is carried along or, to put it more accurately, interwoven with a monistic idea which is . . . the basis for the identification of man and deity. Rudolph later refers to this upward and downward double movement in Gnostic thought as a dualism on a monistic background.⁸ Hans Jonas offers a similar sketch:

The Gnostic doctrines of the origin of the world, because of their central importance, are very richly developed, so that it is not easy to organize them systematically . . . Essentially it is always a question of the downward development from the highest being, already mentioned, which leads by ways usually described in very complicated fashion on the one hand to the creation of the world, but at the same time on the other hand to the embodiment of a divine and spiritual particle (which really makes possible the very creation itself, but is also a pledge of the later redemption).⁹

In the opening half of this chapter I will investigate briefly each of the two elements of this double movement in Gnostic thought. First in view will be themes that suggest everything comes from the One, and then those that suggest everything returns to the One. In the second half of the chapter we will see how Irenaeus responds, and come near its end to a consideration of his uniquely Trinitarian concept of christological mediation.

The Gnostic doctrine of creation—if this is what it should be called—is indeed a dizzying program. An initial observation will recur several times throughout this study: whatever else might be true of Gnostic theology about God and the world, it is almost entirely vertical. At the top of being there is an ontological singularity from which everything else is derived, and things descend from this one source directly or indirectly at more or less whimsical frequency. In one way or another, all of the characters in Gnostic myth have a common generic origin. One could almost randomly select a passage from Irenaeus’ accounts of his opponents to illustrate the point,

These Aeons having been produced for the glory of the Father, and wishing, by their own efforts, to effect this object, sent forth emanations by means of conjunction . . . In a like manner, the rest of the Aeons also, in a kind of a quiet way, had a wish to behold the Author of their being, and to contemplate that First Cause which had no beginning. But there rushed forth in advance of the rest that Aeon who was much the latest of them, and was the youngest of the Duodecad which sprang from Anthropos and Ecclesia, namely Sophia, and suffered passion apart from the embrace of her consort Theletos. (

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With this we come to the element of Gnostic theology that functions as much like a presiding theme as is imaginable in such a diverse range of thought. The apparently endless stream of squabbling and copulating mediatorial Aeons in Gnostic myth is essentially a highly protracted theodicy. Richard Norris explains: The myth of Achmoth and the story of the Demiurge are both attempts to explain the origin of evil without imputing responsibility for it to the Supreme Father.¹⁰ The problem of the reality of evil was the driving dilemma behind the convolution in Gnostic narrative. Their elaborate accounts of fracturing relations and digressing fragmentation among the members of the higher spiritual realms were effectively only sustained efforts to provide their benevolent source of being with an ontological alibi. For the Gnostic, whatever was to be said about the nature and reality of this world would be deferred to the priority of whatever was to be said about the impunity of the One for evil. In this respect Gnosticism foreshadows a trend we will see repeated in later chapters wherein theology about salvation follows theology about creation.

But if theodicy is what fuels Gnostic thought, it is not in itself the vehicle. Concern over the compatibility of a good God and an evil world is only ever given the pride of place in a theology where God and the world are imagined to be somehow ontological compatriots. That is to say, the problem of the reality of evil is especially normative for monistic theologies. Although he was far from immune to challenges over the problem of evil himself, Irenaeus’ critique of the Valentinian attempt to explain the reality of evil as a kind of vacuity or shadow within the One gets us to the connection:

But whence, let me ask, came this vacuity [of which they speak]? If it was indeed produced by Him who, according to them, is the Father and Author of all things, then it is both equal in honour and related to the rest of the Aeons, perchance even more ancient than they are. Moreover, if it proceeded from the same source [as they did], it must be similar in nature to Him who produced it, as well as to those along with whom it was produced. (

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Although Irenaeus never tired of pointing out the obvious logical difficulties with a monist theodicy, the point for our purpose is how Gnostic thought functioned quite naturally within its closed ontology. William Schoedel explains, Irenaeus confronted a group of Valentinians willing to . . . imagine a realm of ‘vacuity and shadow’ or of ‘defect’ within the Father presumably because it was felt to be merely epiphenomenal to the reality of spirit.¹² Evil and its effects were only perceivable to the Gnostic eye as passing epiphenomena against the larger canvas of divine goodness.

Hans Jonas has suggested that the Gnostic penchant for theodicy was compatible with their monist commitments because, no original world of darkness or of matter is assumed to oppose the primal being, . . . the dualism of existing reality is derived from an inner process within the one divinity itself.¹³ In this respect, the matter/evil vs. spirit/goodness dualisms for which Gnostic thought are so well known are effectively just smoke and mirrors in front of the larger whole of the one divinity. By plotting the evil world and the one good God as two points on a single ontological continuum, the Gnostic mind became one of the most efficient myth-making machines in the history of western thought. Their efforts to established distance between God and the world required what seem to be intentionally befuddling narratives, but the dissimilitudes were relative, they could only ever be emphasized by what we might call fictive distance. Despite even their most creative flurries of narrative, Gnostic strategy depended entirely on compounded thematic complexity to provide the appearance of an ineffable separation between the One and the world. Beings from different points on the vertical continuum could be conceptually juxtaposed to form a false dualism, but beneath the façade all things were fundamentally connected and part of a larger whole. In later chapters we will find that a similar tendency to relocate christological duality to something perceivable only in theory also has an orthodox tradition. In common is the attempt to have a dualism in the front of the mind while knowing about and embracing a unity or oneness behind it.

Irenaeus, for one, did not find the rhetoric convincing:

Iu! Iu! Pheu, Pheu!—for well may we utter these tragic exclamations at such a pitch of audacity in the coining of names as he [Valentinus] has displayed without a blush in devising a nomenclature for his system of falsehood . . . It is manifest also, that he himself is the one who has had sufficient audacity to coin these names; so that, unless he had appeared in the world, the truth would still have been destitute of a name . . . there exists a power which I term Gourd; and along with this Gourd there exists a power which again I term Utter-Emptiness. This Gourd and Emptiness, since they are one, produced (and yet did not simply produce, so as to be apart from themselves) a fruit, everywhere visible, eatable, and delicious, which fruit-language calls a Cucumber. Along with this Cucumber exists a power of the same essence, which again I call a Melon. These powers, the Gourd, Utter-Emptiness, the Cucumber, and the Melon, brought forth the remaining multitude of the delirious melons of Valentinus. (

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Although not indicative of Irenaeus’ more refined theological abilities, this less than subtle lampoon does serve to illustrate his rejection of Gnostic theological method. For him, any effort to honour the absolute freedom and sovereignty of the Creator by mythic cajolery or fictive distance was so categorically mistaken that, simply to exhibit their sentiments, is to obtain a victory over them (1.31.3).

If Gnostic theology about creation recurs to themes in which everything comes from a single source, then Gnostic theology about salvation similarly recurs to themes in which everything returns to this source at the end. Irenaeus explains,

He [Saturninus] declares, therefore, that this spark of life, after the death of a man, returns to those things which are of the same nature with itself, and the rest of the body is decomposed into its original elements. (

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Although the details of the varying Gnostic systems differ widely, common among them is the belief that the final accomplishment of salvation occurs within a grand-scale eschatology of return. Robert Haardt comments, The fundamental eschatological orientation in Gnosis lies in the element of dynamic movement . . . considered as an irreversible total process directed towards one end.¹⁴ Another way of putting this would be to say that the Gnostics tended to understand salvation as the process by which one comes to realize—noetically, then ontically—one’s own divinity. Eric Osborn explains,

Resurrection is not an event for the body, say the Gnostics, but is the knowledge of the truth (

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) . . . The Gnostics offered a real identity with God, with all the mystery of his being, an identity which precludes death and separation, which rejects the world and the body as ephemeral and irrelevant.¹⁵

For the Gnostics, salvation is a real identity with God, one which—and this is crucial for the direction of this study—precludes . . . separation. Once again, we will return to similar themes in later chapters but for now we should notice that even though union with the divine is indeed the presiding paradigm in Gnostic soteriology, there is also more to it: alongside themes in which everything arrives together back at the original source of being, it is also true that some Gnostic eschatology included elements of final separation. There are the spiritual ones who will be saved, and there are physical ones who will fall off the bottom of being into nothingness. Irenaeus rightly traces both the implications and the heritage of this idea,

Then again, as to the opinion that everything of necessity passes away to those things out of which they maintain it was also formed, and that God is the slave of this necessity, so that He cannot impart immortality to what is mortal, or bestow incorruption on what is corruptible, but every one passes into a substance similar in nature to itself, both those who are named Stoics from the portico (stoa), and indeed all that are ignorant of God, poets and historians alike, make the same affirmation. (

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By contrast to the Stoic themes in Gnostic soteriology, Winrich Lohr can observe that for Irenaeus, Salvation history has a higher goal than the final return of primary substances to their original positions.¹⁶ And it is the mechanical tone of the Gnostic like-drawn-to-like eschatology that gets us to the point of the issue for Irenaeus. Lohr continues, Irenaeus now argues that if the [spiritual ones] attained their final position because of the very substance of their souls, both the faith of the believer and the descent of the Saviour would be completely superfluous.¹⁷ There are implications here for analyzing how Gnostics thought about the incarnation but the point for the moment is simply that their soteriology was functionally the same as Stoic determinism. Salvation cannot be open to the contingency and flux of time because time is itself a symptom of the need for salvation in the first place. As if in a mirror image of their heavily weighted eschatology, the deterministic themes in Gnostic thought further evacuated the present by overloading the past.

We return to our larger theme when we observe that determinism is the existential underbelly to a monistic ontology. Irenaeus repeatedly argues that wherever God is considered part of a larger whole, God’s freedom is necessarily qualified by the conditions of the other beings with whom he shares this whole.¹⁸ The Gnostics however, by trying to plot a perfectly beneficent God and the evil world of matter as two points on a single ontological line, had few if any other options for their soteriology. Irenaeus rejected Gnostic determinism because it displaced God as the free agent of salvation and made him instead a slave to necessity.

Without a God who is freely willing the salvation of his creatures, Gnostic soteriology relied on theodicy and determinism to keep things moving. But there is at least one major problem with a Godless soteriology. When the Gnostic finally comes to consider his route back to the One, he finds it clogged with all the same mediatorial characters he originally cast to make sense of his theodicy and legislate his determinism. Irenaeus puts his finger on the irony:

But if this be to make progress, [namely,] to find out another Father besides Him who was preached from the beginning; and again, besides him who is imagined to have been discovered in the second place, to find out a third other—then the progress of this man will consist in his also proceeding from a third to a fourth; and from this, again, to another and another: and thus he who thinks that he is always making progress of such a kind, will never rest in one God. For, being driven away from Him who truly is [God], and being turned backwards, he shall be for ever seeking, yet shall never find out God; but shall continually swim in an abyss without limits. (

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The chilling reductio ad infinitum—continually swimming in an abyss without limits—captures the heart of Irenaeus’ critique. Where the Aeons are intended to distinguish the One from the world they connect the two as a matter of deterministic necessity, and where they are needed to bring the human into union with the One, there are constantly more of them popping up to remind him of the One’s incompatibility with evil.

Thus Gnostic theology about mediation is exemplary for the way it is at odds with itself. Any effort to distinguish the One from the creation compromises the possibility of relation between the two, and any effort to relate the two compromises the possibility of their otherness. With this we have set the agenda for the rest of the chapter, and established a sizable mandate for Irenaeus.

Having looked at the shape of Gnostic theology about creation and salvation, we now turn to see what their foe had to say. On the first count we will see that in response to the Gnostic predilection for monistic cosmologies, Irenaeus repeatedly emphasized what later theology came to call an ontological divide between God and everything else.

It is proper, then, that I should begin with the first and most important head, that is, God the Creator, who made the heaven and the earth, and all things that are therein (whom these men blasphemously style the fruit of a defect), and to demonstrate that there is nothing either above Him or after Him; nor that, influenced by any one, but of His own free will, He created all things, since He is the only God, the only Lord, the only Creator, the only Father, alone containing all things, and Himself commanding all things into existence. (

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It is on the basis of passages like this that Richard Norris can identify the central theme of [Irenaeus’] work: the thesis that God is one, and is himself the maker of everything that is.¹⁹ Implicit in Norris’ observation is a theologoumenon so decisive for Irenaeus’ program that it is at least equally as central. To see it however, we need to take a step back. If the two most basic things to be said about God are that he is one and that he is the author of a creation other than himself, it follows that all things are not part of the same ontic lump. Rather everything is distinguishable into two basic categories: there is God and then there is whatever he has created. Irenaeus makes the claim himself,

But the things established are distinct from him who has established them, and what have been made from him who has made them. For he is Himself uncreated, both without beginning and end, and lacking nothing. He is Himself sufficient for Himself; and still further, He grants to all others this very thing, existence; but the things which have been made by Him have received a beginning. But whatever things had a beginning, and are liable to dissolution, and are subject to and stand in need of Him who made them, must necessarily in all respects have a different term [applied to them]. (

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This is the bedrock to Irenaeus’ doctrine of creation. Whatever else he will come to say, it will follow from this version of the infinite qualitative difference between God and everything else.

Irenaeus developed two formulae to support his belief in a basic ontological duality: the idea that God contains all things but is himself not contained and the claim that God created all things out of nothing. I will start with the less familiar.

Now the origin of all things is God. He was not created by anyone, but everything was created by him . . . calling into existence what did not exist. He contains all things, yet cannot Himself be contained . . . There is no other God above him and no other god beneath him.²⁰

It is clear from the context here and from that of almost every other use of this contains—yet cannot Himself be contained formula that Irenaeus intends with it to affirm the absolute sovereignty of the Creator.²¹ Although it is usually translated with derivatives of contain—as we have it here—William Schoedel has argued persuasively for enclosing . . . not enclosed.²² Indeed, insofar as the idea that God encloses all things reserves within it an element of divine volition, it is closer to Irenaeus’ central concern for the absolute freedom of God. Accordingly, Schoedel has observed that for Irenaeus this enclosing—not enclosed formula presupposed a God who transcends the cosmos and is not simply (as in Greek philosophy) a factor in the totality of things. Thus, despite its long history in other capacities, Irenaeus used the idea to provide a context within which the infinite ‘could be detached from the concept of the corporeal, with which it had been essentially united in Greek thought.’²³

In this way, the enclosing—not enclosed formula is closely related to the concern about the possibility of mediation between a supreme God and a contingent creation. By saying that God encloses all things and is himself not enclosed by anything, Irenaeus insisted that there is no swath of intermediaries between God and the world. Yet Irenaeus is not, as some commentators would have him, simply espousing a Christianized form of panentheism.²⁴ As ever, the central issue for Irenaeus against the Gnostics is the ontological freedom of God, and for this reason the double movement of the formula is crucial. The point comes into focus when we note that the Gnostics also used the notion that God contains all things, but their version of the formula was significantly truncated. Schoedel explains, "No doubt Gnostics found it possible to speak of the Father as containing all because in their view nothing outside the Pleroma truly existed."²⁵

The important second element of the formula—and is himself not enclosed by anything—gets to the intent of the idea for Irenaeus. Rowan Greer explains,

To say that God is ‘uncontained’ is not simply to assert that there must be a single first principle; rather it is to proclaim the exaltation of God as Sovereign over all. . . . That God is uncontained in this sense implies that He is to be thought utterly distinct from everything else.²⁶

For Irenaeus, there is that which is enclosed and then there is that which encloses, nothing more.

A raw cosmological duality of this sort might understandably lead one to wonder if Irenaeus had responded to Gnostic dualisms by simply replacing them with his own. But our course through Irenaeus’ doctrine of creation so far would suggest something else is afoot. The issue between Irenaeus and his Gnostic colleagues was establishing the ontological thinkability of divine otherness; accordingly Irenaeus saw a sizeable portion of his task to be the developing of a theology that affirms the distinction between the Creator and the creation. In the history of theology about creation there are few doctrines with as much significance for this task as the concept of creatio ex nihilo. The idea that God does not share eternity with anything and is free enough to call creation into being out of nothing is a fundamental pillar in Irenaeus’ response to Gnostic monism.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.²⁸

By contrast to the extensive efforts of his Gnostic opponents to remove the One from the world by what I have called fictive distance, Irenaeus did his theology as if the distinction between the creation and the Creator was simply axiomatic. Irenaeus’ suggestion that God called all things into being out of nothing refused any space to the Gnostic idea that an element of the human psyche, or a group of demi-gods, or indeed anything else, pre-existed this creation and ought therefore to be considered in some sense divine. By saying that everything arose from nothing at the command of God, Irenaeus made it impossible to imagine creation and Creator as somehow two parts of a single whole.

The question about whether or not Irenaeus adopts a Platonic view of the forms as eternal models in the mind of God for the creation is not an easy one to answer. Irenaeus himself confesses to entertaining his opponents on this issue, I have had very frequent discussions with them concerning forms of this kind (2.17.9). The matter is complicated by the fact that where Irenaeus addresses the question of the forms it is not always clear whether he is representing the position of his opponents, or his own:

Or is it really the case that, in regard to mere men, one will allow that they have of themselves invented what is useful for the purposes of life, but will not grant to that God who formed the world, that of Himself He created the forms of those things which have been made, and imparted to it its orderly arrangement? (

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That might seem clear enough, but just a few lines later Irenaeus continues,

But, again, how can these things [below] be images of those [above], since they are really contrary to them, and can in no respect have sympathy with them? . . . how can those things which are possessed of figure, and confined within certain limits, be the images of such as are destitute of figure and incomprehensible? (

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Some read Irenaeus as himself defending what would have been at his time an orthodox Platonic view of the forms against the recent innovations of the Gnostics; E. P. Meijering is one:

[I]n contemporary Middle Platonism the models were regarded as eternal thought of the Creator and were therefore not regarded as being superior to the Creator . . . When Irenaeus maintains against the Gnostics that there are no models of the world superior to the Creator, but that the Creator conceived in His mind a model of this world, he may therefore consciously oppose what he regards as a Gnostic transformation of Plato’s theory of forms by the Middle Platonic interpretation of this theory.²⁹

Meijering may be at least partially right (although his view has met strong criticism)³⁰ insofar as Irenaeus seems to make use of the theory of the forms when it serves his purpose of