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Œuvres Irénée de Lyon (130-202) Contra Haereses Against Heresies
Against Heresies: Book II
Chapter XXI.--The twelve apostles were not a type of the Aeons.

1.

If, again, they maintain that the twelve apostles were a type only of that group of twelve Aeons which Anthropos in conjunction with Ecclesia produced, then let them produce ten other apostles as a type of those ten remaining Aeons, who, as they declare, were produced by Logos and Zoe. For it is unreasonable to suppose that the junior, and for that reason inferior Aeons, were set forth by the Saviour through the election of the apostles, while their seniors, and on this account their superiors, were not thus foreshown; since the Saviour (if, that is to say, He chose the apostles with this view, that by means of them He might show forth the Aeons who are in the Pleroma) might have chosen other ten apostles also, and likewise other eight before these, that thus He might set forth the original and primary Ogdoad. He could not, 1 in regard to the second [Duo] Decad, show forth [any emblem of it] through the number of the apostles being [already] constituted a type. For [He made choice of no such other number of disciples; but] after the twelve apostles, our Lord is found to have sent seventy others before Him. 2 Now seventy cannot possibly be the type either of an Ogdoad, a Decad, or a Triacontad. What is the reason, then, that the inferior Aeons are, as I have said, represented by means of the apostles; but the superior, from whom, too, the former derived their being, are not prefigured at all? But if 3 the twelve apostles were chosen with this object, that the number of the twelve Aeons might be indicated by means of them, then the seventy also ought to have been chosen to be the type of seventy Aeons; and in that case, they must affirm that the Aeons are no longer thirty, but eighty-two in number. For He who made choice of the apostles, that they might be a type of those Aeons existing in the Pleroma, would never have constituted them types of some and not of others; but by means of the apostles He would have tried to preserve an image and to exhibit a type of those Aeons that exist in the Pleroma.


  1. This passage is hopelessly corrupt. The editors have twisted it in every direction, but with no satisfactory result. Our version is quite as far from being certainly trustworthy as any other that has been proposed, but it seems something like the meaning of the words as they stand. Both the text and punctuation of the Latin are in utter confusion.  ↩

  2. Luke x. 1.  ↩

  3. "Si" is wanting in the mss. and early editions, and Harvey pleads for its exclusion, but the sense becomes clearer through inserting it.  ↩

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