DeConick A.D

268
THE PI OF POLITICS
Irenaeus says that their belief in the “nobility” of their breeding allows
them to engage in forbidden acts (2.14.5). What are these acts? They
eat meat sacrificed to idols, imagining that they cannot contract defilement
(1.6.3, 1.28.2). They are the first to assemble at heathen festivals
celebrating the idols. They attend gladiator games (1.6.3). They love extreme
sexual practices, either engaging in erotic marital sex, which they
consider sacred, or abstaining from sex and marriage, which they consider
abhorrent (1.6.3, 1.13.3, 5, 1.28.1–2). Irenaeus is horrified that Gnostics who
engage in these behaviors do so because they do not fear YHWH, as he
and the other Apostolic Catholic Christians do (1.6.3).
These teachings lead the Apostolic Catholics to view Gnostics as arrogant,
blasphemous, and mad (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.31.3, 2.30.1;
Hippolytus, Refutation 1.pref.2–3). Irenaeus ( Against the Heresies 2.26.3)
is downright shocked that Gnostics do not think that they are inferior to
God in any way. This concept of the human being is so monstrous that
it will invoke divine retribution. The Gnostics are like the Titans who
are struck with thunder when they are inflated by their vanity and hubris
(2.30.1). Irenaeus marks this position as unnatural because it goes against
“the law of the human race” to think that there is “no real distinction
between the uncreated God and the human”—who, Irenaeus reminds us,
is a created entity (4.38.4).
Clearly, before the Gnostics began talking about the divine human,
the Apostolic Catholics had been assuming that humans are inferior to
YHWH, not his superiors (2.26.3). They had taken it for granted that
YHWH cannot be surpassed by humans because YHWH, the immortal,
uncreated God, is wholly Other than the human being, who is a mortal
creature (2.25.4).
Irenaeus wrestles with this assumption when he asks, “How shall he be
God who has not as yet been made human? Or how can he be perfect who
was but lately created? How can he be immortal who in his mortal nature
did not obey his creator? For it must be that you, from the outset, should
hold the rank of human. And then afterwards partake of the glory of God.
For you did not make God, but God made you” (4.39.2; cf. 4.38.4).
Consequently, the Apostolic Catholic community had taken it for
granted that they are YHWH’s servants and must obey his laws as set forth
in the Ten Commandments. They had assumed that salvation is based on
their piety and righteousness as YHWH’s subordinates (2.29.1).