tly as
regards its spirit, and thus rescuing it for the future. But the price
of this preservation was the adoption of a series of "Gnostic" formulae.
Churchmen, though with hesitation, adopted the adversary's way of
looking at things, and necessarily did so, because as they became ever
further and further removed from the early-Christian feelings and
thoughts, they had always more and more lost every other point of view.
The old Catholic Fathers permanently settled a great part of early
tradition for Christendom, but at the same time promoted the gradual
hellenising of Christianity.

2. _The Doctrines of the Church._

In the following section we do not intend to give a presentation of the
theology of Irenaeus and the other Antignostic Church teachers, but
merely to set forth those points of doctrine to which the teachings of
these men gave currency in succeeding times.

Against the Gnostic theses[497] Irenaeus and his successors, apart from
the proof from prescription, adduced the following intrinsic
considerations: (1) In the case of the Gnostics and Marcion the Deity
lacks absoluteness, because he does not embrace everything, that is, he
is bounded by the _kenoma_ or by the sphere of a second God; and also
because his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence have a
corresponding limitation.[498] (2) The assumption of divine emanations
and of a differentiated divine _pleroma_ represents the Deity as a
composite, i.e.,[499] finite being; and, moreover, the personification
of the divine qualities is a mythological freak, the folly of which is
evident as soon as one also makes the attempt to personify the
affections and qualities of man in a similar way.[500] (3) The attempt
to make out conditions existing within the Godhead is in itself absurd
and audacious.[501] (4) The theory of the passion and ignorance of
Sophia introduces sin into the pleroma itself, i.e., into the
Godhead.[502] With this the weightiest argument against the Gnostic
cosmogony is already mentioned. A further argument against the system is
that the world and mankind would have been incapable of improvement, if
they had owed their origin to ignorance and sin.[503] Irenaeus and
Tertullian employ lengthy arguments to show that a God who has created
nothing is inconceivable, and that a Demiurge occupying a position
alongside of or below the Supreme Being is self-contradictory, inasmuch
as he sometimes appears higher than this Supreme Being, and som