So far the explanation seems clear. But when we turn from the Colossian letter to the Ephesian, it is necessary to bear in mind the different aims of the two epistles. While in the former the Apostle’s main object is to assert the supremacy of the Person of Christ, in the latter his principal theme is the life and energy of the Church, as dependent on Christ[[547]]. So the pleroma residing in Christ is viewed from a different aspect, no longer in relation to God, so much as in relation to the Church. |Corresponding application of πληρωμα to the Church.|It is that plenitude of Divine graces and virtues which is communicated through Christ to the Church as His body. The Church, as ideally regarded, the bride ‘without spot or wrinkle or any such thing’, becomes in a manner identified with Him[[548]]. All the Divine graces which reside in Him are imparted to her; His ‘fulness’ is communicated to her: and thus she may be said to be His pleroma (i. 23). This is the ideal Church. The actual militant Church must be ever advancing, ever struggling towards the attainment of this ideal. Hence the Apostle describes the end of all offices and administrations in the Church to be that the collective body may attain its full and mature growth, or (in other words) may grow up to the complete stature of Christ’s fulness[[549]]. But Christ’s fulness is God’s fulness. Hence in another passage he prays that the brethren may by the indwelling of Christ be fulfilled till they attain to the pleroma of God (iii. 19). It is another way of expressing the continuous aspiration and effort after holiness which is enjoined in our Lord’s precept, ‘Ye shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’[[550]].
Gospel of St. John.
The Gospel of St John, written in the first instance for the same Churches to which the Epistle to the Ephesians was sent, has numerous and striking points of resemblance with St Paul’s letter. This is the case here. As St Paul tells the Ephesians that the ideal Church is the pleroma of Christ and that the militant Church must strive to become the pleroma of Christ, so St John (i. 14 sq.) after describing our Lord as μονογενής, i.e. the unique and absolute representative of the Father, and as such ‘full (πλήρης) of grace and of truth’, says that they, the disciples, had ‘received out of His pleroma’ ever fresh accessions of grace. Each individual believer in his degree receives a fraction of that pleroma which is communicated whole to the ideal Church.
Ignatian letters.
The use of the word is not very different in the Ignatian letters. St Ignatius greets this same Ephesian Church, to which St Paul and St John successively here addressed the language already quoted, as ‘blessed in greatness by the pleroma of God the Father,’ i.e. by graces imparted from the pleroma. To the Trallians again he sends a greeting ‘in the pleroma’, where the word denotes the sphere of Divine gifts and operations, so that ἐν τῷ πληρώματι is almost equivalent to ἐν τῷ Κυρίῳ or ἐν τῷ πνεύματι.
Gnostic sects.
When we turn from Catholic Christianity to the Gnostic sects we find this term used, though (with one important exception) not in great frequency. Probably however, if the writings of the earlier Gnostics had been preserved, we should have found that it occupied a more important place than at present appears. One class of early Gnostics separated the spiritual being Christ from the man Jesus; they supposed that the Christ entered Jesus at the time of His baptism and left him at the moment of His crucifixion. Thus the Christ was neither born as a man nor suffered as a man. In this way they obviated the difficulty, insuperable to the Gnostic mind, of conceiving the connexion between the highest spiritual agency and gross corporeal matter which was involved in the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation and Passion, and which Gnostics of another type more effectually set aside by the theory of docetism, i.e. by assuming that the human body of our Lord was only a phantom body and not real flesh and blood. Irenæus represents the former class as teaching that ‘Jesus was the receptacle of the Christ’, and that the Christ ‘descended upon him from heaven in the form of a dove and after He had declared (to mankind) the nameless Father, entered (again) into the pleroma imperceptibly and invisibly’[[551]]. |The Cerinthians.|Here no names are given. But in another passage he ascribes precisely the same doctrine, without however naming the pleroma, to Cerinthus[[552]]. And in a third passage, which links together the other two, this same father, after mentioning this heresiarch, again alludes to the doctrine which maintained that the Christ, having descended on Jesus at his baptism, ‘flew back again into His own pleroma’[[553]]. In this last passage indeed the opinions of Cerinthus are mentioned in connexion with those of other Gnostics, more especially the Valentinians, so that we cannot with any certainty attribute this expression to Cerinthus himself. But in the first passage the unnamed heretics who maintained this return of the Christ ‘into the pleroma’ are expressly distinguished from the Valentinians; and presumably therefore the allusion is to the Cerinthians, to whom the doctrine, though not the expression, is ascribed in the second passage. |Connexion of this use with St Paul and with the Colossian heretics.|Thus there seems to be sufficient reason for attributing the use of the term to Cerinthus[[554]]. This indeed is probable on other grounds. The term pleroma, we may presume, was common to St Paul and the Colossian heretics whom he controverts. To both alike it conveyed the same idea, the totality of the divine powers or attributes or agencies or manifestations. But after this the divergence begins. They maintained that a single divine power, a fraction of the pleroma, resided in our Lord: the Apostle urges on the contrary, that the whole pleroma has its abode in Him[[555]]. The doctrine of Cerinthus was a development of the Colossian heresy, as I have endeavoured to show above[[556]]. He would therefore inherit the term pleroma from it. |The pleroma localized.|At the same time he seems to have given a poetical colouring to his doctrine, and so doing to have treated the pleroma as a locality, a higher spiritual region, from which this divine power, typified by the dove-like form, issued forth as on wings, and to which, taking flight again, it reascended before the Passion. If so, his language would prepare the way for the still more elaborate poetic imagery of the Valentinians, in which the pleroma, conceived as a locality, a region, an abode of the divine powers, is conspicuous.
The term avoided by Basilides,
The attitude of later Gnostics towards this term is widely divergent. The word is not, so far as I am aware, once mentioned in connexion with the system of Basilides. Indeed the nomenclature of this heresiarch belongs to a wholly different type; and, as he altogether repudiated the doctrine of emanations[[557]], it is not probable that he would have any fondness for a term which was almost inextricably entangled with this doctrine.
but prominent in Valentinianism.