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 sometimes so weak and limited that one can no longer look on him as a God.[504] The Fathers everywhere argue on behalf of the Gnostic Demiurge and against the Gnostic supreme God. It never occurs to them to proceed in the opposite way and prove that the supreme God may be the Creator. All their efforts are rather directed to show that the Creator of the world is the only and supreme God, and that there can be no other above this one. This attitude of the Fathers is characteristic; for it proves that the apologetico-philosophical theology was their fundamental assumption. The Gnostic (Marcionite) supreme God is the God of religion, the God of redemption; the Demiurge is the being required to explain the world. The intervention of the Fathers on his behalf, that is, their assuming him as the basis of their arguments, reveals what was fundamental and what was accidental in their religious teaching. At the same time, however, it shows plainly that they did not understand or did not feel the fundamental problem that troubled and perplexed the Gnostics and Marcion, viz., the qualitative distinction between the spheres of creation and redemption.