AEONS. — According to the conceptions of the Enostics, inherited from the ancient oriental mythologies, the aeons are the personification of abstract concepts, emanated directly from God in ever less perfect forms, or produced through successive generations of pairs (syzygies), of which only the first has its origin directly from God. The totality of the aeons constitutes the pleroma (fullness), an intermediary necessary between the inaccessible divine being and creation. Christ himself is regarded as an aeon who restores the fullness of the pleroma (v. GNOSI).
BIBL.: L. Duchesne, Storia della Chiesa antica, I, Rome 1911, p. 87 ff.; W. Bousser, Platons Weltsee und das Kreuz Christi, in Zeitschrift für N. T. Wissenschaft, 14 (1913), pp. 273–85; G. Barville, Gnosticisme, in DThC, XII, cols. 1434–1467; Fliche-Martin-Frutz, II, p. 6 ff. Giuliano Gennaro