EONS. — According to the conceptions of the Gnostics, inherited from ancient Oriental mythologies, the eons are the personification of abstract concepts, emanated directly from God in increasingly imperfect forms, or produced through successive generations of pairs (syzygies), of which only the first has a direct origin from God. The totality of the eons constitutes the pleroma (fullness), the necessary intermediary between the inaccessible divine being and creation. Christ Himself is considered as an eon, the restorer of the fullness of the pleroma (cf. GNOST).
Bibl.: L. Duchesne, Storia della Chiesa antica, I. Rome 1911, p. 87; G. B. Bousset, Platon, Weltseele und das Kreuz Christi, in Zeitschrift für N. T. Wissenschaft, 14 (1913), pp. 273-85; G. Bareille, Gnosticisme, in DThC, XIII, cols. 1434-1457; Fliche-Marin-Furuz, II, pp. 6 ff. Giuliano Gennaro