Irenaeus (c 130-203) was the first Father of the Church to confront the threat presented to Christianity by the Gnostics.
Gnosticism flourished before the birth of Christ, and in some aspects persists today. The phenomenon, however, has always been so diffuse that it is difficult to define.
The essential proposition is that this world is too fundamentally flawed to be the creation of a perfect God. Rather, the Gnostics decided, it was the work of the Demiurge, a partially corrupted emanation of the supreme deity.
