EON

EON, among the followers of Plato, was used to signify any virtue, attribute, or perfection: hence they represented the deity as an assemblage of all possible eons; and called him pleroma, a Greek term signifying fullness. The Valentinians, who, in the first ages of the church, blended the conceits of the Jewish cabalists, the Platonists, and the Chaldean philosophers, with the simplicity of the Christian doctrine, invented a kind of Theogony, or Genealogy of Gods (not unlike that of Hesiod), whom they called by several glorious names, and all by the general appellation of EONS: among which they reckoned Ever-Life; Ador-Word; Most-Only; Only-begetten; Plenitude, Fullness; and many other divine powers and emanations, amounting

in number to thirty: which they fancied to be successively derived from one another; and all from one self-originated deity, named Bythus, i. e. profound or unfathomable; whom they called likewise, The most high and ineffable Father. See VALENTINIANUS.