FULNESS (πλήρωμα).—The Gr. word is used in the Gospels in its natural, physical sense in Matthew 9:16, Mark 2:21, Mark 6:43, Mark 8:20. It has a definite theological meaning in John 1:16 [the only place in the Gospels where it is translation ‘fulness’]. In the Epistles it is used: of time, to denote the period that fills up a certain epoch (Ephesians 1:10, Galatians 4:4, see Fulness of Time); of persons, the full number required to make up a definite figure (Romans 11:12, Romans 11:25); of measure, to indicate the full capacity, the entire content (1 Corinthians 10:26, 1 Corinthians 10:28, Romans 15:29), also this may be said to be its meaning in Romans 13:10 where love is spoken of as the πλήρωμα νόμου . The word has also a definite theological meaning in Colossians 1:19, Colossians 2:9, Ephesians 1:23, Ephesians 3:19, Ephesians 4:13. The central conception of the word, wherever used, seems to be completeness, the totality of the things spoken of, that which binds them into a symmetrical whole. Even when it is the latest addition that is indicated as the πλήρωμα, the word refers back to the beginning, and signifies the completeness effected by the addition. Thus in the passages in St. Matthew and St. Mark which refer to the sewing of the new patch on the old garment, it is not the patch that is the πλήρωμα, it is the completeness that results from the patch; and, as Lightfoot correctly points out, the idea meant to be conveyed is the paradox that it is this very completeness which makes the garment incomplete. A false show of wholeness is worse than an open rent,—an idea entirely in accordance with the method of the teaching of Jesus.
The theological meaning of πλήρωμα in St. John’s Gospel must be taken in connexion with its use in St. Paul’s Epistles. Granted the authenticity of the Epistles and the Gospel, St. John must have written more than a quarter of a century later, and must have addressed practically the same circle as that which St. Paul had in view in writing to the Colossians and the Ephesians. It is clear that St. Paul is dealing with the word in a technical sense as a word which is familiar to his opponents, but is used by him in a sense different from theirs; and St. John’s use of the term is exactly similar. The πλήρωμα represented a leading thought in the Gnostic heresy, of which we find the first germs referred to in the vigorons polemic of St. Paul. Gnosticism was further developed by Cerinthus, a contemporary of St. John, and reached its culmination in the fully elaborated system of Valentinus. The problem with which these Gnostic heresiarchs were continually wrestling was one that is as old as human thought—how to pass from the infinite to the finite, and reconcile absolute good with the existence of evil. The details of the earlier systems with which the Apostles had to deal are unknown to us, but in the speculations of Valentinus, as preserved in the writings of the early Fathers, especially the Philosophoumena of Hippolytus, we have a system in which philosophical conceptions are clothed in Oriental imagery, and an attempt is made to give a consistent explanation of the mysteries of Creation, Sin, and Redemption.
From the Absolute Being or the Abysmal Depth, there issued twin emanations, having each a relative being in itself, but each pair, as they receded from the primal source of existence, had fainter traces of the pure Divine spirit. These emanations are personifications of the Divine attributes, and in their totality constitute the realm of pure spirit—the τλήρωμα of the Godhead. Opposed to the πλήρωμκ is the κἔ?νωμα, the emptiness, the realm of matter and material things, the shadow-world as against the world of reality. It is the philosophical distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the realm of archetypal ideas and the objects of sense perception, with a moral significance imparted into it. In the κενωμα, the thirty aeons of the τλήρωμα have their material counterpart, presided over by the Demiurge or Creator, who has no organic relation to the spiritual realm. This world of chaos and ancient night receives from the τλήρωμα a spiritual principle, reducing it to a semblance of order, in the person of Sophia Achamoth, an emanation from the Sophia of the spiritual realm. The higher Sophia, the latest of the aeons, and the furthest removed from the Absolute, had been consumed with a desire to reach upwards to the Primal Glory, and to emulate the Uncreated by giving birth to another aeon. The result was an abortion,—a being spiritual in essence but out of harmony with the τλήρωμα ,—which was cast forth from the spiritual realm and found a place of exile in the κενωμα . Here Sophia Achamoth imparted of her essence to the aeons of the void, and thus introduced a spiritual principle which was capable of redemption. To those who had in them this spiritual essence Christ was sent, each of the aeons contributing something of its own perfection to fit Him for His errand. The aeon Christ entered into the man Jesus, and through Him effected the redemption of those spiritual beings who were involved in the lower realm of matter, but who had received quickening through the infusion of the spiritual principle into the κενωμα .
What degree of elaboration this fantastic theory had reached in the age of St. Paul, and still later in that of St. John, there is not now material to decide; but there are distinct traces of it in the Epistle to the Colossians in the reference to principalities, dominions, and powers (Colossians 1:16); and we know that Cerinthus, a contemporary of St. John, thought out the religious problem on very similar lines, and used the word pleroma in a similar sense. We are to regard the use of the term, then, by the two Apostles as an assertion of the true doctrine of the pleroma as against a false doctrine which had wide currency. In the Logos, who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, the whole pleroma of the Godhead is contained. Jesus was not the last of the aeons, created as an afterthought. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all created beings (Colossians 1:15). The long chain of mediators between God and man is relegated to the realm of myth, and the one Mediator, μονογενής, full of grace and truth (John 1:14), through whom alone God effects His purposes in Creation and Redemption, is held up for the adoration of all men. And this fulness of the Divine, which is in Him through the closeness of His contact with God, is imparted to His disciples (John 1:16) and to the Church which is His Body, and which in its ideality is the fulness of Him who filleth all in all (Ephesians 1:23). The Church is here regarded as the complement of Jesus. The Head and the Body make one whole—the pleroma of the Godhead, the full realization of the Divine purpose which centres in the redemption of man. For through this Church, which on earth possesses the potentiality of the pleroma, by means of its varied ministries, the fulness which is in Christ the Head passes to the individual, whose destiny it is to attain to the perfect man, to the possession, in his degree, of the entire pleroma of the Godhead.
It is scarcely sufficiently recognized that the NT doctrine of the Church is a philosophy of the Social Organism which embraces all essential human activities (Ephesians 4:15-16). Our difficulty in apprehending it lies mainly in this, that the Apostles, seeing the temporal in the light of eternity, are constantly confusing the boundary lines which separate the actual from the ideal, the process from the consummation.
Literature.—Lightfoot on Colossians; Pressensé, Heresy and Christian Doctrine; Neander, Church History; Hippolytus, Philosophoumena; see also Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible, art. ‘Pleroma,’ with Literature there quoted.
A. Miller.