In one early passage of the treatise, he lost patience with the wholesale arbitrariness of the gnostic system. If the gnostics can fabricate divine beings ex nihilo, Irenaeus concluded, so can anyone else. Along with this Cucumber exists a power of the same essence, which again I call a Melon. According to 1 Kings 18, Elijah, during his confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, mocked as his opponents tried, unsuccessfully, to stimulate Baal to action. Irenaeus and Elijah were on solid psychological as well as theological ground in their use of scorn as an apologetic weapon.
Proud people take themselves very seriously, and heretics are usually very proud people.
Satan himself, Chesterton quipped, fell by force of gravity. Instead of sustaining the heretic's inflated self-conception, mockery attempts to pierce the bubble of pride and produce a redeeming deflation. No one is less likely to be a heretic than the man who can enjoy a hearty laugh at his own expense. Faced with a burgeoning gnosticism in the New Age Movement, contemporary apologists would do well to borrow a page from Elijah and Irenaeus, for the theories of Shirley McLaine are surely no less silly than those of Valentinus. In an age when respect for other beliefs, no matter how inane, defines the limits of acceptable debate, apologetic mockery will doubtless be pilloried as mean-spirited and intolerant.