“According to the good pleasure (eudokia) of the Father”: the expression occurs more than once in Irenaeus. What is its meaning? The Greek word eudokia in biblical and patristic literature does not only stand for “will”, but it points to a strong, primordial will, especially applied to God as one of his sovereign attributes. Its uses by Irenaeus, in particular in quotations from Ephesians 1:5, tend to show that the “good pleasure” of the Father constitutes Irenaeus’ personal “touch” in theology together with the Son’s “recapitulation”: the “good pleasure” of the Father serves as a divine guarantee for what would appear to be too human in the Incarnation of the Son. The Greek Fathers in turn used the phrase according to various theological problematics, and thus witnessed to the posterity of Irenaeus’ expression and intuition.