4. ST. IRENAEUS OF LYONS
St. Irenaeus is one of those sympathetic figures in whom all the tendencies of a time seem to meet. He was born, apparently, between the years 135-140 in Asia Minor, and in his youth was a disciple of the famous Bishop of Smyrna St. Polycarp who was, in turn, the disciple of St. John. From Smyrna Irenaeus passed to Rome and, possibly at this time, came under the influence of St. Justin, reminiscences of whose work are found in all his writings. But it is not until the year 177 that Irenaeus appears in history and he is then in Rome, the envoy of the Church at Lyons, recounting for the Roman Church the detail of the famous persecution. In that persecution he has himself suffered and he is by this time a priest of the Church at Lyons. By the time he returned from Rome, the persecution had given yet more martyrs to the Lyonnese Church, among them its aged bishop, Pothinus. Irenaeus was elected to succeed him, and ruled for the next twenty or thirty years. How his life ended we do not know, but, traditionally, it is as a martyr that he figures in the calendar.
St. Irenaeus -- and the fact is immediately evident from his writings -- is not an apologist. To win a sympathetic hearing from the Pagan elite whom philosophies attract is by no means his object. He is a man of affairs, the busy missionary bishop of a frontier diocese, and if he writes it is to defend his people from the ever menacing heresies. He is concerned to rout the Gnostics to shatter their claims to be followers of Christ, to state yet once again the simple truths delivered to the Apostles in which alone salvation lies. And for all his admiration for St. Justin and his use of that scholar's work, he has little patience with the attempts of philosophers to explain rationally the how and the why of the mysteries. Quasi ipsi obstetricaverint -- "as though they themselves had been the midwives" -- he says scornfully of the theorists busy with discussion on the generation of the Logos. His work marks an epoch in the development of Catholic Theology and there are not wanting scholars to see in him, in this respect, the peer of St. Augustine, the greatest force indeed between St. Augustine and St. Paul.
Yet St. Irenaeus is no innovator. He has no revolutionary theories to present, no new explanations -- explanations indeed he does not profess to give. But he so re-states the old traditional truths in relation to the particular danger of his day, that his restatement has a new, universal value and, beyond what he designed, it has stood ever since as a refutation by anticipation not of Gnosticism alone but of all and every heresy. Simply summarising the legacy of all who had preceded him, setting forth once again the traditional belief and practice of the Church as he knew it, he ends by sketching a theological theory of the Church and its teaching office which all subsequent discussions have merely developed. He is a most valuable witness to the second century Church's own theory of her own nature. He professes merely to state facts, to describe the reality before him, and the event is proof of his sincerity and his truth. The Church did not become Gnostic, although many Catholics were Gnostics. It threw off the doctrine, as a thing it could not assimilate. Gnosticism, and the religion of the Church as Christ would have it, are incompatible because the religion of Christ is essentially a religion of authority. The issue is the simple one of tradition against speculation. Two theories claiming to determine truth within the Church are in conflict -- the Gnostics base all on the depth of their learning, Irenaeus on the teaching authority in the Church. The Gnostics, witnessing to the institution they seek to subvert, gibe at "the teaching fitted for simpletons." Irenaeus accepts the gibe. Upon it he builds his work. Not by the machinery of councils, nor the aid of the State, but by the simple functioning of the authority which was its essence, the Church of the second century shook itself free of its modernising children. Upon no other hypothesis than a general belief in the traditional nature of Christian teaching, and a general acceptance of the claim of the rulers to decide what was the tradition, can the passage of the Church, scathless, through this crisis be explained. If, on the other hand, the Church was as St. Irenaeus describes it, the matter is self-evident.
Two books of his writing survive. The first which we have in a Latin translation, possibly contemporary with the author, and in a vast number of Greek fragments, is the work usually known as the Adversus Haereses -- Against Heresies. Its Greek title better describes it as A refutation and criticism of Knowledge falsely so-called. The second and much shorter work -- The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching -- is a kind of handbook for one who is already a believer, explaining the faith, with arguments and citations from Holy Scripture. It was lost for centuries and rediscovered, in an Armenian translation, as recently as 1904.
It is to the Adversus Haereses that St. Irenaeus owes his place in history. The doctrine of the book is the traditional doctrine. God is only fully knowable by revelation. God is one and there is only one God, God of the Old Testament and of the New alike. This one true God is the Creator of all. In God there are the three, Father, Son (St. Irenaeus characteristically prefers the term Son to Logos with its associations of alien philosophies and Gnostic misuse) and Holy Ghost. The Son existed before His incarnation, for the Son is God equally with the Father. As to the mode or, moment of His generation St. Irenaeus, as against the Gnostics and in marked contrast with the Apologists, has no theory to propose. These are mysteries known to God alone, and the Gnostic's elaborate explanations are mere fantasies. Nor does he offer any explanation of the origin of evil, beyond the free will of man and the fact of the first man's fall and its consequences. That falling away from God at the beginning of things has affected all subsequent humanity. From its disastrous consequences we are redeemed by the saving death of Jesus Christ-the Logos Himself, now incarnate. He is Saviour and Redeemer, as well as Revealer of God to man. He is truly God and truly man; and St. Irenaeus is again content to record the traditional belief without any attempt to show how the two realities meet in Him. From the redeeming action of the incarnate Logos there comes to man the possibility of reconciliation with God, to be achieved by faith in Christ, obedience to His precepts, and rebirth in Him by Baptism. The mystery of the Holy Eucharist in which are really received the Body and Blood of Christ, and which is also a sacrifice, consummates on earth the work of reconciliation.
In all this St. Irenaeus is not merely repeating the tradition. He is repeating it to refute thinkers whose special error it is that they claim to arrive at the fullness of Christianity by "Knowledge." Whence the special attention he gives to the fundamental question of the sources and means by which we can come to know God and His will in our regard. Here is the very heart of what is characteristic in his work. Man, because of his finite nature, can never attain to full knowledge of God. It is no matter for surprise, then, that such mysteries as the generation of the Logos, the origin of the material escape us. Perfect knowledge is more than we can expect. Yet there is open to us a sure knowledge of heavenly things and mysteries, even a sure knowledge of the Logos -- the knowledge God Himself has chosen to reveal. This knowledge is, in part, contained in the divine Scriptures. It is objected that these are often obscure, and the difficulty arises of correct interpretation, of a choice between rival interpretations. What then is the ultimate guide? Not Scripture but "the fixed, unchangeable rule of truth" which each receives in Baptism. This canon of belief is the same throughout the Church; so that the Church whether in the Germanies or in Gaul, in Spain, among the Celts, in the East, in Egypt, in Libya has but one heart and one soul, speaks with one mouth and one voice. The most eloquent of bishops cannot teach otherwise, the weakest can do nothing to lessen the tradition. So it is with the Church universal, wherever it is established. The source of this canon's value is its apostolic origin, the historically demonstrable fact that it was committed to the Church by the Apostles and has, by the Church, been ever since preserved. All those who care to know the truth can examine the apostolic tradition, shown forth clearly in every church throughout the world, guaranteed by the line of bishops which began with those whom the Apostles appointed and which continues to their successors in our own time. To trace the succession of bishops in all the churches of the world would take more space than his book can afford, he proceeds. A simpler way is to examine the succession in that see of Rome, the greatest and most venerable of all, founded by the glorious apostles Peter and Paul. By setting out the tradition it holds from the Apostles, and the faith it has taught through a succession of bishops reaching thence to our times, we bring to confusion those who, for whatever reason, gather elsewhere than they ought. And this for the simple reason that every church throughout the world is bound to bring itself into line with the Roman Church because of that Church's surer guarantees, [1] for in that Church what the Apostles handed down has ever been preserved by those who govern. In final analysis it is not human learning, not even the study of the admittedly Sacred Writings, which is the source of man's knowledge of the truths revealed., It is the teaching of the Roman Church.
Such is the famous testimony of St. Irenaeus written, not as an argument to prove the papal claims against objectors, but, as a reminder of known and accepted truths, to make it easier for his contemporaries to distinguish between truth and heresy. For a Church so constituted, and so clearly conscious of its constitution, there was little to fear in Gnosticism. The seduction of the heresy, its apparent success in giving rational explanations where the Church proposed mysteries to be believed, its ritual, its exclusivism, its suggestion that the Gnostic was one of an elite -- all these might lead many astray. But, upon the institution they deserted for the "knowledge falsely so-called", the theories could make no impression. The tradition was too rooted that the religion of the Church is itself a thing handed down, to be believed on Authority, to be taught by Authority; a religion in which the last word in controversy rests not with learning, but once again, with Authority.
It is the glory of St. Irenaeus that his genius stated the anti-Gnostic case in this universal way. His ideas are never new. They are to be found where he too found them -- in St. Polycarp of Smyrna (155) and Papias and Hegesippus and the whole line back to the Apostles themselves. But his use of these riches stamped on theology once and for all that traditional character which it still bears. He is not the inventor of the principles which he states, and thanks to the Church's acceptance of which the Gnostic influences fail -- the authority of the Rule of Faith and of the Apostolic Succession, the infallibility of the Church and the united episcopate, [2] the special doctrinal authority of the Roman See. But he is the first to set them out for what they are, the several parts of an amazing whole, and thereby he is the first founder of that treatise De Ecclesia fundamental in Catholic Theology.
1Propter potentiorem principalitatem. Adv. Her. III, 3, 2. For the translation of this much-discussed phrase cf. Batiffol, L’Eglise Naissante pp. 251-2, Dawson. Making of Europe, p. 33 n.
2" We must obey the elders in the Church, who hold the succession from the Apostles. . who with the episcopal succession have received the sure gift of truth. As for the rest, who are divorced from the principal succession and gather where they will, they are to be held in suspicion, as heretics and evil thinkers, faction makers, swelled-headed self-pleasing. . . " (Adv. Haereses, iv, 26, 2.) " It is through the Church that it has been arranged for us to receive what Christ communicates i.e., the Holy Spirit, the confirmation of our faith and the ladder to mount to God. ' For in the Church ' He says, ' God hath placed Apostles, prophets, teachers (I Cor. xii, 28) and all that other working of the Spirit in which none of those share who, instead of hastening to the Church, rob themselves of life by following evil opinions and a wicked way of life. For with the Church is the Spirit of God to be found, and with the Spirit of God there the Church and all grace: the Spirit indeed being truth. Those therefore who share not that Spirit are not nourished in life at the breasts of their mother nor do they receive of that most pure stream which flows from the body of Christ " (Adv. Her., iii, 24, 1).
St. Irenaeus is one of those sympathetic figures in whom all the tendencies of a time seem to meet. He was born, apparently, between the years 135-140 in Asia Minor, and in his youth was a disciple of the famous Bishop of Smyrna St. Polycarp who was, in turn, the disciple of St. John. From Smyrna Irenaeus passed to Rome and, possibly at this time, came under the influence of St. Justin, reminiscences of whose work are found in all his writings. But it is not until the year 177 that Irenaeus appears in history and he is then in Rome, the envoy of the Church at Lyons, recounting for the Roman Church the detail of the famous persecution. In that persecution he has himself suffered and he is by this time a priest of the Church at Lyons. By the time he returned from Rome, the persecution had given yet more martyrs to the Lyonnese Church, among them its aged bishop, Pothinus. Irenaeus was elected to succeed him, and ruled for the next twenty or thirty years. How his life ended we do not know, but, traditionally, it is as a martyr that he figures in the calendar.
St. Irenaeus -- and the fact is immediately evident from his writings -- is not an apologist. To win a sympathetic hearing from the Pagan elite whom philosophies attract is by no means his object. He is a man of affairs, the busy missionary bishop of a frontier diocese, and if he writes it is to defend his people from the ever menacing heresies. He is concerned to rout the Gnostics to shatter their claims to be followers of Christ, to state yet once again the simple truths delivered to the Apostles in which alone salvation lies. And for all his admiration for St. Justin and his use of that scholar's work, he has little patience with the attempts of philosophers to explain rationally the how and the why of the mysteries. Quasi ipsi obstetricaverint -- "as though they themselves had been the midwives" -- he says scornfully of the theorists busy with discussion on the generation of the Logos. His work marks an epoch in the development of Catholic Theology and there are not wanting scholars to see in him, in this respect, the peer of St. Augustine, the greatest force indeed between St. Augustine and St. Paul.
Yet St. Irenaeus is no innovator. He has no revolutionary theories to present, no new explanations -- explanations indeed he does not profess to give. But he so re-states the old traditional truths in relation to the particular danger of his day, that his restatement has a new, universal value and, beyond what he designed, it has stood ever since as a refutation by anticipation not of Gnosticism alone but of all and every heresy. Simply summarising the legacy of all who had preceded him, setting forth once again the traditional belief and practice of the Church as he knew it, he ends by sketching a theological theory of the Church and its teaching office which all subsequent discussions have merely developed. He is a most valuable witness to the second century Church's own theory of her own nature. He professes merely to state facts, to describe the reality before him, and the event is proof of his sincerity and his truth. The Church did not become Gnostic, although many Catholics were Gnostics. It threw off the doctrine, as a thing it could not assimilate. Gnosticism, and the religion of the Church as Christ would have it, are incompatible because the religion of Christ is essentially a religion of authority. The issue is the simple one of tradition against speculation. Two theories claiming to determine truth within the Church are in conflict -- the Gnostics base all on the depth of their learning, Irenaeus on the teaching authority in the Church. The Gnostics, witnessing to the institution they seek to subvert, gibe at "the teaching fitted for simpletons." Irenaeus accepts the gibe. Upon it he builds his work. Not by the machinery of councils, nor the aid of the State, but by the simple functioning of the authority which was its essence, the Church of the second century shook itself free of its modernising children. Upon no other hypothesis than a general belief in the traditional nature of Christian teaching, and a general acceptance of the claim of the rulers to decide what was the tradition, can the passage of the Church, scathless, through this crisis be explained. If, on the other hand, the Church was as St. Irenaeus describes it, the matter is self-evident.
Two books of his writing survive. The first which we have in a Latin translation, possibly contemporary with the author, and in a vast number of Greek fragments, is the work usually known as the Adversus Haereses -- Against Heresies. Its Greek title better describes it as A refutation and criticism of Knowledge falsely so-called. The second and much shorter work -- The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching -- is a kind of handbook for one who is already a believer, explaining the faith, with arguments and citations from Holy Scripture. It was lost for centuries and rediscovered, in an Armenian translation, as recently as 1904.
It is to the Adversus Haereses that St. Irenaeus owes his place in history. The doctrine of the book is the traditional doctrine. God is only fully knowable by revelation. God is one and there is only one God, God of the Old Testament and of the New alike. This one true God is the Creator of all. In God there are the three, Father, Son (St. Irenaeus characteristically prefers the term Son to Logos with its associations of alien philosophies and Gnostic misuse) and Holy Ghost. The Son existed before His incarnation, for the Son is God equally with the Father. As to the mode or, moment of His generation St. Irenaeus, as against the Gnostics and in marked contrast with the Apologists, has no theory to propose. These are mysteries known to God alone, and the Gnostic's elaborate explanations are mere fantasies. Nor does he offer any explanation of the origin of evil, beyond the free will of man and the fact of the first man's fall and its consequences. That falling away from God at the beginning of things has affected all subsequent humanity. From its disastrous consequences we are redeemed by the saving death of Jesus Christ-the Logos Himself, now incarnate. He is Saviour and Redeemer, as well as Revealer of God to man. He is truly God and truly man; and St. Irenaeus is again content to record the traditional belief without any attempt to show how the two realities meet in Him. From the redeeming action of the incarnate Logos there comes to man the possibility of reconciliation with God, to be achieved by faith in Christ, obedience to His precepts, and rebirth in Him by Baptism. The mystery of the Holy Eucharist in which are really received the Body and Blood of Christ, and which is also a sacrifice, consummates on earth the work of reconciliation.
In all this St. Irenaeus is not merely repeating the tradition. He is repeating it to refute thinkers whose special error it is that they claim to arrive at the fullness of Christianity by "Knowledge." Whence the special attention he gives to the fundamental question of the sources and means by which we can come to know God and His will in our regard. Here is the very heart of what is characteristic in his work. Man, because of his finite nature, can never attain to full knowledge of God. It is no matter for surprise, then, that such mysteries as the generation of the Logos, the origin of the material escape us. Perfect knowledge is more than we can expect. Yet there is open to us a sure knowledge of heavenly things and mysteries, even a sure knowledge of the Logos -- the knowledge God Himself has chosen to reveal. This knowledge is, in part, contained in the divine Scriptures. It is objected that these are often obscure, and the difficulty arises of correct interpretation, of a choice between rival interpretations. What then is the ultimate guide? Not Scripture but "the fixed, unchangeable rule of truth" which each receives in Baptism. This canon of belief is the same throughout the Church; so that the Church whether in the Germanies or in Gaul, in Spain, among the Celts, in the East, in Egypt, in Libya has but one heart and one soul, speaks with one mouth and one voice. The most eloquent of bishops cannot teach otherwise, the weakest can do nothing to lessen the tradition. So it is with the Church universal, wherever it is established. The source of this canon's value is its apostolic origin, the historically demonstrable fact that it was committed to the Church by the Apostles and has, by the Church, been ever since preserved. All those who care to know the truth can examine the apostolic tradition, shown forth clearly in every church throughout the world, guaranteed by the line of bishops which began with those whom the Apostles appointed and which continues to their successors in our own time. To trace the succession of bishops in all the churches of the world would take more space than his book can afford, he proceeds. A simpler way is to examine the succession in that see of Rome, the greatest and most venerable of all, founded by the glorious apostles Peter and Paul. By setting out the tradition it holds from the Apostles, and the faith it has taught through a succession of bishops reaching thence to our times, we bring to confusion those who, for whatever reason, gather elsewhere than they ought. And this for the simple reason that every church throughout the world is bound to bring itself into line with the Roman Church because of that Church's surer guarantees, [1] for in that Church what the Apostles handed down has ever been preserved by those who govern. In final analysis it is not human learning, not even the study of the admittedly Sacred Writings, which is the source of man's knowledge of the truths revealed., It is the teaching of the Roman Church.
Such is the famous testimony of St. Irenaeus written, not as an argument to prove the papal claims against objectors, but, as a reminder of known and accepted truths, to make it easier for his contemporaries to distinguish between truth and heresy. For a Church so constituted, and so clearly conscious of its constitution, there was little to fear in Gnosticism. The seduction of the heresy, its apparent success in giving rational explanations where the Church proposed mysteries to be believed, its ritual, its exclusivism, its suggestion that the Gnostic was one of an elite -- all these might lead many astray. But, upon the institution they deserted for the "knowledge falsely so-called", the theories could make no impression. The tradition was too rooted that the religion of the Church is itself a thing handed down, to be believed on Authority, to be taught by Authority; a religion in which the last word in controversy rests not with learning, but once again, with Authority.
It is the glory of St. Irenaeus that his genius stated the anti-Gnostic case in this universal way. His ideas are never new. They are to be found where he too found them -- in St. Polycarp of Smyrna (155) and Papias and Hegesippus and the whole line back to the Apostles themselves. But his use of these riches stamped on theology once and for all that traditional character which it still bears. He is not the inventor of the principles which he states, and thanks to the Church's acceptance of which the Gnostic influences fail -- the authority of the Rule of Faith and of the Apostolic Succession, the infallibility of the Church and the united episcopate, [2] the special doctrinal authority of the Roman See. But he is the first to set them out for what they are, the several parts of an amazing whole, and thereby he is the first founder of that treatise De Ecclesia fundamental in Catholic Theology.
1Propter potentiorem principalitatem. Adv. Her. III, 3, 2. For the translation of this much-discussed phrase cf. Batiffol, L’Eglise Naissante pp. 251-2, Dawson. Making of Europe, p. 33 n.
2" We must obey the elders in the Church, who hold the succession from the Apostles. . who with the episcopal succession have received the sure gift of truth. As for the rest, who are divorced from the principal succession and gather where they will, they are to be held in suspicion, as heretics and evil thinkers, faction makers, swelled-headed self-pleasing. . . " (Adv. Haereses, iv, 26, 2.) " It is through the Church that it has been arranged for us to receive what Christ communicates i.e., the Holy Spirit, the confirmation of our faith and the ladder to mount to God. ' For in the Church ' He says, ' God hath placed Apostles, prophets, teachers (I Cor. xii, 28) and all that other working of the Spirit in which none of those share who, instead of hastening to the Church, rob themselves of life by following evil opinions and a wicked way of life. For with the Church is the Spirit of God to be found, and with the Spirit of God there the Church and all grace: the Spirit indeed being truth. Those therefore who share not that Spirit are not nourished in life at the breasts of their mother nor do they receive of that most pure stream which flows from the body of Christ " (Adv. Her., iii, 24, 1).
