SOURCE: “Irenaeus of Lyons,” in The Early Christian Apologists and Greek Philosophy, Van Gorcum & Comp., B.V., 1973, pp. 23-39.

[In the essay below, Timothy examines the content and structure of Irenaeus's Adversus haereses,demonstrating Irenaeus's skill in refuting the arguments of the Gnostics.]

In the manner of a surgeon performing a major operation, though not quite so methodically, Irenaeus, in the first book of the Adversus haereses, begins to lay bare the nerves and sinews and so take us to the very heart of the Gnostic heresy which he knew from all too close acquaintance with it in the valley of the Rhone and had, it seems probable, encountered before then when he was passing from youth to manhood in the province of Asia.

He describes it as “the many-headed Lernaean hydra” sprung from the Valentinian school¹ and likens it in respect of the rapidity of its self-proliferation to mushrooms growing from the ground,² alluding to the fact that its craftily constructed plausibilities draw away the minds of the inexperienced so as to take them captive³ and have deluded many women.⁴

He gives us an insight into the Gnostic anthropology according to which there are three given types of men, the spiritual, the material, and the “psychical”, represented by Cain, Abel and Seth⁵ in the Old Testament. The good are those capable of receiving a seed of the divine nature into themselves. The bad, on the other hand, are by nature utterly and eternally devoid of this capacity.⁶ The former are guaranteed salvation solely in virtue of their inherent spirituality,⁷ and everything for them is considered lawful or permissible since they hold that it is incumbent on them to experience all things, however abdominable, so as to attain complete self-fulfilment in this life and thus evade reincarnation.⁸

The Gnostics boast of possessing a secret tradition revealed mystically to them in parables by Christ, because, on their submission, they alone are qualified to understand it.⁹ They construe chapter XI, verses 25-27 of the first gospel as signifying that, whereas the creator of the world has always been known universally, the words uttered by Jesus in this passage refer to the Father of truth who has been unknown hitherto and whom they now consider themselves in a special position to proclaim.¹⁰

Knowledge of what they call the “unspeakable greatness”,¹¹ they say, in and by itself constitutes perfect redemption,¹² and to know what they make out the truth to be is equivalent to the resurrection of the dead.¹³ Whoever acquires the knowledge thus possessed by them has the power conferred on him of becoming invisible and incomprehensible to the angels and the powers,¹⁴ so as to meet and pass through them with impunity when his soul, liberated from the evil environment that confines it in this world, takes its flight to the Beyond.

They also claim that the consummation of all things will come about when the spiritual or the elect attain finally to the perfect knowledge of God and have been initiated into the mysteries of their so-called soul-mother, Achamoth.¹⁵

According to the tenets of docetic Gnosticism, Jesus was simply Joseph's son and, as such, nowise different from other men, except for having kept his soul steadfast and pure and perfectly remembering the things seen by him within the sphere of the unbegotten God;¹⁶ he is, in other words, simply the last of the Gnostic aeons or intermediaries between this world and the high spiritual realm, the pre-eminent revealer sent to lead men to the knowledge of the truth.

Jesus, in the drama of redemption, some of the Docetists make out, had a purely dispensational role. The Logos and the saviour, according to their views, never became incarnate, but descended on the dispensational Jesus at his baptism by John at the river Jordan, like a dove.¹⁷ Jesus, so portrayed, was merely a receptacle for Christ who having declared the unnameable Father reascended into the Pleroma incomprehensibly and invisibly.¹⁸ The baptism, moreover, which the visible Jesus instituted was for the remission of sins, whereas the redemption initiated by the Spirit that descended on him, as described, was for perfection.¹⁹ The spirit of Christ, because of his being incomprehensible and invisible and, therefore, immune to suffering, was taken away from Jesus when he was delivered to Pontius Pilate,²⁰ while Simon of Cyrene was transformed by Jesus so as to pass for him and at the Crucifixion took his place.²¹ The same applies to the post-resurrection appearances, since, as asserted by the heretics, it was the Gnostic Christ, not Jesus, who survived death on the cross.²²

Those who know these things have, according to the teaching of Basilides been set free from the powers that formed the world and anyone confessing to belief in a crucified redeemer is to be looked on as a slave.²³

Such is allegedly the basis of the position taken by the Gnostics and these are some of the arguments adduced by those who claim to speak for it. By way of stating the case for orthodoxy as plainly as possible. Irenaeus now proposes and proceeds to rebut these arguments.

Life in God being, on the Gnostic thesis, conditioned by the predetermined state or natural condition of the soul, producing this or that fixed type, faith is rendered meaningless. If nature or substance are the determinants of salvation and, on this principle, some are saved and some are not, righteousness will appear either impotent or unjust;²⁴ but, insists Irenaeus, it was for all mankind from the beginning that Christ came, not merely for the sake of those who believed in him in the days of Tiberius Caesar, nor was it for those only who are presently alive that the Father exercised his providence.²⁵

There is—and this is the main thrust of Irenaeus' case against the heretics—the question of tradition of which they make so much, but, he reminds them, the tradition which is the only true, life-giving faith, received from the apostles by the Church and imparted to her sons,²⁶ and this the Church, though scattered throughout the world, as if occupying one house, carefully preserves.

The world's languages are all different, yet what is contained in and conveyed by the tradition is identical for them all. The churches in Germany do not believe or pass on anything different from those in Spain or Gaul or anywhere else on earth. Like God's own sun the light of which is the same wherever it shines on men, the proclamation of the truth handed down from the beginning of the Christian dispensation sheds its radiance on all those who are willing to come to a knowledge of the truth. The faith is always one and the same. Irrespective of how much or how little anyone has to say concerning it, no one can increase or diminish it.²⁷

The Gnostics presuming, however, to improve on the apostles read into the scriptures their own interpretation and when challenged, or refuted from the scriptures, will retort that the latter cannot rightly be interpreted by anyone who is ignorant of the genuine tradition handed down, not in writing, but viva voce as a secret revelation to themselves, they having discovered the unadulterated truth. They will, besides, to justify themselves, assert that the apostles confused the Gospel and the Law drawing their inspiration from different sources, at one time from the Demiurge, at another from the middle sphere, at yet another from the Pleroma, and that the Lord occasionally even did the same himself.²⁸

The apostles, Irenaeus answers, did not teach one set of doctrines privately and another publicly. Their testimony is open and stands sure. The reason why God caused so many testimonies to the Gospel to be pointed out by Luke may be that everyone, considering it essential to use all of them, might have access to the truly unadulterated rule of truth and so be saved.²⁹ The case made out by the Gnostics can be upheld by the authority of neither the prophets, nor the Lord, nor the apostles. This, then, is what they boast of having perfect knowledge of, surpassing anything that anyone else knows! They gather their views from sources other than the scriptures and adapt them, regardless of the order and connection of the scriptures, to the teaching of the prophets, the Lord and the apostles, so as to make their systems seem soundly Christian in character.³⁰

The mere fact that the heretics differ so much among themselves affords a priori (ex extensione) proof of the falsity of the tales they fabricate and of the immovability of the truth the Church proclaims.³¹ A sound mind which is pious and truth-loving will be ready to give thought to the things God has placed within our power, the things, that is to say, which are open to our view and have been set forth unambiguously in the scriptures, so that, if we progress therein by daily study, knowledge of them will be made easy. If, however, scripture is to be interpreted according to individual taste and elaborated by the application of expressions which are not clear or evident, nobody will possess the rule of truth. Tot homines quot sententiae will rather be the rule, and the outcome will be antagonistic doctrines, like the questions investigated by the pagan philosophers.³²

Let right reason, Irenaeus pleads, be given its rightful place. Where in the bizarre mythologizing of the Gnostics is there any evidence of rationality?³³ God himself is Reason in one aspect of his being; therefore, it stands to reason that he has made all things rational and that those who live contrary to reason with which God endowed man at his creation and which the Logos and the Spirit have united to restore to men in Christ, live in effect opposed to God.³⁴ Irrational constructions placed upon a rationally constituted universe are faced with the charge even of repudiating reality. In their denial of the God who made all things the Gnostics, by being irrational in fact, deny themselves.

There is, emphasizes Irenaeus, pressing the point home, one and the same God and Father as announced in both the prophets and the Gospel.³⁵ Was it only in appearance that the Lord performed his wondrous works? The prophets foretold them and as part of God's unfolding history their predictions have come true.³⁶

The birth of Christ is reported plainly enough in scripture. The Lord came in reality, not despising or evading any condition of human life,³⁷ nor dispensing in his own case with the law decreed by him for mankind, observing the law even of the dead, that he might become the first-begotten from the dead.³⁸

The Gnostics aver that Jesus was born of Mary but that Christ descended from above. Matthew, however, in the first gospel³⁹ begins his narrative: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”, and also, “The birth of Jesus Christ was as follows”.⁴⁰ For the received text⁴¹ he might have written: “Now the birth of Jesus was as follows”, but anticipating those who were to come as the corrupters of the truth the Holy Ghost declared through him: “… the birth of Christ was as follows”, that we should not perchance think he is only man or suppose Jesus to be one and Christ another, but should know they are one and the same.⁴²

Because, says Irenaeus, elaborating on this point, our Lord Jesus Christ, one and the same, the Logos and Son of God, who always existed with the Father, by whom all things were made and who always was present with mankind,⁴³ who has power over all things from the Father … and is in rational communication (participans rationabiliter) with things invisible, while at the same time ruling over things visible and the affairs of men⁴⁴—because this Lord Jesus Christ has for man's sake become incarnate, all the doctrines concocted concerning him by the heretics are proved false—their theories as to subdivisions in his personality, for instance.⁴⁵ He is in fact as God fashioned him, human in all respects and in order to provide man with a model and example passed through every stage of human life.⁴⁶ Administering all things for the Father he discharges them from the beginning to the end, and no man apart from him can attain to the knowledge of God.⁴⁷ He is the Son of the Creator of the world who, as Mind and Logos in their fulness, both speaks that which he thinks and thinks that which he speaks,⁴⁸ for the Logos is his thought and the Logos is his mind, and the Father himself is Mind embracing everything, through whom the wood fructifies and the fountains well forth and the earth gives “first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear”.⁴⁹

Since the Son is the Logos vested with power, and truly man, he redeemed men in a manner consonant with reason,⁵⁰ thus redeeming his own property, for, though he was not received by his own to whom he came, he came to what belonged to him,⁵¹ the incarnation of the Logos being the union of himself with his own handiwork.⁵²

The things of time have been divinely made for man that he might come to maturity in them and thus bring forth the fruit of immortality,⁵³ he is, as Irenaeus puts it, ripening for immortality that he may attain to the freedom that enables man to put himself in subjection to God.⁵⁴ All through the ages God kept drawing on his people by means of successive covenants, while they kept progressing by faith to complete salvation, the human race being in a variety of ways adjusted to agreement with the goal that God had set for it, and the whole process reaching its culmination through the Gospel which renews man and recapitulates all things in itself, raising up and winging men to the heavenly kingdom.⁵⁵

Jesus poured out the spirit of the Father for the union and communion of God and man, whereby he imparted God to men. By his incarnation he attaches God to, and bestows immortality on, man.⁵⁶ He took up man into himself, the invisible being made visible, the incomprehensible being made comprehensible, the impassible being made capable of suffering, and the Logos becoming man, thus for all time summing up all things in himself, so that he might have the headship in things visible and invisible;⁵⁷ and bringing to its fulfilment the divine plan of salvation,⁵⁸ that by God's renewing knowledge man might repossess the divine image and likeness⁵⁹ and be promoted to receive a greater glory, namely, the expectation of being made like God Himself.⁶⁰ Jesus became the Son of Man that man might become a son of God.⁶¹ This is how Irenaeus sums it up. “Wherefore”, he wrote, “I do also call upon thee, Lord God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God of Jacob and Israel, who art the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God who through the abundance of thy mercy hast had a favour toward us, that we should know thee, who hast made heaven and earth, who rulest over all, who art the only true God, above whom no other God exists, grant by our Lord Jesus Christ the governing power of the Holy Spirit. Give to every reader of this book to know thee, that thou art God alone, to be strengthened in thee, and to avoid every doctrine that is heretical and Godless and impious.”⁶²

He has been aptly styled “the great opponent of Gnosticism”.⁶³ He had, it is evident, taken full stock of the situation and saw clearly where the vital issues lay. In the ensuing struggle there could be no compromise, for Gnosticism “in the second century, while it was yet living and agressive … constituted a danger greater … than any peril that has ever menaced the existence of the faith”.⁶⁴ It attempted to overthrow “belief in the almighty God of creation and redemption”.⁶⁵ It is, then, as the champion of that faith that Irenaeus steps forth into the arena to draw the teeth of the agressor and to take the many-headed hydra, as he calls it, by the tail.

The contest is fought out at two levels with weapons appropriate to each. First, with the weapons of an informed polemic for the most part within the confines of the Christian community; then with the weapons of a persuasive apologetic in a somewhat broader context where we find Irenaeus making effective use of certain concepts drawn from Greek philosophy.

The grounds of contention, already dealt with in some detail, may for convenience be more briefly presented here in terms of the following three chief areas of dispute:

First and perhaps foremost is the Gnostic doctrine of election and going along with it, the claim by the Gnostics to possession of an esoteric or exclusive type of knowledge in virtue of which, on the basis of their peculiar psychological or anthropological ideas, the heretics have created a sort of pre-determined class distinction in the spiritual life, with themselves as an élite minority at the upper end of the scale. They speak of the unknown Father whom they profess to have brought to light, unknown, not in the sense that he should not have been known at all, but unknown as he really is, because, from having lost or forgotten it, the majory of men are blind to the knowledge of his true nature and existence.⁶⁶ Faith is, in consequence, bypassed in favour of knowledge, as the Gnostics think of it, and coming to that knowledge is substituted for salvation, with pragmatic subjectivism set up as the norm in the sphere of moral conduct, as we should say.

Secondly, there is the tampering with tradition by the Gnostics in their allegorizing of the scriptures, wrested usually from the accepted reading or interpretation to accommodate their views and with the object of explaining away the content of the Christian revelation. Faith in the process becomes fiction and myth takes the place of history, the culprits having, as Irenaeus accuses them, substituted belief in unrealities for belief in what is real.

Thirdly, there is the Gnostic aeonology in which Jesus is represented as but one among the many cosmic intermediaries between God and the world. The Logos, consequently, on the Gnostic thesis, did not become flesh because he could not become flesh. It follows that the divinity of Jesus is not questioned but his humanity is denied. involved in this are the extravagances of Docetism which amounts to polytheism in a new and dangerous disguise.

The questions raised by such bold speculations would, at first glance, appear to pose more than one serious problem for the Church of the second century, but there is for Irenaeus, at least to begin with, a quite obvious solution and a perfectly straightforward, unequivocal reply.

On the claim to possession of a special gnosis and the doctrine of election which the Gnostics entertain, the Church makes no secret, Irenaeus points out, of the divine plan of salvation, because, handed down from the beginning and committed to the care and keeping of those rightfully regarded as successors of Christ's apostles, it is publicly proclaimed. It would not have been entrusted in the first place to those who transmitted it, had they not had requisite knowledge of what was entrusted to them to transmit. This is the only gnosis that exists or that ever has existed so far as true and truly informed Christians are concerned.

Neither is the plan of salvation in any way restrictive or limited. Its range in keeping with the faith obtaining everywhere from the first is universal in its scope. The Church has been entrusted with the light of God whose wisdom is the means whereby she saves all men. One and the same way of salvation is shown forth by the Church in all the world: she is the sevenbranched candlestick (… lucerna) that bears the light of Christ.⁶⁷ God's chosen or elect are those, and only those, who revere and love him, who give proof of their profession by the honesty of their dealings and their Godly attitude toward their fellow-men, and whose desire has been “to see Christ, and hear his voice”.⁶⁸

As to the counter-charge of inconsistency brought forward by the Gnostics when thrown back on the apostolic origin and nature of the teaching of the Church,⁶⁹ there is, retorts Irenaeus, in what has been given by God no inconsistency. It is per contra through the agency of the Gnostics that inconsistency has arisen. The Church's witness stands immovable and indisputable. There is but one testimony and the God by whom that testimony was given and to whom it testifies is the Creator of the world, the rule of truth being, so far as the Christian community is concerned, that there is one, almighty God who by his Logos established everything, who fashioned and formed from what had no existence all things that exist.⁷⁰

As for manipulation of the scriptures by the Gnostics, nothing can take the place of the traditional interpretation that the Church has inherited on apostolic authority. Private interpretation in any shape or form accordingly is condemned and prohibited, the scriptures being appointed to be read in the churches in the presence of the presbyters with whom the apostolic doctrine has been duly deposited.

With respect to Gnostic aeonology, the crucial point is the Incarnation reported and recorded as one of the great, incontestably fundamental facts of Christian history. Invoking the sacramental principle in support of this basic fact, Irenaeus says of Jesus that “he took bread, that created thing (eum qui ex creatura est panis), and gave thanks and said: “This is my body”. The cup which is “part of that creation to which we belong”, Irenaeus comments, “he confessed to be his blood”.⁷¹ Because Jesus is the Logos of God almighty who pervades the whole creation in his invisible form, and because by God's Logos all things are disposed and administered, the Son of God was also crucified in these things, imprinted in the form of a cross on the universe,⁷² his crucifixion consequently having cosmic significance.

Such is the sum and substance of the matter, as Irenaeus sees and expresses it, from the orthodox point of view. This is the true fides credenda whereby the churches live and they who believe or teach otherwise must regard themselves as extra fidem and, therefore, extra ecclesiam. That is the whole position in a nutshell and no more need be said, so far as concerns, at any rate, the Church's rule of faith and life.

The better, however, to dissuade any who may feel inclined to throw in their lot with the heretics, and, if possible, to save the latter from the error of their ways, Irenaeus shows his readiness to pass beyond the strictly orthodox position (on which, it must always be remembered, basically he refused to compromise) and to set the dialogue in a larger universe of discourse by invoking philosophic principles and arguing philosophically.

With reference to the apologies that abound in the early Christian centuries, Daniélou has drawn attention to the place occupied in them by affirmations concerning truths of a general nature where certain aspects of the content of the Christian message are concerned, and with regard to which he says:

Elles tendent à montrer que le christianisme est conforme à ce qu’il y a de valable dans l’âme humaine … leur but est surtout de montrer l’accord du message chrétien et de la raison humaine. C’est là ce qui constitute leur ressort principal et qui établit en même temps le contact entre le message chrétien et l’hellénisme.⁷³

Irenaeus is no exception. He readily allows that reason complements or reinforces revelation and corroborates the faith. He “did not merely confine himself to describing the fact of redemption, its content and its consequences, but he also attempted to explain the peculiar nature of this redemption from the essence of God and the incapacity of man, thus solving the question cur deus homo in the highest sense,” as Harnack says.⁷⁴

Discussing the wholly otherness of God's thoughts as compared with the thoughts of men, Irenaeus states that God is both simple and uncompounded and that in his being there is no distinction between the whole and the parts of which it is composed—the evident meaning of the word, similimembrius which Irenaeus employs here—that … he is wholly mind or understanding, and wholly spirit, and wholly thought, and wholly intelligence, and wholly reason, and wholly hearing, and all eye and all light, and the sole source of everything that is good …”.⁷⁵ Irenaeus is quoting Is. LV,8 as his proof text, but the idea itself recalls Xenophanes, fr. 24 Diels-Kranz (De Vogel, Greek Phil. I, nr. 72 b).

He says again: “What God had conceived in his mind was also brought about as soon as he mentally conceived it”, and, with reference to the creation of the world that, if it was made such as it is, he himself also made it so who had as such indeed mentally conceived⁷⁶ it; which, if of Biblical origin, is rather the rationalization of the original than the original itself. The following which is only one among many similarly worded passages in the Adversus haereses, will serve to illustrate how philosophically-minded he can be:

“Et utrum eiusdem substantiae exsistebant his qui se emiserunt, an ex altera quadam substantia, substantiam habentes? Et utrum in eodem emissi sunt, ut eiusdem temporis essent sibi; an secundum ordinem quendam, ita ut anti-quiores quidam ipsorum, alii vero iuveniores essent? Et utrum simplices quidam et uniformes, et undique sibi aequales et similes, quemadmodum spiritus et lumina emissa sunt; an compositi et differentes, dissimiles membris suis?”⁷⁷

The Logos-concept which features so conspicuously in the early Christian apologists is given due prominence and employed by Irenaeus to full effect. Other concepts current in the philosophic circles of his day which he draws on to advantage for apologetic purposes are the notion of natural law, the doctrine of innate ideas⁷⁸ and the consensus gentium associated with the argument from design.

Certain of the Gentiles, he writes, less voluptuous and less misguided by idolatrous superstition were convinced, if only slightly, that the designation “father” should be attributed to the creator of the universe who providentially rules over all things and arranges this world's affairs.⁷⁹ Though “no one knows the Father, save the Son, nor the Son, save the Father and those to whom the Son will reveal him”,⁸⁰ yet because reason is implanted in their minds, because it moves them and reveals the truth to them, all men know this one fact at least, that there is one God, the Lord of all,⁸¹ acknowledged as the creator of the world even by those who speak in many ways against him.⁸² All men in fact give assent to this persuasion which was preserved among the ancients as a legacy from the first-created man. Others coming after learned it from the prophets, and the heathen from creation. It is also part of the tradition passed down from the apostles to the universal church, for the established order of things reveals him who established it … and the world gives evidence of him who ordered it.⁸³

God at first warned the Jews by means of natural precepts which he had implanted from the beginning in mankind.⁸⁴ Those righteous men who lived before Abraham were justified without the Mosaic Law because they had the meaning of the Decalogue inscribed in their hearts and souls and had within themselves the righteousness of the Law. God moreover has increased and widened those laws which are natural and noble and common to all.⁸⁵

More pointedly, a propos of the determinism for which he takes the heretics to task, Irenaeus reiterates that man is a being imbued with reason which makes him godlike and endows him with free-will, compared with other forms of creation, such as frumentum … et paleae, inanimalia et irrationabilia exsistentia, naturaliter talia facta... This accounts for man's causing himself to become “sometimes wheat and sometimes chaff”. He is responsible for his fall and deserving of judgment, since, despite his creation as a rational being, he lost the true rationality and lived irrationally in opposition to the righteousness of God.⁸⁶

There appears, then, in the case of Irenaeus, one feels entitled to conclude, no great problem as regards the relation of the visible world to God or of the natural to the supernatural, and no insuperable obstacle to admitting reason or philosophy as footnotes to revelation, so to speak, or as means of enlightening faith. The latter must “to some extent include a knowledge of the reason and the aim of God's ways of salvation. Faith and theological knowledge are, therefore, after all, closely intertwined”,⁸⁷ always provided, Irenaeus would have insisted that they do not become intertwined to the extent that as a consequence faith becomes obscured.

He asserts that the apostles “had nothing in common with the teaching of the Gentiles”,⁸⁸ accusing the heretics of plagiarizing the comic poets, of bringing together the things that have been said by all those who are ignorant of God and who are called philosophers, and of sewing the rags and tatters they have picked up from such sources into a patchwork garment which they use as a cloak to cover their deceit.⁸⁹ He charges Basilides and his like with bringing into conformity with their own teaching matters “that lie outside the truth”,⁹⁰ by which he means, in contrast to the Christian revelation the speculations of the contemporary pagan world. He seeks, however, on the other hand to vindicate whatever the latter can be made to yield up as a means for facilitating the propagation of the faith. His attitude to such things, from this rather different point of view, is summed up forcefully and quite frankly in the following passage from the Adversus haereses.

With reference to the spoiling of the Egyptians by the children of Israel on the eve of their departure from the land of bondage, he first of all explains that God intended to provide this prototype in the history of the chosen people of what was one day to be the experience of the Church. He then goes on to say that, as the tabernacle in the wilderness was constructed out of the appropriated things, so Christians have every right to appropriate whatever will serve their purpose from the “mammon of unrighteousness”, for he asks:

From what source do we derive the houses in which we dwell, the garments in which we are clothed, the vessels that we use and all else ministering to our everyday existence, unless it be from those things which, when we were Gentiles, we acquired by avarice or received from our heathen parents, relations or friends who unrighteously obtained them, not to mention that even now we acquire such things? In what way are the heathen debtors to us from whom we receive both gain and profit? Whatever they amass with labour we make use of without labour, though we are in the faith.

Thus is using the goods bestowed on him by a society which is not Christian, the Christian redeems his own from the hand of the stranger. How can he say “stranger”, as if the world did not belong to God? Whatever Christians, therefore, when they were heathen, acquired from unrighteousness, they, having become Christians, are proved righteous by applying it to the advantage of the Lord.⁹¹

Notwithstanding his vigorous critique of Gnostic irrationalism, Irenaeus might at times impress us as being himself irrational or at least anti-rationalist. He speaks, for example, of the Church as a garden planted in a world in which one may eat of every fruit except that which is forbidden, namely, the ubiquitous (universam) discord introduced by the heretics.⁹² There are, he declares, certain matters about which we should not ask. Many things lying at our feet, such as the rising of the Nile, remain a mystery. How much more, then, of a mystery must be those things which are in heaven.⁹³ We know only in part and accordingly should leave all difficult questions in the hands of God who bestows in some measure grace on us whereby we are enabled to explain some things, though there are others we must simply leave to him.⁹⁴ Christians have the truth itself and the witness of God set clearly before them to go by in such things and, therefore, have no need to depart from the steadfast and true knowledge of God, by casting around for the various answers given to certain questions; and if Christians cannot find in scripture the explanation of the things with which human curiosity or investigation is concerned, the difficulty will not be lessened by their search for a divine being other than the God who really exists and to whom they owe their creation. Man is inferior to and lower in the scale of being than the Logos and spirit of God. To that extent the mysteries of God are beyond the limits of human knowledge and must be made known by revelation. That God should excel in knowledge is appropriate to his nature. Much may be said as to the causes of certain natural phenomena, but only God, their creator, can get at the truth regarding them. There are, then, certain questions which we must leave in his hands. The Christian, indeed, must leave them there, if he is to protect himself from danger and his faith from injury. The scriptures, given by God, can be relied on to be perfectly consistent. They speak with many voices but they all blend together into one harmony in praise of the Creator. Who but he can answer such questions as: “What was God doing before he made the world?”

Irenaeus quotes the scriptures testifying to the fact that evil exists but makes no effort to reflect on or account for its existence. God has, he notes, prepared eternal fire from the beginning for transgressors, but as regards the cause or origin of the latter, “neither has any scripture informed us, nor any apostle told us, nor the Lord instructed us”.⁹⁵ It is sufficient to say of things the source of which we are unable to explain that God prearranged them so to be.⁹⁶ Such thornier problems would appear to fall into their proper, one might almost say, their appointed place, in what for Irenaeus is the harmonious perfection of the Creator's handiwork.

He lingers on the thought that it is “better and more profitable to belong to the unlettered class, better that one should have no knowledge whatsoever of why a single thing in creation has been made, but should believe in God and continue in his love, than that, puffed up through such knowledge, one should fall away from the love which is the life of man”, but recollecting that he is writing with what the apostle Paul had said in mind, he hastens to add, “not that he meant to inveigh against a true knowledge of God, for in that case, he would have accused himself, but because he knew that some, puffed up by pretence of knowledge, fall away from the love of God …”⁹⁷

Harnack said of Irenaeus that he “replaced the vanishing trust in the possibility of attaining the highest knowledge by the aid of reason with the sure hope of a supernatural transformation of human nature, enabling it to appropriate what is above reason”,⁹⁸ which in the overall estimate holds substantially true.

Notes

1. Adv. haer., I. xxviii. 8, 1-3.

2. ibid., I. xxvii. 1, 2-3.

3. ibid., I. Praefatio, 4-6.

4. ibid., I. vii. 6, 2-3.

5. ibid., I. i. 14, 1-2 Hominum autem tria genera dicunt; spiritalem, psychicum, choicum, …

6. ibid., I, i. 14, 12-15.

7. ibid., I. i. 11, 26-27.

8. ibid., II. xlviii. 4, 1-3; I. xx. 2, 15f.

9. ibid., I. i. 5, 8-10.

10. ibid., I. xiii. 2, 23-33.

11. ipsam agnitionem inenarrabilis magnitudinis.

12. Adv. haer., I. xiv. 3, 9-11.

13. ibid., II. xlviii. 2, 18-19.

14. ibid., I. xix. 3, 15-17.

15. ibid., I. i. 11, 17-20 cf. Adv. haer., I. xxviii. 7, 34-36, consumationem autem futuram, quando tota humectatio spiritus luminis colligatur, et abripiatur in Aeonem incorruptibilitatis.

16. ibid., I. xx. I, 3-7.

17. ibid., III. xi. 3, 7-10.

18. ibid., III. xvi. 1-4.

19. ibid., I. xiv. 1, 15-18.

20. ibid., I, i. 13, 16-19.

21. ibid., I. xix. 2, 13-16.

22. ibid., I. xxviii. 7, 1-16.

23. ibid., I. xix. 2, 26-29.

24. ibid., II. xliv. 1, 20-25.

25. ibid., IV. xxxvi. 2, 1-3.

26. ibid., III. Praefatio, 20-21.

27. ibid., I. iii. cf. III, i. 1, 7-13.

28. ibid., III. ii. 1, 1-5; 2, 5-8.

29. ibid, III. xv. 1, 18-22.

30. ibid., I, i. 15, 4-10.

31. ibid., I. i. 20, 60-62.

32. ibid., II. xl. 1, 1-16.

33. ibid., II. xxii. 3, 9-23; 4.

34. ibid., V. i. 3, 13-24.

35. ibid., III. xi. 6, 21-23.

36. ibid., II. xlix. 3, 1-3.

37. ibid., II. xxxiii. 2, 6-7.

38. ibid., V. xxxi. 2, 1-2.

39. ibid., III. xi. 11, 29-30 Matthaeus vero eam quae est secundum hominem generationem ejus enarrat. This gospel, explains Irenaeus, is humanae formae, …

40. ibid., III, xi. 11, 30-32.

41. Matt., I, 1-18.

42. Adv. haer., III. xvii. 1, 26-29; 32-33.

43. ibid., III. xix. 1, 1-7; 2, 1-5, etc.

44. ibid., V. xviii. 2, 30-34.

45. ibid., III. xvii. 8, 1-9.

46. ibid., II. xxxiii. 2, 11-21.

47. ibid., IV, xi. 5, 17-23.

48. ibid., II. xlii. 2, 20-23.

49. ibid., IV. xxxi. 3, 22-24.

50. ibid., V. i. 1, 16-17.

51. ibid., III. xi. 7, 35-36 in sua propria venit.

52. ibid., III. xix. 1, 3-5.

53. ibid., IV. viii, 2-3.

54. ibid., V. xxix. 1, 4-6.

55. ibid., IV. xix. 2, 1-7, cf. IV. xxi, 1. 9-15 and III. xi. 11, 47-52.

    The recapitulation idea occurs repeatedly. The Gospel, as here, recapitulates all things. Christ is the means of recapitulation; and God recapitulates (the creation of man) in humanity that by destroying death he may deprive it of its power and restore man to life.

56. Adv. haer., V. i. 2, 1-7.

57. ibid., III. xvii. 6, 20-26.

58. ibid., III. xix. 2, 6-7.

59. ibid., V. xii. 4, 15-18.

60. ibid., III. xxi. 2, 23-24.

61. ibid., III. xi. 1, 38-39.

62. ibid., III, vi. 3.

63. F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, London 1952, vol. II, p. 20.

64. C. Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, Oxford 1886, p. 62.

65. Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. II, Boston 1903, p. 3. The essential character of the threat to orthodox Christianity is well brought out by E. F. Osborn, The Philosophy of Clement of Alexandria, Cambridge 1957, p. 176-177.

66. The Jung Codex, p. 105-106.

67. Adv. haer., V. xx. 2, 1-4; 7.

68. ibid., IV. xxxvi. 2, 3-7.

69. See page 26, supra.

70. Adv. haer., I. xv, 1-4.

71. ibid., IV. xxix. 5, 12-15.

72. Epid., 34.

73. J. Daniélou, Message Évangélique et Culture Hellénistique aux IIe et IIIe Siècles, Tournai 1961, p. 34 cf. p. 39.

74. op cit., p. 289.

75. Adv. haer., II. xv. 3, 15-19.

76. ibid., II, iii. 1, 17-18; 23-24; cf. II. iii. 2 and II. v. 2, 12-26, etc.

77. ibid., II, xxi. 2, 14-21.

78. See E. Bréhier, Chrysippe et L’Ancien Stoïcisme, Paris 1951, p. 65-67.

79. Adv. haer., III. xxxix, 6-11.

80. Matt., XI, 27.

81. Adv. haer., II. iv. 5, 11-15.

82. ibid., II. vii. 3, 5-6.

83. ibid., II. viii. 1, 7-9.

84. ibid., IV. xxv. 3, 21-22. The manna provided for the Hebrews in the wilderness is referred to by Irenaeus as rationalem escam (Adv. haer., IV. xxvii. 3, 13).

85. ibid., IV. xxviii. 29-30. The Logos used to converse with the ante-Mosaic patriarchs (Adv. haer., III. xi. 11, 39-41).

86. ibid., IV. vii. 7-13 homo vero rationabilis, et secundum hoc similis Deo, liberin arbitrio factus et suae potestatis, ipse sibi causa est ut aliquando quidem frumentum aliquando autem palea fiat. Quapropter et iuste condemnabitur, quoniam rationabilis factus amisit veram rationem, et irrationabiliter vivens, adversatus est iustitiae Dei.

87. Harnack., op cit., p. 246, footnote 1.

88. Adv. haer., IV. lvii. 2, 3-4.

89. ibid., II. xviii. 2, 1-5.

90. ibid., II. xlviii. I, 28-29.

91. ibid., IV. xlvi, abridged.

92. ibid., V. xx. 2, 19-23.

93. ibid., II. xli. 2, 1-7.

94. ibid., II. xliii passim, cf. II. xlii. 4.

95. ibid., II. xliii. 2, 1-7.

96. ibid., II. ii. 3, 10-13.

97. ibid., II. xxxix. I, passim.

98. Harnack, Dogmen., vol. II, pag. 240.