Against Heresies

A bishop who remembered Polycarp

Irenaeus grew up in Asia Minor, probably in the first half of the second century. There he saw Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, a disciple of apostles, "in my early youth" 3.3.4. He became a presbyter at Lyons in Gaul, and when its aged bishop Pothinus died in the persecution of 177, Irenaeus succeeded him.

The greater danger came from within. The teachers we now group as Gnostics held that the material world was made by a lesser power, not the highest God, and that salvation came by a secret knowledge for the few. Irenaeus's chief opponents, the followers of Valentinus, read the Scriptures and used the church's words, which made them harder to answer. At a friend's request he answered them, around 180, in five books; Book III was written while Eleutherius "does now, in the twelfth place from the apostles, hold the inheritance of the episcopate" 3.3.3 at Rome. The full title, the Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called, comes from Paul:

O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid irreverent, empty chatter and the opposing arguments of so-called “knowledge,” which some have professed and thus swerved away from the faith.

1 Timothy 6:20-21

Irenaeus died around 200; the story of his martyrdom appears only much later. His age is told in After the apostles: the apologists and Irenaeus.

Five books, and the chapters held here

Book I sets out the Valentinian system and traces the sects back to Simon the magician of Acts 8. Book II refutes them by reason; Books III to V answer from the apostles, the words of the Lord and Paul's letters.

The library holds five portions: Book I, 10, the faith of the church; Book III, 1 to 4, the apostles and their tradition; Book III, 18 and 19, Christ who sums up humanity in himself; Book IV, 20, how the invisible God is seen; and Book V, 1, 16 and 36, the incarnation, the image of God and the new creation.

Left out are most of Book I, all of Book II, and some best-loved pages: why the Gospels must be four, and how Mary's obedience untied the knot of Eve's disobedience (Book III); humanity made like a child, to grow (Book IV); and the reign of the righteous on a renewed earth (Book V, 32–35).

The one faith of the whole church

Book I, 10 follows nine chapters of Valentinian myth, and the contrast is the point. "The Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith" 1.10.1: in one God, the Father Almighty, in one Christ Jesus made flesh for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit who spoke through the prophets. A chapter earlier he calls it the rule of truth, received at baptism; the later Apostles' Creed follows much the same outline. The church holds it "as if occupying but one house" 1.10.2, and neither can the eloquent add to it nor the halting take from it. That is no ban on thought: a teacher may "gratefully describe on what account the Word of God became flesh and suffered" 1.10.3, but may not imagine another God.

Book III asks where this faith came from. The apostles preached it, and "at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith" 3.1.1. His account of how the four Gospels were written is among the earliest (How did we get the Bible?). His opponents set aside both Scripture and tradition 3.2.2. Had the apostles kept hidden mysteries, he answers, they would have handed them to the men to whom they entrusted the churches 3.3.1. So he lists the bishops of Rome from Linus to Eleutherius 3.3.3 and calls Polycarp and the church of Ephesus as witnesses 3.3.4. Even believers among the barbarians keep this faith, "having salvation written in their hearts by the Spirit, without paper or ink" 3.4.2 (compare 2 Corinthians 3:3).

One sentence here has been argued over for centuries: "For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its pre-eminent authority" 3.3.2. The Greek is lost, and the Latin verb behind ‘agree with’ can also mean ‘resort to’. The Catholic Church reads here an early witness to the primacy of Rome and to the succession of bishops from the apostles. The Orthodox, who keep that succession too, note that Irenaeus sets Smyrna and Ephesus beside Rome, and see a primacy of honour. Many Protestants read his tradition as the public faith the apostles preached and wrote down, not a second source beside Scripture, and his lists of bishops as proof that it was handed on openly. Irenaeus himself, Eusebius tells, true to his name (from the Greek for peace), urged Victor of Rome around 190 not to cut off the churches of Asia over the date of Easter. See How do Catholics and Protestants differ?

The second Adam, and a living man

Irenaeus's deepest thought is recapitulation, from Paul's word for God's plan:

And He has made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to bring all things in heaven and on earth together in Christ.

Ephesians 1:9-10

The verb, anakephalaioomai (ἀνακεφαλαιόομαι), means to sum up under one head. The Word made man began the human race afresh in himself (the translators' ‘commenced afresh’ renders his ‘recapitulated’), "so that what we had lost in Adam—namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God—that we might recover in Christ Jesus" 3.18.1. Adam, moulded from virgin soil, made many sinners; Christ, born of a virgin, makes many righteous 3.18.7. Paul had said it: "For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous" (Romans 5:19). The disobedience that began at a tree Christ undid "through that obedience which was [wrought out] upon the tree [of the cross]" 5.16.3.

Why both God and man? "For unless man had overcome the enemy of man, the enemy would not have been legitimately vanquished" 3.18.7. So Irenaeus will not hear of a Christ who only seemed to suffer: "For if He did not truly suffer, no thanks to Him, since there was no suffering at all" 3.18.6. For the bishop of a church that had lately buried its martyrs, this was no abstraction. Then he gathers it all up: "For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God" 3.19.1.

The Orthodox find in this sentence theosis, or deification: by grace, not by nature, we share the life of God. The Catholic Catechism quotes it where it teaches that the Word became flesh so that we might become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). Many Protestants read it as adoption and union with Christ: God sent his Son "that we might receive our adoption as sons" (Galatians 4:5). None of them means that we become God by nature.

Book IV, 20 turns to the sight of God. God made all things not through angels but by "His own hands" 4.20.1, the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit. Unknown in his greatness, he is known in his love through his Word 4.20.4. Hence his most quoted line: "For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God" 4.20.7. Often cited by its first half alone, it means that to live is to see God: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God" (Matthew 5:8).

Book V binds all this to the body. "For in no other way could we have learned the things of God, unless our Master, existing as the Word, had become man" 5.1.1, and he redeemed us "giving His soul for our souls, and His flesh for our flesh" 5.1.1 (see The cross and atonement). While the Word was unseen, the likeness in which we were made was easily lost; made flesh, "He both showed forth the image truly, since He became Himself what was His image" 5.16.2, and restored the likeness. The Orthodox keep his distinction of image and likeness; Calvin and many Protestants read the two words as a Hebrew repetition (The image of God).

The last chapter looks to the new creation: "For neither is the substance nor the essence of the creation annihilated" 5.36.1; only its present form passes away (1 Corinthians 7:31), and the new man will be "always holding fresh converse with God" 5.36.1, until God is all in all 5.36.2. Irenaeus also looks for the resurrection of the just and a kingdom on the earth 5.36.3. Historic premillennialists count him, with Papias and Justin, a forebear; from Augustine on, most of the Western church read the thousand years of Revelation 20 as the age of the church, and evangelicals today hold several views (What are the rapture and the millennium?).

Reading it well

This is a book of controversy, and strange names arrive unannounced: the Valentinians' Pleroma, or fullness, of thirty Æons, one of which went astray and gave rise to the lesser maker of this world 1.10.3. You need not master the myth; hold on to why he rejects it: the maker of this world is the Father of Jesus Christ. Remember, too, that he describes them as an opponent; since the finds at Nag Hammadi in 1945, scholars can test his reports.

His words can be harsh. Heretics are "like slippery serpents" 3.2.3, and he tells with approval how Polycarp greeted Marcion as "the first-born of Satan" 3.3.4. Remember beside these his hope for them: "it is not altogether impossible to escape from error when the truth is brought alongside it" 3.2.3.

His reading of Scripture is bold. He takes the "three spies" 4.20.12 whom Rahab hid for a type of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, though Joshua sent two (Joshua 2:1); read such pages as typology offered in meditation. Writing long before Nicaea, he takes the Wisdom of Proverbs 8 to be the Spirit, unlike most later Fathers 4.20.3.

Irenaeus wrote in Greek, but the whole survives only in an early Latin version; the English, by Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut in the Ante-Nicene Fathers (1885), is made chiefly from it. Square brackets mark the translators' additions, and round brackets often give the Latin text's own word. A ‘dispensation’ is God's ordered working out of his plan (Paul's ‘plan’ in Ephesians 1:10), ‘similitude’ is likeness, to ‘vivify’ is to give life, and ‘conversation’ is a way of life.

Begin with 1.10.1 and 4.20.7, linger at 3.18.7, and keep a Bible open. What he held, all the churches confess: the God who made the world saves it, the Word truly became flesh, and the whole person, body and soul, is saved. God is past finding out, yet he has made himself known:

No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is Himself God and is at the Father’s side, has made Him known.

John 1:18