Why a user’s guide?
The thought of this early Christian thinker is rich, complex, and crops up in the various current theological contexts. For example:
- Atonement theology: in relation to the concept of ‘recapitulation’ which gives Irenaeus a rather particular – and highly interesting – take on Christian soteriology; (e.g. Hans Boersma)
- Studies of Eucharist and sacrifice; because Irenaeus strongly focuses on the Eucharistic sacrifice as an ‘offering to God’ rather than an act of commemoration; (e.g. Robert Daly)
- Recent attempts (in context of environmentalism) to establish a more this-worldly theology in which the material world is not just seen as something purged away on the Last Day (N.T. Wright)
For all of which reasons Irenaeus’ ideas might seem very ‘timely’. But you won’t want to read the whole of ‘Against Heresies’.
It’s partly that, the text, though enlivened by flashes of insight, is long and meandering. But also that Irenaeus’ aim (as implied by the title of his book) is not, simply, to give a straight account of orthodox doctrine as he sees it, but to attack certain quite specific theological positions of the Gnostics, which he first needs to set out for the benefit of his readers. The problem here isn’t just that modern readers are unlikely to be disciples of Valentinus, Carpocrates, et al.. After all, the positions Irenaeus attacks have an intrinsic interest. It’s also that, to the extent that you are interested in those beliefs, the kind of approach you will want to adopt, as an educated modern, will not be that of Irenaeus. You will be trying to understand the ‘belief-systems’ of his interlocutors, in their own terms, rather as you might the myth-worlds of other ancient or indigenous peoples – Levi-Strauss’s Amerindians or Dieterlen’s West African Dogon, for Levi-or example. Or, closer to hand, the ‘gnostic myth’ that Abrams sees as underlying the Romantic revolution of the late 18th century (also, incidentally, a ‘deformation’ of the Christian salvation story). The chances are you will not be looking to fault individual items of mythological doctrine, as illogical or absurd, or criticize them for their divergence from Christian, or contemporary post-Christian, beliefs about the same thing.
If so, you will find Irenaeus’ interminable analysis of the inconsistencies of the doctrines of the various gnostic teachers (both with each other, and with orthodox Christianity) rather pointless. Sadly, this kind of exposition and analysis occupies the best part of Irenaeus’ first two books. You will have to hang on to the beginning of book III in order to get to the interesting part!
Hence the need for this user’s guide.
I would rather like to ‘excerpt’ this text. Failing that, I place chapter references for sections of the text that I would excerpt in bold, together with accompanying topic descriptions. (It is, in each case, evident which ‘topic descriptions’ belong to which chapter references). These topics and references are listed at the end.
Book I
The first book kicks off with Irenaeus’ account of the cosmological narrative common to the Gnostic teachers (‘the system of the heretics’) seen here in its broad sweep, and without attention to those details that distinguish the various teachers from each other (1-7). There then follow two chapters critiquing their mode of interpreting Scripture (8-9). The cosmology is of great interest. The editor who, in one recent edition, pronounced these systems to be ‘some of the silliest ever devised’ is clearly unfamiliar with Meyer Abram’s ground-breaking treatment of the Romantic Gnosticism in The Mirror and the Lamp. Fortunately – at least for more sympathetic and discerning readers – I.’s exposition of this cosmology helps us to see the wood from the trees. The material is inherently complex in the same way as cosmological narratives to be found in contemporary ethnography of indigenous myth-systems; yet, I. offers us a simplified outline (here largely without critique) which – at least to all appearances – allows the reader to grasp its general principles and structure. Ch.8-9 are the first of a number of passages that apply a kind of methodological critique to the interpretative strategies of I.’s interlocutors. Here as elsewhere I. has v. perceptive, and not infrequently witty and amusing, things to say about how not approach Scripture (or any other text). Here, he parodies the way his adversaries string together Biblical verses in order to suggest meanings not in the text, by assembling miscellaneous verses from the Odyssey to create a retelling of Hercules visit to the underworld (not, of course, in the original!)
The remainder of the book (11-31) is occupied with setting out the opinions of the various different systems of the heretics. Particular attention is given to those of Marcus (13-22). I. is principally concerned here to contrast the unity of orthodox Church doctrine with the multiplicity and inconsistency of the various Gnostic alternatives. This is of limited interest to the modern reader, for reasons given above. But, as ever, there are occasional highlights. The fictional dialogue between the lascivious Marcus and a society lady he attempts to seduce by convincing her she possesses prophetic gifts is worthy of Apuleius or Lucian (13).
Book II
Ch.1-24, 29-36 (the best part of the book) turns from the critique of various named interlocutors, to an appraisal of individual Gnostic doctrines. This is of limited interest. But the survey of doctrines is interrupted by four chapters (25-28) that return to the methodological issues of book I.8-9 – this time, laying down some admirably sane, and still very pertinent, principles for the interpretation of parables, and other obscure passages of Scripture.
Book III
The opening (1-4) is definitely a highlight. Here the teachings of the heretics are placed in the context of a contemporary (c. 160 AD) defence of the authority of the apostolic tradition, with detailed reference of the episcopal succession in Rome. This gives the reader a real sense of the degree of generational closeness to the apostles perceived by the Church at this relatively early stage in its history – i.e. who was old enough to have known who.
Ch.5-15 respond to one of the fundamental claims of I.’s interlocutors that the creator of the material world and ‘God’ of the OT is not the ‘Father’ of the NT, but an inferior ‘demiurge’. Each successive NT author is trawled for passages that demonstrate that the God known to the NT is perceived to be the one true God, who created the universe, called Israel to be His people, and sent the prophets. This is of limited interest, given that Irenaeus’ argument for the unity of the biblical conception of God nowadays appears – to any sane contemporary reader of the Scriptures – incontrovertible.
Ch.16-25 respond to a second fundamental claim: that the Word (or Christ) is not incarnated in the historical Jesus at his birth, but comes upon him at baptism, and leaves him at a certain point, before his crucifixion. Unlike I.’s response to the earlier claim, his response here takes him into some interesting soteriology. I. expands interestingly on why it is theologically essential to insist on the humanity of Christ and his redemption of ‘the flesh’, and, equally, on his being the divine Word of the one true God. And on why, in consequence, Christians believe Jesus not to be, biologically, the son of Joseph, and yet to be the son of Mary, and on the theological stakes of a belief in the virgin birth. Much of this is bound up, for I., with his extreme incarnational position on the redemption of ‘the flesh’, and his consequent insistence on the dignity of ‘matter’ as having a share in the creative designs of God – both in the case of bodily humanity, and the created order. This is a theme subsequently taken up in book V.
The importance of Christ’s biological descent from Mary leads to the first emergence of another core theme: that of ‘recapitulation’ (22-23). Hard to sum up, this. But the basic idea is that human history from Eden through Christ to the restoration of paradise is a process of human ‘maturation’. Early humanity in Adam is ultimately destined, in God’s purposes, to divinization, but, as a ‘created’ – not, like God, an ‘uncreated’ – being, cannot arrive at that destination except over a long period of time. What happens, with the fall, is both an attempted short-circuiting of this process, and, simultaneously, as foreseen in the wise purposes of God, the inception of a divinely ordered sequence of formative events through which, in due course, humanity reaches divinization. Why ‘formative’? Because the glory to which man is destined (i.e. the glory of a ‘creative’ being) is one that requires man to gratefully cherish his status of dependency, and to ‘become little by little accustomed to receive and bear God’.
Book IV
This strikes me as the heart of I.’s enterprise. If I wanted to sum up in a single word I.’s core message in the book (probably also in the whole work), I would describe him as ‘anti-supersessionist’. By anti-supersessionism, I mean opposition to the belief that: NT supersedes (i.e. renders obsolete) OT; Grace in Jesus Christ supersedes the Law; the ‘body of Christ’ supersedes the Hebrew temple cult. I. believes that, in each of these cases, the new does not bring the old to an end – or even mark any discontinuity with it; rather, the new brings the old to its proper fulfilment. Given that a supersessionist style of theology is actually quite prevalent in certain areas today, I.’s presentation of the Christian faith acquires great contemporary relevance.
Ch. 1-4 seems to belong to the previous book, summing up I.’s position hitherto, and dealing with some minor cavils.
Ch.5, the anti-supersessionism argument begins in earnest. It begins with discussion around Christ’s words: ‘no-one knows the Father but the Son, or the Father but the Son’, and the case of Abraham, whom the Gnostics saw as excluded from the promise (6-9). In response, I. develops the line that the divine Word speaks throughout the OT, and, indeed, through the mouths of its characters, to whom Grace was not unknown (10-18). (So far does I. take this, the he feels the need explicitly to pose the question, what the incarnated Christ brings that Israel did not already possess). Conversely, Christ acts not only to redeem present and future generations, but all the righteous through whom the Word speaks in the OT (22). I.’s theology thus binds people of the old and new dispensations into a kind of mutually dependent community of past and present. The old Law and cult offer the basis for human understanding of the full revelation of the Word that comes with Church, which thus reaps a crop that Israel has sown; while at the same, what reaches perfection with the fulness of revelation, is the experience of the past generations, which achieves redemption along with the present.
Within this anti-supersessionist and typological perspective, I. offers a v. non-fundamentalist assessment of the place of the Law as a dispensation appropriate to men of a certain time (12-16); then proceeds to examine the OT cult and its continuity with the Eucharist (17-18). The latter two chapters are of exceptional interest as regards our understanding of the contemporary practice, and have been frequently referred to, in modern liturgiological contexts, especially by those arguing for a broader and less propitiatory understanding of Christian sacrifice (i.e. as an offering to God, as opposed to commemoration of the atoning sacrifice of the cross).
I. argues against his Gnostic interlocutors that God, though invisible, is NOT unknowable (20). This leads to a recap. of the above anti-supersessionist arguments but now from the perspective of their implications for a hermeneutic of biblical interpretation. Broadly, this is a typological interpretation. For I., the patriarchs actually speak of the foundation of the Church, while the foundation of the Church vindicates the prophecies of the patriarchs and their successors (22-24).
Ch. 27-31 caution against the tendency to exaggerate the culpability of earlier generations. Ch. 32-36 extol the position of Christian orthodoxy, which, I. argues, gives its adherents a vantage point from which it is able to rightly assess past and present generations.
Finally, ch. 37-41 argue for the ‘perfectibility’ of man against the Gnostic view that there are inherently ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people. This leads to an extended restatement of I.’s theory of ‘recapitulation’, and the evolution of humanity as a process of maturation. (This I have already discussed in relation to a parallel passage at the close of book III (22-23).
Book V
Ch.1-2 develop the soteriological aspect of recapitulation, and lead on to the main theme of this book: the salvation of the flesh. I.’s interlocutors evidently had a very low esteem for the material world – the creation of their inferior demiurge. In response to this, I., as already stated, argues for the dignity of the material creation and its participation in God’s creative designs (Ch.3-19). This is all highly relevant to recent attempts, by such as NT Wright (Surprised by Hope) to re-orientate Western Christianity from an understanding of redemption as ‘soul rescue’ to a broader conception of it as the restoration of God’s creation (‘I shall make all things new’). Irenaeus’s work could certainly be invoked in support of such an interpretation. A long passage at the heart of this section is taken up with an extended discussion of the meaning of a verse from Galations: ‘flesh and blood shall not inherit the Kingdom of God’. (9-14) I. argues that this verse, taken out of context, has been misinterpreted by his interlocutors in a way that makes it appear to corroborate their low estimation for the material world. ‘The redeemed world’, I. claims, ‘is God’s, not the product of a defect’.
Ch. 21-22 contain an extended interpretation of the temptation of Christ in the desert. This reintroduces the theme of recapitulation. It also constitutes the point of departure for an extended discussion of Satan and the Antichrist which appears to reject the possibility of their identification with the secular authorities, and leaves open the possibility – without saying explicitly – that they might refer to people like I.’s antagonists.
This is, in turn, a prelude to ch. 31-36 which adopt a very literal interpretation of biblical prophecies of the redemption of the world under the rule of God’s elect. Allegorical interpretations of the ‘promise’ are rejected in favour of a literalist and embodied understanding of the restoration of Paradise. This again is strongly supportive of understandings of the future promise as a restoration of Heaven and Earth rather than an exodus of individual souls from the present world into a spiritual ‘Heaven’.
Gnostic cosmological narrative: I.1-7
Authority of apostolic tradition: III.1-4
Recapitulation: III.22-23; IV.37-41; V.1-2
Law: IV.12-16
Eucharist: IV.17-18
Dignity of the flesh and the material creation: V.3-19
Interpreting Scripture: I.8-9; II.25-28
Soteriology: III.16-25
What’s up, just wanted to say, I liked this blog post.
It was practical. Keep on posting!