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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, [ ] 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, [ ] 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.
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