Irenaeus

History

Life

Irenaeus grew up in Roman Asia Minor, almost certainly at Smyrna. His birth date is unknown; estimates run from about 115 to about 142, and c. 130 is a common middle guess (Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Irenaeus”, 1910, secondary). As a boy he heard Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, who had known the apostle John. Irenaeus says he saw Polycarp “in my early youth” (Against Heresies 3.3.4), and in a letter to his old schoolfellow Florinus he recalls “the very place in which the blessed Polycarp sat as he discoursed” and the stories he told of John (Eusebius, Church History 5.20, New Advent). That link, from John to Polycarp to Irenaeus, is the backbone of his whole argument about tradition.

By 177 he was a presbyter in Lyon, a Greek-speaking Christian community in the Rhône valley. That year the churches of Lyon and Vienne sent him to Rome with a letter to Bishop Eleutherus, commending him as “zealous for the covenant of Christ” (Eusebius, Church History 5.4). While he was away a persecution killed many of the Lyon Christians, among them their bishop Pothinus, who was over ninety. Irenaeus came back and succeeded him (5.5).

Around 190 he stepped into the Easter dispute. Victor of Rome tried to excommunicate the churches of Asia, which kept Easter on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month rather than on Sunday. Irenaeus kept the Sunday feast himself, but he wrote to Victor that he “should not cut off whole churches of God which observed the tradition of an ancient custom.” Eusebius remarks that Irenaeus “truly was well named,” since eirēnē means peace (Church History 5.24). Nothing reliable is known of his death. A later tradition calls him a martyr, but the Catholic Encyclopedia judges this “not very probable.”

Two of his works survive whole. Against Heresies (c. 180, five books; New Advent; CCEL), whose full title is On the Detection and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called, survives complete only in an early Latin translation. The shorter Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching was lost until an Armenian copy turned up in 1904 (J. Armitage Robinson’s 1920 translation).

Causes

Irenaeus wrote against the Gnostics, a spread of second-century teachers who claimed secret knowledge handed down from the apostles. The school he knew best was that of Valentinus and his follower Ptolemaeus. Irenaeus says he read their commentaries and talked with some of them in person (Against Heresies 1, preface). They taught that the material world was made by a lesser, ignorant god, not by the supreme Father; that Christ only seemed to have a body; and that salvation meant the escape of a spiritual elite from matter. Marcion, a separate teacher, rejected the God of the Old Testament and kept an edited Luke and ten letters of Paul.

Each of Irenaeus’s main ideas is an answer to one of these claims. Against a lower creator he insists that one God made the world and gave both Testaments. Against a phantom Christ he insists that the Word really became flesh. Against secret tradition he points to a public one, visible in the churches the apostles founded. Against private gospels he names the four the churches actually read.

Influence

Irenaeus is the earliest writer whose works give a whole Christian theology, from creation to the last things, in one connected argument. Later fathers built on him: Athanasius’s “He was made man that we might be made God” (On the Incarnation 54) echoes Irenaeus’s line that Christ “became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself” (Against Heresies 5, preface). Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, he was also the main source anyone had for what the Gnostics taught.

All the old churches honor him. The Eastern Orthodox treat him as a founding witness for theosis and for the reading of Genesis behind it. The Roman Catholic Church cites him for apostolic succession and the authority of Rome, and in January 2022 Pope Francis declared him a Doctor of the Church with the title Doctor unitatis, “Doctor of Unity” (decree). Protestants read him for his biblical theology and his account of Christ’s victory. In the twentieth century Gustaf Aulén made him the chief witness for the “classic” view of the atonement, and the philosopher John Hick named the “Irenaean theodicy” after him in Evil and the God of Love (1966).

Key ideas and contributors

The rule of faith. Irenaeus gives a short summary of what “the Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world” received from the apostles: one God the Father, maker of heaven and earth; one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, made flesh for our salvation; and the Holy Spirit, who spoke through the prophets (Against Heresies 1.10.1). This “rule of truth” is the frame for reading Scripture. The church keeps it “as if she possessed only one mouth”: no church leader, however eloquent, may teach anything different, and one “deficient in power of expression” does no harm to the tradition (1.10.2). It is a direct ancestor of the later creeds. He adds that whole barbarian nations believe “having salvation written in their hearts by the Spirit, without paper or ink” (3.4.2).

Apostolic succession. The Gnostics claimed a hidden tradition. Irenaeus answers that if the apostles had secret teaching they would have given it to the men they left in charge of the churches, and those men’s successors can be named (Against Heresies 3.3.1). He gives one list as a sample, the bishops of Rome from Linus down to Eleutherus, the twelfth (3.3.3), and points to Polycarp at Smyrna and the church at Ephesus (3.3.4). In a disputed sentence he says of Rome “it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority” (3.3.2). His point is that the teaching is public and checkable. “Should we not have recourse to the most ancient Churches,” he asks, “and learn from them what is certain and clear?” (3.4.1). This is the oldest full statement of Episcopal Polity as a guard of doctrine and a key text for Holy Tradition.

The four Gospels. Irenaeus is the first writer to name the four Gospels and say there are exactly four. Matthew wrote for the Hebrews, Mark wrote down Peter’s preaching, Luke wrote down Paul’s, and John, “who also had leaned upon His breast,” published his Gospel at Ephesus (Against Heresies 3.1.1). In 3.11.8 he argues that “it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are,” since there are four zones of the world and four winds, and the church needs “four pillars” (3.11). He also notes that each heretical group leaned on one Gospel: the Ebionites on Matthew, Marcion on a cut-down Luke. Elsewhere he mentions a Gnostic “Gospel of Judas” (1.31.1). His testimony is central to every account of how the New Testament took shape (see Scripture and Inerrancy).

Recapitulation. Irenaeus takes the word from Ephesians 1:10, God’s plan “to gather all things in one” in Christ (Greek anakephalaiōsis, Latin recapitulatio). Christ goes back over the whole human story and gets right what Adam got wrong. “God recapitulated in Himself the ancient formation of man, that He might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify man” (Against Heresies 3.18.7). When the Son became man, “He commenced afresh the long line of human beings… 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). The pattern runs through the details. Luke’s genealogy runs back to Adam, and “the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary” (3.22.4). Salvation here is less a legal payment than the healing and completing of human nature, which is why Orthodox writers and Christus Victor theologians both claim him (see Atonement).

Image and likeness. Irenaeus reads the two words of Genesis 1:26 as two different things. In Against Heresies 5.6.1 the complete human being is body, soul and the Spirit of God. When the Spirit is joined to God’s handiwork, “this is he who was made in the image and likeness of God.” Without the Spirit a person is “imperfect,” “possessing indeed the image [of God] in his formation, but not receiving the similitude through the Spirit.” Adam “did easily lose the similitude”; Christ “re-established the similitude after a sure manner, by assimilating man to the invisible Father” (5.16.2). The image is given at creation; the likeness is a goal, reached by growth in the Spirit. Eastern Orthodox theology builds its doctrine of Theosis on this distinction.

Growth from childhood. For Irenaeus Adam and Eve were made as children. “It was possible for God Himself to have made man perfect from the first, but man could not receive this [perfection], being as yet an infant” (Against Heresies 4.38.1). The fall is the stumble of an immature creature, and human history is God’s long education of the race. The goal is full life with God: “the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God” (4.20.7). This gentler picture of the fall is one reason Eastern theology speaks of Ancestral Sin where the West, after Augustine, speaks of Original Sin.

Genesis 3:15 and the serpent. Irenaeus gives one of the earliest surviving Christian readings of the promise to the serpent as a prophecy of Christ. In his “work of recapitulation” Christ waged war on “our enemy,” “crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam, and trampled upon his head, as you can perceive in Genesis that God said to the serpent, And I will put enmity between you and the woman” (Against Heresies 5.21.1). Christian readers later called the verse the protoevangelium, the “first gospel.” The same chapter ties it to Christ’s victory over the devil in the temptation, which is the core of the Christus Victor reading.

One God, one history. Against Marcion and the Gnostics, Irenaeus treats the Old and New Testaments as one story told by one God through a series of “dispensations.” Christ is already present in the patriarchs and prophets, and the Old Testament is read as pointing to him. The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching sets out this story in brief for a friend named Marcianus.

The last things. Book 5 ends with a literal earthly kingdom of the righteous after the resurrection, before the final new creation, “the commencement of incorruption” in which the worthy grow used to God (Against Heresies 5.32.1). He cites “Papias and the elders” for the promise of fruitful harvests in that kingdom (5.33). This makes him one of the main early witnesses for Premillennialism.

Key controversies

Rome’s “preeminent authority.” The sentence in 3.3.2 survives only in Latin, and its key phrase, potiorem principalitatem, is translated “preeminent authority” in the standard English version. Catholic readers take it to mean that every church must agree with Rome because of its higher authority, an early witness to Papal Primacy. Other readers translate the verb as “resort to” rather than “agree with,” or take Rome as one sample of the apostolic churches, since Irenaeus goes straight on to Smyrna and Ephesus. The Greek original is lost, so the dispute cannot be settled from the text. His rebuke of Victor in the Easter quarrel is cited by both sides: Catholics see a bishop deferring to Rome’s role, others see a bishop telling Rome it had overreached.

Tradition and Scripture. Catholic and Orthodox writers read Irenaeus as teaching that the church’s living tradition is needed to interpret Scripture rightly (Holy Tradition, Magisterium). Protestant writers answer that for him the apostolic tradition is the same content as Scripture, “handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith” (3.1.1), and that he appeals to succession only to show that no secret extra teaching exists. They read him as an ally of Sola Scriptura properly understood. Both readings can quote him, because the split between Scripture and tradition had not yet opened in his day.

Reliability as a witness to the Gnostics. For centuries Irenaeus was taken at his word. After the Nag Hammadi texts appeared, scholars could compare his reports with Gnostic writings. Walter Bauer (Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 1934) had already argued that “orthodoxy” was the view of the party that won, and Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels, 1979) presented Irenaeus as the architect of a church that excluded rival forms of Christianity. Defenders reply that his summaries often match the recovered texts, and that he cites Valentinian teachers by name and quotes them. How fair he was remains debated.

The four-Gospel argument. Irenaeus’s reasons for exactly four Gospels (four winds, four zones, four living creatures) strike most modern readers as weak. Critical scholars also doubt his attributions, especially that the apostle John wrote the Fourth Gospel at Ephesus. Others answer that the symbolism is decoration on a fact he reports, that the churches already used these four and no others.

Theodicy and the fall. John Hick built a “soul-making” answer to the problem of evil on Irenaeus’s picture of humanity created immature and growing toward God’s likeness, and set it against an “Augustinian” view of a perfect creation spoiled by the fall. Critics on the Augustinian side say this makes sin a necessary stage of growth and weakens the fall. How closely Hick’s version matches Irenaeus is itself debated, since Irenaeus still treats the fall as a real disobedience that brought death.

Chiliasm. His literal earthly kingdom became an embarrassment in later centuries, when Augustine’s Amillennialism won the West. Modern premillennialists cite him as proof that their view is ancient; amillennialists treat it as a minority opinion of the second century.