The Chronology of Irenaeus' Life and Writings
Irenaeus of Lyons Christ the Son of God, and which will be accompanied, as John shows in the Apocalypse, by universal plagues, as was Egypt by a local plague (haer.
4.30.1). With this typological reading of Scripture, as we see it in the extracts preserved for us by Irenaeus, Polycarp reserves the word 'Scripture' for what would later be called the 'Old Testament'.151 And, if these extracts, recalled from memory by Irenaeus several decades later, are indeed from Polycarp, he is evidently extremely adept and aware in his handling of them.
From this survey of the relationship between Polycarp and Irenaeus, which is greatly indebted to the work of Charles Hill, we must conclude that, far from being a rather rustic and unsophisticated writer of only one letter, Polycarp was a gifted orator and theologian, who has the distinction of being not only an Apostolic Father, but also an apologist, a heresiologist, and a scriptural exegete. Moreover, Irenaeus was not lying when he appealed to the memory of Polycarp, nor were his reminiscences vague and confused. We can, rather, be certain that Irenaeus did in fact receive a great deal of oral teaching from his beloved teacher, a tradition that can legitimately claim to go back at least to the apostle John.
THE CHRONOLOGY OF IRENAEUS' LIFE AND WRITINGS
With the details that we have established, we can now turn to providing some dates for Irenaeus' life and literary activities. Irenaeus, as we have seen, says he was 'still a boy [ÆE Ø þ]' when he knew Polycarp in Smryna (h.e. 4.20.5), and elsewhere that he knew him 'in his early youth [K Bfi æÅfi H ºØŒ Æfi]' (haer.3.3.4). However, from what we have seen, Irenaeus' association with Polycarp was sustained over a sufficiently long period to describe him as being accustomed to delivering
151 I would be less inclined than Hill (Lost Teaching, 87) to see in the quotation given in haer. 4.32.1, cited above, which asserts that the 'two testaments' come from one and the same
God, a reference to two bodies of literature, though accepting, of course, that Polycarp had various writings of the apostles and evangelists available to him. Early typology relates the Scripture (the 'Old Testament') to the event, Christ and his Passion, as type and fulfilment, rather than one text to another, as is abundantly clear, for instance, with Melito of Sardis, On Pascha, and, as we will see, with Irenaeus. Cf. John Hainsworth, 'The Force of the Mystery:
Anamnesis and Exegesis in Melito's Peri Pascha', SVTQ 46/2 (2002), 107–46. When the typological structure comes to be thought of as relating two bodies of literature, it is reconfigured: type/shadow (in the Old Testament)—image (in the New Testament)—reality
(in the kingdom to come). For example, Maximus the Confessor, cap. theol. 1.90: 'The Law is the shadow of the Gospel. The Gospel is the image of the blessings held in store.'
Irenaeus of Lyons
discourses to the people and to have etched in his mind not only key themes of Polycarp's teaching but also lengthy analyses and quotations.
Such would not be likely for one who was a 'boy' as we now use that term.
But Irenaeus himself describes the ages of life in the sequence 'infants and children [parvulos] and boys [pueros] and youths [juvenes] and old men', specifying that the 'first stage of early life embraces thirty years, and that this extends onwards to the fortieth year . . . but from the fortieth and fiftieth year a man begins to decline towards old age' (haer. 2.22.4–5).152
Based on this text, Lipsius concluded that, when referring to himself as having then been a 'boy [ÆE]', Irenaeus designates the period between 18 and 30 years of age, as would also be implied by his speaking of 'early youth'.153 Accepting the date of Polycarp's martyrdom as 155/6, and his visit to Rome as 154/5, this would give us a date for Irenaeus' birth of around 130.154
There is one final piece of evidence relating to Irenaeus that has yet to be mentioned. The Moscow manuscript of the Martyrdom of Polycarp includes a further chapter, which offers this report:
This account Gaius copied from the writings of Irenaeus, and he had also lived with Irenaeus, who was a disciple of the holy Polycarp. For this Irenaeus, at the time of the martyrdom of the bishop Polycarp was in Rome, and taught many, and many most excellent and correct writings are extant, in which he mentions
Polycarp, saying that he had been his pupil, and he ably refuted every heresy, and he also handed on the ecclesiastical and universal canon [e KŒŒºÅ ØÆ ØŒe
ŒÆÆ ŒÆd ŒÆŁºØŒ], as he had received it from the saint. (M. Polyc. 22.2–4) It is possible, then, and indeed likely, even without the report of the Moscow manuscript, given what we have seen of the migration of Christians from Asia to the West, that Irenaeus accompanied Polycarp to Rome, or that Irenaeus, perhaps with his family, had travelled to Rome sometime earlier, as had many other Christians from Asia, and renewed his acquaintance with his teacher then, hearing again his refutation of the heretics.
152 Aristotle (Rh. 2.12–14) divides life into three stages—youth, prime of life, old age—and thought that the body reaches its 'prime' between the age of 30 and 35 years, and the mind around 49 years old.
153 R. Lipsius, 'Irenaeus', DCB iii. 253–79, at 254.
154 This is the date proposed by Lipsius. Hill, Lost Teaching, suggests 135, so that Irenaeus would have turned 18 in 153, when Polycarp was about 83. Robert Grant (Irenaeus of Lyons
(London: Routledge, 1997), 2) claims that Against the Heresies indicates that a 'boy' could be nearly 15 years old, and so places Irenaeus' birth at about 140.
Irenaeus of Lyons Regarding the literary activity of Irenaeus, only three of his writings can be dated with certainty: first, by its direct reference to Eleutherus as the current bishop in Rome (haer. 3.3.3), the third book of Against the Heresies must have been written sometime between 178 and 189 (and books one and two before book three); and, second, his two letters to Victor (189–98).
After transcribing the extract from the Letter to Florinus, Eusebius continues directly, 'And at the same time in the reign of Commodus' (h.e. 5.21.1), thus suggesting that this letter was composed between 180 and 192, during the time of either Eleutherus or Victor. The Letter to Florinus clearly pre-dates the Letter to Victor, on the Ogdoad, regarding Florinus. It is also pretty certain that these letters, with their references to Polycarp as their common teacher, were written around the same time as haer. 4.27–32, with its reports of his teaching and the allusion to those in 'the royal court', but that the reference to false presbyters in haer. 4.26 also links this section to the Letter to Victor, on the Ogdoad, and probably also the Letter to Blastus, on Schism. By this time, Florinus was circulating some controversial works, and Irenaeus, having already written to him personally, wrote to Victor to warn him of the situation.
Regarding the work The Demonstration of the Apostolic Tradition, although it refers in its concluding chapters to the Refutation and Overthrowal of Knowledge falsely so-called (Dem. 99), it is likely that this is a later addition, attempting to reuse this work in the polemic against heresy.155
Even if one accepts this passage as coming from Irenaeus himself, it is possible that it only intends to refer to the first two books of Against the Heresies, which, as we will see in the next chapter, alone properly correspond to the title Refutation and Overthrowal. It is only after the opening chapters of the third book that Irenaeus sets out to demonstrate 'the scriptural proof furnished by those apostles who did also write the Gospel'
(haer. 3.5.1). Between the second and third books of Against the Heresies 155 As argued by Yves-Marie Blanchard, Aux sources du canon: Le Te´moignage d'Ire´ne´e (Paris:
Cerf, 1993), 113, n. 2. This suggestion was rejected by A. Rousseau (ed. and trans.), without addressing the main argument: Ire´ne´e de Lyon: De´monstation de la pre´dication apostolique, SC 406
(Paris: Cerf, 1995), 352–3. That it is a later addition is further suggested by the unique manner of translating a Greek genitive absolute at the beginning of Dem. 99, as discerned by Rousseau himself, and the atypical use of the term 'seal' as an equivalent of baptism. Cf. J. Behr (trans.),
St Irenaeus of Lyons: On the Apostolic Preaching (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1997), 118, n. 29.
One might also add the apparently non-chiliastic interpretation of Isa. 11 in Dem. 61, which suggests that it was composed before haer. 5. Cf. Charles Hill, Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in the Early Church, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 255, n. 2. On the development of Irenaeus' eschatological thought, see the following paragraphs.
Irenaeus of Lyons
would be a natural context for sketching out the apostolic preaching from the Scriptures, such as we see in the Demonstration. The structure of Against the Heresies will be further considered in the following chapter.
As such, I would modify slightly the chronology proposed by Hill for the writings of Irenaeus:
1. haer. 1–2 2. Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 3. haer. 3
4. Letter to Florinus, on the Sole Sovereignty 5. Letter to Blastus, on Schism 6. haer. 4
7. Letter to Victor, on the Ogdoad 8. haer. 5
9. Letter to Victor and letters to other church leaders.
Items 1–3 are clearly from the time of Eleutherus (178–89) and items 6–9 from the time of Victor (189–98). Items 4 and 5 could be placed either during the time of Eleutherus or early in that of Victor.
Charles Hill raises one final intriguing suggestion concerning the relationship between the Letter to Victor, on the Ogdoad and haer. 5.156 The subtitle of the Letter to Victor clearly brings to mind the primary eight
Aeons in the Valentinian pleroma (haer. 1.1.1, 3), and, as we have seen, Florinus is described by Eusebius as turning to the teachings of Valentinus
(h.e. 5.20.1). But the term 'Ogdoad' also has eschatological overtones in Valentinian teaching, which taught that at the end of time all the spiritual seeds, having come to perfection, will ascend into that Pleroma (haer.
1.7.1). Irenaeus turns to the topic of eschatology in the later chapters of book five. He claims that 'the opinions of certain people are derived from heretical discourses', which have led them to misunderstand 'the economy of God and the mystery of the resurrection of the just' (haer. 5.32.1).
These 'discourses' are probably either the ones circulated by Florinus, and so the 'certain people' are the ones whom Florinus has been misleading, or they are the works of Valentinian teachers that have been misleading others, including Florinus.
But, after having completed book four, and forcefully asserted the need to pay attention to the presbyters, Irenaeus seems to have re-examined the books of Papias, who could certainly be looked upon as such an elder and 156 Hill, Lost Teaching, 77–80.
Irenaeus of Lyons who also claimed to have had contact with the apostle John, or so Irenaeus believed (haer. 5.33.4).157 In his treatment of eschatology, countering the claims that Florinus was circulating, Irenaeus then utilized the elements he found in Papias regarding the thousand-year kingdom in which the just are raised to reign with Christ in a fully material and abundantly fruitful earth, as had apparently been taught by the elders of Asia, who 'had seen
John, the disciple of the Lord', and heard him speak of these things himself (haer. 5.33.3). Such chiliastic eschatology was, however, something of a departure for Irenaeus, for, following Polycarp, he had earlier taught that those who died in righteousness, such as the martyrs, entered immediately into the kingdom.158 Yet this change of eschatological teaching served his primary purposes tremendously well, emphasizing the teaching that runs throughout Irenaeus' writings, that the one God is indeed the Creator of everything, and so, in turn, the creation that he has established is indeed good, and that everything we see within this creation serves the one economy of God, who forbears even our apostasy, so that his ultimate purpose, the fashioning of living human beings, should be fulfilled.
Already, by the late 170s, it was not simply the diversity of Christian communities in Rome, a microcosm of Christianity throughout the Empire, that was striking, but the coherence of the broad and general consensus among them, from which Marcion himself had departed many decades earlier and from which Valentinus and his disciples were progressively isolating themselves. This unity was such that it was recognized even by those outside, such as the pagan philosopher Celsus, who spoke of this community as the 'Great Church'.159 By the time of his death,
Irenaeus had done more than anyone else to expose those who had departed from the Church for what they were and to refute their teachings, to expound the Christian faith with a comprehensiveness, coherence, and a remarkable degree of hermeneutical awareness, and to promote peace and toleration within the Church.
Before we turn to an examination of his work, one final monument of Christianity in Gaul in this period, in fact the only other piece besides the literary evidence we have already considered, forms a suitable conclusion to this chapter. This is the inscription, in Greek and dating to the early
157 See Ch. 1, n. 132.
158 For Polycarp, see Hill, Lost Teaching, 83–5. For Irenaeus, see haer. 3.16.4, 4.33.9, and the descriptions of the martyrs in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, see, e.g., h.e. 5.1.55.
For further discussion, see Hill, Regnum Caelorum, 254–9.
159 Cf. Origen, Cels. 5.59–61; for the date of Celsus' True Logos, see Henry Chadwick
(trans.), Origen: Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. xxviii.
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third century, found in the cemetery of Saint Pierre l'Estrier in Autun, 100 miles or so north of Lyons:
Divine race of the heavenly Fish, with a noble heart draw, receiving, amongst mortals, the immortal spring of oracular water. Friend, warm your soul in the eternal waters of bounteous wisdom;
Receive the food, sweet as honey, of the Saviour of the saints; Eat with zest, holding the Fish in your hands.
That I may be filled with the Fish, I ardently desire, Master and Saviour.
That my mother may be in blessed calm, I beseech, Light of the dead.
Ascandios, my father, so dear to my heart, with my sweet mother and brothers, in the peace of the Fish, remember your Pectorius.160
All the central elements of the faith of Christians in Gaul are brought together in this beautiful inscription of Pectorius: baptism, Eucharist
(received in the hands), eternal life, prayers for the departed, and request for their prayers in turn. The image of Christ as the 'Fish', emphasized by the fact that the first five lines of this inscription form an acrostic spelling out 'Fish', is based both upon the symbolism of the baptismal waters and the play made upon the Greek word for 'fish' (the letters of which, NåŁ, are taken as signifying 'Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour'), and once again links the Christians of Gaul to Rome, where the image is found in the art of the Catacombs, and Asia and Phrygia, where it occurs in the epitaph of Abercius Marcellus, the bishop of Hieropolis in Phrygia at the end of the second century, who on his own epitaph describes how he has travelled from Nisibis to Rome and found the same faith, serving the same nourishment, everywhere.161 If Rome, during the second century, was the crucible in which 'orthodoxy' was forged, it was Irenaeus, on the basis of the witness of the martyrs in his community and the tradition going back through Polycarp to John, who oversaw the process.
160 The text is transcribed in DACL vol. 1, pt 2, p. 3196, where it is followed by a plate of the inscription. The translation is based on that given in F. van der Meer and C. Mohrmann,
Atlas of the Early Christian World, trans. M. F. Hedlund and H. H. Rowley (London: Nelson,
1958), 42, where a plate of the inscription is also given.
161 Text in J. Stevenson, A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church to A.D. 337 (London: SPCK, 1963), 143.
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Against the Heresies Irenaeus' work The Refutation and Overthrowal of Knowledge falsely so-called is not an easy read. It is often characterized as tedious, repetitious, and unwieldy, and its author as inept. And it is indeed a difficult read for a variety of reasons. First, as there is only one complete English translation of the work available, that given in the nineteenth-century Ante-Nicene
Fathers series, English-speaking readers are confronted with some 250 pages of dense text formatted in two columns with no clear guidance to the structure of the work. Moreover, if they begin at the beginning, they must wade through 100 pages describing the variety of teachings of the disciples of Valentinus and others in book one and a lengthy examination of the inconsistencies and logical contradictions of such teachings in book two. If readers make it to book three, where Irenaeus begins an exposition of his own theology, many of the elements that he discusses are now so familiar to those who know something of Christian theology that, paradoxically, he is still a difficult figure to read because, laying all this out so fully for the first time in the history of Christian theology, he does so according to his own rationale, rather than the 'logical' order of Christian theology that we might expect to see, and so he can again appear rather inept. Much work, however, has been done over recent decades examining the theological and literary method of Irenaeus, and this has given us a greater understanding of how he thinks and how his works are structured.1 It is with this that we will begin this chapter, so that we can gain an overview of his magnum opus, before considering his objections to his opponents later in this chapter and his own exposition in the next. The larger architecture of this work, as we will see, provides important insights into Irenaeus' theological vision.
1 See esp. Bacq, De l'ancienne a` la nouvelle alliance selon S. Ire´ne´e, and the companion volumes of notes to each book of haer. in the SC edition.