Introduction
INTRODUCTION
I
‘So-called gnosis’ was an enormous temptation in the early Christian Church. By contrast, persecution, even the bloodiest, posed far less of a threat to the Church’s continuing purity and further development. Gnosticism had its roots in late antiquity, drew on oriental and Jewish sources, and multiplied into innumerable esoteric doctrines and sects. Then, like a vampire, the parasite took hold of the youthful bloom and vigour of Christianity. What made it so insidious was the fact that the Gnostics very often did not want to leave the Church. Instead, they claimed to be offering a superior and more authentic exposition of Holy Scripture, though, of course, this was only for the ‘superior souls’ (‘the spiritual’, ‘the pneumatic’); the common folk (‘the psychic’) were left to get on with their crude practices. It is not hard to see how this kind of compartmentalizing of the Church’s members, indeed of mankind as a whole, inevitably encouraged not only an excited craving for higher initiation, but also an almost unbounded arrogance in those who had moved from mere ‘faith’ to real, enlightened ‘knowledge’.
All manner of attractions for the religious sensation-seeker were on sale at this gaudy funfair. Always in the background was the fundamental dogma of Gnosticism—the belief that the lower, material sphere, the ‘flesh’, the world of the ‘psychic’, was contemptible, something to be vanquished, while the higher, spiritual world was all that was excellent, the only thing worth cultivating. Sometimes extreme licentiousness was permitted or recommended, for after all ‘to the pure all things are pure’; at other times, the rule would be a body-hating asceticism. What mattered most was the ‘knowledge’ that ensured spiritual power: the timetable for all the soul’s journeys in the hereafter, the ground plan and genealogy of all the cosmic spheres, the key to the riddles of nature, the knowledge of all the powers holding sway between earth and heaven, and, last but not least, a true anatomy of the Godhead itself. In fear and trembling, the adept gazed into the abyss of eternity. He could see, emerging from the eternal silence of the ‘void’, from the ‘groundless’ abyss of the absolute, a teeming mass of powers, ‘Aeons’ and divine ‘emanations Being male and female, these mated with each other, forming ‘couples’ (‘syzygies’), in order to produce new beings belonging to the divine world. One of these, just one among many, was the ‘redeemer’ of the world, the Christ.
Tragic scenes are played out in this eerie twilight zone between the unfathomable ‘groundlessness’ of the divine, on the one hand, and the earthly world (which is still a thing of the future), on the other. The projecting of tragedy into the realm of the divine shows that the fantastic Gnostic systems, though very different from each other, are myths in the proper sense of the word. They are, therefore, all in unambiguous opposition to the Christian view of the world. For the Christian, God’s creation, in its material and spiritual totality, is ‘very good’. But, for Gnosticism, the world always comes into existence as the result of a tragic accident, a disaster, a fall. In the first book of his work Against the Heresies, Irenaeus tries to outline the diversity of these Gnostic myths. It will suffice here to list a few of their main themes.
For example, one of the ‘gods’, forgetting his origins, sets himself up as creator of the world (demiurgos). By his own power, and against the will of the Forefather (propator), he produces the earthly world, the realm of iron fate, of harsh ‘justice’, of bodiliness, of blind instinct. But, by cunning, an emissary of the supreme god penetrates the sphere of this antidivine Demiurge and goes down to earth. There, through initiation into the mysteries of the upper world, he redeems the elect (and only the elect!).
In a second tragic myth, one of the Aeons that make up the ‘divine Pleroma’, namely, the daughter of God, Sophia (Achamoth), strays from the Pleroma; the material world arises out of her fears and tears, her ‘secretions’. The Christ, who once again is seen as coining down from the world of sublimity to penetrate the world of poverty, eventually redeems her together with the higher spiritual souls.
It was Marcion who taught the most dangerous form of this mythical struggle of the gods, the most dangerous because it is the one that seems closest to Christianity and least burdened by fantasy. What is more, he is keen on scriptural exegesis. Marcion identifies the evil Demiurge with Yahweh, the Old Testament God of justice. The redeemer who sets us free from his tyranny is Jesus the Christ. According to Marcion, the teaching of Jesus has unfortunately been mixed up by the evangelists with elements from the Old Testament, from which it must be set free. The principle of justice and the principle of love are in stark opposition, as are the religion of works and the religion of grace, the religion of legal exteriority and spiritual inferiority. This is the first systematic form of theological anti-Semitism.
The same conflict, the same dualism, runs through all the other systems of Gnosticism. In the earthly world it is reflected in the stark opposition of body and spirit. The bodily is regarded as something antidivine, which the ‘spiritual’ person leaves behind and beneath him if he is to be redeemed and returned, through secret knowledge, to the supermundane regions of pure spirit from which he fell. The inferior, animal souls are incapable of such an existence. Catholics are occasionally conceded an intermediate existence between the two spheres, but at the end of the world, they do not reach the highest of the heavenly spheres, but only the cosmic ‘centre’. From this very general description, we can see that Gnosticism is radically anti-Christian. Irenaeus, with great perspicacity, understood this, and showed it up for what it was. For him, Christianity is about the divine and spiritual Word becoming flesh and body. The redemption depends on the real Incarnation, the real suffering on the Cross, and the real resurrection of the flesh. All three of these are a scandal for Gnosticism. On their view, Mary is not really Mother of God, and Christ did not really suffer—no, the heavenly Christ made off before the man Jesus suffered, and there can be no question at all of an actual resurrection of the flesh. Underlying this refusal of the flesh and Us saving role in the Incarnation is a confusion between the human spirit (nous) and the divine Holy Spirit (Pneuma Hagion). The former puts itself in the place of the latter and identifies itself with it. And so the main object of Irenaeus’ anti-Gnostic polemic is the salvific character of the Incarnation of God’s Son and Word. Similarly, writing against Marcion, he proves the indispensability of the ‘fleshly’ Old Testament for the ‘spiritual’ New Testament by showing the old covenant to be basically an ‘adaptation’ of the divine Word to live in fleshly man, or, expressing the same idea from the other side, as the adaptation of earthly man to be the bearer of the divine Word. Caro cardo salutis, the flesh is the hinge, the decisive criterion, of salvation: this well-known saying of Tertullian, upon whom Irenaeus had a lasting influence, can in fact be regarded as the very centre of Irenaeus’ theology.
II
The Word of God first dashed with Gnostic myth in the second century, and nowhere more dramatically than in the work of Irenaeus. Given the fantastic forms of the mythology of the time, it all seems exotically remote. In fact, when we look more closely, we can see that we are dealing with a confrontation which has never ended and is constantly assuming new forms. The confusion mentioned above between the spirit of man and the Spirit of God characterizes all of mankind’s more ambitious religious and philosophical speculations and mysticisms. It constantly devalues the sensible world, visible organization, the flesh, matter: these are mere ‘appearances’, either a deception or something to be seen through and overcome. Concealed behind them lies the only truth, the spirit, which must be set free and brought out into the open. This is the central axiom of all the religions of the East—from their ancient beginnings to their present-day posterity in this allegedly ‘post-Christian age’. We shall see how hard it was for the Fathers after Irenaeus to ward off Gnostic infiltration. In the Middle Ages, from the remote Calabrian monastery of Fiore, the doctrine of Abbot Joachim was to exert an incalculable influence on later generations which has lasted to the present day. He thought that the age of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity (together with the organized structure of His Church) would eventually ‘dissolve’ into an age of Pure (Holy!) Spirit. This spirit—passing through the stages of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment (Lessing), Idealism, and Marxism—degenerated into the purely human spirit of atheism.1 Of course, the Jewish Kabbala and Gematria of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were also of predominantly Gnostic origin. Jakob Böhme, with his far-reaching influence on Romanticism and Idealism, reintroduced a tragic dualism into the Godhead. This was the inspiration of Schelling and Baader. But it is above all the fundamental tendency of Hegel’s philosophy which can be called Gnostic. For Hegel, everything material remains phenomenal and only finds its truth in the spiritual. The religious ‘dualism’ which distinguishes between pious consciousness and the Absolute is a mere ‘image’ (Vorstellung), which, even in the case of the so-called ‘absolute religion’ of Christianity, has to be rejected in favour of all-encompassing absolute ‘knowledge’. Ultimately, for man, there can be no more mystery about the divine Spirit.
The Gnostic impulse secretly or openly animates all those modern world-views which see ‘body’ and ‘spirit’, bios and ethos, nature and God, in antagonism or opposition. Apparently irreconcilable schools of thought come together in the spirit of Marcion. Biologistic resentment against the Jewish spirit of the Old Testament feeds on it; it is no accident that Harnack erected a memorial to the old heretic. One of ancient Gnosticism’s favourite doctrines, vigorously satirized by Irenaeus, is the glorification of the ‘eternal quest’, the idea being that the supreme principle, the ‘Groundless One’, is unknowable. It is not difficult to see why this emotional attachment to seeking, which despises finding as bourgeois, should have revived in our own times. But the clearest proof of the continuing relevance of the second-century struggle against Gnosticism is the fashionable interest, within the Christian Churches, in Zen meditation. This is essentially anti-Incarnational. All sensible images, all words and concepts must be removed, so that there is nothing left but the unfathomable void in which a supposedly super objective insight (gnosis) can flourish. However mutually contradictory these currents of thought may at first sight appear to be, they are united in their ‘spiritualizing’ flight from matter and the ‘flesh’. Modern materialism seems to be an exception, and yet it too is opposed to the Christian principle of Incarnation. At least in practice, it regards matter as something to be dominated, and in man himself as the way to power. Myth and Christianity are opposed on every point. Myth seeks the ascent of man to spirit; the Word of God seeks descent into flesh and blood. Myth wants power; revelation reveals the true power of God in the most extreme powerlessness. Myth wants knowledge; the Word of God asks for constant faith and, only within that faith, a growing, reverent understanding. Myth is the lightning that flashes when contradictory things collide—absolute knowledge, eternal quest; the revelation of God’s Word is gentle patience amidst the intractable tensions of life. Myth tears God and world apart by trying to force them into a magical unity; the revelation of God’s Word unites God and world by sealing the distance between them in the very intimacy of their communion. That is why myth eventually breaks up into the two irreconcilable halves of ‘being as God’ and ‘tragic existence’, while God’s Word delivers man from both, for God incarnate, by His suffering in the flesh, has set us free from our tragedy.
Myth is unmasked by the Word of God. It is the outcome of man’s desperate arrogance, his refusal to submit to God, his determination to make his own way to Heaven. Irenaeus did not need to speculate. All he had to do was let the Word of God speak for itself and show its inner logic, the logic of Old and New Testaments in their perpetual unity. The biblical way to God has been opened up by God Himself—God’s Word is the way. And so, for the person willing to follow it in patience, it can lead to the divine destination, to the vision of God the Creator and Redeemer. By contrast, the Gnostic’s self-devised ascent is bound to end, like the flight of Icarus, in a crash both tragic and grotesque. The surge beyond faith into the abyss of God ends in a blinded fall into inhumanity. The Godhead that seemed to hold the promise of plenitude (pleroma), reveals itself to be anonymity, a silent void, the empty abyss of man himself, the projection of his own deficiency onto the wall of the absolute.
III
In their epistles, St. Paul and St. John had begun the struggle against Gnosticism, which in their time was in its early stages. Even so, it was already showing its pernicious tendencies: promoting its seductive secret knowledge in the Christian communities, confusing simple believers, and spreading the first dangerous ‘pluralism’ within the unity of the faith. A real showdown only became possible when all the various systems of Gnosticism had been constructed. This took place towards the end of the second century. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, was originally from Asia Minor. In his childhood he had known old Polycarp, the disciple of St. John. In about AD 180 he composed his ‘Five Books on the Unmasking and Refutation of the Falsely Named Gnosis’. This, apart from the short ‘Proof of the Apostolic Preaching’ and a few fragments, is the only work of his to come down to us. The five books were not written at the same time, but at intervals, though a logical plan underlies them. After describing the erroneous doctrines (Book 1) and reducing them to absurdity (Book 2), Irenaeus begins a detailed, positive refutation on the basis of Sacred Scripture. The truth of the Scriptures proves the uniqueness of God, the Creator of the world, the Lord of the Old Testament as well as of the New. The Scriptures also prove the uniqueness of the Word of God, who spoke and acted in the old covenant and became man in Jesus Christ (Book 3). The pedagogical meaning of the Old Testament is considered in the light of its fulfilment in the New (Book 4). The resurrection of the flesh, prepared for by the Eucharist, presupposes that matter has been created by God and is good (Book 5). These statements are, of course, only very general indications. The progress of the argument is impeded by all kinds of digressions and repetitions.
Nevertheless, this work is sufficient to qualify its author as indisputably the greatest theologian of his century. That is how he was regarded by experts on the theological tradition such as Tertullian, Eusebius, Theodoret, and Epiphanius, who showered their praise on him. Gnosticism was rampant in Irenaeus’ day, and is constantly reviving in all the non-Christian religions and philosophies. As we have seen, he exposed it as an essentially anti-Christian religious experiment which destroys the psychosomatic unity of man. He refuted th is system not by his own speculation, but by simply contemplating Christian revelation in its unity, by seeing its form. He is theology’s founding father and a paradigmatic figure in its history. Immediately after his death, the clear lines which he drew become blurred. Tertullian, who had written a powerful treatise ‘On the Flesh of Christ’, defected to the ‘spiritual Church’ of the Montanists, thereby subscribing to one of the fundamental principles of Gnosticism. Not long after, the great Alexandrians, Clement and Origen, attempted to annex to Christian theology as much as they could of the speculative property of Gnosticism, and behind that, of Middle Platonism. The Council of Nicaea drew once more a clear dividing line between the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the schema adopted by Arius of emanations from the primordial One. This was a rule for the whole Church, but it did not stop the debate with Greek thought for long. The exchanges continued, in ever new forms, throughout the whole of the Patristic period, in the Byzantine tradition, in the western Middle Ages, right up to the Renaissance and the age of Baroque. If one takes, so to speak, a bird’s-eye view of it, Irenaeus’ place in this convoluted story seems even more remarkable. He draws the battle-lines clearly and cleanly.
In fact, the demarcation is the exact opposite of what we are used to seeing now. Today Christianity is regarded as an ‘otherworldly’ religion, whereas pagan atheism claims to be an affirmation of life in this world. In the second century, Gnosticism, the anti-Christian experiment, was seen to be a flight from the world and the body, a pale and arid spiritualism. It replaced the real world—violent, indeed sinful, yet redeemable by God, and actually redeemed through the Incarnation of the Word—with an imaginary world, thus splitting the one nature of man in two. Christianity, by contrast, proved Us plausibility not least because it wholeheartedly acknowledged the goodness of creation, and gladly and bravely affirmed man, man threatened by destiny, sin, and death, as well as God.
To Gnosticism’s separation of soul and body, spirit and flesh, pneumatic and animal existence, Christianity opposed the Incarnation of God. The fact that God has become man, indeed flesh, proves that the redemption and resurrection of the entire earthly world is not just a possibility but a reality. Against the Gnostic separation of the old and new covenants, Irenaeus taught the unity of the testaments in Christ: they were different, because they were different stages in the one divine education of the human race. In contrast to Gnosticism’s cold presumption, he proclaimed God’s patience, visible in Christ and His Passion, given to us as redemptive grace in the form of faith, hope and love, by means of which we preserve a patient and humble distance from the eternal God whom we can never exhaustively comprehend. This attitude is the fundamental condition of all redemption; indeed, it is redemption itself. Tim after time, Irenaeus refers all the specific questions back to the simple issue of the sovereign God and the humbly submissive creature, the eternal majesty of Being in its Trinitarian vitality and the eternal poverty and yearning of Becoming in Us brokenness and open-endedness.
For the Christian, this issue loses all shadow of tragedy. In Christ—and so from the side of God, not from the side of man—the gulf has been bridged. Man becomes the vessel of God, earth His dwelling-place. Bread and wine, the fruits of the earth, in their Eucharistic transformation, seal the redemption of the world and the gratitude of the creature. Everything in Irenaeus is bathed in a warm and radiant joy, a wise and majestic gentleness. True, his words of struggle are hard as iron and crystal clear. A compromise, a ‘synthesis’ of the Word of God and myth, never emerges, not even as a speculative possibility. But his struggle is not dialectical. He refutes by unmasking, or rather by showing the face of truth. He does not try to persuade by means of syllogisms; he lets the truth shine and warm like the sun. He has the patience of maturity; in fact, those two words—‘patience’ and ‘maturity’—constantly recur in decisive places. In the noblest sense of the word, he is naive, as naive as God’s Word was in human form. In this sign He ‘overcame the world’.
In what follows, we hope to provide a systematically arranged selection of texts from all that is extant of the works of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons. All selections are arbitrary. The long descriptions of the Gnostic systems, which contain little of interest to the modern reader, have been deliberately left aside. The same goes for the more detailed refutations of Gnostic doctrines. The short summary at the beginning of this introduction should be enough to enable the reader of the texts to understand the allusions to the theorems of Gnosticism and to put them into context. Of course, these texts do not give us a fully detailed and comprehensive picture of Irenaeus’ teaching on many subjects—for example, the Trinity, the Incarnation of the Logos, the Church, Scripture and Tradition, and so on. However, it must be admitted that very often he does not go beyond hints and allusions, and so anyone who reads these texts carefully—and that is necessary!—will get a good idea of the essence of his theology. For him, the meaning of Scripture, as read in the Church and understood by her, is self-evident to anyone with eyes open enough to see. Everything in the Bible is ‘certain, true and real’ (omnia firma et vera et sub-stantiam habentia, V 35,2), though it is also clear that it is not meant to be a textbook leading us into total knowledge. Instead, it leads us to faith in Christ and in prayer to God for the wisdom and insight to ‘understand the sayings of the prophets’ (D 57). But to seethe self-evident meaning of Scripture, we have to read it in the Church, in other words, in her publicly confessed and authenticated tradition, the tradition that has come down from the apostles. The contrast between the secret tradition of the Gnostics (secret and therefore uncontrollable and arbitrary) and the public character of the Church—in the provable apostolic succession and the exposition of the faith given by the bishops and presbyters—is absolutely fundamental for Irenaeus. The two things—Scripture and Tradition—reflect each other. Together they make up the regula veritatis (what Tertullian calls the regula fidei), the normative confession of faith; it is this, claims Irenaeus, which is the ‘true gnosis’. The theology of this first great Christian thinker may not be worked out to the last technical detail, but its basic intuition, its vision of what distinguishes the Church from heresy and the sects, is so clear and penetrating that, taken as a whole, it cannot fail to enlighten the unbiased observer.
Hans Urs von Balthasar