The Sign of the Son of Man
The sign of the Son of Man
The thought of Irenaeus forms a great axis. Its first movement is steep and Godward. From the icy arrogance and worldly secrecies of Gnosticism, it flies straight to the saving heights of the ever greater God, whom no finite mind can grasp. The other movement is broad, slow, heavy, a line drawn across the face of the earth. In contrast to the Gnostics’ empty spiritualism and proud contempt for the body, he stubbornly refuses to let man cut himself off from the life of this world and escape into a pseudo-heavenly half-existence. Iranaeus is the outspoken champion of the ‘realism’ of Christian theology. If there is to be real redemption, this earth and no other, this body and no other, must have the capacity to take God’s grace into itself.
At the centre of this axis is the image of the Son of Man, who unites heaven and earth. He is the first touchstone of Christian truth. Only in Him is there resolution of the paradox which Gnosticism tried in vain to master: God by nature is invisible, yet man by nature desires the vision of God.
But this uniting of God and world takes place in the Passion of Christ, when He is stretched out between height and depth, breadth and length. The cross-beams are the world’s true centre, and since it is in this sign that all creation is redeemed, they become the ‘watermark’ of any kind of existence in the world.
The flesh will see God through the Incarnation of God’s Word
(1) And the Word ‘used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (Ex 33:11). Moses longed for an unveiled sight of the One with whom he spoke, and so he was addressed as follows: ‘Stand on the top of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand. When my splendour passes by, you will see me from behind, but my face will not be shown you, for no man shall see my face and live’ (cf Ex 33:20ff). This signifies two things: first, that it is impossible for man to see God, and secondly, that, through the wisdom of God, in the last days, man will see God ‘on the top of the rock’, that is to say, in His coming as man. That is why, as the Gospel tells us, [the Lord] conversed with [Moses] face to face on the top of a mountain, in the presence also of Elijah. At the end He fulfilled the ancient promise.
IV 20, 9
(2) Not one of the heretics is of the opinion that the Word was made flesh. If you examine their creeds carefully, you will find that, in every one of them, the Word of God is presented as without flesh and incapable of suffering, as is ‘the Christ who is above’. Some say that He revealed Himself as a transfigured man, but was not bom or made flesh. Others deny that He took human form at all. They say that He descended, in the form of a dove, on the Jesus born of Mary . . . and after He had announced the ‘unknown Father’, He went up again into the ‘divine Pleroma’. . . The Lord’s disciple shows all these people to be false witnesses when he says: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’ (John 1:14).1
III 11, 3
(3) All the solemn declarations of the heretics come down ultimately to this: blasphemy against the Creator, denial of salvation to God’s handiwork, which is what the flesh is.
IV praef.
(4) To them the Word says, referring to His gift of grace: ‘You are gods, and all of you the sons of the Most High, but you like men shall die’ (Ps 81:6f). He is without doubt addressing here those who do not want to accept the gift of adoption, but instead despise that pure birth which is the Incarnation of the Word, defrauding man of ascent to God and showing ingratitude to the divine Word who for them became incarnate. For it was for this that the Word of God became man and the Son of God became the Son of Man, namely, that man, commingled with the Word of God and receiving adoption, might become the son of God.
III 19, 1
The Passion as the presupposition of redemption and union with God
(5) If He was not born, neither did He die. And if He did not die, neither did He rise from the dead. And if He did not rise from the dead, He did not conquer death and abolish its reign. And if He did not conquer death, how are we to ascend to the light, we who from the beginning have been subject to death? Those who rob man of redemption do not believe that God will raise man from the dead.
D 39
(6) He appeared as man in the fulness of time, and, being God’s Word, He summed up in Himself all things in heaven and on earth. He united man with God and brought about communion between God and man.
D 30f
(7) ‘A child is born to us, and a son is given to us, and the government is upon His shoulder’ (Is 9:6). . . The words ‘the government is upon His shoulder’ figuratively signify the Cross, to which His arms were nailed. The Cross was and is ignominy for Him—and for us, for His sake. And yet it is the Cross which He calls His government, the sign of His kingship.
D 56
The cosmic dimension of the Cross
(8) By His obedience unto death on the Cross, He wiped out the ancient disobedience wrought on the tree. He is Himself the Word of almighty God, who in His invisible form pervades us all and encompasses the breadth and length, the height and depth, of the whole world, for by God’s Word all things are guided and ordered. Now God’s Son was also crucified in them [the four dimensions], since He has imprinted the form of the Cross on the universe. In becoming visible, He had to reveal the participation of the universe in His Cross. He wanted to display, in visible form, His activity in the visible realm, namely, that it is He who makes bright the heights, that is, what is in heaven, and reaches down into the depths, to what is under the earth, and spreads out the length from East to West, and, like a pilot, guides the breadth from North to South, and calls together all the dispersed, from all the comers of the earth, to the knowledge of the Father.
D 34
Only if Christ has suffered, can He impose suffering
(9) If [as the Gnostics say] Christ was not supposed to suffer but fled from Jesus [during the Passion], what right did He have to exhort His disciples to take up their cross and follow Him (cf Matt 16:24f)? For, according to the Gnostics, He Himself did not take up the Cross and abandoned the plan of suffering. He was not talking about the ‘knowledge of the Cross above’, as some of them have the audacity to claim, but about the suffering which He was to endure, and which awaited His disciples in the future. He proved this when He said: ‘Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will find it’ (cf Matt 16:25). . . The same argument applies against those who say that He suffered only in appearance. If He did not really suffer, no gratitude is due to Him, since there was no Passion. And when He tells us, in our real sufferings, to endure the blows and to turn the other cheek, it will look like deception if He Himself has not suffered this in reality first . . . In fact, we should be ‘above the Master’, were we to suffer and sustain what the Master Himself had not suffered and sustained beforehand.
III 18, 5-6