St. Irenaeus/Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Irenaeus, as well as commemorating the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. St. Irenaeus was perhaps the most important of the Church Fathers in the second century. He was born in Asia Minor, and in his youth had known St. Polycarp, one of the Apostolic Fathers (those who were orthodox teachers in the period after the Apostolic age but before the time of Church Fathers like St. Irenaeus). Subsequently, he moved west and became Bishop of Lyons in Gaul in the last decades of the second century. In the words of a modern scholar, “he gathered up and combined the traditions of predecessors from Asia Minor, Syria and Rome and used them to refute the Gnostics who were subverting the Gospel. He built up a body of Christian theology that resembled a French Gothic cathedral, strongly supported by columns of biblical faith and tradition, illuminated by vast expanses of exegetical and logical argument, and upheld by flying buttresses of rhetorical and philosophical considerations from the outside.”
But what was Gnosticism and why was it heretical? Gnosticism was the belief in salvation through secret knowledge and that the redeemer was not the creator, in contrast to the orthodox faith in redemption through the work of Christ, in whom the creator is reconciled with his creation. There were many varieties of Gnosticism, and St. Irenaeus examined them in his treatise against Gnosticism in order to refute them. Irenaeus represents them all as essentially variants of the same heresy, distorting the orthodox faith by claiming secret knowledge. For example, one Gnostic teacher, Valentinus, divided humanity into three categories, the purely material, the law abiding and the spiritual or Gnostics. This at first sight may seem superficially plausible. Some people seem to live their lives on a purely material level, others are law abiding and moral, but seem uninterested in higher spiritual things. Only a few show interest in a higher spiritual dimension.
However, in restricting salvation to an elite few who believed themselves to possess a higher knowledge of spiritual things, Irenaeus pointed out that the Gnostics were divorcing the redeemer from the creator and denying the doctrine of the Incarnation. In claiming salvation by esoteric knowledge, Gnosticism was really a form of human pride, of those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others. It denied that all of humanity were fallen and in need of redemption, and that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through the redeeming work of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Irenaeus insisted against the Gnostics that the message of redemption was freely available to all, not a message of superior knowledge for a select few who prided themselves on their knowledge of higher things.
Gnosticism was heretical because it divorced Christianity from the biblical message of salvation in history. Irenaeus elaborated further St. Paul’s doctrine that as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive, into a doctrine of recapitulation. Adam, the first man, had been created in the image and likeness of God, but had lost the likeness to God through disobedience. However, despite the fall the human race had never wholly lost the image of God. God in Christ had entered the world to redeem the world so that humanity could be restored to the likeness of God that had been lost through the fall. God in Christ had brought about the reconciliation between the Creator and his creation. Salvation was not about a few elect souls who claimed to have higher knowledge escaping from the material world, but rather the restoration of the world so that humanity was restored in Christ to the image and likeness of God.
“In and through this the same God the Father will be shown forth. It is he who formed man and promised the fathers the heritage of the earth. It is he who will give it at the resurrection of the just and will fulfil the promises in the kingdom of his Son. For there is one Son who achieved the will of the Father, and one human race, in which are achieved the mysteries of God… For God wanted his first born Word to descend into his creation and be held by it, and in turn for the creation to hold the Word and ascend to him, thus surpassing the angels and coming to be in the image and likeness of God.”
“There is one human race in which are achieved the mysteries of God.” This was an important message then, and it is especially so now, as there is today so much emphasis on the differences and conflicts between people rather than the unity of humanity as created in the image of God. There are many today who reject Christian orthodoxy because they are offended by its exclusive claim to provide the way of salvation for all humanity. They prefer the idea of everyone finding their own way through their own private religious experience. However, this is in fact a contemporary form of Gnosticism, for it converts the message of salvation from being freely available to all humanity to a purely private religious experience for a few.
This is the reason why sacraments are so important, as outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual graces. The message of redemption is freely available to all through the regenerating waters of baptism, and the Body and Blood of the risen and glorified Body of Christ is received under the forms of bread and wine. Sacraments bear witness to the incarnational principle that faith is not simply a bare intellectual assent to a series of propositions but involves the whole person.
In combating Gnosticism, St. Irenaeus appealed to the witness of the continuous tradition of the Church that could be traced back to the apostles. This contrasted with the Gnostics who had no claim to succession from the apostles, but rather appealed to esoteric knowledge obtained through certain teachers of enlightenment. It is important to realise that for St. Irenaeus the doctrine of Apostolic Succession (the succession of bishops from the time of the Apostles) is not simply a matter of the laying on of hands, but is first and foremost about an orthodox succession of teachers, the bishops who are successors of the apostles. It is not enough for the bishops of the Church simply to claim succession from the apostles through the laying on of hands. They must also teach and uphold the orthodox faith. This was later summarised by the maxim of St. Vincent of Lerins that the Orthodox faith is that which is upheld everywere, always and by all. This is what Orthodox Catholic Christianity is about, as opposed to the private esoteric speculations of Gnosticism. This was the faith of the saints and martyrs of the early Church that ultimately converted the empire, not least of St. Peter and St. Paul whose feast day we will be celebrating tomorrow.
Let us pray that we will continue to follow the example of St. Irenaeus, and be witnesses to that faith in our own time and place.
“The glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.”
by the Revd Dr Robert Wilson PhD (Cantab), Old Roman Apostolate UK
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