St. Irenaeus as Mystical Theologian

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PROVINCE OF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington, D. C. 20017 VoL. XXXIX APRIL, 1975 No.2 ST. IRENAEUS AS MYSTICAL THEOLOGIAN THE AIM of this article is to suggest that Irenaeus of Lyons is the first really apophatic theologian to write in the West. His work is perhaps the greatest monument in the Patristic Period of Greek theology developed in a Latin setting. Few now would doubt the importance of negative theology for the development of Christian spirituality. Significantly, it was during the 4th century, the first great age of monasticism, when St. Basil was composing the fundamental legislation for Eastern monks, that his brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, was drawing on his profound initiation into the Greek philosophical tradition to provide the intellectual undergirding for the growing ascetical movement. This Cappadocian theologian was essentially apophatic. Since the God of faith transcends every concept or image we may form of him, we can only know him by a supra-rational mode of cognition, a way of unknowing. 185 186 NICHOLAS GENDLE This is true theoria (Oewpia) or contemplation, and such is the inexhaustible goal of the spiritual life. The importance of Irenaeus's doctrine of transcendence is that this is the work of a Biblical theologian, not at all given to Platonic speculations, with no time for any kind of Christian intellectual elitism. For him, God's progressive self-manifestation is realized in the spiritual advance of man, called to grow in the deifying vision of God by participation in the divine life. But we intend to show that this hope of glory is grounded in a truly Biblical grasp of the transcendence of God and in a profoundly religious sense of man's dependence on him. This is why piety demands a proper agnosticism beyond the sphere of revelation; and why our knowledge of God can never be a mere rationalism presupposed by the innate powers of the human mind. That the Invisible should become visible and the Unknowable known is always a miracle of grace, and if this is so, then we must be dealing here with a genuine connaissance mystique. Studies in the past, e. g., the work of Lawson and of Wingren, have rightly elaborated the Biblicism of Irenaeus and the robust Paulinism of his soteriology. I£ then we can establish the centrality of the doctrine of transcendence for the spirituality of a great teacher, little moved to look to philosophy for the content of his theology, then it may well be that a grasp of the unknowability of God might be basic to any truly Christian account of man's religious quest. Apophaticism, with its implication that all religious knowledge is limited and given is not just a basic position of Christian Platonism. It may be claimed-and here lies Irenaeus's importance-that the Via Negativa is implied as much by Isaiah's sense of the sovereign otherness of Yahweh as by the Platonic axiom of the simplicity of the One. Philosophy merely provided the Fathers with a set of concepts with which to defend and expound a sense of Transcendence inherent in the Tradition from the beginning, and reinforced by the data of contemplative experience. ST. IRENAEUS AS MYSTICAL THEOLOGIAN 187 1) The setting of Irenaeus's Mystical Theology. Our contention is reinforced in the case of Irenaeus, if we consider the nature of his detachment from Greek Paideia. The polemical pressures have changed from the need to challenge fairly straightforward polytheism to an attack on a worldnegating religious outlook often highly sophisticated-sometimes absurdly so-in its philosophical complexities. The gnosticism of men like Valentinus was a danger-sign as to where unbridled Hellenistic speculation might lead the Church. The Gnostics too preached an Unknowable God, but this implied for them not a democracy of grace but an intellectual elite, alone fitted by nature to attain to knowledge of God. Hence, we should not be surprised to detect a change of key in comparing Irenaeus to the Apologists: he is more cautious in his attitude to Hellenism, less inclined to laud the natural capacities...