Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy

1. Who Was Irenaeus? An Introduction to the Man and His Work

13 Who was Irenaeus? This chapter will attempt to provide some sort of an answer to that rather complex question while, along the way, introducing some of the key literature that helps to articulate the study of Irenaeus. We could try to answer it by looking at the bare bones of the little that is known of his life: he came from the East, was bishop of Lyons in the 180s, and wrote a monumental Against the Heresies. But that sort of an answer would not give us a handle on why he really matters—on why the question is of more than antiquarian interest in the first place. Or we could give an answer in terms of his “achievement,” which might involve us in talking about his role in the development of the very notions of orthodoxy and heresy or his contribution to a doctrine of “apostolic succession” or an understanding of the role of tradition in the life of the Church. But there are at least two problems there. One is the obvious fact that that sort of an approach means treating him as a sort of disembodied mind—“notions,” “doctrine,” “understanding”—rather than as one passionately engaged in the struggles and in the dramas of the world he lived in. And the other is the rather subtler danger of viewing him only from our end, as it were, for focusing on such “achievements” inevitably means privileging the problems and questions of later ages and that in turn means both belittling and distorting his thought by trying to wedge it into later categories. And the Irenaeus we are then left with is an inevitably divisive character because in the foreground as we look at him are issues that have caused and continue to cause division both within the Church and among the churches.1 So I would like to approach the question from another angle—by looking at the first more or less coherent account we have of Irenaeus and seeing how it does and how it does not fit the a priori questions we might be tempted to raise. That earliest account comes from the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius of Caesarea, the first edition of which was produced shortly before the year 300.2 Eusebius tells us that Irenaeus (1) had in his youth been a “hearer” of Polycarp of Smyrna and (2) became bishop of Lyons in Gaul sometime around 180. He gives (3) a ChAPtER OnE Who Was Irenaeus? An Introduction to the Man and His Work Paul Parvis 14 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy catalogue of Irenaeus’s own writings, at least those “that have come to our knowledge” (HE V.26) and (4) an account of the books Irenaeus accepted as canonical. He is (5) suspicious of Irenaeus’s views on chiliasm and the thousand-year reign of Christ but (6) knows him as a man of peace—which is, after all, what the name “Irenaeus” means— and as one who was active and influential in the ecclesiastical affairs of his day. Those six points deserve to be looked at one at a time. Polycarp of Smyrna First, Polycarp. Irenaeus twice says that he knew Polycarp. In a letter that Eusebius quotes but which is otherwise lost to us, Irenaeus reminds the Florinus to whom it is addressed that “I saw you when I was still a boy, in lower Asia” and recounts how “I can speak of the place in which the blessed Polycarp used to sit and converse and how he would go out and come in and his manner of life and his bodily appearance and the talks he gave to the people and how he described his association with John and with the others who had seen the Lord and how he recalled their words” (HE V.20.5-6). That takes us back to the middle of the second century, if not slightly earlier, since Polycarp was martyred—burned alive in the arena in Smyrna—at the age of eighty-six on a date that appears to be 23 February 157.3 Polycarp is important to Irenaeus because he thinks that through him he is himself linked to the apostolic age.4 And there we come to one of the central elements of Irenaean theology—the role of the bishop and succession from the apostles. For him the bishop is above all a teacher, a publicly accredited witness to the teaching of the apostles. It is easy for us...