Faith, Reason, and Incarnation in Irenaeus of Lyons

Introduction

In his Regensburg lecture on "Faith, Reason, and the University," Pope Benedict surveys some of the decisive fluctuations in the relation of faith and reason within the Christian tradition. In the course of this broad overview, he presents the early Church's performance of this relation as paradigmatic and normative, indeed as "part of faith itself." But he contrasts this exemplary synthesis with later developments within the Christian tradition in which this synthesis is distorted through either a conception of faith that abstracts entirely from human reason or a conception of reason that precludes any positive continuity with faith. He identifies the former relation with the voluntarism of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus, in which God's transcendence and otherness are affirmed at the expense of any analogical reflection in human reason. On the other hand, he diagnoses in modern theology, going back at least to the liberal Protestantism of Adolf von Harnack, a reduction of the scope of reason to the apprehension of the mathematical structure of matter and to experimental verification. This "reduction of the radius of science and reason" not only excludes the question of God from the scope of rational enquiry but also precludes the possibility of rational enquiry into the most fundamental questions of human origin, destiny, and meaning. Pope Benedict concludes his lecture with a call for a renewal of the synthesis of faith and reason in the modern context, a renewal in which the decisive element would be the enlargement of the scope of reason itself.

It would stand to reason, in terms of the logic of Pope Benedict's Regensburg lecture, that the Christian renewal of the proper synthesis of faith and reason should draw upon the resources of the paradigmatic and normative instantiations of this synthesis in the early Church. In this essay, I would like to implement this strategy by reflecting on one significant example of this synthesis in the theology of the great second-century bishop and theologian Irenaeus of Lyons. There are strong grounds for identifying Irenaeus as the first Christian systematic theologian, the first Christian thinker who explicitly conceived of Christian faith as a coherent body of truth whose very coherence and consistency should be the object of disciplined reflection. Irenaeus's attentiveness to the systematic wholeness of the Christian proclamation was provoked in reaction to what he considered to be the false doctrine of the heretical "gnostics." Irenaeus attacked the gnostics both for their misuse and neglect of human reason and for their mischaracterization of both the material contents and the formal character of Christian faith. He derided what he called their "knowledge falsely so-called" as a perversion of both faith and reason. In opposition to this gnostic system, Irenaeus elaborated a conception of authentic Christian knowledge as a synthesis of faith and reason that is grounded in the simultaneous difference and relation between the Creator and the creation and comes to full maturity in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.

In attempting to retrace the synthesis of faith and reason in Irenaeus's theology, this paper will proceed in three main parts. First, I will attempt to draw out some main elements of Irenaeus's critique of the gnostics on rational grounds. Second, I will demonstrate how Irenaeus's construal of the God–world relation determines his own characterization of the proper capacities and limits of human reason. And, third, I will show that Irenaeus's understanding of authentic Christian knowledge presumes that the synthesis of faith and reason is consummated only through the Incarnation of Divine Reason in the person of Jesus Christ and is authentically proclaimed only within the communion of the visible and hierarchical Church.

Irenaeus's Rational Critique of the Gnostics

Irenaeus often criticizes his opponents for not making sense. But, at the beginning of his five-book treatise Against the Heresies, he also seems to suggest that previous defenders of Christian doctrine against the gnostics did not succeed precisely because they precipitously dismissed gnostic teaching without probing its seeming intelligibility and plausibility, and without acknowledging its demonstrable attractiveness and appeal...