Irenaeus

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Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202) was bishop of Lyon in Roman Gaul and the author of the most influential early Christian attack on the Gnostics — a five-book work known by its Latin title Adversus Haereses, “Against Heresies,” composed in Greek around 180. For most of Christian history he was read as a defender of orthodoxy. He is read now, additionally, as something he never meant to be: the fullest surviving witness to the very teachings he wanted destroyed.

He came from the Greek-speaking East, probably Smyrna, and made much of a personal link to the apostolic past. As a boy, he wrote, he had heard Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who in turn claimed to have known the apostle John. That chain of memory mattered to his whole argument: the truth, in his account, was what the churches founded by the apostles had handed down without a break, in the open, to anyone who cared to look — against which the Gnostic teachers offered a secret knowledge passed privately to the few. By his middle years he was a presbyter at Lyon, and after the persecution that struck that church around 177 he became its bishop. Of his death almost nothing certain is known; the later tradition that he was martyred has no early support.

Against Heresies sets out, school by school, the elaborate cosmologies of the Valentinians and other teachers — the descending ranks of aeons, the fall of Sophia, the lower craftsman-god who fashions the material world — and then turns to refute them. Irenaeus argues for one God who is both creator and redeemer, for the goodness of the flesh and its resurrection, and for a single thread of teaching guaranteed by the public succession of bishops. The work is polemic, and it reads the systems it describes through hostile eyes; how fairly it renders them is a question scholarship still weighs. Until the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices let some of these movements speak in their own documents, Irenaeus’s summary was, for many of them, nearly all that remained. On certain points the codices have borne him out; on others they show where report and original diverge.

Later ages gave him the standing his own had only begun to. The Western church came to call him a Father and, eventually, a Doctor; his insistence that the sweep of salvation history is one continuous work of one God shaped doctrines that long outlived the disputes he was fighting. For the modern study of the Gnostic currents, his importance is double-edged and entirely real: the man who labored to extinguish these systems is also the reason their shape was never wholly lost.

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