IRENAEUS OF LYONS

IRENAEUS OF LYONS, bishop, St. (ca. 130-ca. 200). Irenaeus was a native speaker of Greek born in Asia Minor (probably in Smyrna) where in his youth, according to Eusebius of Caesarea, he came to know Polycarp (qq.v.). He became bishop of Lyons in Roman Gaul shortly after that church had suffered a severe local persecution. His great and deserved place among the Church Fathers comes chiefly from his defense of the theology of the Great Church against gnosticism (qq.v.), especially in his massive, five-volume work, Adversus Haereses (extant in Latin translation).

In Adv. Haer. his description of gnostic thought in volume I is indispensable, if highly colored by the exigencies of polemic, and volume II is a detailed refutation of the thought previously outlined. Volumes III and IV center on what is, in effect, an argument for the Incarnation, which depends on the lex orandi. The Eucharist (q.v.), Irenaeus argues, is a primary witness to the truth about Christ that the Apostles (q.v.) preached from the beginning: “Our opinion [i.e., that Christ is truly God and truly flesh] is in accord with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn sustains our opinion.” Given this, the true presence of Christ in the eucharistic bread and wine, Irenaeus can argue for the reality and goodness of the physical world itself and of its Creator, the one God (q.v.) to whom both the Old and New Testaments bear witness. In response to the gnostics’ claim to a “secret tradition” handed down from a select few of Christ’s Apostles, he replies that no such secrets exist. The preaching and faith of the Church was open and public from the first and may be checked against the preaching found in all churches of apostolic foundation. This is Irenaeus’s-and the original-sense of the phrase, “apostolic succession,” i.e., the succession of the teaching of the apostles carried on preeminently by their successors, the Christian bishops. This teaching is summed up in the “rule of truth” (kanon tes aletheias), by which Irenaeus means the confession of faith in the Father, Son, and Spirit made by every believer at baptism-an ancestor of the later creeds (qq.v.).

Irenaeus’s thought served the Cappadocian Fathers later in their correction of Origen (qq.v.). One can find in him at least the adumbrations of virtually the whole of subsequent Orthodox theology, anthropology, ecclesiology, and Christology (qq.v.). The disappearance of his works in the Greek-speaking East probably owes to a later disdain in the Byzantine era for his millennialism (qq.v.). He is known and quoted in the East until at least the 6th c.