Irenaeus was having none of it

The Turkish city of Izmir, formerly known as the Greek city of Smyrna, has, due to its location, a crossroads of languages and cultures. Also, probably due in part to its proximity to Ephesus, where the Apostle John is said to have taken Jesus’ mother, Mary, to live with him, it was also home to a bustling hub of Christian activity. 

As a young man, Irenaeus (born c.125) heard the preaching of Polycarp in Smyrna, while Polycarp had in his youth heard the preaching of the Apostle John himself. Not long after meeting Polycarp, Irenaeus moved to Lyons in southern France. Polycarp’s preaching had evidently made a deep enough impression on Irenaeus that he had converted before relocating, because the bishop of Lyons, Pothinus, entrusted him with a mission to Rome in 177. 

While Irenaeus was away, Pothinus and others were killed when a severe persecution broke out. Upon his return to Lyons, Irenaeus was made bishop, a post he held until his death around 202. He is therefore an important link between the apostolic and post-apostolic eras, as well as between Eastern and Western Christianity.

Gnosticism was one of the earliest heresies appearing in the church, and Irenaeus was one of its early opponents. His Refutation of Heresies, a defense of orthodox Christianity against Gnosticism, is his best known writing. Gnosticism comprises a spectrum of beliefs, but in general, the Gnostics were dualists—they believed in two great and opposed cosmic forces, represented variously as good versus evil, light competing with darkness, knowledge opposing ignorance, and spirit at variance with the material world. Interestingly, I find this combative, dualistic worldview very similar to that of American Evangelicals with their “prayer warriors”, their focus on “spiritual warfare” against the forces of evil, and their belief that they are engaged in a “battle for the soul of the nation.”

The Gnostics reasoned that the material world, being both flawed and finite, couldn’t have been made by a perfect and eternal God. “How can the perfect produce the imperfect, the infinite produce the finite, the spiritual produce the material?” they asked. Some posited that there were thirty beings called AEons, of whom God made the first, which made the second, which made the third. It was the thirtieth Aeon that finally created the world. 

The word “gnostic” comes from the Greek “gnosis”, meaning “knowledge” and therein lay the conflict between Christians and Gnostics. Unlike Jesus, whose Good News of salvation was available to everyone, the Gnostics taught that salvation required arcane, hidden knowledge. In their view, the story of the thirty AEons comprised the true, hidden, “spiritual” meaning behind the statement that Jesus was thirty years old when he began to preach. (“Click the ‘Subscribe’ button for more secret spiritual-life-hacks”, the Gnostic YouTube or Tik Tok posts might have said.)

Irenaeus was having none of it. Besides being an absurdly unwieldy and abstruse interpretation of a simple biographical statement, the Thirty AEons story assumed that to be saved, the faithful needed special knowledge not found in scripture—knowledge with which only they were entrusted. Irenaeus stood firmly against the Gnostics’ implicit claim to be spiritual gatekeepers. 

Irenaeus was the first to characterize the church as “catholic”, meaning “universal.” The message of Jesus was not reserved for a spiritual elite group of gnostics with supposed secret knowledge, but for all.  “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,” Jesus prayed, “that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children” (Matthew 11:5).

I want to note in closing that one of my favorite utterances from early Christianity comes from Irenaeus: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” Besides reminding us that God wants all of us in both senses—every one of us, and the totality of each—this saying also reminds us that God’s priority is human thriving. It is easy to think of the church’s various struggles with heresy as mere hair-splitting over arcane points of doctrine, fought over merely to shore up the power of the winners. But many heresies were rife with terrible ideas, with the potential to do real harm to the faithful. People like Irenaeus opposed heresy, not for the sake of being on the winning side, but because they wanted Jesus’ promise of abundant life to be available to everyone.