Poisoned Wells and Living Water

St Irenaeus (130 – 202), whose feast it is today, was a Greek from Polycarp’s hometown of Smyrna in Asia Minor, now Izmir, Turkey. We do not know how or why he ended up in Gaul (that is, France) in Lyons (then known as Lugdunum) but he eventually became the second bishop of that place. Lyon’s first bishop, Pothinus, was martyred around 177 during persecutions under Marcus Aurelius, when Irenaeus was visiting Rome.  St. Irenaeus had been instructed in the faith by the Hieromartyr Polycarp who had himself had been taught by St. John the Theologian.  This fact is highly pertinent to much of St. Irenaeus’ teaching of Orthodoxy against the heretics as we shall see.  This is his account in his own words.

Polycarp also was not only instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ, but was also, by apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna, whom I also saw in my early youth, for he tarried [on earth] a very long time, and, when a very old man, gloriously and most nobly suffering martyrdom, departed this life, having always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles, and which the Church has handed down, and which alone are true. To these things all the Asiatic Churches testify, as do also those men who have succeeded Polycarp down to the present time, a man who was of much greater weight, and a more stedfast witness of truth, than Valentinus, and Marcion, and the rest of the heretics.  (Against the Heretics, Ch. 3:4).

These last two men mentioned, Valentinus and Marcion were the arch-heretics of this very early period of Christian history.  St. Irenaeus bravely opposed them by showing their teaching to have come from a poisoned well rather than the Holy Spirit. His main argument concerns the purity of the doctrine handed down in a living chain from the Apostles and hence from Christ Himself.  St Irenaeus himself had been only the third link in that chain from St. Polycarp and St. John.  Valentinus, the Gnostic and Marcion the divider of the Old and New Testaments - and the cherry picker of the New - both claimed to have the truth as being only revealed to them and not to the Orthodox Catholic Church.  Here is how St. Irenaeus puts it:-

It is within the power of all, therefore, in every Church, who may wish to see the truth, to contemplate clearly the Tradition of the Apostles manifested throughout the whole world; and we are in a position to reckon up those who were by the Apostles instituted bishops in the Churches, and [to demonstrate] the succession of these men to our own times; those who neither taught nor knew of anything like what these [heretics] rave about. For if the Apostles had known hidden mysteries, which they were in the habit of imparting to “the perfect” apart and privily from the rest, they would have delivered them especially to those to whom they were also committing the Churches themselves. For they were desirous that these men should be very perfect and blameless in all things, whom also they were leaving behind as their successors, delivering up their own place of government to these men; which men, if they discharged their functions honestly, would be a great boon [to the Church], but if they should fall away, the direst calamity.  (Against the Heretics, Ch. 3:1).

What then can we learn from St. Irenaeus’s teaching?

First, don’t listen to heretics. If you can, challenge and refute them as did St Irenaeus. Only this week, I noticed a Protestant woman quoted on Facebook, a lady who has a very extensive and lucrative ministry in the US, teaching some very strange and heretical ideas.  According to her Jesus died spiritually in hell (having ceased to be the Son of God at his death) in order to be reborn through his resurrection. St Irenaeus would have asked her some very simple questions here:  “Do you have a Bishop? What is his name? From where did you or he get this teaching? Is this your own idea? Did it come to you through some supposed special revelation? What authority can it then have?” These are very unpopular questions in secular academic circles, among those who purport to be scholars of religion. The prevailing narrative among these intellectuals is that the Christian Church is one vast historical conspiracy that has suppressed the truth for centuries. There is a kind of circular argument here that nothing can be trusted if it comes from an official source and more especially from the Church. Perhaps the greatest apologetic challenge for the Orthodox today is to contest this view, especially here in the West, that Christ and the Church have no essential connection and are indeed antagonistic to one other.

There is another side to St Irenaeus.  He wasn’t always combating heretics! His spiritual teaching concerning Jesus Christ and salvation confirms the truth of the Gospel as we have always received it in the Orthodox Church. However, this teaching immediately throws into sharp relief those distortions within the Western Christian tradition that have emerged the other side of the Renaissance, the Reformation and Enlightenment. St Irenaeus could not have possibly known that his adherence to the very basics of the Christian faith would go down these strange and unaccustomed paths in subsequent centuries. Take, for example, his teaching (and that of the Fathers, generally) that humankind in the Garden of Eden was created neither perfect nor immortal but rather has the potential for perfection and immortality. The Fathers characterised our first parents as children in the divine image, needing to develop by closeness to God and divine grace into the divine likeness. For St Irenaeus and the rest, the disobedience of Adam and Eve was not too much a Fall from divine perfection but rather a failure to rise.  This broken development was caused by our self-willed isolation from the Source of all that is good, that is God. St Irenaeus taught that the Incarnation of our Lord would have happened anyway without this tragedy. However, now that humanity had, to a greater or lesser degree fallen out of divine communion, this could only be restored by the undoing of death in the resurrection of Christ. It was the Incarnation itself that enabled the Word, the Logos, to gather up (through Mary’s obedient offering) the fullness of our humanity.  Christ thereby united that humanity (our humanity) to the Godhead, that is to the Father himself, of whom Christ and the Spirit are, to use Irenaeus’ own evocative language, “the two hands of God.”  Now that sounds very different doesn’t it from the idea, now normalised in the West, that the disobedience of our first parents destined us for the ultimate punishment of hell and that the only means of escaping this terrible fate is to accept that God’s sacrifice of his own Son satisfied, as none other could, his own entirely justifiable wrath against sinners. No wonder then, as many Orthodox commentators have noted, that there is so much atheism now in the post-Christian West! Who could believe in such a God as this? Not the Church, not the Orthodox Church, and, hopefully, neither you nor I as her faithful members of the body of Christ.

For these many different reasons it is timely that Orthodox Christians, particularly in the West, should reacquaint themselves with what the Orthodox Church teaches about Christ and salvation. In few places is this more clearly and attractively presented than in the writings of this early Greek theologian and martyr, who one day found himself in France. He still speaks to us concerning those who through their ravings and pointless speculations poison the well of the apostolic Christian faith. Through him we can refine our palate to spew out this poison and cherish the sweet life giving water of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, which is indeed no less than the life of Christ Himself. In this we shall be unpopular and countercultural. We shall be portrayed as persecutors and suppressors of the truth. We shall even be opposed as liars and deceivers ourselves. We might even, with St Irenaeus, be called to surrender our lives for this truth. There may indeed be no other way that this poison might be purged. We recall the words of the letter to the Hebrews: “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8).  Amen.