I started the day in a typically productive fashion: frowning over my various projects and bemoaning what I cannot complete before the school year. Right about then, as my attention began to wander, and so afforded an opportunity, the devil himself appeared to me in the form of social media—this being his most natural visage above all others. As experience would lead one to expect, his temptation was not wholly unreasonable. He just tried to persuade me to compose a timely blog post, nothing more. The proposed subject, you see, included the very pressing, very serious questions of whether seed oils, the sumo deadlift, Burger King, my neighbors’ dogs, the I-formation, Stilton cheese, and Tom Bombadil are pro-nationalist or not, and what it all means for Christian civic engagement in 2024.
But a still, small voice reminded me that if I heed the nationalism discourse much further, my brain will assuredly lose more ridges than I can afford, and the longer-term prognosis is a high probability of suffering a stroke before I turn forty.
To paraphrase Scripture, then, resist the devil and he will flee faster than Jim Harbaugh evading NCAA sanctions.
Instead, as a bit of counterprogramming (and as promised in the last post)I want to do a deepish dive on Irenaeus and his notion of authority: the Bible, tradition, apostolic succession, and history. For many (though not all) Protestants, “apostolic succession” or “apostolic tradition” can sound a little spooky, and in fairness, it can mean different things to different people. Among other points, I want to suggest here that there’s nothing all that spooky about Irenaeus’ own concept of it, which may be the oldest comprehensive explanation we have. In fact, I think Irenaeus’ version of apostolic tradition is remarkably consonant with Protestant ideas of authority and dogmatic epistemology. In short, Irenaeus is a lot more concerned with what we may call history than ecclesiology per se.
For this topic, we mainly have to look at the first few sections of Against Heresies Book 3. Note that at this point, however, Irenaeus has already laid out what he considers to be the general beliefs among the sectarians he’s criticizing. And back in 1.10, he states the highly compact universal creed, or rule of faith, received in all churches throughout the world. This small collection of articles, which roughly resembles the contents of the Apostle’s Creed, is the exact tradition the catholic Church has received from the apostles themselves. Irenaeus admits (1.10.3) that some teachers will have more skill expounding these themes, but the content is publicly known and essentially static.
Then we turn to Book 3, where these ideas are elaborated more fully. In the Prologue, Irenaeus reminds his readers that, in what he has already written, he has given them the ability to defend the “true and life-giving” (vera et vivifica fide) faith that Church received from the apostles and hands on to believers today (which strongly implies the rule of faith is sufficient for salvation). From there, Irenaeus denies the claim that the apostles taught before they were fully inspired by the Holy Spirit. Initially, the apostles publicly preached the Gospel, but later, “through God’s will, they handed it down to us in the Scriptures, in order to be the foundation and pillar of our faith.”[1] That would seem to indicate apostolic tradition and Scripture are coterminous.
In 3.2, Irenaeus explicitly addresses the appeal to otherwise secret oral tradition. Unlike our friend Ps. Germanos, Irenaeus claims that it is the sectarians who assert the insufficiency of Scripture. When the Bible is used to contradict their teachings, they insist “as though (Scripture) is incorrect and does not have authority, and that what is said there is varied, and that the truth cannot be found in (Scripture) by those who don’t know tradition.”[2] Moreover, adds Irenaeus, some will say that “the truth was not handed on in writing but orally.”[3] Yet when you try to meet them on their own terms and talk about tradition, complains Irenaeus, this too is unsatisfactory. “But when we again call them to the tradition from the apostles, which is guarded by the succession of elders in the churches, they are opposed to tradition” because the elders and/or apostles did not leave behind the unalloyed truth.[4]
A chapter later, Irenaeus makes another bold but important claim about tradition:
Thus, for all who wish to see, it is at hand to view the tradition of the apostles manifested in the whole world in every church. And we can enumerate those who were instituted by the apostles as supervisors (episcopi) and their successors even up to us, who have not taught or known any such thing of the sort hallucinated by (sectarians).[5]
Irenaeus then gives two exemplars: the church of Rome[6] and his own teacher, Polycarp. The point here is that the apostles and their teaching were not in some remote, murky past. In some cases, they are only a generation or two removed from living memory, and figures such as Polycarp constitute an indispensable form of historical (my term) evidence as to what the apostles actually believed and taught. Note what this does not mean: Irenaeus was not intimating that the institutional bishops/elders have some kind of spiritually guaranteed infallibility ex officio: “Trust whatever the bishops tell you because they’re the episcopacy, which is the only real ecclesiastical model.” That is precisely the kind of argument the gnostics themselves made about their own doctrine, at which point, it is one institution’s word against another. Mere assertion of institutional authority scores no points in this debate, as it only begs the fundamental question at issue. Institutional assertion is also decidedly not how one persuaded an educated person in antiquity, but that’s a longer story for another time.
Irenaeus then offers a kind of thought experiment in the next chapter (3.4): what would we do if we didn’t have the testimony of Scripture? (Again, the protasis of this rhetorical question strongly implies a high view of Scripture’s sufficiency.) We would, he concludes, need to consult the tradition preserved in the churches.[7] And in fact, observes Irenaeus, this is the case for “barbarians” who do not yet have the Bible translated into their own language, but they don’t hold to the full truth any less than their Greek counterparts.[8]
Lastly, Irenaeus dispenses with a proposition similar to the one that appears in some later medieval commentators such as Ps. Germanos: perhaps Christ and the apostles were teaching esoterically, or else condescending to the comprehension and the prejudices of their initial listeners.[9] Not so, says the bishop of Lyons. “For those who had been sent (the apostles) for finding those who wander, for the vision of those who were not seeing, and for the treatment of the sick, were not chatting with them in accord with contemporary opinion but in accord with the truth’s manifestation.”[10] What’s more, Christ himself taught the same way. “So at the time, he was not speaking to them according to their original opinion, nor was he was answering questioners according to their prejudice, but rather according to salvific teaching, without play-acting and without respect to the person.”[11]
All in all, Irenaeus’ reasoning puts theological novelty—and especially appeals to obscured oral traditions from the apostles—in a tough spot. All meaningful dogmatic content is already on the table for everyone to see, captured by the biblical record and then fenced in again by the historical witnesses of apostolic churches. In my reading of him, it is almost impossible to imagine a form of doctrinally developed credenda that Irenaeus would tolerate, because it would then let in all the different arguments he is attempting to disprove.
It is that static quality of the tradition that necessarily prevents doctrinal accretions, à la the gnostics and their baroque cosmologies. If essential Christian doctrine is not available prima facie here c. 180, if there are other crucial pieces of tradition floating “out there” somewhere in the Christian aether, then Irenaeus’ reasoning cannot work, and he basically owed an apology to those gnostics who claimed their own alleged forms of apostolic succession (e.g., through teachers). In this scenario, perhaps we might say the gnostics were wrong about the specific items they wanted to add to the rule of faith, but in terms of how a Christian should think about doctrinal authority, they were more right in substance of their dogmatic epistemology than Irenaeus.
But that would seem to put some of us in a rather awkward spot.
Against Heresies 3.1.1: Non enim per alios dispositionem salutis nostrae cognouimus quam per eos per quos Euangelium peruenit ad nos: quod quidem tunc praeconauerunt, postea uero per Dei uoluntatem in Scripturis nobis tradiderunt, fundamentum et columnam fidei nostrae futurum. Translations are my own. ↑
3.2.1: quasi non recte habeant neque sint ex auctoritate, et quia varie sint dictae, et quia non possit ex his inueniri ueritas ab his qui nesciant traditionem. Non enim per litteras traditam illam sed per uiuam uocem. ↑
Ibid. The clause in question reads, Non enim per litteras traditam illam sed per uiuam uocem. Presumably, no individual sectarian would have said all these arguments at once, as they seem contradictory, so Irenaeus is likely illustrating different strategies to evade biblical evidence. ↑
3.2.2: Cum autem iterum ad eam traditionem quae est ab apostolis, quae per successiones presbyterorum in Ecclesiis | custoditur, prouocamus eos, aduersantur traditioni . . . .
↑3.3.1: Traditionem itaque apostolorum in toto mundo manifestatam in omni Ecclesia adest perspicere omnibus qui uera uelint uidere, et habemus adnumerare eos qui ab apostolis instituti sunt episcopi in Ecclesiis et successores eorum usque ad nos, qui nihil tale docuerunt neque cognouerunt quale ab his deliratur. ↑
In 3.3.2, the Latin has generated discussion for understandable reasons, ad hanc enim Ecclesiam propter potentiorem principalitatem necesse est omnem conuenire Ecclesiam, hoc est eos qui sunt undique fideles, in qua semper ab his qui sunt undique conseruata est ea quae est ab apostolis traditio. Given what we know about second-century prosopographies, I think Irenaeus may be referring to the fact that many eastern Christians had made their way to Rome in the mid-second century: if you wanted to get a sense of international Christianity, Rome would be the place to go, much like Constantinople in the sixth century. Some figures, such as Hegesippus, were intentionally going there as part of a fact-finding mission of the sort Irenaeus himself proposes. Based on what Eusebius reports about Irenaeus’ own interactions with Rome’s clerics, Irenaeus presumably did not mean that all the catholic faithful needed to agree with Rome’s bishops on all points. And to reiterate, making such a bald assertion of institutional authority would not have really addressed the gnostic arguments anyway.
3.4.1: Quid autem si nec apostoli quidem Scripturas reliquissent nobis, nonne oportebat ordinem sequi traditionis quam tradiderunt his quibus committebant Ecclesias? ↑
Who are these “barbarians”? Pulling together what Irenaeus says elsewhere about living in Lyons, he probably has his Latin-speaking brethren at the front of his mind. See Jared Secord, “The Cultural Geography of a Greek Christian: Irenaeus from Smyrna to Lyons,” in Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy, ed. Paul Foster and Sara Parvis (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 25–33.
↑
3.5.1: The crucial clause: fecerunt doctrinam secundum audientium capacitatem et responsiones secundum interrogantium suspiciones.
↑
3.5.2: Qui enim ad inuentionem missi erant errantium apostoli et ad uisionem eorum qui non uidebant et ad medicinam languentium, utique non secundum praesentem opinionem colloquebantur eis sed secundum ueritatis manifestationem.
↑
Ibid. Non igitur iam secundum pristinam opinionem loquebatur eis neque secundum suspicionem interrogantium respondebat eis, sed secundum doctrinam salutarem et sine hypocrisi et sine personae acceptatione. ↑