Note (return) — Chapter V

The manner in which Irenæus undertook his great task of expounding and defending orthodox Christianity in opposition to the Gnostic form was already a prediction of the future. The oldest Christian motives and hopes; the letter of both Testaments, including even Pauline thoughts; moralistic and philosophical elements, the result of the Apologists' labours; and realistic and mystical features balance each other in his treatment. He glides over from the one to the other; limits the one by the other; plays off Scripture against reason, tradition against the obscurity of the Scriptures; and combats fantastic speculation by an appeal sometimes to reason, sometimes to the limits of human knowledge. Behind all this and dominating everything, we find his firm belief in the bestowal of divine incorruptibility on believers through the work of the God-man. This eclectic method did not arise from shrewd calculation. It was equally the result of a rare capacity for appropriating the feelings and ideas of others, combined with the conservative instincts that guided the great teacher, and the consequence of a happy blindness to the gulf which lay between the Christian tradition and the world of ideas prevailing at that time. Still unconscious of the greatest problem, Irenæus with inward sincerity sketched out that future dogmatic method according to which the theology compiled by an eclectic process is to be nothing else than the simple faith itself, this being merely illustrated and explained, developed and by that very process established, as far as "stands in the Holy Scripture," and—let us add—as far as reason requires. But Irenæus was already obliged to decline answering the question as to how far unexplained faith can be sufficient for most Christians, though nothing but this explanation can solve the great problems, "why more covenants than one were given to mankind, what was the character of each covenant, why God shut up every man unto unbelief, why the Word became flesh and suffered, why the advent of the Son of God only took place in the last times etc." (I. 10. 3). The relation of faith and theological Gnosis was fixed by Irenæus to the effect that the latter is simply a continuation of the former.495 At the same time, however, he did not clearly show how the collection of historical statements found in the confession can of itself guarantee a sufficient and tenable knowledge of Christianity. Here the speculative theories are as a matter of fact quite imbedded in the historical propositions of tradition. Will these obscurities remain when once the Church is forced to compete in its theological system with the whole philosophical science of the Greeks, or may it be expected that, instead of this system of eclecticism and compromise, a method will find acceptance which, distinguishing between faith and theology, will interpret in a new and speculative sense the whole complex of tradition? Irenæus' process has at least this one advantage over the other method: according to it everything can be reckoned part of the faith, providing it bears the stamp of truth, without the faith seeming to alter its nature. It is incorporated in the theology of facts which the faith here appears to be.496 The latter, however, imperceptibly becomes a revealed system of doctrine and history; and though Irenæus himself always seeks to refer everything again to the "simple faith" (φιλη πιστις), and to believing simplicity, that is, to the belief in the Creator and the Son of God who became man, yet it was not in his power to stop the development destined to transform the faith into knowledge of a theological system. The pronounced hellenising of the Gospel, brought about by the Gnostic systems, was averted by Irenæus and the later ecclesiastical teachers by preserving a great portion of the early Christian tradition, partly as regards its letter, partly as regards its spirit, and thus rescuing it for the future. But the price of this preservation was the adoption of a series of "Gnostic" formulæ. Churchmen, though with hesitation, adopted the adversary's way of looking at things, and necessarily did so, because as they became ever further and further removed from the early-Christian feelings and thoughts, they had always more and more lost every other point of view. The old Catholic Fathers permanently settled a great part of early tradition for Christendom, but at the same time promoted the gradual hellenising of Christianity.