Note (return) — Chapter V

Irenæus expressly refused to investigate what the divine element in Christ is, and why another deity stands alongside of the Godhead of the Father. He confesses that he here simply keeps to the rule of faith and the Holy Scriptures, and declines speculative disquisitions on principle. He does not admit the distinction of a Word existing in God and one coming forth from him, and opposes not only ideas of emanation in general, but also the opinion that the Logos issued forth at a definite point of time. Nor will Irenæus allow the designation "Logos" to be interpreted in the sense of the Logos being the inward Reason or the spoken Word of God. God is a simple essence and always remains in the same state; besides we ought not to hypostatise qualities.551 Nevertheless Irenæus, too, calls the preëxistent Christ the Son of God, and strictly maintains the personal distinction between Father and Son. What makes the opposite appear to be the case is the fact that he does not utilise the distinction in the interest of cosmology.552 In Irenæus' sense we shall have to say: The Logos is the revelation hypostasis of the Father, "the self-revelation of the self-conscious God," and indeed the eternal self-revelation. For according to him the Son always existed with God, always revealed the Father, and it was always the full Godhead that he revealed in himself. In other words, he is God in his specific nature, truly God, and there is no distinction of essence between him and God.553 Now we might conclude from the strong emphasis laid on "always" that Irenæus conceived a relationship of Father and Son in the Godhead, conditioned by the essence of God himself and existing independently of revelation. But the second hypostasis is viewed by him as existing from all eternity, just as much in the quality of Logos as in that of Son, and his very statement that the Logos has revealed the Father from the beginning shows that this relationship is always within the sphere of revelation. The Son then exists because he gives a revelation. Little interested as Irenæus is in saying anything about the Son, apart from his historical mission, naïvely as he extols the Father as the direct Creator of the universe, and anxious as he is to repress all speculations that lead beyond the Holy Scriptures, he could not altogether avoid reflecting on the problems: why there is a second deity alongside of God, and how the two are related to one another. His incidental answers are not essentially different from those of the Apologists and Tertullian; the only distinction is this incidental character. Irenæus too looked on the Son as "the hand of God," the mediator of creation; he also seems in one passage to distinguish Father and Son as the naturally invisible and visible elements of God; he too views the Father as the one who dominates all, the head of Christ, i.e., he who bears the creation and his Logos.554 Irenæus had no opportunity of writing against the Monarchians, and unfortunately we possess no apologetic writings of his. It cannot therefore he determined how he would have written, if he had had less occasion to avoid the danger of being himself led into Gnostic speculations about æons. It has been correctly remarked that with Irenæus the Godhead and the divine personality of Christ merely exist beside each other. He did not want to weigh the different problems, because, influenced as he was by the lingering effects of an early-Christian, anti-theological interest, he regarded the results of this reflection as dangerous; but, as a matter of fact, he did not really correct the premises of the problems by rejecting the conclusions. We may evidently assume (with Zahn) that, according to Irenæus, "God placed himself in the relationship of Father to Son, in order to create after his image and in his likeness the man who was to become his Son;"555 but we ought not to ask if Irenæus understood the incarnation as a definite purpose necessarily involved in the Sonship, as this question falls outside the sphere of Patristic thinking. No doubt the incarnation constantly formed the preëminent interest of Irenæus, and owing to this interest he was able to put aside or throw a veil over the mythological speculations of the Apologists regarding the Logos, and to proceed at once to the soteriological question.556