Irenaeus: How Can Man Understand or Know in His Heart the Unknowable God?

Early Church Father, Irenaeus (c. AD 120–202), served the Lord as bishop of Lyons. One of his greatest contributions to the Christian Faith was his apologetic engagement with Marcion and the Gnostics.[1] His detailed exposition of Gnosticism in book 1 of his Against Heresies is our greatest surviving description of this sect.

Irenaeus’ method of attack was to use the full range of apostolic writings, standing firm on the words of Paul and John. He defended biblical monotheism and the Oneness of God as the First Cause, whereas Gnostics taught that there were other gods (or personified aeons)[2] and another pleroma (the abode where God dwells).[3] Irenaeus observes that the vital error in Gnostic thought is they look for types and images beyond God and wander away, “never being able to fix their minds on the one true God.”[4]

Irenaeus, not in the most tactful manner, expresses how “stupid” and “foolish” such people are, allowing their “imaginations to range beyond God.”[5] But, a few paragraphs later he writes, “God cannot be measured in the heart, and incomprehensible is He in the mind.”[6] This raises a question: If one cannot comprehend God, how is one to imagine or know God? Irenaeus, likewise, realizing the problem, a few sentences later asks, “But if man comprehends not the fullness and the greatness of His hand, how shall anyone be able to understand or know in his heart so great a God?”[7]

Irenaeus understood that while “Christ himself … together with the Father, is the God of the living who spoke to Moses, and who was also manifested to the fathers,”[8] he had been hidden, only being revealed to us in the apostolic preaching, preserved and articulated through the medium of Scripture.[9] “The Father,” Irenaeus writes, “is the invisible of the Son, but the Son the visible of the Father.”[10] And to answer his question, humans need a ‘measure’ of the ‘immeasurable Father.’ Therefore, in the appointed time, God the Son comes in human measure, so that we can see the immeasurable Father.[11]

God created all things with his Word and Wisdom.[12] And while he gifted the world to humanity, his greatness is unknown. “But,” Irenaeus writes, “as regards His love, He is always known through Him by whose means he ordained all things. Now this is His Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the last times was made a man among men, that He might join the end to the beginning, that is, man to God.”[13]

How does one come to know and see God? Irenaeus places this ability in God, not by human willing or power. He writes, “For man does not see God by his own powers; but when He pleases He is seen by men, by whom He wills, and when He wills, and as He wills.”[14] And that power through which God enables a finite creature to “behold Him [is] through faith.”[15] The apostle John summed up his prologue with these words: “No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him.”[16]

So, to Marcion, and all those who would let their imaginations carry them away from the One, True God, Irenaeus gives this exhortation:

. . . read with earnest care that Gospel which has been conveyed to us by the apostles, and read with earnest care the prophets, and you will find that the whole conduct, and all the doctrine, and all the sufferings of our Lord, were predicted through them.[17]

And to all of us in the 21st Century, do the same. And if we do, with earnest care, “read the Scriptures in this way, [we] will find in them in the Word concerning Christ and a foreshadowing of the new calling. For Christ is the treasure, which was hid in the field, that is, in this world—for 'the field is the world'—but the treasure hid in the Scriptures is Christ.”[18]

Look and listen to Jesus: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God” (Matt 5:8).

—Romans 11:36

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[1] The name derives from the Greek word gnōsis, meaning “knowledge.” Gnostics sought a secret knowledge that was connected with human salvation, and most Gnostic teaching was rooted in the idea of a cosmic dualism. Everything in the universe was seen as falling into one of two categories: the immaterial or spiritual realm that was good or the material universe that was, by nature, evil. Various theories were suggested to explain the origin of matter, but Gnostics generally held that a God of pure spirit emanated spiritual beings called “aeons,” who had the power of emanation themselves. With each descending level of creation, the aeons became less and less like the pure God until one, generally called the “demiurge,” was so far removed from the wisdom of God that it created matter. Gnostics saw each person as a microcosm of the universe, containing both good (spiritual) and evil (material, i.e., the body) natures. “Gnosticism,” in Pocket Dictionary of Church History, (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2008).
[2] Aeons were spirits or emanations of God, having with Gnostics, such as Valentinus, having a total of thirty aeons.
[3] Pleroma refers to the spiritual universe where God dwells, containing his divine powers and emanations.
[4] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.19.1 in Roberts Alexander, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Cox, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume I: The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885). Further citations designated as AH.
[5] Ibid.
[6] He cites Isa 40:12; Eph 1:21; Jer 23:23 as scriptural proofs.
[7] AH 4.19.13.
[8] Ibid., 4.5.2.
[9] John Behr, The Way to Nicaea, vol. 1 (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 112–13.
[10] AH 4.6.6.
[11] Behr, 1:114.
[12] Irenaeus refers to the Spirit as God’s Wisdom.
[13] AH 4.20.4
[14] Ibid., 4.20.5. He cites Luke 28:27. Cf. John 1:10–13.
[15] Ibid. Cf. Acts 15:9
[16] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020).
[17] Behr, 1:116. AH 4.34.1
[18] AH 4.25.1. Behr’s translation was intermingled in the quotation (Behr, 1:119).

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