Against Heresies: The Work and Its Targets

St. Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies, c. 180): the plan of its five books, the Gnostic systems it describes and refutes — Valentinus, Marcus, Basilides, Marcion — Irenaeus’ careful, almost ethnographic method of exposition, the striking vindication of his accuracy by the Nag Hammadi discoveries, and the complicated history by which the work survives. This file maps the work and its opponents; the companion file treats its argument.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Work and Its Plan

Irenaeus’ major work bears the full title Detection and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called (Elenchos kai Anatropē tēs Pseudōnymou Gnōseōs) — usually shortened to Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses, AH). It was written in Greek, in five books, in stages around the year 180 during his episcopate at Lyons (Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons, ch. 1; Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons, pp. 73–80).

The five books have a deliberate architecture:

• Book I describes the Gnostic systems in detail — chiefly the Valentinian school — so that, exposed to view, they may be recognized.
• Book II refutes them by reason, showing the internal incoherence of their elaborate mythologies.
• Books III–V refute them from the apostolic tradition and the Scriptures: Book III from the public teaching of the apostolic churches and the Gospels; Book IV largely from the words of the Lord and the unity of the two Testaments; Book V from the resurrection of the flesh and the last things.

The whole moves from exposure through reason to the positive apostolic faith (see The Refutation for the argument’s logic).

The Targets: An Ethnographic Method

Irenaeus’ opponents were the second-century teachers of gnōsis — secret saving knowledge — and the dualists who divided the God of creation from the God of redemption. He treats several:

• The Valentinians, followers of Valentinus, whose elaborate system of thirty aeons emanating from an unknowable Father, the fall of Sophia, and the fashioning of the material world by an inferior Demiurge, occupies most of Book I. Irenaeus had read their books and questioned their disciples.
• Marcus the magician, a Valentinian whose number-mysticism and ritual practices Irenaeus describes at length and with evident firsthand knowledge (AH I.13–21), including his exploitation of women in the community.
• Basilides of Alexandria, with his hierarchy of 365 heavens (AH I.24).
• Marcion of Pontus, who is not a Gnostic of the aeon-spinning kind but the most consequential of the dualists: he set the just, harsh Creator-God of the Old Testament against the alien God of love revealed in Christ, and accordingly mutilated the Scriptures, keeping a shortened Luke and ten Pauline epistles (AH I.27).

What distinguishes Irenaeus is his method. Rather than caricature, he sets out the systems in their own terms, often in their own technical vocabulary, on the principle (argued in his preface) that error disguises itself and that to display it plainly is already to begin its refutation (AH I, Preface 2; see The Refutation). The result reads almost like ethnography of the sects.

The Nag Hammadi Vindication

For most of Christian history, Irenaeus’ account of the Gnostics could not be checked against the Gnostics’ own writings, which had perished. That changed with the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt — a cache of Coptic Gnostic codices including the Apocryphon of John, whose mythology closely matches the system Irenaeus reports in AH I.29.

The scholarly assessment that followed has been broadly favorable to Irenaeus’ reliability. With the Gnostic texts in hand, scholars found that he had reported his opponents with substantial accuracy: until 1945 Against Heresies had been the single best surviving description of second-century Gnosticism, and the new primary sources confirmed rather than discredited it (so the consensus surveyed in Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures, and the introduction to the Apocryphon of John; cf. Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons, pp. 73–80; Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons, ch. 1). His polemical purpose did not, it turns out, license invention. This is the rare case of a heresiologist’s portrait being substantially corroborated by the heretics’ own documents.

The Transmission of the Text

The survival of Against Heresies is itself a small drama of textual history. The original Greek is lost as a continuous text; it survives only in fragments, preserved as quotations by later writers — Hippolytus, Eusebius, Epiphanius, and others — through whom much of Book I can be reconstructed.

The work survives complete only in a very ancient Latin translation, literal to the point of woodenness, probably made in the fourth or early fifth century; it is the basis of every modern edition and translation (the ANF translation renders this Latin). In addition, Books IV and V survive entire in an Armenian translation (the Armenian version made in the V–VI centuries, preserved in later manuscripts), with further fragments in Syriac and Armenian for the earlier books (Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons, pp. 73–80; Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons, ch. 1). The standard critical edition is that of Sources Chrétiennes, which presents the Latin, the surviving Greek, and the Armenian together. The texture of the evidence — a Greek original reaching us through Latin, Armenian, Syriac, and a scatter of quotations — is itself a reminder of how the early Church’s memory was carried.

See Also

• Against Heresies: The Refutation — the architecture of the argument and its key passages
• From Smyrna to Lyons — the living tradition Irenaeus set against secret gnōsis
• Apostolic Succession — the public, traceable transmission opposed to Gnostic secrecy
• The Church Fathers — Irenaeus among the Ante-Nicene Fathers
• Holy Tradition — paradosis against the claim of secret tradition

References

• Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1: The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885.
• Behr, John. Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Grant, Robert M. Irenaeus of Lyons. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1997.
• Layton, Bentley. The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
• Osborn, Eric. Irenaeus of Lyons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Irenaeus. Contre les hérésies (Adversus Haereses), critical edition with the Latin, Greek, and Armenian. Sources Chrétiennes. Paris: Éditions du Cerf.