Infancy and Growth

The most distinctive move in St. Irenaeus’s anthropology is that Adam was created not as a finished, mature perfection but as a child — an infant made for growth toward the likeness of God under divine pedagogy. On this reading the Fall is the deception of an immature creature more than a titanic rebellion, death is God’s merciful limit on sin, and the whole human story is a maturation arc completed in Christ. Modern theology has returned to this anthropology for its bearing on theodicy and on the relation between creation and growth.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Adam Created as a Child

Where a later Western tradition would picture Adam created in a state of original perfection and wisdom, Irenaeus pictures him as a newly made infant, immature by design and given time to grow. In the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching he says plainly that Adam and Eve in paradise were “little ones” whose understanding was not yet mature: “the man was a little one, and his discretion still undeveloped, wherefore also he was easily misled by the deceiver” (Irenaeus, Demonstration 12; trans. Behr, PPS 17). Their innocence is the innocence of children — naked and unashamed because not yet grown.

The fullest statement is in Against Heresies 4.38. There Irenaeus answers the gnostic taunt that, if God is good and all-powerful, He should have made man perfect from the start. He concedes the premise about God’s power and locates the limitation in the creature, not the Creator: “it was possible for God Himself to have made man perfect from the first, but man could not receive this, being as yet an infant” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.1; trans. ANF 1). The image is maternal: a mother could give solid food to her newborn, “but the child is not yet able to receive more substantial nourishment” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.1; trans. ANF 1). To be created is to be finite and therefore to begin imperfect; only God is perfect from the beginning, and a made thing must grow toward Him: man “should in the first instance be created; and having been created, should receive growth; and having received growth, should be strengthened; and having been strengthened, should abound; and having abounded, should recover from the disease of sin; and… being glorified, should see his Lord” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.3; trans. ANF 1).

God’s Pedagogy

This is the theological key Irenaeus calls God’s pedagogy or accustoming. The whole history of the covenants is God patiently habituating an immature humanity to Himself, and Himself to humanity, by stages it can bear (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.3, cf. 4.14.2; trans. ANF 1). Even the incarnation participates in this: the Son, “although He was perfect, passed through the state of infancy in common with the rest of mankind, partaking of it thus not for His own benefit, but for that of the infantile stage of man’s existence” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.2; trans. ANF 1). Christ sanctifies each age of human life by passing through it, so that the maturation God intended for Adam is carried by Christ from infancy to fullness. Growth, then, is not a remedy improvised after the Fall but the original design of a creature made to move from image toward likeness (see The Glory of God Is a Living Man).

The accustoming runs in both directions, and this is one of Irenaeus’s most striking formulations. Through the long sequence of the economies, God was “accustoming” man to bear and to receive Him, while the Word was simultaneously “accustoming” Himself to dwell with humanity (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.20.2, 4.14.2; trans. ANF 1). The Old Testament theophanies, the giving of the Law, the words of the prophets — these are not merely information delivered to humanity but a graduated habituation by which an immature creature is brought, step by step, to a capacity it did not possess at the start. Just as solid food would have harmed the infant, so the fullness of divine glory given all at once would have overwhelmed rather than perfected. God therefore reveals Himself proportionately, in measures the creature can assimilate, until in Christ the Word dwells with man fully and man is at last able to bear it. Growth, on this account, is not a concession to human weakness but the very form in which a finite creature can come to share the life of the infinite God.

The Fall as a Child’s Deception

If Adam was a child, the Fall takes on a different complexion. Irenaeus consistently presents it as the deception of an inexperienced creature by a cunning enemy rather than as a fully knowing, titanic revolt against God. Adam was “easily misled” because his discretion was undeveloped (Irenaeus, Demonstration 12; trans. Behr, PPS 17); the serpent preyed on weakness and immaturity. Irenaeus’s sympathy is notable — he treats fallen Adam as a casualty to be rescued more than a rebel to be condemned, which is why he can read the expulsion from paradise and even death itself as acts of mercy (see below).

Here the methodology of careful distinction is required. The contrast with the later Augustinian reading is real but must be stated precisely. Irenaeus does not deny human responsibility or the gravity of sin; Adam genuinely transgresses, and the consequences are catastrophic. What differs is the frame: for Irenaeus the protagonist is an immature creature at the start of a journey, not a perfected being falling from a height, and the emphasis falls on growth interrupted and to be resumed rather than on a nature juridically ruined and burdened with inherited guilt. This corresponds to the broader Orthodox doctrine of ancestral sin rather than the Augustinian doctrine of inherited guilt and total depravity (see Theological Anthropology). The difference should not be overdrawn into a flat opposition: Augustine and Irenaeus address different opponents and questions, and reading Irenaeus as a self-conscious anti-Augustinian is anachronistic, since he wrote two centuries before the Pelagian controversy. The honest statement is that Irenaeus furnishes the East with an anthropology of growth and pedagogy that never developed the juridical apparatus the West later built — a difference of trajectory and emphasis, attributed as such in the scholarship (Behr, Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement; Steenberg, Of God and Man).

Freedom as the Condition of Growth

The whole scheme of growth presupposes that the human creature is genuinely free, and Irenaeus makes free will (self-determination, to autexousion) the indispensable condition of maturation. A creature that matured by mechanism would not grow into the likeness of God at all, for likeness to God includes God’s own freedom. “Man is possessed of free will from the beginning,” he writes, “and God is possessed of free will, in whose likeness man was created” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.37.4; trans. ANF 1). God does not coerce, “for there is no coercion with God, but a good will towards us is present with Him continually” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.37.1; trans. ANF 1); He made man to obey “voluntarily, and not by compulsion.” Virtue that is forced is not virtue, and a likeness imposed from outside would be no real likeness.

This is why the pedagogy of growth must run through real choices, including the possibility of the wrong one. The freedom that lets Adam be deceived is the same freedom without which he could never have grown into God; God permits the immature creature to err rather than override the freedom that is itself part of the divine image. Growth toward the likeness is thus inseparable from a hard-won, freely chosen obedience — the obedience Adam failed to render as a child and that Christ renders perfectly as the second Adam (see Exegesis on recapitulation). The Orthodox tradition’s insistence that the image includes rational freedom and self-determination, and that theosis is a synergy of grace and free human response rather than a coerced transformation, takes its rise here (see Theological Anthropology).

Death as a Merciful Limit on Sin

Consistent with this whole vision is Irenaeus’s striking reading of death. Where death might be construed only as punishment, he construes it primarily as mercy — a divinely imposed limit on sin so that human evil should not become immortal. Commenting on the expulsion from paradise, he writes that God “set a bound to his state of sin, by interposing death, and thus causing sin to cease, putting an end to it by the dissolution of the flesh,” so that man, “ceasing at length to live to sin, and dying to it, might begin to live to God” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.23.6; trans. ANF 1). Had humanity remained immortal in its fallen condition, sin would have been perpetual and incurable; death dissolves the sinful flesh so that it can be remade in the resurrection. Even the curse, on this reading, is medicinal — the act of a God who pities His wayward child and arranges even mortality for his eventual healing.

The Maturation Arc Completed in Christ

The trajectory that begins with the infant Adam is completed in Christ, the second Adam, in whom the whole arc of human growth is recapitulated and brought to its intended end (see Exegesis on recapitulation). Christ becomes what Adam was — passing through infancy, childhood, youth, and maturity — and carries human nature through to the glorified vision of God that was always its goal. The growth Adam could not yet sustain, Christ accomplishes; the likeness Adam had not yet attained, Christ restores and secures. Thus the same anthropology that begins with a child in paradise ends with the deified human being beholding the Father — “the life of man is the vision of God” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20.7; trans. ANF 1; see The Glory of God Is a Living Man).

Modern Interest

This anthropology has drawn renewed attention in modern theology. John Behr, whose Popular Patristics translation and Oxford study have shaped the contemporary reading, presents Irenaeus’s account of created immaturity and pedagogical growth as a coherent alternative to the perfection-and-fall narrative, and as central to an Orthodox theology of the human being as one who comes to be over time (Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity, Oxford, 2013; Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement). M. C. Steenberg likewise reads Irenaeus as founding a tradition in which theology is anthropology — the doctrine of God worked out through the doctrine of the human being made to grow into God (Steenberg, Of God and Man).

Irenaeus’s view has also been taken up, with care, in modern theodicy. The so-called “Irenaean” type of theodicy associated with John Hick — which treats the world as a “vale of soul-making” where evil and struggle serve the maturation of free creatures, in contrast to an “Augustinian” type centered on fall and punishment — draws its name and inspiration from this material (attributed; Hick, Evil and the God of Love). The attribution requires qualification: Hick’s existential, evolutionary use of Irenaeus is his own construction and is not simply Irenaeus’s own theology, which is christological and ecclesial rather than philosophical. Still, the underlying Irenaean intuition — that a good God might create immature, growing creatures precisely so that they could freely mature toward Him, and that even the Fall and death are taken up into that pedagogy of growth — is genuinely his, and it remains one of the most fruitful contributions of second-century theology to contemporary discussion (Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons).

See Also

References

  • Irenaeus of Lyon. Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses). c. 180. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (ANF 1); Greek/Latin in PG 7.
  • Irenaeus of Lyon. Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching (Epideixis). Trans. John Behr, St. Irenaeus of Lyons: On the Apostolic Preaching, Popular Patristics Series 17. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
  • Behr, John. Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Behr, John. Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
  • Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. London: Macmillan, 1966; rev. ed. 1977.
  • Osborn, Eric. Irenaeus of Lyons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  • Steenberg, M. C. Of God and Man: Theology as Anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius. London: T&T Clark, 2009.
  • Presley, Stephen O. The Intertextual Reception of Genesis 1–3 in Irenaeus of Lyons. Leiden: Brill, 2015.