Antichrist and the Resurrection of the Flesh

Alongside his millennial hope, St. Irenaeus develops in Against Heresies Book 5 a sober exegesis of the Antichrist and the number 666 (AH 5.25–30) — famously counseling restraint against naming names — and mounts the great patristic defense of the bodily resurrection (the entire burden of Book 5 against Gnostic spiritualizing), set within his teaching that the present creation is renewed and not annihilated (AH 5.36.1). These themes passed, through Hippolytus, into the mainstream of patristic apocalyptic.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Antichrist and the Number 666 (AH 5.25–30)

In the chapters preceding the millennial section, Irenaeus treats the figure of the Antichrist, drawing on Daniel, 2 Thessalonians, and the Apocalypse of John. He understands the Antichrist as a real individual to come — “the apostasy” personified, who will “sit in the temple of God” and concentrate in himself all the rebellion that runs through history, reigning for the three and a half years figured by Daniel’s times (AH 5.25, 5.30; cf. 2 Thessalonians 2:3–4). On this point Irenaeus stands squarely within what would become the settled Orthodox expectation of a personal Antichrist before the Second Coming (compare the Orthodoxy guide to eschatology).

His Caution Against Naming Names

Irenaeus’s most quoted contribution here is his restraint. Confronting the number of the beast, 666 (Revelation 13:18), he refuses to leap to identifications. Many names can be made to yield the number; certainty is impossible before the event; and so the prudent course is to wait:

“It is therefore more certain, and less hazardous, to await the fulfilment of the prophecy, than to be making surmises, and casting about for any names that may present themselves, inasmuch as many names can be found possessing the number mentioned; and the same question will, after all, remain unsolved.” (AH 5.30.3, trans. ANF 1)

He adds that the Holy Spirit has deliberately withheld the name — “had it been necessary to announce his name distinctly at the present time, it would have been declared by him who beheld the apocalyptic vision,” and “the name, however, is suppressed, because it is not worthy of being proclaimed by the Holy Spirit” (AH 5.30.3–4, ANF 1). This is one of the earliest and most enduring warnings in Christian literature against apocalyptic name-calling — a counsel of sobriety the later Church made its own, and which stands in pointed contrast to the date-setting and identification that has recurred in every age.

The Candidates He Floats

Irenaeus is not, however, silent about the possibilities; he simply offers them as conjecture, not assertion. Examining names whose Greek letters sum to 666, he floats three:

ΕΥΑΝΘΑΣ (Euanthas) — a name he reports as proposed but does not press;
ΛΑΤΕΙΝΟΣ (Lateinos) — “very probable, this being the name of the last kingdom of the four” (the Roman), which he finds plausible while declining to insist on it;
ΤΕΙΤΑΝ (Teitan) — which he judges “of all the names… the one most worthy of credit,” noting its ancient and royal associations, while still refusing to dogmatize (AH 5.30.3, ANF 1).

The point of the exercise is precisely its inconclusiveness: Irenaeus lays out the strongest candidates in order to demonstrate that none can be certain, and so to justify his counsel of patience.

The Resurrection of the Flesh

If the Antichrist chapters are a detail, the resurrection of the flesh is the architecture. The whole of Book 5 is constructed to defend it. Where the Gnostics spiritualized salvation — teaching that the body is a prison to be escaped and that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50) meant the literal flesh is excluded from salvation — Irenaeus insists that the same flesh that is now mortal is the flesh that will be raised, vivified by the Spirit. His opening argument is Christological and Eucharistic: the Lord redeemed us by His own blood and gives us His flesh and blood in the Eucharist, and “our bodies, being nourished by it… are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection” (AH 5.2.2–3, ANF 1). A creature that receives the Body and Blood of Christ cannot be destined for annihilation.

He answers the Gnostic proof-text directly: “flesh and blood” in St. Paul names not the substance of the body but the works of the flesh, the carnal manner of life that cannot inherit the kingdom; the flesh itself, possessed and quickened by the Spirit, most certainly does inherit it (AH 5.9–14). The resurrection is the salvation of the whole human being, body and soul together — the same conviction the Orthodox tradition confesses as dogma, that the resurrection is the reunification of the psychosomatic person, not the liberation of the soul from the body (see Orthodoxy: Eschatology). For Irenaeus this is the hinge of the entire anti-Gnostic case: a God who created flesh, whose Word became flesh, and who feeds the faithful with flesh, will assuredly raise the flesh.

The Renewed Creation, Not Annihilation (AH 5.36.1)

Irenaeus’s eschatology ends not in the destruction of the world but in its transfiguration. At the close of Book 5 he is explicit that the cosmos is renewed, not abolished:

“For neither is the substance nor the essence of the creation annihilated (for faithful and true is He who has established it), but ‘the fashion of the world passeth away’ [1 Corinthians 7:31]; that is, those things among which transgression has occurred… And in this [renewed] creation… God is for ever to be glorified.” (AH 5.36.1, trans. ANF 1)

The substance of creation endures; only its present fallen fashion passes away. This is the consistent Irenaean note — the goodness and permanence of what God has made — and it converges exactly with the received Orthodox teaching that the material cosmos will be renewed rather than destroyed, the “new heaven and new earth” being the transfiguration and not the abolition of this world (2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1, 5; cf. Orthodoxy: Eschatology, “The Age to Come”). Whatever became of Irenaeus’s literal millennium (treated in Millenarian Passages), his doctrine of the renewed creation was received whole.

Influence on Patristic Apocalyptic: Hippolytus

Irenaeus’s apocalyptic exegesis did not die with him; it was carried forward, above all by Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170–235), whom Photius described — perhaps too neatly — as a disciple of Irenaeus. In his treatise On Christ and Antichrist and his Commentary on Daniel, Hippolytus depends visibly on Irenaeus: he expects a personal Antichrist, correlates the visions of Daniel with the Apocalypse, awaits the literal bodily resurrection of the righteous, and — most tellingly — reproduces Irenaeus’s very solution to the number 666, enumerating the same three candidates, Lateinos, Euanthas, and Teitan (Hippolytus, On Christ and Antichrist 50; cf. AH 5.30.3). Through Hippolytus, Irenaeus’s restraint, his reading of the prophetic books, and his insistence on the bodily character of the end passed into the broader stream of patristic apocalyptic. The chiliasm the later Church would set aside; the structure of Irenaeus’s eschatology — a personal Antichrist soberly awaited, the flesh truly raised, and creation renewed to God’s glory — it kept.

References

Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 5.2, 5.9–14, 5.25–30, 5.36. Trans. ANF 1 (Roberts & Donaldson).
Hippolytus of Rome. On Christ and Antichrist. Trans. ANF 5.
Osborn, Eric. Irenaeus of Lyons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Steenberg, M. C. Irenaeus on Creation: The Cosmic Christ and the Saga of Redemption. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 91. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (Council of Constantinople, 381).