testants; for an attentive and an impartial study of S. Irenæus yields sufficient proof that the Church of his day was one in the main features of its doctrine, as well as in the authority by which it claimed to teach, with the Church of our own time. It is enough to convince us that the Catholic Church of to-day is the one Church of Christ and of His Apostles, the Church of the early fathers and of the martyrs, the Church which overcame the world. It is enough to convince us that history, even if we put the Church's title to infallibility aside, confirms the Catholic belief on the most important points, and at least tends to confirm it upon others. Still, our main purpose at present is historical, rather than controversial. Nothing tends so much to promote a real acquaintance with the general history of doctrine in the early Church, as the investigation of the writings left us by particular fathers. Now, in our own language, we have books of name on the doctrine of S. Justin, of Clement of Alexandria, of Tertullian. But on S. Irenæus, in many respects the most important of them all, nothing worth notice has been written; * and even the imperfect sketch of his doctrine which we can give here may not be without interest and importance. We have hinted already, that we shall have to content ourselves with selecting certain points of his doctrine, and we begin, for the sake of clearness, by stating the points on which we propose to draw out the teaching of S. Irenæus, and the conclusions which we hope to reach. We shall set out from the doctrine of the Trinity, and show that while many fathers of the first three centuries speak ambiguously or even erroneously on the coeternity of the Son with the Father, S. Irenæus, the only father, of all who discuss the subject, closely connected with the Apostles, speaks as clearly and as explicitly as Athanasius himself for the doctrine which the Church ultimately defined upon this head. Next we shall pass by a natural transition to the doctrine of the Incarnation; and here we shall find that the more carefully we look at the doctrine of Irenæus on the Incarnation, the more force we shall discover in the testimony which has been so often alleged from his writings, in favour of the Immaculate Conception. Finally, we shall add his testimony to the chain of evidence which can be produced. * No one who has any acquaintance with it will think this a hard judgment on Mr. Beaven's book. A very learned edition of S. Irenæus has been published by Mr. Harvey, and a very beautiful and accurate translation by Mr. Keble; but neither of these works discusses the doctrine of S. Irenæus except in the most incidental way. from the earliest ages, for the Church's perpetual belief in the sacrifice of the Mass, and the Real Presence of our Lord's body and blood in the sacrament of the Altar. We have however a preliminary remark to make, and it is this: The direct object of the work which S. Irenæus wrote, is to refute the Gnostics rather than to make a formal exposition of his own doctrine. It is for this reason that it needs labour and research to understand his teaching. We have to collect statements which lie scattered through the five books in which he attacks the Gnostic errors, and before we can tell what these statements mean, and what weight they carry, we must keep in mind the nature of the error against which they are directed. In some cases this precaution will enable us to see the full force of the words which S. Irenæus employs, and keep us from explaining them away till their logical force as arguments is gone; in other cases it will save us from expecting of him doctrinal statements more full and more explicit than he had any occasion to give. The reader will find this principle illustrated best when we come to the doctrine of the Eucharist; but we shall have to apply it throughout, and we must begin our account of the statements which S. Irenæus makes on the doctrine of the Trinity, with a word or two on the heresy which called these statements forth. A word or two will be enough, for we gave a detailed account in our former article; and when, through this process of comparison, we have ascertained the exact tenets of the father about whom we are writing, we shall add something which may serve to fix his relation to the other fathers, and to the general tradition of the Church. The Gnostics then, or rather the Valentinian Gnostics with whom S. Irenæus was in immediate conflict, believed in a long series of æons or spiritual beings, which had emanated from the supreme God. The ground of their belief was this. They had to explain the origin of the material world, and they could not refer it to the supreme God, because they considered everything material to be impure, and the very notion of contact with it degrading to the supreme and absolute God. Hence they were led to invent their long series of æons, each more and more imperfect, as it was further and further removed from the original and perfect Spirit, till at last the lowest point was reached in this descending scale, and the Demiurge came into existence. He was blind and ignorant in comparison with the higher powers, and therefore he was, according to the ideas of the Gnostics, fit for contact with matter, the principle of imperfection, and for the task of moulding and fashioning it into the world which we see around us. Now, it is just at this point that S. Irenæus joins issue with his antagonists. In his first book he states with little or no criticism what the theories of the Gnostics were. At the very opening of the second, when he begins his attack upon them, "It is well," he says, "to start with the first and the chief point, with God the Creator, and to show that there is nothing above Him, nothing after Him; that He, without impulse from another, of His own will and freely, made all, since He is the sole God, the sole Lord, the sole Creator, the sole Father."* Elsewhere, he repeats his assertion with increased emphasis. "Justin was right,' he tells us, "when he declared in his book against Marcion, 'I would not even have believed the Lord Himself, had He announced any other God beside the Creator of the world.'”† Moreover, he lets us see the principle which drew from him these vehement utterances. Among all the arguments which may be adduced for the existence of God, there is only one on which Irenæus lays any special stress, and that the familiar argument which is drawn from the existence and order of the visible world. ‡ Nor does Irenæus stop here. It is not merely that he proves the existence of God from creatures. He avails himself of the Gnostic hypothesis that the Demiurge made the world; and he argues, if he made the world, it follows that he is, not, as the Gnostics maintained, an inferior being, limited in power and intelligence, but the absolute and supreme God. The first mark, he urges, of God's superiority to man, lies in the fact that He made all out of nothing. Again, in another argument, he takes for granted that a creature, as such, cannot create, anticipating, in fact, the thesis of the scholastic theologians, that creative action on the part of a creature is an absolute impossibility.|| Finally, he sums up his whole position against the Gnostics in the words, "Unus Deus Conditor ""There is one God, viz. the Creator."¶ This should suffice to show that to the mind of S. Irenæus the work of creation belongs exclusively to God; and if he speaks of the Son as creator of the world, we may conclude with safety, that he confessed His absolute divinity, and believed that the Son with the Father, (including of course Iren., iv. 6, 2. Iren., ii. 1, 1. He states it in ii. 9, 1. "Ipsa enim conditio ostendit eum qui condidit eam; et ipsa factura suggerit eum, qui fecit; et mundus manifestat eum qui se disposuit." This is indeed the only argument for God's existence to which he has recourse, unless we regard the appeal to the general belief of the human race in the same passage as an independent argument. § Iren., ii. 10, 4. Iren., iv. 41, 1. Iren., ii. præf. 1. the Holy Ghost, as will appear further on,) is the one supreme God. His very point against the Gnostics was the unity of God, and the fact that the one God is the creator of all; and the vital importance of this matter which was, indeed, the hinge upon which the whole controversy turned, must have compelled him to be careful and precise in the terms which he employed. We have an instance of the precision which was thus forced upon him, in the pains he takes to show that Scripture never applies the word "God" to any being except the one true God, unless with the addition of some modifying clause to point out that this sacred name is used in a loose or improper sense.* Yet without qualification or reserve he calls the Word "the creator, the Demiurge, the maker of all things,"+ and he describes Him in words taken from the book of Deuteronomy," as the Lord, who possessed us, and made us, and created us." In short, the Gnostics held that the Demiurge or Creator was an inferior God. Irenæus took this language out of their own mouths. He chose the formula, the Demiurge § is the one God, and therefore he uses the strongest mode of expression open to him, when he calls the Son Demiurge, or artificer of all. We have done our best to make this point clear. It throws light upon the doctrine of the Trinity as S. Irenæus received it from the disciples of the Apostles. Nor is this all. It helps us to understand the place S. Irenæus holds among the ante-Nicene fathers. Even within the pale of the Church, we find in fathers more remote than S. Irenæus from the fountain-head of Apostolic tradition, a doctrine less pronounced and less consistent than his, on the Godhead of the Son. It is well known, for example, that Origen held clearer views than many of his contemporaries on the divinity of the Word. Yet even Origen denied distinctly that all things were made by the Word. "If," he says, in his commentary on S. John, "if all things were made through the Word" (i.e., as he thought, through the instrumentality of the Word), "they were not made by the Word, but by Him who is mightier and greater than the Word," i.e., as he proceeds to explain, by the Father. S. Athanasius *Iren., iii. 6, 3. § Anμovpyos never occurs in the New Testament as a name of God. Indeed, the sacred writers nowhere use it at all, except in a single passage; viz. Heb. xi. 10. In Joann., tom. ii. 6. See also Petav. de Trinitate, vii. 17, 6. We do not forget that in Hebrews i. 10 creation is attributed directly to the Son. But the authority of this epistle was not recognized throughout the Church till the close of the fourth century. and the other fathers who contended for the definition of the Nicene Council, use the language of S. Irenæus; and we may note this as one among many instances of the way in which history supports the Catholic, and refutes the infidel views on the origin of dogma. The belief in the full Divinity of Christ did not grow, as it passed from the hands of one father to those of another, till at last it was defined by the Church in its fullest and most explicit form. On the contrary, she proclaimed the doctrine of the Trinity as it had been delivered by the Apostles, and defined a truth which needed definition, because it had been obscured by the lapse of time and by the course of speculation. To return, however, to S. Irenæus. After the quotations we have made already, it is not worth while to quote passages in which he calls the Son, God, because this is a title which all Catholics have notoriously given Him from the beginning, and which is not, taken by itself, a test of Catholic orthodoxy, since even the Arians did not venture to withhold it. It is worth noting, however, that Irenæus speaks of the "Father, with His Word," as "the only Lord and God";* thus implying the unity of their essence, and the consequence which results from it; viz., that the Son is God as fully and as truly as the Father. Moreover, in asserting the divinity of the Son, Irenæus holds language which anticipates the controversies of a later day, and forbids us to doubt which side he would have chosen in the strife between Catholics and Arians, or even between Catholics and Semi-Arians. When the Arians wanted to express the inferiority of the Son to the Father, they insisted that the Father, as the absolute God, was incomprehensible in His own nature, and therefore incomprehensible even to the Son. Such was the language which the Arian Maximinus held in his controversy with S. Augustine,† and Arius himself laid down the same cardinal principle in the words, "the Son can endure to look upon the Father only so far as the measure of His own being permits." Now, long before the rise of Arianism, the Gnostics had put forth a similar error. The first God, according to their theory, was incomprehensible, even to the æons who emanated from Him.§ Irenæus, of course, admitted with them, that God, as God, is incomprehensible, and he could not have differed from them on this head, unless he had forgotten one of the most familiar parts of Christian teaching. He is very far, notwithstand *Iren., iii. 8, 3. Petav. de Trin., i. 10, 1. + Petav. de Trin., viii. 2, 10. It was one of most familiar ways of describing God's perfections to speak of Him as a Being who was immeasurable, and who could not be |