1
Patristic Humanism
The Beginning of ChristianPaideia
John Behr
‘The glory of God is the living human being.’^1 These words by Irenaeus of
Lyons, written at the end of the second century, offer perhaps the most
beautiful, and certainly the most vibrant, definition of a human being. Rather
than seeing the human being as placed under the injunction to serve or glorify
God, for Irenaeus it is God who glorifies the human being, a creature who is
nothing less than the very glory of God itself. And yet‘the living human
beings’that Irenaeus has in mind are none other than the martyrs!^2 Since
Western humanism with its understanding of what it is to be human, and
the education and formation—thepaideia—that results in this, is grounded in
the Christian humanism of the last two millennia, it is worth returning to the
earliest strata of this tradition to see whether it contains any important
insights that have since been covered over by the weight and familiarity of
tradition.
The relationship between Adam and Christ—the former made‘in the image
and after the likeness’of God (Gen. 1:26) and the latter being‘the image of the
invisible God’(Col. 1:15)—has long stimulated Christian theological reflec-
tion. Later generations took the idea of the human being as created‘in the
image’to point to various qualities in human existence, and the‘likeness’as
something to be attained, in a process of‘sanctification’or‘deification’. Some
of the most intriguing earliest reflections on the image of God, especially by
those from Asia Minor and Syria, who, following in the tradition of the
beloved disciple John, described the status of being human as something
which itself must be attained.
(^1) Irenaeus,Haer. 4.20.7.
(^2) Cf. John Behr,Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity, CTIC (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 198–203.