133Chapter elevenThe Heart of Irenaeus’s Theology
Michael Slusser
T
he title of this chapter is meant to provoke. After all, many scholars and many
books have described Irenaeus’s theology and located the heart of his thought
in other places. Recapitulation is probably the theological idea most frequently pro-
posed as the central theme for Irenaeus. Even if I did not harbor the suspicion that
Irenaeus learned about recapitulation from Justin Martyr,^1 I would consider mag-
nitudo and dilectio to be at the heart of Irenaeus’s theology. Two other authors have
hinted at the argument that I am about to make, but they have not carried it out
in full. Joseph Caillot proposes “the distance between God the creator and created
humanity” as a kind of unifying thread throughout Irenaeus’s work, and he resolves
that distance by the union effected by Jesus Christ.^2 Yoshifumi Torisu in a recent
book addresses my theme, although only briefly, since he is mainly occupied with
trinitarian doctrine.^3 Neither author places enough emphasis on love as the central
factor in true knowledge of God, true gnosis.
Critical to my argument is the way that Irenaeus sees the matter at dispute
between himself and the Gnostics against whom he is writing. As he presents it, the
Gnostics accuse the ecclesiastical Christians (the church people, as I shall call them),
who are not spiritual but merely psychic, of worshiping a limited being, the creator
Demiurge, instead of God. These psychic Christians do not know any better. They
are ignorant, knowing nothing of the infinite and eternal God, the God above the
Demiurge, the high God about whom the Gnostics speak and to which they claim to
be related in their spiritual nature.^4 The Valentinians “speak to the crowd regarding
those who are from the church, whom they call ordinary church people, and by their
speeches they take in very simple people and deceive them, by imitating our mode
of address, into frequenting their classes. These then ask us why, although they think
many things the same as we do, we arbitrarily refrain from communicating with
them, and why, although they say the same things and hold the same doctrine, we
call them heretics.”^5 The alleged knowledge of the Gnostics and the alleged ignorance
of the psychic Christians set the parameters of the argument in Adversus haereses.