180 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacywith the spirit in moral decisions. This follows Irenaeus in seeing perfect ἄνθρωπος as
reliant on God. It also echoes Irenaeus’s sense that humans ultimately surrender their
self-direction, though here there is more ambiguity than in Irenaeus. It differs very sig-
nificantly in that there is no sense of a tripartite anthropology in which the spirit is a
third component of human ontology.
Eustathius’s view of the spirit’s role in soteriology corresponds with his divisive
Christology in that both are concerned to keep God’s ontology separate from human
ontology. God is more involved in Eustathius’s perfect ἄνθρωπος than in Marcellus’s,
but Eustathius nonetheless agrees with Marcellus that God and humanity are totally
other; where Marcellus frames the union of God and ἄνθρωπος in teleological terms
and wonders whether it will last, Eustathius reduces the extent to which God and
ἄνθρωπος are unified.
Eustathius’s dyohypostatic Christology allows him to develop a fuller anthropology
than Marcellus. Like Irenaeus and Marcellus, he sees flesh as central to God’s image;
this is strikingly evident in his description of Adam’s pre-ensouled body as a statue of
God. Further, like Marcellus, Eustathius insists that John 6:63 does not mean that the
flesh is “useless.”^57 However, unlike Marcellus, he places the human soul, with the body,
in contradistinction to the Word: his God-ἄνθρωπος contrast does not run parallel to
a contrast between corporeal and incorporeal realities.
Eustathius’s practical emphasis on Christ’s full humanity is in many ways a logical
development from various themes in Irenaeus, set within Eustathius’s very different
metaphysical and christological frameworks: the idea that original ἄνθρωπος, body
and soul, progresses to perfect ἄνθρωπος, body, soul and spirit, coheres best with the
idea that Christ is new ἄνθρωπος if Christ has a human soul. Further, Eustathius’s
emphasis on Christ’s soul shares with Irenaeus’s emphasis on flesh a desire to defend
the whole person. Nonetheless, Eustathius’s articulation of Christ’s human soul comes
within a Christology that is far too divisive for Irenaeus. Eustathius explains the Adam-
Christ connection better than Irenaeus or Marcellus, but only at the expense of the
incarnation.
Irenaeus’s Theological Anthropology
In Marcellus and Eustathius, we see that some of the most distinctive aspects of Ire-
naeus’s theological anthropology left an abiding legacy into the fourth century. We also
see significant divergences. Both later thinkers closely follow Irenaeus’s understand-
ing of the relationship between Adam and Christ, but have a different understanding
of what the descriptor “God’s image” says about the relationship between Christ and
God. Consequently, a very similar conception of the relationship between Adam and
Christ has significantly different implications for theological anthropology in Marcel-
lus and Eustathius than in Irenaeus. Marcellus and Eustathius share a fundamental
divergence from Irenaeus that shows the defining influence of fourth-century meta-
physics: humanity is more distant from God, but its capacity, nevertheless, to reveal
God, is all the more striking.
Marcellan anthropology, in particular, has sacrificed Irenaeus’s sense of intimacy
and interrelation between God and humankind, but it has gained in return the sense of