188 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy
summaries at the head of each chapter as a guide to the reader. And he divides Book
V into chapters, for the first time—thirty-six of them, each with its own summary.
All that, he says, involved reading and rereading the text often, but “I find it hardly
surprising that those who are unable to swallow the tedium of examining this do not
make much progress nor for long in the reading of this and similar authors—they don’t
eat the nut because they don’t crack the shell.”
And then there are the extensive—and pugnacious—notes to the text itself, most
of which, according to the eighteenth-century editor Massuet, “contain nothing but
meaningless and coarse declamations.”^18 Indeed, “it seems that it was not so much
Gallasius’ plan to produce a more polished and more correct Irenaeus as to circumvent
the thought of that most holy man with prolix notes drawn from Calvinist doctrine.”^19
The introduction to the Annotationes runs through various heresies. “Execrable
were the Nicolaitans, who profaned marriage and permitted adultery. Their error is
condemned in words by the Papacy, but in actual fact applauded.” “The heresy of the
Collyridians was once condemned; they worshipped and invoked Mary. But today not
only Mary, but other saints as well are graced with divine honours, and those who say
that they should not be invoked or worshipped are held to be heretics” (359).
The flavor of the annotations can be seen from his long note on the much con-
troverted phrase “potentiorem principalitatem” (“pre-eminent authority”/“stronger
rule”/“more powerful origin”) used with reference to Rome and its bishops in his
III.2, our III.3.2. “Great once was the authority of the Roman Church among other
nations... But after it began to raise itself on high under the pretext of Roman impe-
rium, to give orders to others, and to differ in mind from the Word of God... that
authority was not only minished, but taken away.... From a chaste virgin it became
an impudent whore.”^20 Or, on traditio in III.4.2, “Of course, what the Apostles did not
teach is not to be regarded as their tradition. But what they did teach and commanded
all churches to observe is apparent from the Acts of the Apostles and their own letters.
Therefore we are not to seek other things unless we wish to fall into error and to have
Satan for our teacher.”^21 But for all its faults, Gallasius’s work did at least make the text
of Irenaeus more accessible and launched a series of heavily annotated editions, each
engaging with its predecessors in a conversation that would continue for nearly three
hundred years.
Feuardent
Another of Gallasius’s contributions was to provoke an impassioned reaction. Francis
Feuardent, who was born in 1539 and died in 1610, was a Franciscan Friar, celebrated
preacher on behalf of the Catholic League, and later Doctor and Professor of Theology
in Paris, and a scholar of some standing. He produced a number of scriptural commen-
taries and a major edition of Nicholas of Lyra’s Gloss, but his most important patristic
work was Irenaeus. He produced two editions—one in Paris in 1575 and an expanded
and rather more cumbersome revision in Cologne in 1596.
In the 1575 preface (to Cardinal Charles Bourbon),^22 he compares the Gnostici of
Irenaeus’s time to the Hu-Gnostici—the Huguenots—of his own time: “one egg is never
found more like another than the latter are to the former” (+ (6 v)). It is, he thinks, by