Irenaeus

P. Parvis—Packaging Irenaeus: Adversus haereses and Its Editors 189

divine providence that you can derive the word Hu-Gnostici by taking the first syllable

of the name of Ioannes Hussus.

It is a joke he obviously liked, for he repeats it often, both here and, twenty-one

years later, in the edition of 1596. Presumably, it had gone down well from the pulpit.

Feuardent was, indeed, something of a firebrand. The prefatory letter is signed

“Paris, on the ides of August, in the one thousand five hundred and seventy-fifth year

from the Virgin giving birth”—just under three years after the Saint Bartholomew’s

Day massacre. It is ominous that in that political climate he can follow up a discus-

sion of the trinitarian errors of Calvin and his followers with an impassioned plea:

“O Emperors! O kings! O men of power—you who await Christ our God and Lord as

judge—is it for no reason that you carry scepters and swords?” (++ (i r)).

A prefatory note informs the “pious reader” that the annotations include

many things drawn from other martyrs and select Fathers which particularly

pertain to the confirmation of the ecclesiastical faith, the forms and norms of

doctrine, the rites of the sacraments, the mores of Christians, and the overthrow

of heresies.... In addition to this, the heretics after their own fashion—espe-

cially the men of Magdeburg [that is, the Centuriators] and a certain Nicolaus

Gallasius, a preacher of the Calvinist pestilence at one time in Geneva, then

in Orleans, afterward as they say in Basque country—industriously corrupted

many passages from this writer, which it was worthwhile and fitting to restore

and vindicate from their false interpretation. (+ ii (v))

His text itself, Feuardent says, presents “these books of the divine Irenaeus purged
by us, with much vigilance and labour, from innumerable faults with which they for-
merly abounded” (++ ii (v)). And it is indeed an improvement.
The 1575 edition has no Greek—the long Epiphanian citation from Book I is ban-
ished to an appendix and appears only in the translation of Billius (Jacques de Billy).
But for the Latin Feuardent has been able to bring onstream, for the first time, the late
fifteenth-century manuscript which became Vossianus lat. F. 33, which enabled him
to supply the last chapters of book V and fill in various holes in Erasmus’s (and Gal-
lasius’s) text.
Feuardent’s text itself is printed chapter by chapter—some of which are quite long—
each followed by annotations, many of which are also quite long. And often quite mili-
tant. He thinks, for example, that the pseudoprophetae of our IV. 33.6, his IV.61, are
Marcionites in particular, but include also the Valentinian Marcus. He then goes on,

But the insolence and madness of all these is followed hook, line, and sinker (ped-

ibus et manibus) by—among latter-day Gnostics—the Anabaptists, whose leader

Munzer called himself and his adherents heavenly prophets—something which

I think they learnt from Luther, who, as Calvin complains, was decked out by his

people with the spoils of the greatest of the prophets, Elijah and John the Baptist.

Beza isn’t alone in making Calvin a distinguished prophet. See the force of an

estranged mind! Indeed, even Calvin himself often boasts that such he is. (299)