P. Parvis—Packaging Irenaeus: Adversus haereses and Its Editors 193
sect than to produce a more correct and better edited work.”^31 Indeed, one of Grabe’s
significant achievements was precisely to provoke Massuet.
Massuet
Massuet’s own edition of Irenaeus was published in Paris in 1710. He himself (1665–
1716) was a Benedictine of the Congregation of St. Maur, who spent the last thirteen
years of his life teaching at St. Germain des Prés.^32
His Praefatio explains that it was both the success and the weaknesses of Grabe’s
edition that made the Maurists resolve to produce one of their own. He blames the
Oxford printers for the fact that “that edition is so scarce overseas that it can be pur-
chased only with the greatest difficulty and at quite a high price.” The result was that
booksellers in both Paris and Amsterdam were planning to reprint it.
In order to forestall that, “it seemed to men renowned for doctrine and piety that
a new edition of Irenaeus was not only useful, but necessary—an edition which would
both be more accurate and also one which Catholics could go through without trip-
ping up. That labour they wished to be undertaken by one of our people”—that is, by
one of the Maurists. “That burden was imposed on me. I baulked for a long time, but
at last submitted” (vii).
The result was the most sumptuous of all the editions—it runs to 842 large folio
pages, 211 quires in all. Layout and typography are magisterial. The medium is, as they
say, the message. It is difficult to imagine that a concern with cost was the driving force
behind the project.
The preface (v–xii) and the three long Dissertationes that follow—on Gnostics,
on the life and works of Irenaeus, on his teaching (xiii–clxii)—are learned, elegant,
weighty, and almost regal in tone. We have already seen some of the judgments he
rendered on the work of his predecessors.
Massuet provides yet another set of chapter divisions, this time with subdivisions
into sections. He explains that in subjoining his abundant annotations at the foot of
the page, he has taken thought above all for “those who are moderately versed in these
matters” and the need “to spare them tedium and labour,” though he has tried to keep
these notes as brief as the difficulty of the argument would allow. “Yet I did not go on
to burden the margins with those notes that relate only to a display of erudition—in
my case, small of course—or to dogmas and controversies of the faith, thinking—and
having learned from my own experience—that nothing is more annoying to the reader
than to be compelled to halt at almost every step by the interposition of some delay” (x).
And yet the work, though unimpassioned, is not dispassionate. It is certainly not
neutral in tone. The beginning of the preface affirms that among the merits of Irenaeus
is the fact that “certain principal dogmas of the Catholic faith, which we profess today,
about the mysteries of the most holy Trinity and incarnation, about the sacraments,
ecclesiastical hierarchy, the divine institution of bishops, the authority of tradition, the
supreme dignity and primacy of Peter and his successors, and so on, are so eloquently
explicated and confirmed that not only ancient heresies but those that emerged all the
way from apostolic times to our own can be extirpated from the root and overturned
from the foundation” (v).