194 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy
On Irenaeus on the position of Rome: “But what seemed most efficacious and
ineluctable to the holy Fathers for confuting all the heretics and schismatics of their
own time ought to be no less efficacious for overthrowing the heretics of our time—
Lutherans, Calvinists, and others, as many as seceded from the Roman Church” (cxv).
On Irenaeus on the Eucharist: “So Irenaeus argues against the heretics, whether more
recent heretics like it or not; if he does not do that, he does not do anything” (cxli).
“The most illustrious Grabe did not refrain from very long annotations in order to
twist and weaken the arguments. But he is wasting his words” (cxlvii). And he rounds
off his introductory matter by saying in the very last paragraph of the final dissertation
that “I would have wished it to be shorter, had it been possible. But it was made longer
both by the complex difficulties of many passages... and by the importunities of the
Protestants and especially the cavils of the recent editor of Irenaeus, which, lest they
proceed to deafen our ears, it was worth the trouble to dissipate” (clxii).
The notes to the text often have a go at Grabe. He picks up Grabe’s remark at I.10.1
that eternal life is a gift of grace. “The learned man is wasting his time,” since the posi-
tion he is attacking is not in fact Catholic doctrine, as he thinks it is. “If Grabe had
wished to think about this carefully, he would have abstained from a useless note” (49).
At III.3.2, Grabe tries to “twist” the words about the Roman Church. Indeed, he is
forced to “attribute quite absurd ideas to Irenaeus, which could not have entered the head
of that most holy bishop unless he had become absolutely mad” (175). In the same pas-
sage, Grabe “tries to do violence to Irenaeus’s words” about tradition from the apostles.
Since he “was unable to deflect the weight of the apostolic tradition... he at least tries to
confine it within narrower limits, lest it prove so pressing.” And so Grabe takes it to mean
the “symbol of the apostolic faith”—“as if the whole faith proclaimed to humankind were
contained in the Apostles’ Creed! As if the apostles had not handed down many other
dogmas of the faith, which Protestants themselves profess along with us” (175).
Massuet’s Irenaeus, like so many of the other Maurist editions, is a magnificent
piece of work. But its tone and style, even its layout and typography, can only partially
conceal what a polemical piece of work it is as well.
And it was destined to become something of a textus receptus. It is of course the
edition reprinted in Migne’s Patrologia (PG 7), and it reigned unchallenged for a cen-
tury and a half.
Harvey
The year 1857 saw the appearance of W. Wigan Harvey’s Cambridge edition. When
we look at these two stout, sensibly bound octavos, it is difficult to resist the impres-
sion that they are, in their sound, commonsense values, truly English. Harvey, at least,
would, I suspect, rather have liked that conceit.
He himself was a sound, commonsense member of the Anglican establishment—
Eton; King’s, Cambridge; Cambridge don and then, after his marriage, country vicar; a
Tory and a magistrate. Ecclesiastically, he was High, but anti-Tractarian.
In 1841–1843 he had published a three-volume work entitled Ecclesiae Anglicanae
Vindex Catholicus, which demonstrated the conformity of the Thirty-Nine Articles
with the teaching of Christian antiquity. It consists of quite extensive extracts from