200 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacybut then, despite the fact that his works are translated and read, the name of Irenaeus as
theologian seems to go rather quietly into the night.
Or does it?
In the modern day, Irenaeus’s influence is at a peak. The fascination with the bishop
of Lyons among scholars over the past century demonstrates a particularly modern
appeal, and in and among the various themes and persons that mark out the second
century, Irenaeus has today become a kind of figurehead. Of course, scholars have a
penchant for digging up the long-lost and little-known and bringing them to center
stage; but perhaps this interest has something to do with what Bernard Sesboüé, in
his helpful and at times quite moving study published in 2000, called “la séduction
d ’ I r é n é e .”^3 He is, in the most positive sense of the term, a seducer: he draws one into
his vision of the Church, of God, of redemption with a kind of potency and imme-
diacy that has hardly diminished over the past 1,800 years. Or, to put it in the words
of Sesboüé: “Irénée de Lyon, qui fut une autorité pour l’Église ancienne et dont l’œuvre
a été relue de siècle en siècle, se présente encore à nous comme un auteur ‘séduisant’ au
sens noble de ce terme. Son texte est le témoignage de la jeunesse de la foi, thème qui lui
est d’ailleurs cher. Il dit les choses avec une grande fraîcheur et un réalisme simple qui
emportent la conviction.”^4
Perhaps this is a touch romantic, but it is grounded in reality. In the complex and
often unclear array of voices and activities of the second century, scholars of the nine-
teenth and twentieth discovered in Irenaeus an apostolic disciple (through his con-
nection to Polycarp), a peacemaker, a pastor, a kind of defensor fidei who nonetheless
broke out of the pattern of focusing narrowly on any specific doctrinal question, to
broach the whole vision of God, creation, man, and redemption that stands at the heart
of Christian life. To characterize him in the words of the late Eric Osborn: “No one has
presented a more unified account of God, the world and history than has Irenaeus.”^5
One might challenge this assessment (though personally I would not); but one cannot
deny something quite remarkable to his person, voice, and work.
Or, at least one shouldn’t—but this will hardly stop the inevitable. Disparaging Ire-
naeus had become something of an academic pastime under Harnack and Loofs, and
for a brief moment in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries it looked as
if the Irenaean legacy had been reclaimed from history for the sole purpose of giving
it a firm academic beating with the stick of a modern systematics and source-critical
methodology.^6 But this has, thankfully, passed, and the theology of Irenaeus has gained
a place in modern patristic study that it has perhaps never before quite had. Every
aspect of his thought is undergoing renewed attention and flourish: his scriptural back-
ground; his anthropology; his cosmogony and cosmology; his witness to ecclesiology
and apostolic succession; his anti-“Gnostic” testimony; his Mariology; his vision of
history; and above all his vision of a recapitulative soteriology—and these are to name
but a few. And this excellent work continues today.
But what was and is his legacy? Taking as rote the profound nature of his thought,
the robust characteristics of his work, what can we say of the place his influence had in
succeeding generations of Christian expression? This is an area of which we perhaps
know less than we do of his thought proper, for Irenaeus’s place in the limelight of