Irenaeus

Hill—The Man Who Needed No Introduction 101

youth,” and so could legitimately be said to have encountered, and thereby to have
sanctified, all the stages of human life (infans, parvulus, puer, juvenis, senior). It seems
that before the age of forty, one is still in the prime (first age) of natural youth. After
that are one’s “declining years.”
Once we understand this, it becomes clear that when in Book III Irenaeus says that
he was ἐν τῇ πρώτῃ ἡμῶν ἡλικίᾳ when he knew Polycarp, he is simply saying that he
was then in the prime of his life (by implication, something he had since passed). And
this prime seems to be more or less identifiable with the stage of a iuvenis or νεανίας,^26
which, in Irenaeus’s view, began after boyhood and ended at the age of forty. Thus, all
one can say for certain from his use of this expression of his age in III.3.4 is that Ire-
naeus was under forty when he knew Polycarp. It may well be that in the spectrum of
life’s prime years, Irenaeus was closer to the age of a παῖς than to that of a πρεσβύτερος
when his contact with Polycarp ended, but to say this we would have to depend on
other considerations, not strictly on the age terminology he uses to describe himself.
d. I pointed out in Lost Teaching that an interesting comparison can be made
between what Irenaeus says of himself and what Philostratus says about the disciples
of Dionysius of Miletus, who flourished under Hadrian.

How was it then that his pupils had a peculiar gift for memory? It was because

the declamations of Dionysius gave them a pleasure of which they could never

have enough, and he was compelled to repeat them very often, since he knew

that they were delighted to hear them. And so the more ready-witted of these

youths (νέων) used to engrave them on their minds, and when, by long practice

rather than by sheer memory, they had thoroughly grasped them, they used to

recite them to the rest; and hence they came to be called “the memory-artists,”

and men who made it into an art.^27

The delight of Dionysius’s youthful students is reminiscent of Irenaeus’s words,

“The presbyter used to delight us by recounting certain matters like these.. .” (Haer.

IV.31.1). The engraving on the minds of these students reminds us of Irenaeus’s nota-

tions “not on papyrus but on my heart” (Ep. Flor.). The repeated recitations of the

Dionysian disciples are not unlike Irenaeus’s “And always by the grace of God truly do

I ruminate on them” (Ep. Flor.). I would not claim that Irenaeus was a memory artist,

but it was probably, as Philostratus said, by practice rather than sheer memory that

Irenaeus was able to maintain his recollection over the years. We also see evidence

of a mnemonic device in one of the fragments of the elder’s teaching.^28 Philostratus’s

account serves as a reminder that the eagerness of the young Irenaeus to retain the oral

teaching of a revered teacher is not out of the ordinary for his time and place.

e. Finally, there may be something to be gained from the modern psychological

study of memory, and what is called by some researchers “the reminiscence bump.”

Summarizing the results of many studies, Ulric Neisser and Lisa K. Libby observe that

when tested by the method of open recall, in which subjects are allowed to choose

to tell their own memories, “middle-aged and older adults produce disproportion-

ate numbers of memories from adolescence and early adulthood: roughly, from ages