P. Parvis—Packaging Irenaeus: Adversus haereses and Its Editors 197
The Stream of Tradition
If we survey the sweep of this editorial endeavor as a whole, we might note two features
shared by almost all the tradition. The first is that the editions were engaged in a dia-
logue with each other, a conversation that lasted for over 300 years.
A simple example—who are the “false prophets,” the pseudoprophetae, of IV.33.6?
Feuardent thinks the Marcionites, but also Marcus the follower of Valentinus. Grabe
thinks Montanists. Massuet asks why not both? We have seen other, more complex
examples in the course of our discussion.
Even Harvey, in that twilight at the dawn of the fully critical era, is still in the game.
He not infrequently cites the views of his predecessors—most commonly Grabe but
also Feuardent—though he seldom takes the time to argue against them.
With Rousseau, it is not so. Though he frequently engages with modern secondary
literature, he very seldom engages with his predecessors—indeed, virtually the only
interest he evinces in the earlier editions is to discuss—thoroughly and usefully—their
manuscript base. Editorial methods and editorial standards had changed.
The Trappist has broken off the conversation. Or, if you prefer, just as Orval itself
was a new, twentieth-century foundation planted on a medieval site, so is Rousseau’s
edition a new construction built over an ancient tradition.
The second common element we can see is that each of our editors writes from a
particular perspective with a particular purpose, and they look for different things. It
could not, of course, be otherwise. There can be no text without context. An edition is
a state of the text that exists in a particular place at a particular time.
Here again, it might seem at first blush as if Rousseau breaks the pattern. Over and
over again he avoids obvious bias, as in his resolution of the misplaced dichotomies of
much Catholic—Protestant polemic. Or perhaps it simply seems to us that he avoids
obvious bias because we are on the same camber.
But it is worth remembering that the first two volumes—the text and notes to Book
IV—appeared in 1965. They had received their nil obstat in March and were legally
deposited in the fourth trimester. The fourth and last session of the Second Vatican
Council occupied that same trimester. Change was in the air—change that radically
affected the Church in France and monastic life throughout the world. There was a
sense of old divisions being transcended, of windows opening. The air must have been
like that Grabe breathed in the Oxford of 1700. He, too, felt that he could leave past
controversies behind and that he was moving from a confined to a larger room.
Now, a generation later, we perhaps no longer feel that optimism, that realization
of new possibilities of ecclesial life opening up before us. We live, I fear, in a world that
is more cynical, more inclined to look for spin and rhetoric—in both the narrower
and the wider meanings of the term. We look for rhetorical strategies and are wary
of totalizing discourse. We are inclined to resort all too easily to “he would say that,
wouldn’t he?”
What sort of Irenaeus should we look for, in our own time, as editors, translators,
readers? What sort of Irenaeus do we deserve?
Perhaps we should be more ready to make capital of our hermeneutic of rhetori-
cal suspicion by exploring the shifts of register, the changes of tack and mood, that we