The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus Against the Heresies

To Gnosticism's separation of soul and body, spirit and flesh, pneumatic and animal existence, Christianity opposed the Incarnation of God. The fact that God has become man, indeed flesh, proves that the redemption and r…

Gnosticism was rampant in Irenaeus' day, and is constantly reviving in all the non-Christian religions and philosophies. As we have seen, he exposed it as an essentially anti-Christian religious experiment which destroys…

St. Paul and St. John had begun the struggle against Gnosticism, which in their time was in its early stages. Even so, it was already showing its pernicious tendencies: promoting its seductive secret knowledge in the Chr…

Irenaeus taught the unity of the testaments in Christ: they were different, because they were different stages in the one divine education of the human race. In contrast to Gnosticism's cold presumption, he proclaimed Go…

Myth is unmasked by the Word of God. It is the outcome of man's desperate arrogance, his refusal to submit to God, his determination to make his own way to Heaven.

Given the fantastic forms of the mythology of the time, it all seems exotically remote. In fact, when we look more closely, we can see that we are dealing with a confrontation which has never ended and is constantly assu…

And so, for the person willing to follow it in patience, it can lead to the divine destination, to the vision of God the Creator and Redeemer. By contrast, the Gnostic's self-devised ascent is bound to end, like the flig…

Myth and Christianity are opposed on every point. Myth seeks the ascent of man to spirit; the Word of God seeks descent into flesh and blood. Myth wants power; revelation reveals the true power of God in the most extreme…

So-called gnosis' was an enormous temptation in the early Christian Church. By contrast, persecution, even the bloodiest, posed far less of a threat to the Church's continuing purity and further development. Gnosticism h…