There are many ancient saints whose lives seem to have been lived for modern days, whose relevance has only grown greater with the passage of time. By this paradox, old things become new in the apocalyptic sense, or else are reflections of that eternity where things are always important. Or perhaps it is only the case that good and evil are still as good and as evil as ever they were, and we should find a less exciting biblical paradigm, such as “nothing is new under the sun.”
When it comes to old saints who hold the solution for new problems, it probably is just because the problems aren’t new. Even something like the New Age movement is age-old. As it rears its gnostic head in what seem to be new forms of fierce fantasy, there is a saint whom we should remember and invoke to fight the heterodoxies that persist even in our day and age, though they be as old as the hills.
This is the mighty Irenaeus, whose feast day we just celebrated, and whose embattled history against the Gnostic heresy comes alive again in the present-day culture wars.
Irenaeus was a second-century Greek raised in the faith by St. Polycarp. He was ordained a priest and labored under the persecution of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Gaul. As a vigorous (and sometimes vicious) defender of clergy and congregation alike, Irenaeus was tasked with a mission to travel to Pope Eleutherius in Rome with warnings concerning a strange new face of heresy: Gnosticism.
Gnosticism was a belief that creation is the evil, twisted work of a wicked “demiurge.” The Gnostics fostered a kind of hatred for the physical world and the human body: nature as man knew it was irredeemable, and salvation consisted in escaping the material prison that holds the divine spark, the immaterial soul, in all men. The soul’s release would result in an experience of knowledge, or the gnosis, the Gnostic salvation.
Even in the second century, people flocked to the idea of personal spiritual knowledge and wielded Gnostic syncretism against budding Christian orthodoxy, the beginnings of tradition, and the rise of ecclesial authority.
And so, as the persecution against the Christians abated, Irenaeus launched his own campaign against the Gnostics. When the bishop of Lyon was martyred, Irenaeus took up his fallen crozier. With blazing theology, he tore down the Gnostic dream of secret salvation, attained by secret knowledge of the forgotten secrets of the universe. He denounced their strange spells that purported to free the mind to higher realms of being.
Irenaeus grappled with the Gnostics. With his prodigious mind and spirit, he laid out that orthodoxy is orthodox, that Christian tradition is traditional, and that the succession from the apostles is apostolic succession. In this, Irenaeus was central in establishing the mystery of the triune God and the continuity of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church over the weird vagaries of cosmic mind, conscious universe, and the demiurge. When the Gnostics cited the high-flying mysteries of the Gospel of St. John for their purposes, Irenaeus turned that same text against their surreal wonders, fighting Gnosticism so fiercely and thoroughly that his arguments provide much of what is known about Gnosticism today.
Irenaeus was one of the first great theologians and clerical writers of Western Christianity. He defended the unity between the Old and New Testaments; he upheld the essential mystery of Christ’s human and divine natures; he promoted the indispensable purpose of Church rituals; he taught that “the glory of God is man alive,” that man’s happiness and God’s glory are integral. Whether it was the persecutor’s prison or the heretic’s sophistry, Irenaeus resisted and repelled the enemies of the Church, that it might maintain its fresh footing and continue spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth.
That mission continues to this hour, and the battles remain surprisingly similar. A new Gnosticism has asserted itself that is just as airy and erroneous as the old one—the Gnosticism of relativism and subjective truth, of self-definition and self-expression, of knowledge that is power, of transhuman technology and robotics, of transgenderism and homosexuality. Mankind has always been eager to make his knowledge and inclination in some way supreme and a source of redeeming enlightenment. The twisting and repurposing of various philosophies and even theologies that is prevalent today, with its weird whimsy unbound by strict rules and revelations, is nothing more than the seductive sedative of the Gnostics.
If the Word didn’t become flesh, as Gnosticism posits, then what remains is atheism. The material world must be the be-all, end-all, ministered and manipulated by chance and not by God. Science then becomes the key to making the faulty material realm beneficial to man and creating utopia through technology, molding all things to and by the human intellect, and making human beings the deity that will save mankind from the evil effects of nature. In our day especially, we see how technology is hailed as the means to change human nature and human society to bring peace out of randomness and incompleteness. By this view, reconstruction and not resurrection is the principle.
The Gnostic repurposing of sex (or “gender”) is especially rampant nowadays, to bring some sort of equality (or perhaps equivalency) in secular society’s desperate search for meaning. Biological sex is an obstacle to freedom, to self-desire and self-expression, a boundary that relegates and restricts. Mind games, corporate ideologies, and invasive technologies are all being leveraged to upend longstanding norms and find an unbounded, unshackled state of “individualized” being. This is the Gnostic impulse—to be free of the material world—and it has given rise to a dismissal of the reasons for standards and roles like male and female. Sexual acts for pleasure, or according to disorders, and gender-dysmorphic psychoses are upheld in a Gnostic attitude of reconstructing nature and society as the work in progress that it is. Nature is fundamentally flawed, after all, and needs the correction of modern science and modern values as opposed to the blessing of ancient spirituality and traditional virtues.
This is the era of the new Gnostics: the era of discovering your inner self, your inner god, where psychology replaces theology, dreams replace doctrine, experience replaces exegesis, and the person replaces the institution in the attempt to enshrine the importance of the self without the importance of Christ. This is the Gnostic world of feelings, caring, inclusivity, diversity, and soft femininizing asexuality that focuses on narcissistic attitudes rather than objective truth and the one God.
It’s everywhere. It is the same war that Irenaeus joined nineteen hundred years ago on earth. He pursues it still from heaven.
From her earliest days, the Church has sent forth heroes to carry the cross of Christ and bear the good news—heroes who made sure that the cross remained Christ’s and the news remained good. Such foundational evangelization was undertaken with terrific force by Irenaeus, this towering second-century figure who, even though his name means “peaceful one,” is remembered as an army of angels waging war against heresies.
Irenaeus, a patron of sanity, will guide us still through the insanity of our times and defend us against the heresies that loom large over civilization. The glory of God is man alive, and so let us live as men, as nature and the Creator intended, and give to him the glory that is his due, and his alone.