Irenaeus says that there is only one way to be safe from error: go back to what you first learned, and “hold unmoving in [your] heart the canon of truth received in baptism.”49 He assumes that his audience knows what this canon is: “This faith, which the church, even when scattered throughout the whole world . . . received from the apostles,” and which, he specifies, includes faith in one God, Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and the seas . . . and in one Christ Jesus, the son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation, and in the holy spirit . . . and the birth from a virgin, and the suffering, and the resurrection from the dead, and the heavenly ascension in flesh . . . of our beloved Jesus Christ.50
True believers everywhere, he says, share this same faith.
Irenaeus’s vision of a united and unanimous “catholic church” speaks more of what he hoped to create than what he actually saw in the churches he knew in Gaul, and those he had visited or heard about in his travels though Gaul, Asia Minor, and Italy. In those travels he encountered resistance from those he called heretics, and when he urged them to return to the simple baptismal faith, he says that they answered in words like this:
We too, have accepted the faith you describe, and we have confessed the same things—faith in one God, in Jesus Christ, in the virgin birth and the resurrection—when we were baptized. But since that time, following Jesus’ injunction to “seek, and you shall find,” we have been striving to go beyond the church’s elementary precepts, hoping to attain spiritual maturity.
Now that the discoveries at Nag Hammadi allow the heretics—virtually for the first time—to speak for themselves, let us look at the Gospel of Philip, to see how its author, a Valentinian teacher, compares his own circle with that of those he considers “simpler” Christian believers. This author, whom we call Philip, and his circle apparently had received baptism in a procedure similar to the one that the church father Justin Martyr describes as customary in Rome;51 that is, the initiate, having repented of past sins, receives and affirms the teachings of Jesus as taught by his followers, confesses the faith, and promises to live accordingly. Then, led naked into the water, the initiate is baptized as the divine names—God the Father; Jesus Christ, his son; and the holy spirit—are pronounced; and finally, dressed in fresh garments, the new Christian is anointed with oil and invited to participate in the eucharist. Like Justin, Philip says that baptism effects spiritual rebirth; “through this mystery we are born again though the holy spirit.”52
But unlike Justin—or any other early Christian writer known to me—Philip then asks, What happens—or doesn’t happen—when a person undergoes baptism? Is baptism the same for everyone? Philip suggests it is not. There are many people, he says, whose baptism simply marks initiation; such a person “goes down into the water and comes up without having received anything and says ‘I am a Christian.’ ”53 But sometimes, Philip continues, the person who undergoes baptism “receives the holy spirit . . . this is what happens when one experiences a mystery.”54 What makes the difference involves not only the mysterious gift of divine grace but also the initiate’s capacity for spiritual understanding.
So, Philip writes, echoing Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, many believers see themselves more as God’s slaves than as God’s children; but those who are baptized, like newborn infants, are meant to grow in faith toward hope, love, and understanding (gnosis):
Faith is our earth, in which we take root; hope is the water through which we are nourished; love is the air through which we grow; gnosis is the light through which we become fully grown.55
Thus, he explains, those who first confess faith in the virgin birth later may come to a different understanding of what this means. Many believers, indeed, continue to take the virgin birth literally, as if Mary conceived apart from Joseph; “some say that Mary conceived through the holy spirit,” but, Philip says, “they are in error.”56 For, he explains, “virgin birth” is not simply something that happened once to Jesus; rather, it refers to what may happen to everyone who is baptized and so “born again” through the “virgin who came down,” that is, through the holy spirit.57 Thus, as Jesus was born to Joseph and Mary, his human parents, and later was born spiritually when the holy spirit descended upon him at his baptism, so we, too, first born physically, may be “born again through the holy spirit” in baptism, so that “when we became Christians we came to have both a father and mother,”58 that is, both the heavenly Father and the holy spirit.
But Philip says that many people, whom he calls “the apostles and the apostolic ones,”59 are “in error,” since they remain oblivious of—even offended by—this mystery. Such people, he continues, are also wrong about resurrection, since they take this, too, as if it could be only a unique event in which Christ died and rose bodily from the grave. Philip suggests instead that Jesus’ resurrection, like his virgin birth, is not only something that occurred in the past but is a paradigm of what happens to each person who undergoes spiritual transformation. Philip quotes Paul’s famous teaching on resurrection (“flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God,” I Corinthians 15:50) to show that those who receive the holy spirit in baptism are not only “born again” but also “raised from the dead.”60
Someone might object, however, that this cannot be what resurrection means: didn’t Jesus rise in the flesh? Philip answers that, of course, “one must rise ‘in this flesh,’ since in this world everything exists in [the flesh].” But he challenges those who take bodily resurrection literally. After all, he asks, “what is flesh?” In answer, he quotes from John’s gospel to show that when Jesus told his disciples to “eat my flesh and drink my blood” (John 6:53), he was speaking in metaphor, since what he meant was that they were to partake of the sacred meal of bread and wine, which conveys Jesus’ ”flesh,” that is, Philip suggests, his divine word, and his “blood,” the holy spirit.61
Philip thus discriminates between nominal Christians—those who claim to be Christians simply because they were baptized—and those who, after baptism, are spiritually transformed. He sees himself among the latter but does not congratulate himself for belonging to a spiritual elite; instead, he concludes by anticipating that ultimately all believers will be transformed, if not in this world then in eternity. Whoever undergoes such transformation, he says “no longer is a Christian, but a Christ.”62
If Irenaeus read the Gospel of Philip, he must have sharply rejected such teaching; for, as we have seen, when he demands that the believer “hold unmoving in his heart the rule of truth received in baptism,” he specifically includes the “birth from a virgin, the passion, and the resurrection from the dead . . . in the flesh of our beloved Jesus Christ, our Lord”;63 and, like many orthodox believers ever since, Irenaeus accepted these as unique, revelatory events through which Christ ensured human salvation. Were members of Philip’s circle to answer that they confessed the same faith, Irenaeus would have replied, as he did to other Valentinian Christians, that although they “say the same things, they mean something different by them.” Followers of Valentinus might readily have admitted that this was true; but, they asked him, what is wrong with that? “When we confess the same things as you, why do you call us heretics?”64 No doubt their interpretations differed from his, and from each other's; but why did Irenaeus think that these differences actually endangered the church?
These questions are hard to answer, for although Irenaeus liked clear boundaries, he was not simply narrow-minded, and he was by no means intolerant of all difference. In fact, as he sought to realize his teacher Polycarp’s vision of a universal church, he included as “apostolic” a wide range of traditions that spanned a century and a half and, he claimed, were shared by Christians scattered from Germany to Spain, Gaul to Asia Minor, and from Italy to Africa, Egypt, and Palestine. Irenaeus surely knew that the traditions he accepted—to say nothing of many more that he disagreed with but allowed—included the diversity of beliefs and practices that one would expect of what he called “the catho
lic church . . . scattered throughout the whole world.”65
In fact, Irenaeus encouraged his fellow believers to tolerate certain variations of viewpoint and practice. For example, he argued against those who accepted only one gospel, such as those he calls the Ebionites, who, he says, accepted only Matthew, and followers of Marcion, who accepted only Luke. And while his contemporary Tatian, who, like himself, was a student of Justin, attempted to harmonize the various gospels by rewriting them into one single, composite account, Irenaeus was the first, so far as we know, to urge believers to accept all four distinct gospels, despite their obvious differences, and to join them into the collage that he called the “four formed gospel.” Furthermore, when Victor, bishop of Rome, demanded that all Christians in the capital city celebrate Easter on the same day, Irenaeus traveled to Rome to urge the bishop not to cause trouble for Greek-speaking Christians, who like Irenaeus himself, had emigrated from Asia Minor and traditionally celebrated Easter on a different day (as Greek, Russian, Ethiopic, Serbian, and Coptic Orthodox Christians still do).66
Given, then, that Irenaeus acknowledged a wide range of views and practices, at what point did he find “heterodoxy”—which literally means “different opinions”—problematic, and for what reasons? Why does he declare that the Gospel of Truth, like all the “heretical” gospels, “has nothing to do with the apostolic gospel” but is “full of blasphemy”?67 Why does he insist that the Secret Book of John simply shows “the kind of lies the heretics invent”?68 To answer these questions, we should recall that Irenaeus was not a theoretically minded philosopher engaging in theological debate so much as a young man thrust into leadership of the survivors of a group of Christians in Gaul after a violent and bloody persecution. As we have seen, Irenaeus could not forget that in Smyrna, where he had grown up in the household of Bishop Polycarp, his aged and renowned spiritual father had been hounded by the police, and after escaping and hiding in a country house, had been captured and brought back to the public amphitheater, where, as the mob shouted insults, he was stripped naked and burned alive. Then, as we noted, about twenty years later (c. 177), in Gaul, where Polycarp may have sent him to work as a missionary, Irenaeus had seen more violence against Christians, some of whom were lynched while dozens of others were arrested and tortured, many strangled to death in prison. According to The Letters of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, some thirty to fifty who survived and refused to renounce their witness were torn apart by wild animals and killed by gladiators in a public spectacle attended by his fellow townspeople. And we have seen that only after the aged bishop Pothinus had died of torture and exposure in prison, Irenaeus, perhaps in his thirties, having somehow escaped arrest, apparently stepped in to serve as leader of those who were left.
As he did so, determined to consolidate these scattered believers and provide them the shelter of a community by joining them into the worldwide network Polycarp had envisioned as a “catholic” church, what concerned Irenaeus was whatever proved seriously divisive. What, then, did prove divisive? Irenaeus would have answered heresy—and because of the way he characterized it, historians traditionally have identified orthodoxy (which literally means “straight thinking”) with a certain set of ideas and opinions, and heterodoxy (that is, “thinking otherwise”) as an opposite set of ideas. Yet I now realize that we greatly oversimplify when we accept the traditional identification of orthodoxy and heresy solely in terms of the philosophical and theological content of certain ideas. What especially concerned Irenaeus was the way the activities of these “spiritual teachers” threatened Christian solidarity by offering second baptism to initiate believers into distinct groups within congregations.
The author of the Gospel of Philip, as we have seen, implicitly divided the church by discriminating between those who, he says, are “in error” and those who have “come to know the truth”; but Irenaeus knew that many other followers of Valentinus divided the church explicitly. What he found most objectionable was not so much what they said as what they did—above all, that many offered believers a second baptism in a ritual they called apolutrosis—which could take many forms.69 Irenaeus describes precisely how they operated. First, they called themselves “spiritual Christians” and attracted unwary people from what they called the “common” and “ecclesiastical” majority, inviting them into private meetings of their own. There they challenged the newcomers—and themselves—to question what their faith meant, and in the process they often discussed passages from the Scriptures. Irenaeus may be speaking from his own experience when he complains that when someone objects to what they say or asks them to explain what they mean, “they claim that he is not a person capable of receiving the truth, since he has not received from above the capacity to understand”; thus, he says, “they really give him no answer.” But when they find people who prove receptive, they engage them in a long period of preparation and finally declare that these are ready to receive apolutrosis, which enables them to move beyond the “common” community to join the more select circles of the spiritually mature. So, Irenaeus complains, they call those who belong to the church “common,” and “ecclesiastic”. . . and if anyone gives himself up to them like a little sheep, and follows out their practice and their apolutrosis, such a person is so elated that he imagines he . . . has already entered within the “fullness of God”. . . and goes strutting around with a superior expression on his face, with all the pomposity of a cock.70
What Irenaeus found most distressing was that those who flocked to the groups gathered around teachers like Ptolemy often heard in these meetings that the baptism all Christians receive in common is, in fact, only the first step in the life of faith. Such teachers explained to newcomers that just as John the Baptist baptized with water those who repented, when they themselves first confessed faith in God and in Jesus, they too received, in effect, the “baptism of John” to cleanse them from sin. But such teachers also pointed out how, according to the gospel accounts of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, John the Baptist prophesied that Jesus himself would baptize his followers “with the holy spirit and with fire.”71 They pointed out, too, Jesus’ saying that he had “another baptism with which to be baptized,”72 and they explained that this means that those who advance on the spiritual path are to receive that second baptism.
Furthermore, they said, this higher baptism marks a major transition in the initiate’s relationship with God. In their first baptism, believers have pledged to serve as Lord the God whom they revere as creator, and fear as divine lawgiver and judge; but now, Ptolemy and his disciples explained, having progressed beyond that level of understanding, they are to come to see God as Father, as Mother, Source of all being—in other words, as One who transcends all such images. Thus Ptolemy invites those who previously saw themselves as God’s servants—or, more bluntly, his slaves—to come to understand themselves as God’s children. To signal their release from slavery to become, in Paul’s words, God’s own children and heirs,73 Ptolemy calls the second baptism apolutrosis, which means “redemption” or “release,” alluding to the judicial process through which a slave became legally free.
When we look back to our examples of “evil interpretation,” we can see that Irenaeus’s characterization, however hostile, nevertheless is accurate. Those who wrote and treasured innovative works such as the Gospel of Truth, the Round Dance of the Cross, the Secret Book of John, and the Gospel of Philip were implicitly criticizing, intentionally or not, the faith of most believers. So, as we noted, Valentinus contrasts those who picture God as a “petty, jealous, and angry” with those who receive “the grace of knowing him” as a loving and compassionate Father. Many scholars believe that the Gospel of Truth was written as an inspirational talk to be delivered at some such baptism among Valentinus’s followers, as those who come to know themselves as God’s children also come to recognize one another, this gospel says, as “true brothers, upon whom the Father’s love is poured out, and among whom He is fully present.”74 So, too, those w
ho participated in the Round Dance of the Cross, circling in the dance and chanting “Amen!” in response to the person chanting Jesus’ part, were celebrating their new relationship with Jesus, who here, as we noted, invites them to see yourself in Me who am speaking, and, when you have seen what I do, keep silent about my mysteries. You who dance, consider what I do; for this human passion which I am about to suffer is your own.75
The dance celebration described in the Round Dance itself may have served as a form of apolutrosis; for while virtually all Christians first initiated newcomers through some kind of water baptism, Irenaeus says that these spiritual teachers had not come up with any single way of performing the second baptism: “It has no set form, and every teacher transmits it in his own way, as each is inclined; so there are as many kinds of apolutrosis as there are teachers of these mystical insights.”76
Having carefully investigated these matters, he reports that some of them baptized initiates with water a second time, using different invocations:
Some . . . bring the initiates to water, and baptizing them, they say these words: “in the name of the unknown Father of all being; into Truth, the mother of all things; into the One who descended on Jesus [the spirit]; into union; redemption [apolutrosis]; and communion with the powers.”77
Others performed apolutrosis as a kind of spiritual marriage, which joins a person in union with one’s “life hid with Christ in God,”78 that is, the previously unknown part of one’s being which connects one with the divine. Still others, he says, “repeat[ed] certain Hebrew words,” and he reports the invocations they used (which are actually not Hebrew words)—“Basema, Chamosse, Baonara, Mistadia, Ruada, Kousta, Babaphor, Kalacheit”79—which allude to the hidden names of God. After the invocations and prayers, those who participated pronounced a blessing (“Peace to all upon whom this name rests”), anointed the initiate with balsam oil, and chanted “Amen.” There were others, Irenaeus says, who rejected any kind of ritual at all, for they said that “recognizing [God's] ineffable greatness” itself constitutes redemption; thus whoever recognized this already had been “set free.”80
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