Beyond Belief

by Elaine Pagels

  No doubt . . . the Son of God is implanted everywhere throughout his Scriptures; at one time speaking with Abraham; at another time, with Noah, giving him the dimensions of the ark . . . at another time, he directs Jacob on his journey, and speaks with Moses from the burning bush.26

  When the prophet Ezekiel saw the Lord surrounded by angels and worshiped in heaven, Irenaeus declares that the One he saw on the throne was Jesus Christ.27 Even when Genesis tells how “the Lord took clay from the earth, and formed adam” (Genesis 2:7), Irenaeus declares that “the Lord God” who created humankind in Paradise was “our Lord Jesus Christ, who ‘was made flesh’ [John 1:14] and was hung upon the cross.”28

  Irenaeus knew that this claim far oversteps anything found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, where, he notes, each pictures Jesus as a man who receives special divine power, as God’s “anointed one.” Each of these gospel writers assigns Jesus a somewhat different—human—role. Thus, Irenaeus says, Matthew depicts Jesus as God’s appointed king and traces his family back to King David;29 Luke emphasizes his role as priest;30 and Mark depicts him primarily as God’s prophet.31 But each of these gospels stops short of identifying Jesus with God, much less as God. For Irenaeus, however, the Gospel of John does precisely that; as the church father Origen said later, only John speaks of Jesus’ ”divinity.” Irenaeus, like Origen, took this to mean that John is not only different but also “more elevated,” having seen what the others missed; and from this conviction he apparently concluded that only by joining John with the others could the church complete the “fourfold gospel,” which teaches that Jesus is God incarnate. Carried away with enthusiasm, Irenaeus identifies personally with the evangelist and declares that “John, the Lord’s disciple,” wrote this gospel for precisely the same purpose that he himself now was writing his own book—namely, to expose “heretics”; to confound those who spread “falsely so-called gnosis”; and, above all, “to establish the canon of truth in the church.”32

  Having set forth his reformulated canon of truth—that God the Father is also the Creator who “made all things through his word” (John 1:3), the word that became incarnate in Jesus Christ—Irenaeus turns to the practical question: Who worships God rightly, and who does not? First, he says, the Jews do not, since they refuse to see that “the word of the Lord” which spoke to Abraham and Moses was none other than Jesus Christ. Because they do not identify “the word of the Lord” as Jesus Christ, Irenaeus declares, the Jews have departed from God, since they have not received his word, but they imagined that they could know the Father . . . without the word, being ignorant of the God who spoke in human form to Abraham and then to Moses.33

  Since they fail to recognize Jesus as “the God who spoke in human form” to their ancestors, Irenaeus says that God disinherited the Jews and stripped them of their right to be his priests. Although they continue to worship, God rejects their offerings as he rejected Cain's, since, just as Cain killed Abel, so the Jews “killed the Just One,” Jesus, so that “their hands are full of blood.”34

  Thus the Jews worship God in vain, for he has transferred their priesthood to those who did recognize his “word”35—namely, the apostles whom Jesus taught to offer “the sacrifice of the new covenant,” when he told them to offer the bread he called his body and the wine he called his blood. Ever since Jesus’ death on the cross, the eucharist that reenacts his sacrifice is the lightning rod that draws God’s power down to earth. Not only does the eucharist alone offer access to God but, Irenaeus declares, “this pure sacrifice only the church offers—not the Jews . . . nor any of the assemblies of the heretics.”36

  Since Irenaeus assumed—rightly, no doubt—that few Jews would read what he wrote, much less contest his claim that God rejects their worship, he spent little time arguing that they are excluded. But he did anticipate objections he expected members of his Christian audience to raise: Isn’t the eucharist a holy sacrifice when any baptized Christian—or, at least, any priest—offers it as Jesus taught his disciples to do? Irenaeus says no: when heretics offer the eucharist, they do so in vain. For those who accept his canon of truth, what matters is not only to be a Christian but to be an orthodox Christian—that is, one who “thinks straight.”

  Instead of asserting his own authority to interpret the gospel against that of his opponents, Irenaeus identifies his own belief with that of the whole consensus of what he calls “apostolic tradition.” Thus, he insists, “orthodox” Christians are those who uphold the fourfold gospel together with the canon of truth—later to be expanded into the great creeds—that directs how to interpret it. I do not mean to suggest that he set out to deceive his audience. On the contrary, Irenaeus surely shared the conviction that made “orthodox Christianity” so compelling to him, as well as to many other Christians to this day: that “the faithful,” as trustworthy stewards, hand down only what they, in turn, received from the apostles, without adding or subtracting anything from what Irenaeus and others call the depositum fidei—the faith that the apostles deposited, as in a bank. By invoking the authority of the ancient consensus of the apostles they can claim, then, that what they teach is not only the unchanging truth but absolutely certain.37

  Irenaeus warns that eternal salvation depends on discriminating between which priests in Christian churches are “genuine” and which are, in his words, “heretics, schismatics, or hypocrites,” and he calls on believers to obey the former and shun the latter:

  Therefore it is necessary to obey the priests who are in the church—those who have received the succession from the apostles, as we have shown, and who have also received. . . . the certain gift of truth . . . but to hold in suspicion those who stand apart from the primary line of succession, and who gather in any place whatsoever, [and to regard them] either as heretics with evil intentions or as schismatics, puffed up with themselves, or as hypocrites.38

  Irenaeus knew that the “disciples of Valentinus” did not oppose the clergy. On the contrary, what made them especially hard for him to discredit was the fact that many of them were priests themselves. Yet he warns believers to beware of those whose claims to priestly office are virtually identical to any others’ but who actually are heretics who “serve only themselves,” and not God. He says that believers must be careful to associate only with priests who worship God rightly. This means not only that they “teach sound doctrines” but that they speak “sound words” and display “blameless conduct”—in short, they do not hold unauthorized meetings, or claim access to secret teaching, or perform special initiations.

  Irenaeus ends his five-volume Refutation calling upon his fellow believers to judge and excommunicate heretics. Recalling how God’s wrath falls upon the Jews “who became the killers of their Lord,” he declares that truly spiritual Christians must also condemn “all the followers of Valentinus,” since, although many believers see them as fellow Christians, they actually subvert the faith and, like the Jews, have become “sons of the devil.” Finally he contrasts those who take “many deviant paths” with those who “belong to the church,” who share one and the same faith, observe the same precepts, and . . . protect the same form of ecclesiastical constitution . . . in which one and the same path of salvation is demonstrated throughout the world.39

  Vividly evoking the final judgment pictured in the Revelation, he leaves the reader with visions of the devil, the antichrist, and all their demonic powers being cast into eternal fire along with all of their human offspring, while the heavenly Jerusalem descends to welcome “the priests and the disciples of the apostles” along with “the faithful.”40 For Irenaeus, then, and for his successors, making a difference between true Christians and those he calls heretics—and choosing the path of “orthodox” faith and practice—is what ultimately makes the difference between heaven and hell.

  We do not know how members of Irenaeus’s own congregation reacted to his pleas, although we do know how distressed he was that the great majority of Christians initially accepted the V
alentinians’ view of themselves. While Irenaeus, as bishop, was working to expose them as “wolves in sheeps’ clothing”41 and expel them from the churches, he wrote that most Christians regarded them as among their most influential and advanced members. In his own time, Valentinus had been widely respected as a teacher by his fellow Christians in Rome,42 and even a generation later Irenaeus’s contemporary the famous Egyptian teacher Clement of Alexandria, as well as Clement’s brilliant successor, Origen, engaged in discussion and argument with prominent disciples of Valentinus, and regarded them as fellow Christian teachers. Although Clement and Origen often criticized aspects of Valentinian theology, they also adopted elements of it into their own teaching.43

  About twenty years after Irenaeus wrote, Tertullian described how his fellow believers in Carthage reacted when he warned them against joining circles he called heretical:

  “How does it happen,” they ask, “that this woman or that man, who were the most faithful, the most circumspect, and the most respected in the church, have gone over to the other side?”44

  But Irenaeus was convinced that the presence of the Valentinian Christians was dangerously divisive—that it undermined the preaching of the gospel and the authority of its leaders. He wanted them either to abandon their “heresy” or be cut off from the churches. We do not know how his contemporaries responded; I would guess that the majority, moved by his concern, rallied around Irenaeus and, rather than risk expulsion, chose the safer shelter of the church community and what Irenaeus insisted was the stable authority of the “catholic” consensus of churches and their clergy. In any case, we know that Christians in later generations increasingly followed his lead, as many tried to compel those who persisted in “heresy” either to conform or to separate themselves from the churches. For during the following century and a half, as rapidly growing numbers of converts joined Christian churches despite sporadic outbursts of violent persecution, many bishops adopted and developed the safeguards Irenaeus had outlined to strengthen what he had called the “same form of ecclesiastical constitution” by standardizing basic Christian instruction and excluding those who deviated from the “one . . . path of salvation.” During the fourth century, when persecution suddenly gave way to official toleration of Christians under Constantine, and then to the construction of a Christian empire, a coalition of bishops would take up Irenaeus’s agenda and attempt to realize his vision of a catholic—that is, universal—orthodox church.

  During Irenaeus’s lifetime, of course, this astonishing turn of events lay a hundred and fifty years in the future. As we have seen, his Valentinian opponents had never intended to go their own separate way. But many of them rejected the alternatives Irenaeus placed before them: either accept the common faith as “the whole faith” or reject it entirely. Instead, they continued to affirm the common faith as a first step toward truth but questioned not only what it means but what lies beyond it. Among themselves they not only recognized diversity but expected and welcomed it, as philosophers did in their discussions, as evidence of original and creative insight.45 So, Tertullian wrote caustically, When they consider that “spiritual seed in everyone,” whenever they hit upon something new, they immediately call their audacity a spiritual gift—no unity, only diversity! And so we see clearly that most of them disagree with one another, since they are willing to say—and even sincerely—of certain points, “This is not so,” and “I take this to mean something different,” and “I do not accept that.”46

  Tertullian expressed shock, too, that, as in some philosophic circles, women participated with men: “These heretical women—how audacious they are! They are bold enough to teach, to preach, to take part in almost every masculine function—they may even baptize people!”47 While they appreciated diverse viewpoints within their own circles, such Christians may have extended less tolerance and generosity toward the “simple” believers who followed the bishop. Irenaeus wrote that when he directly questioned Valentinians and challenged them, they either remained silent or said that he was simply wrong, since he had not yet advanced beyond a naÏve level of understanding.48

  Irenaeus, for his part, says that when these “absolutely foolish and stupid people” were threatened with excommunication, they sometimes replied that they no longer believed in the God whom he invoked as an angry judge ready to cast unbelievers into the fires of hell. Moreover, they questioned his understanding of the Scriptures. Some asked, for example, how one could worship a God who first “hardened the heart of Pharaoh and his servants”49 and then punished them by drowning them in the sea. Or how could a just God refrain from condemning Lot for impregnating his own daughters when he was drunk?50 As we have seen, the author of the Gospel of Truth says that those who come to know the infinite goodness and compassion that belong to “the fullness of God” no longer think of God in terms of such deficient and anthropomorphic images.

  Others, including Valentinus’s disciple Heracleon, interpreted disparity between Christians in terms not unlike what the psychologist William James would call “varieties of religious experience.”51 Heracleon contrasts two qualitatively different types of conversion experience. He says that the great majority of Christians appeal to God only when they are desperate, and turn to faith only when they see miracles; thus the gospels often depict Jesus as a wonder-worker who heals the sick, raises the dead, and walks on water. Since they experience the human situation—their own situation—as pervaded by suffering and threatened by death, these Christians see Jesus above all as a healer and savior. Heracleon says that John characterizes this kind of conversion when he tells how Jesus, traveling to Galilee, met a ruler who begged him to come down and heal his son, who was desperately ill. Although Jesus rebuked him for the deficiency of his faith (“Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe”), the ruler renewed his pleas: “Sir, come down before my child dies.” But after Jesus challenged him to have faith (“Go: your son will live”) and his son recovered, the story concludes that “he himself believed, and all his household.”52

  This type of conversion experience, Heracleon says, is familiar to those Christians who see God as John pictures this ruler—as a strict, limited, but well-meaning master and father, who has decreed the death penalty for every one of his children who sins and yet loves them and grieves when they perish. But they also believe that, apart from Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross, God does not forgive his own children; he actually saves only those who “believe.”

  One might ask, how else could one see God than as divine ruler, father, and judge? And how else could one see Jesus, except as a miracle worker and savior? Isn’t that how the gospels depict him? Heracleon says that John tells the story of the “woman at the well” to show, by contrast, how a person gifted with grace experiences conversion. Here John recounts how Jesus, tired from travel, sits down to rest near a well, asks a Samaritan woman who comes to draw water to give him a drink, and offers her, in return, “living water”:

  The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water?” . . . Jesus said to her, “Whoever drinks from this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks from the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I give will become in him a spring of water, welling up to eternal life.”

  The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty, nor come here to draw.” Jesus said, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” . . . Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming . . . and is now, when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and in truth. . . . God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”53

  Heracleon explains that for John, as for the prophet Isaiah, water means “spiritual nourishment”; thus, the story shows that the woman is aware of spiritual thirst and, not knowing how to satisfy it, she has come to draw water from the “well of Jacob,” which signifies traditional ways of worshiping God. But since these le
ave her thirst unsatisfied, when Jesus offers to reveal the source of a wellspring within herself, she immediately grasps what he means and responds, “Give me this water!”

  Heracleon points out that Jesus’ answer (“Go, call your husband, and come here”)54 makes no sense: not only does he not respond to her request but, as the story shows, he knows that she is not married. Bewildered by his words, the woman initially takes them literally and admits that she is unmarried but has lived with six men. Heracleon says that Jesus reveals to her that she has lived this way “through ignorance of God and the needs of her own life.”55 When he tells her to “call her husband,” he is showing her that she already has a “partner” in divine being—that is, a relationship to God of which she is not yet aware. He directs her to call upon resources she already has been given, and to discover her spiritual counterpart, her “fulfillment” (pleroma in Greek). Once she recognizes this as an essential part of her being, she may celebrate communion with God as the divine “marriage.”

  Different as these two types of conversion experience are, they are by no means mutually exclusive. The first sees salvation as deliverance from sin and death; the second shows how someone “ignorant of God and of [one's] own nature,” and mired in destructive activity, eventually develops a growing awareness of—and need for—relationship with God. Heracleon explains that whoever experiences the first type of conversion may—eventually will—also experience the second, which is what Augustine, writing two centuries later, meant when he spoke of “faith seeking understanding.”

  Heracleon explains that most Christians tend to take literally the images they find in the Scriptures: they see God as the creator who made this present world, the lawgiver who gave tablets to Moses on Sinai, the divine father who begot Jesus. But those who experience God’s presence come to see these traditional images of God for what they are—human creations. One need not reject such images, Heracleon says, since they provide an essential way of pointing toward divine reality that words cannot express; but one may come to see that all religious language—and much other language—consists of such images. Whoever realizes this comes to worship God, as Jesus says, “in spirit and in truth.”56