Home › Fathers, Saints & Teachers › St. Irenaeus
At a glance
| Who | St. Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202), born in Asia Minor, a hearer of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, priest and then bishop of Lyons in Gaul after the persecution of 177. Later tradition counts him a martyr; the details of his death are not known. |
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| Standing | Father of the Church · Saint feast June 28 · Doctor of the Church declared by Pope Francis with the title Doctor unitatis, Doctor of Unity, by decree of January 21, 2022 |
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| The work | Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses, c. 180), five books written against the Gnostic sects. Book V defends the resurrection of the flesh and ends with the Antichrist, the kingdom and the new creation. |
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| Translation | Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (1885), at New Advent |
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| Weight | A very early and precious witness to the apostolic faith. Where he hands on what the whole Church believes, the resurrection of the body, the coming of the Antichrist, the return of Christ, his word carries great weight. His millenarian expectation of an earthly kingdom, his reckoning of six thousand years for the world, and his guesses at the name of the beast are his own opinions, which the Church has not adopted. |
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Why Irenaeus matters here
Irenaeus stands only two links from the apostle John. He writes that he saw Polycarp “in my early youth,” and that Polycarp had been “appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna” by apostles (Against Heresies 3.3.4). In a letter preserved by Eusebius he recalls Polycarp speaking of his conversations with John and others who had seen the Lord (Church History 5.20). When he discusses the Book of Revelation, then, he is reading a book that had been written, as he says, “towards the end of Domitian's reign,” within living memory (5.30.3).
His great theme is unity: one God, who made both spirit and matter; one Christ, truly God and truly man; one Church, keeping one apostolic faith. That is the root of his title Doctor of Unity, and it shapes what he says about the end. Against teachers who despised the body and the world, he insists that the God who made them will raise and renew them. The Catechism shares his hope: “The visible universe, then, is itself destined to be transformed” (CCC 1047).
Against Heresies, Book V, on the end
5.25; 5.28–29 · The Antichrist, the summing up of apostasyPatristic teachingFuture
“…being an apostate and a robber, is anxious to be adored as God…” (5.25.1)
- Teaching
- For Irenaeus the Antichrist is one man, endowed with the power of the devil, “concentrating in himself [all] satanic apostasy” (5.25.1). Every rebellion against God since the beginning flows together in him. In him there is “a recapitulation made of all sorts of iniquity and of every deceit,” so that “all apostate power, flowing into and being shut up in him, may be sent into the furnace of fire” (5.29.2).
- Why “recapitulation”
- The word is the key to Irenaeus's whole theology. Christ, the new Adam, sums up all of humanity in himself and undoes Adam's fall by his obedience. The Antichrist is a dark mirror of this: he sums up all disobedience. The whole story of evil is gathered into one place, and so it can be ended in one judgment.
- False wonders
- The beast's helper, “whom he also terms a false prophet,” works signs; Irenaeus warns: “Let no one imagine that he performs these wonders by divine power, but by the working of magic” (5.28.2; Revelation 13:11–15).
- Where the Fathers agree
- That a personal Antichrist will come before Christ's return, deceive many and persecute the Church, and be destroyed by the Lord, is the common teaching of the Fathers, and the Catechism teaches the final trial and “the supreme religious deception” of the Antichrist (CCC 675). See Newman on the Antichrist.
“…unless the apostasy comes first and the lawless one is revealed…” (2 Thessalonians 2:3)
- Teaching
- Irenaeus reads Daniel and Paul together. He quotes Paul's warning of the falling away and of the one who “exalts himself above every so-called god” and seats himself in the temple of God (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4; 5.25.1), and Paul's promise that the Lord will destroy him at his coming (2 Thessalonians 2:8; 5.25.3). From Daniel he takes the fourth beast with ten horns and the little horn that rises among them, speaking great things (Daniel 7:8, 23–25), and looks forward to “the end of the last kingdom, i.e., the ten last kings,” among whom the kingdom will be divided “and upon whom the son of perdition shall come” (5.25.3).
- The half-week
- The holy ones are handed over “for a time, two times, and half a time” (Daniel 7:25). Irenaeus joins this to the last week of Daniel 9:27: “Now three years and six months constitute the half-week” (5.25.4), the length of the Antichrist's reign. He also sees in the desolating abomination that Jesus foretold (Matthew 24:15) a sign of the Antichrist sitting in the temple of God (5.25.2).
- Why mystery
- That Daniel's visions reach beyond Antiochus to the end is a reading many Fathers shared. How the horns, the kings and the temple map onto future history, the Church has never defined. See Daniel 7 and 2 Thessalonians 2:3–5.
5.30 · The number 666, and a cautionPatristic opinionMystery
“We will not, however, incur the risk of pronouncing positively as to the name of Antichrist…” (5.30.3)
- Scripture
- “Wisdom is needed here; one who understands can calculate the number of the beast, for it is a number that stands for a person. His number is six hundred and sixty-six” (Revelation 13:18).
- The text
- Irenaeus defends the reading 666, found “in all the most approved and ancient copies,” against copyists who “have erred following the ordinary mode of speech, and have vitiated the middle number in the name” by dropping fifty from it, which gives the variant 616 (5.30.1). He sees the number as summing up “the whole of that apostasy which has taken place during six thousand years” (5.28.2).
- His guesses
- He then tests three Greek names whose letters add up to 666: Evanthas, Lateinos (the Latins, that is, the Romans who then ruled) and Teitan, which he thinks “rather worthy of credit” (5.30.3). These are guesses, and he presents them as guesses.
- His caution
- Then he draws back. It is “more certain, and less hazardous” to wait for the prophecy to be fulfilled than to guess at names, because if the name were meant to be known now, “it would have been announced by him who beheld the apocalyptic vision” (5.30.3). Of those who built names on the faulty number and insisted on them, he says that “they have led into error both themselves and those who confided in them” (5.30.1). The name is withheld, he suggests, “because it is not worthy of being proclaimed by the Holy Spirit” (5.30.4).
- Why mystery
- The Church has never identified the number with a name. Irenaeus's restraint, from a man who knew the disciples of John, is the best answer to every number-of-the-beast “solution” since. This site names no one.
5.1–14 · The resurrection of the fleshPatristic teachingFuture
“…a grain of wheat falling into the earth and becoming decomposed, rises with manifold increase…” (5.2.3)
- Teaching
- The first part of Book V answers those who said the body is worthless and cannot be saved. Irenaeus's strongest argument is the Eucharist. How can anyone say the flesh cannot receive “life eternal,” when it is “nourished from the body and blood of the Lord”? As the grain of wheat dies in the ground and rises multiplied, so our bodies, nourished by the Eucharist, “shall rise at their appointed time” (5.2.3). In the chapters that follow (5.3–14) he gathers Scripture after Scripture to show that the God who formed Adam from the earth and raised Christ in his body will raise ours.
- With the Church
- This is the faith of the Creed: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” The Catechism makes his argument its own, quoting him: “so too our bodies, which partake of the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, but possess the hope of resurrection” (CCC 1000, quoting Against Heresies 4.18.4–5).
- Hope
- The last trial is real, but so is the purpose behind it. Irenaeus says that “tribulation is necessary for those who are saved,” and quotes the martyr St. Ignatius: “I am the wheat of Christ, and am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts” (5.28.4).
5.32–36 · The kingdom of the just: his millenarian hopePatristic opinionMystery
“They came to life and they reigned with Christ for a thousand years.” (Revelation 20:4)
- His view
- Irenaeus was a millenarian, or chiliast. He expected that after the Antichrist is destroyed, the risen just would reign with Christ on a renewed earth for a thousand years before the final judgment. The just, he argues, ought “first to receive the promise of the inheritance” in the very creation in which they labored and suffered, and “the creation itself, being restored to its primeval condition,” should serve them (5.32.1). When the Lord comes from heaven and casts the Antichrist into the lake of fire, he will bring in “for the righteous the times of the kingdom” (5.30.4).
- His sources
- He reports a saying handed down by “the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord”: “The days will come, in which vines shall grow, each having ten thousand branches,” and so on, and names Papias, “the hearer of John, and a companion of Polycarp,” as a witness to it (5.33.3–4). He also reckons that the world will last six thousand years, one thousand for each day of creation: “For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded” (5.28.3).
- Where the Fathers differed
- Several early writers shared this hope, among them St. Justin Martyr and, later, St. Victorinus. Others did not. St. Augustine, who once held a form of it himself, came to read the thousand years of Revelation 20 as the present age of the Church, in which Christ already reigns with his saints (City of God 20.7–9), and his reading became the common one in the West.
- The Church's judgment
- The Church has not adopted the expectation of an earthly thousand-year reign. The Catechism teaches that she “has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism” (CCC 676); its note cites Denzinger (DS 3839), and in 1944 the Holy Office judged that even a mitigated millenarianism cannot safely be taught. The kingdom will be fulfilled “not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil” (CCC 677). Irenaeus was a saint and a Doctor, and on this point he was mistaken; he would be the first to submit his opinion to the Church whose unity he defended.
- Why mystery
- What he got right lies underneath the mistake: the promise of Revelation 20 is real, and God's purpose for his creation is not to scrap it but to set it free (Romans 8:19–21).
5.35–36 · The new Jerusalem and the new creationPatristic teachingFuture
“…the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” (Revelation 21:2)
- Teaching
- Irenaeus ends his whole work with the new heaven and the new earth. The world is not destroyed but transformed: “For neither is the substance nor the essence of the creation annihilated,” but “the fashion of the world passes away” (5.36.1; 1 Corinthians 7:31). In “the new heaven and the new earth” the new man will remain, “always holding fresh converse with” God (5.36). The presbyters, he adds, taught that in the Father's house there are many dwelling places, and that the saved advance by stages toward God (5.36; John 14:2). At the last, “the Son will yield up His work to the Father” (5.36; 1 Corinthians 15:24–28), and the creature will be “made after the image and likeness of God.”
- With the Church
- Here Irenaeus speaks with the whole Church. At the end of time “the universe itself will be renewed” (CCC 1042), and the Catechism borrows his own words to describe it: the visible universe is destined to be transformed, “so that the world itself, restored to its original state, facing no further obstacles, should be at the service of the just” (CCC 1047, quoting Against Heresies 5.32.1). The Church does not take from him the thousand years; she does take his hope for creation.
Mary, the New Eve
Irenaeus is the first great witness to a teaching that runs through the whole of Tradition. As Christ is the new Adam, Mary is the new Eve. “The knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith” (Against Heresies 3.22.4). As Eve by disobedience became the cause of death, Mary did, “by yielding obedience, become the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race” (3.22.4). And again: the human race “fell into bondage to death by means of a virgin,” and “is rescued by a virgin” (5.19.1).
Irenaeus does not comment on the woman of Revelation 12. But the Church has seen in her the woman of Genesis 3:15 whose offspring crushes the serpent, and in both, Mary: the New Eve standing against the ancient serpent. The Second Vatican Council takes up Irenaeus's teaching on Mary's obedience in its chapter on Our Lady (Lumen Gentium 56). See the study of Revelation 12 and the Fathers on Revelation 12.
Irenaeus's own cautionIrenaeus wrote with great confidence about the faith handed down from the apostles, and with real hesitation about the details of prophecy. On the name of the beast he refused to pronounce. On the thousand years he followed the elders he trusted, and the Church later judged otherwise. Reading him well means keeping both: his witness to the faith, and his humility before what had not yet been revealed. He sets no date and names no one.
For reflection
What does God mean to save in me?
Irenaeus teaches that God does not discard what he has made: not the body, not the world, not the long history of a human life. What part of myself or my past have I given up on? How might the God who raises the grain of wheat be preparing to make it new?
Sources
- St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.3.4; 3.22.4; 5.2.3; 5.19.1; 5.25; 5.28–30; 5.32–33; 5.36, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (Buffalo, 1885), New Advent
- Eusebius, Church History 5.20, Irenaeus's letter to Florinus, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1, New Advent
- Catechism of the Catholic Church 675–677, 1000, 1042–1047, vatican.va
- Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 56
- Pope Francis, decree declaring St. Irenaeus of Lyons Doctor of the Church, January 21, 2022 (Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity)
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