How is the human person, created after the image of God, joined to the life of Father, Son and Spirit? Here Irenaeus’ theology of image comes to deal with the more precise defi nitions of anthropological substance. ‘What is man?’ is answered in reference to the dust of which he is fashioned, the image of Christ into which this dust is formed, and the vivifi cation of the Spirit offered to this image-bearing dust, which leads the human person, through divinizing likeness to the Son, to an obedient, fi lial relationship with the Father.
The fabric of humanity is the earthen, material creation joined to the life of the Father by his two hands. This Irenaeus establishes through a discussion on the various constituent ‘parts’ of the human formation: body, soul and spirit. This emphasis on composite being is built on the framework we have explored above: the paradigm of the incarnate Son, Word-made-fl esh, indicates (especially in his baptism) a distinction-yet-connection of the material and the spiritual in man. The present section will explore his understanding of what precisely constitutes each of these three ‘parts’ of man; and by identifying the soul in particular as means of reception of the Spirit of the Father, will lead into Irenaeus’ second great anthro- pological supposition, that the fashioned creature is necessarily economic, and in its economy of growth further reveals the unchanging attributes of the God into whose image it grows.
The fi rst two component parts – body and soul – Irenaeus identifi es in a discus- sion on their relationship in the experience of human life, contained in a passage of no little oddity of language:
The body is not stronger than the soul, since indeed the former is inspired, vivifi ed, increased and held together by the latter; but the soul possesses and rules over the body. It is retarded in its velocity in exactly the proportion that the body shares in its motion, but it never loses the knowledge which is its own. For the body should be compared to an instrument, while the soul possesses the reason of an artist.54
Irenaeus here speaks of the human person as a ‘body’, made of the earth and in some sense an ‘instrument [. . .] inspired, vivifi ed, increased and held together’ by
the soul. His language is unique, especially in his imagery of the ‘velocity’ of the soul as hampered by the physical constraints of the body – a spatial conception that reaches its pinnacle in his assertion that the soul has a ‘shape’, the same as that of the body which it animates.55 His basic point, however, is simply to cate-
gorize the assertions of scripture: that God fashioned man from the dust, and breathed into his face the ‘breath of life’ (cf. Genesis 2.7). These claims demand recognition on the one hand of the material element in the human person; and on the other the ‘spiritual’ or ‘soulful’, though there is little expansion in the scrip- tural narrative as to what this latter might be in a concrete sense. Irenaeus ponders this in some detail, spurred on by his refl ections on resurrection. If, as the scrip- tures proclaim, the human formation will at the end be raised from the dead, even as Christ was raised from the tomb, what does the experienced (in the life of Christ) and awaited (applicable to all others) resurrection have to tell us of the constitutive relationship of the ‘parts’ of the human creature? Those against whom Irenaeus’ polemic is aimed argued that that the resurrection must be ‘spiritual’ rather than physical, for the material is the product of corruption and bound to corruption. Predictably, Irenaeus reads the situation differently.
What, then, are mortal bodies? Can they be souls? But souls are incorporeal when compared to mortal bodies, for God ‘breathed into the face of man the breath of life, and man became a living soul (animam viventem)’. Now the breath of life is an incorporeal thing; but certainly they cannot maintain that the very breath of life is mortal. [. . .] What, therefore, is there left to which we may apply the term ‘mortal body’, unless it be the thing that was moulded, that is, the fl esh, of which it is also said that God will vivify it?56
Here Irenaeus identifi es the soul with the ‘breath of life’ recounted in Genesis 2.7, the force by which the dust becomes a living being. It is a gift directly from God, an actualizing (Irenaeus’ preferred term is ‘vivifying’) power, refl ecting or trans- mitting his own divine attributes, for it is incorporeal and immortal, each of which are attributes of God alone. This soul, through union with the body, brings the ‘thing moulded’ – the fl esh wrought of the dust – from inanimacy to life. Irenaeus’ intention is to show that the soul, thus defi ned as properly incorporeal and immor- tal, cannot be the object of the resurrection ‘from the dead’, given that death is not an event applicable to the immortal force in man. That which dies, which consequently can be brought back to life, must be the body. Yet the two – body and soul – are one in the actualization of human personal reality. Irenaeus’ peculiar language of the soul’s ‘shape’, of its relation in ‘velocity’ to the body, is meant above all to demonstrate the intimacy of their union. In this light, his conception
55 ‘Souls themselves possess the fi gure of the body in which they dwell, for they have been adapted to the vessel in which they exist’, Ref. 2.19.6.
is not in fact as peculiar as it may at fi rst seem: the same thing is said, and for the same reasons, by Theophilus before him and Tertullian after.57
Framed in this way, one is left wondering whether the soul, as the breath of life, is thus itself an eternal principle of human existence. In other words, does the proclamation that the soul is ‘immortal’, and thus not the proper object of resur- rection, imply that the human creature is ‘naturally immortal’ at the level of its ensoulled existence? Our passage from Refutation 5 might tend towards such a conclusion; but already Irenaeus’ comments on the soul’s immortality, paired with his proclamation earlier in the text that God is ‘alone immortal, alone eternal’, suggest otherwise. He in fact qualifi es his remarks in an important way:
As the body animated by the soul is certainly not itself the soul, but has fellowship with the soul as long as God desires, so also the soul herself is not life, but partakes in the life bestowed on her by God. Wherefore also the pro- phetic word declares of the fi rst-formed, ‘He became a living soul’, teaching us that by participation in life the soul became alive. Thus the soul and the life which it possesses must be understood as separate existences.58
The soul which gives life to the body, and the life which the soul thus transmits, are not one and the same. Ultimately, the ‘life’ which the soul grants the human frame is the life of God, and more clearly the life (or Life) that is the Spirit of God the Father.59 Through means of the soul, which is a constitutive yet immaterial
component of humanity’s being, the person receives the life of the Holy Spirit, given in token as the ‘breath of life’ fi rst granted in Eden, yet fully borne into human experience only when man is united to the divine life through the incarna- tion. Through this means, the Son and the Spirit are united in their full glory to the handiwork fashioned by the former and sanctifi ed by the latter. As such, to frame this point in the words of Behr, ‘the Spirit is essential to Irenaeus’s understanding of man, yet is not a “part” of his constitution [. . .] The Spirit itself is not a man, nor even a part of a man, but is itself given to man in such a manner that it can be legitimately described as his Spirit’.60 Categories of ‘bi-partite’ and ‘tri-partite’,
which scholars of theological anthropology often assign to a given author’s per- ception of the human creature, are challenged by Irenaeus’ reading. The human person is two ‘parts’ in composition (body and soul), yet three in actualization (body, soul and Spirit). Already in its formation it is both material and immaterial,
57 See Theophilus, Ad Autolycum 1.5; Tertullian DA 5–9, esp. 7.1, 9.4. So too earlier in Justin
Martyr, though he suggests only that souls retain sensation after death (cf. 1 Apol. 18, 20). Cf. E. Osborn, The Emergence of Christian Theology (Cambridge: University Press, 1993) 235. We shall have more to say on this in subsequent chapters.
58 Ref. 2.34.4. In this Irenaeus almost exactly mirrors Justin’s comments at Dial. 5. 59 See Ref. 5.1.3.
but this composite being of body and soul has life – true and full life – only when these exist in communion with the vivifying Spirit of the Father.
That the soul is not life, and certainly not itself eternal life, but that which transmits God’s life to the person, defi nes human existence from the outset as a dynamic of relationship between the creature and its creator. Humanity ‘lives’ only in communion with its creator, enabled most fully by the incarnate Christ and perfected through the accustomization of the Spirit in whose life it takes part. This relationship of human and divine, of man and God, is dynamic not only in reference to the need for relational communion between them; it is so too in the necessary implication of maturation and development – themes for which Ire- naeus is rightly well known, though with regard to which he is often not well understood. Irenaeus’ discussion at Ref. 4.38.1–3, where he strikes off by asking ‘Could not God have created man perfect from the beginning?’ and concludes by noting that though God can do anything, humanity could not bear the full glory of the divine life until such time as it had matured in Christ, has its relevance pre- cisely here. The formation of the human person is that of a material, fl eshly body in possession of an immaterial soul, which bears in its frame the life of God. This confession defi nes the reality of human existence as a dynamic of growth into an ever fuller reception of this divine life. The human person as created in the image of God is, at the moment of its formation in Eden, one that awaits the experience of being ‘profoundly enriched and transfi gured’61 through the incarnation of the
Son – a transfi guration expressed most potently in human history through that very incarnation, but which in its apprehension by man awaits the eschatological hope promised in the Spirit.