On "Against Heresies" by Irenaeus ***

I listened to this over the course of a few months on various commutes. Actually, I would have finished listening to this weeks ago had it not been that Covid 19 disrupted my usual daily commute. Thus, listening was reduced to the rare circumstances when I was out and about running errands.

As a listening experience, this book stands on a par with most other Librivox recordings--namely, it was at times really dull, such that my mind often wandered. The readers themselves differed from chapter to chapter, with some reading better than others, though there were rarely readers whose accents left me struggling to understand. Still, because chunks of the book were on topics I was interested in, I was at times drawn in, despite the quality of the recordings--or the writing.

The translators include a long introduction in which they write about the challenges of translating--indeed, of even reading--Irenaeus. The man was not a talented writer and, in fact, perhaps did not have a full grasp on the language he was using. This makes for much much difficulty of understanding, even before you get to the process of translating the material.

Of the five books that make up Against Heresies, I was most interested in the first two. Here, Irenaeus lays out the various heresies, most especially gnostic ideas, for readers. It was nice to hear that much of what I'd read third-hand in various modern discussions of Valentinians, Balsides, and so on has been accurately portrayed based on Irenaeus's writings. That is, when people have summed up what these folks believed, using Irenaeus as their source, they've largely remained true to what Irenaeus wrote, rather than presenting some skewed picture that is not in the primary text.

What becomes evident is how reliant most thinkers Irenaeus discusses were on polytheistic ideas and religions, positing not the one God, creator of all, and his son, but rather a pleroma, or family of gods--or emanations from the supreme God--from which Yahweh and Jesus eventually derive. There's a certain degree of similarity among most of the heresies that Irenaeus writes about, though he does cover a few more Jewish-centric ones.

The later books prove less interesting, because Irenaeus sets out not just to describe the heresies but to do, as his title suggests: to write "against heresies." Thus, he spends most of the later portions of this book arguing that the ideas of such thinkers make no sense either logically nor biblically. The arguments here are usually fairly obvious, and given Irenaeus's penchant for lousy prose are not very engaging. The rare times my attention popped up in the later sections were when he wrote of various doctrinal ideas, such as the resurrection, has they provide a window into the standard thinking of many Christians in the late second century, before some later ideas, like going to heaven after death, took as firm a hold. On Irenaeus's views of the afterlife, I need to do a second closer reading, as they seem in places contradictory.

The Librivox audio version can be found here.