Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/290

 274 I R E I B E the Christian church, and on the necessity of life within the church. Christianity does not consist merely in the possession of knowledge, but in partaking in a life which is to be lived in the world and beyond it. Believers have a common religious experience, and this rests both upon facts outside -them and upon their association together within the church, while it implies a community of know ledge. The church rests upon the common facts contained., in the gospel history ; her historical succession of pastors places her in direct and outward relation to Christ, to whom her pastors ought to be inwardly related also by spiritual consanguinity. Her common knowledge the true Gnosis, and not the false of the Gnostic comes from the Holy Scriptures, which in Old Testament and New are inspired by the Holy Spirit and contain the truth of God. The church has also got, coming to her from apostolic times, and giving authoritatively the interpretation of the Scripture, certain forms of sound words or rules of faith which keep her from heresy. In speaking of God Irenasus is careful to insist that the God of the Christian church is the maker of heaven and earth, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; for it was a Gnostic inference from the supposed sinfulness of matter that the good God could not defile Himself with matter in a work of creation, and some carried their antipathy to the Old Testament so far as to make the Hebrew Jehovah a malignant deity whom Christ had come to destroy. Ireneeus is at pains to explain that Christ, the Logos of God, the Saviour, is true man and true God, in opposition to the Gnostic Docetse who taught that our Lord s body was only an assumed phantasm, and in contradiction to the Ebionites, who acknowledged Christ to be the last of the prophets, and looked upon Christianity as Judaism with a new prophet, but refused to confess him true God of true God. Irenseus also lays great stress upon the doctrine of the Trinity. His exposition is by no means either so full or so precise as that of theologians who write after the council of Nicaea, but he insists on the equality in divinity of the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The plan or method of salvation is commonly represented under the idea of a covenant, which word is used more in the sense of promise than of bargain. Sometimes the covenant is represented as twofold, that given to the favoured nation and symbolized in the Mosaic economy, and that given to those who are not the descendants of Abraham and promised in the gospel ; sometimes it is fourfold, and Iren&us speaks of a covenant given to Noah, and renewed through Abraham and Moses, and lastly in the gospel of our Lord. It is difficult to state with any precision what Irenaeus holds about the nature of the effect of Christ s work of reconcilia tion upon man. He makes great use of metaphor, and evidently had not learnt to express himself otherwise. The doctrine was still in its pictorial state in his mind. Still, traces appear of that tendency afterwards common in the Greek Church to make the incarnation rather than the crucifixion and ascension of our Lord the most important part of his work, and to look upon the effect of that work as a transfusion of the incarnation through redeemed humanity. The doctrine of the sacraments is also too metaphorically expressed to admit of precise statement ; but Irenseus seems to believe that in the sacrament of the Lord s Supper it is the heavenly body of Christ which is actually partaken of in the elements, and that such parti cipation gives immortality. Our knowledge of the writings of Irenrcus comes principally from Eusebius. That church historian tells us that Irenfeus wrote a Letter to Florinus, and a tract On the Valentinian Octave (of JEons), both against Gnostic theories ; a Letter to Pope Victor, and another to Blastus, also at Home, both on the Easter controversy ; a work, probably on apologetic, called Upos&quot;ET)vas yos . . . irepl fTn- typa/m.fj.fi/os; a Picture of Apo&tolic Preaching; and a book of aphorisms. According to Photius, Irenreus wrote also on the Substance of the World. Fragments from these lost works and perhaps from others have been recovered from Eusebius, from Maximus of Turin, from Leontius of Byzantium, from John of Damascus, and from several collections of fragments, some of which were discovered in European libraries, and others came to the British Museum among Syriac MSS. from the Nitrian convents. The only work of Irenseus which has come to us entire is the treatise Against Heresies. The original Greek text, except the greater part of the first book, which has been preserved in quota tions in Hippolytus and Epiphanius, has been lost, and the treatise has been preserved in a somewhat barbarous Latin version. The first edition was published by Erasmus in 1526. He used three MSS. which have since been lost, In 1570 Gallasius, a C alvinist pro fessor in Geneva, published a new edition. He had before him the Greek text as far as given in the quotations in Epiplianius. The next important edition was that of Feuardent in 1596, and frequently reprinted, i euardent used a Vatican MS. In 1702 Grabe pub lished at Oxford a new edition, greatly better than preceding ones. He used the Arundel codex. In 1710 the Benedictine Massuet published at Paris another edition, in which, three new MSS. were used. It long continued the standard, and forms the 5th volume of the Abbe Migne s Patrologia Grseca, Paris, 1857. A valuable edition was published in 1849-53 by Adolph Stieren, which really superseded the others. The fragments discovered among the Syriac MSS., however, are only to be found in the Cambridge edition of 1857, edited by the. Rev. Wigan Harvey. The extant writings of Irenfeus, including the fragments, have been translated and published in Clark s Ante-Kicenc Library. The facts of Irenaius s life and his dogmatic teaching and ecclesiastical position maybe learnt from the prefaces of Feuardent, Massuet, and Stieren, as well as from such church historians as Tillemont, Schrock, Neander, and Fr. Chr. Baur. There is a very valuable monograph upon Irenseus in Ersch and Gruber s Encyclopadie, II. section, vol. xxiii., written by Stieren, the editor of the German edition. This was written, how ever, before the Syriac versions were discovered. (T. M. L.) IRENE (752-803) was the wife of Leo IV., emperor of the East. A poor but beautiful Athenian orphan, she speedily added the confidence to the love of her feeble husband, and at his death in 780 was left by him sole guardian of the empire, and of their young son Con- stantine VI. Seizing the supreme power in the name of the latter, Irene s first endeavours were to revive the orthodox image-worship, which she had secretly cherished, although compelled solemnly to abjure it in the life-time of her iconoclastic father-in-law and husband. In 784 she obtained the elevation of Tarasius, a partisan of her own, to the patriarchate ; and, at first suffering the laws against image-worshippers to fall into disuse, she assembled a council of clergy at Nicsea in 787 to discuss the whole question anew. An attempt to hold the council at Constantinople in the preceding year had been frustrated by the iconoclastic zeal of the soldiers. Under the auspices of a ruler whose wishes were so clearly known, the decision of this second council of Nice could take only one direction, and the Icono clasts were hurled from their supremacy (vol. xii. p. 713). So long as Constantino remained a child, Irene was able to combine his interests and her own, and to rule wisely and faithfully ; but as the prince approached maturity he began to grow restive under her autocratic sway. An attempt to free himself by force was met and crushed by the empress, who in her first indignation demanded that the oath of fidelity should thenceforward be taken to her name alone. The discontent which this occasioned swelled in 790 into open resistance, and the soldiers, headed by the Armenian guard, formally proclaimed Constantino VI. as the sole ruler. A hollow semblance of friendship was maintained between Constantine and Irene, whose title of empress he confirmed in 792 ; but the court, the army, and the capital were divided between rival factions, and that which sup ported the mother against her son grew daily in number and strength. Constantine perceived his danger too late to avert it ; and when he saw the conspiracy ripe for action he could only flee for aid to the provinces. But even there he was surrounded by those who were already too deeply implicated in treason to refuse to complete their perfidy. Seized by his attendants on the Asiatic shore of the