Bishop of Lyon in the late second century, and the exception in the lineage. He read the serpent as the prime mover, the beguiled as the one God pitied, and the barring of the tree of life as mercy. In the chapter before, he made Eve the cause of death. Both readings are his, and the first one was available to every author who came after him.
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Irenaeus was bishop of Lyon and wrote Against Heresies around 180, a generation before Tertullian wrote to the women of Carthage. It is read here in the translation of Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 1, 1885.
He read the pair in the garden as young: having been created a short time previously, they had no understanding of the procreation of children, and it was necessary that they should first come to adult age. Not a perfect creature fallen from completion, but two who had not yet grown.
The lineage the Codex reads against has a dissenter in it, and he wrote first.
[See TERTULLIAN · JEROME]
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HE PUT NO QUESTION TO THE SERPENT
Reading the trial, Irenaeus noticed what the tradition after him stopped seeing. God questions the man and the woman, and not the serpent: He put no question to the serpent; for He knew that he had been the prime mover in the guilty deed.
And he drew the conclusion: God detested him who had led man astray, but by degrees, and little by little, He showed compassion to him who had been beguiled. He named the operator as the prime mover and the beguiled as the one shown compassion, which is the reading Eve's own answer gives, and which the conversion after him reversed.
[See BEGUILING · THE NACHASH · EVE]
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THE BARRING WAS PITY
The way to the tree of life was kept, after the eating, by cherubim and a flaming sword. Irenaeus refused the reading that God kept it out of envy. God removed him far from the tree of life, not because He envied him the tree of life, as some venture to assert, but because He pitied him, and did not desire that he should continue a sinner for ever.
And he read death as a bound set on that condition: God set a bound to his state of sin, by interposing death, and thus causing sin to cease. The death he describes is the one that ends the dying, not the dying itself, and it agrees with what the Codex reads in mot tamut: the arrest that runs while the process goes on, and the required death that brings it to an end.
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AND HE STILL MADE HER THE CAUSE
The same author, one chapter earlier, set Eve against Mary. Eve, having become disobedient, was made the cause of death, both to herself and to the entire human race; Mary, by yielding obedience, became the cause of salvation. The knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary.
That is the scale again: obedience on one pan, disobedience on the other, a woman on each, and the history of the world weighed between them. He dissented on the operator and on the barring, and joined the tradition on her as the cause, and the half he joined is the half the tradition kept.
[See OBEDIENCE · THE SCALE · THE VIRGIN]
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WHY HE BELONGS IN THE RECORD
The conversion of a forecast into a sentence, a sentence into a guilt, and a guilt into a nature was not the only reading open to the men who performed it. Irenaeus had read the trial as naming the serpent, the beguiled as pitied, and death as mercy, a generation before Tertullian wrote You are the devil's gateway.
So the conversion was a choice made against a reading already on the shelf, and a lineage with a dissenter in it is harder to dismiss as the only way the text could be read.
[See NOW IT'S JUST YOUR NATURE · DARVO · THE CONVERSION]
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THE OBJECTION THAT HAS TO BE MET
Irenaeus is the father of the Eve and Mary typology, and that typology did as much as anything to make obedience the measure of a woman. Recruiting him as a dissenter selects the sentences that suit and leaves out the ones that built the very structure being diagnosed.
The entry carries both, and does not recruit him. It does not say he was right, or that he was on her side. It says the record holds a reader, early, who saw the serpent as the prime mover and the barring as pity, and who in the next breath made her the cause. That is the point: the operator's guilt was visible to the tradition at its start, and was set down beside her guilt rather than in place of it, and only one of the two was carried forward.
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He saw that God asked the serpent nothing, because the serpent's part was known.
He also wrote that she had bound the knot. The tradition kept the knot.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
