anity as a
religion, that is, a theory of its purpose. The first fundamental idea,
in its all-dominating importance, was suggested to Irenaeus by his
opposition to Gnosticism. It is the conviction that the Creator of the
world and the supreme God are one and the same.[480] The other theory as
to the aim of Christianity, however, is shared by Irenaeus with Paul,
Valentinus, and Marcion. It is the conviction that Christianity is real
redemption, and that this redemption was only effected by the appearance
of Christ. The working out of these two ideas is the most important
feature in Irenaeus' book. As yet, indeed, he by no means really
succeeded in completely adapting to these two fundamental thoughts all
the materials to be taken from Holy Scripture and found in the rule of
faith; he only thought with systematic clearness within the scheme of
the Apologists. His archaic eschatological disquisitions are of a
heterogeneous nature, and a great deal of his material, as, for
instance, Pauline formulae and thoughts, he completely emptied of its
content, inasmuch as he merely contrived to turn it into a testimony of
the oneness and absolute causality of God the Creator; but the
repetition of the same main thoughts to an extent that is wearisome to
us, and the attempt to refer everything to these, unmistakably
constitute the success of his work.[481] God the Creator and the one
Jesus Christ are really the middle points of his theological system, and
in this way he tried to assign an intrinsic significance to the several
historical statements of the baptismal confession. Looked at from this
point of view, his speculations were almost of an identical nature with
the Gnostic.[482] But, while he conceives Christianity as an explanation
of the world and as redemption, his Christocentric teaching was opposed
to that of the Gnostics. Since the latter started with the conception of
an original dualism they saw in the empiric world a faulty combination
of opposing elements,[483] and therefore recognised in the redemption by
Christ the separation of what was unnaturally united. Irenaeus, on the
contrary, who began with the idea of the absolute causality of God the
Creator, saw in the empiric world faulty estrangements and separations,
and therefore viewed the redemption by Christ as the reunion of things
unnaturally separated--the "recapitulatio" ([Greek:
anakephalaiosis]).[484] This speculative thought, which involved the
highest imaginab