Tatian, Irenaeus, Cyril on the Trinity

The following excerpt is taken from Michael F. Bird’s Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World, published by Baylor University Press, Waco, TX in 2022], pp. 157-160. This is from section II. Jesus and Intermediary Figures, 4. Jesus and the “In-Betweeners”: Comparing Early Christologies and Intermediary Figures. All emphasis will be mine.

(8) Proto-orthodox theologians.

Early theologians represent another stage in the development of Logos Christology before Origen’s contribution and the debris that followed in his trail, which was only gradually resolved in the tumultuous christological debates of the fourth century.¹¹¹

Tatian’s Oratio demonstrates a strong interest in the Johannine prologue for its cosmology and Christology.

Tatian glosses John 1.1:

The Lord was alone in the beginning, and the Logos sprang forth from the Father as his “firstborn,” a procession from within the divine power (Or. 5).

Like Justin (Dial. 128.4) and Tertullian (Prax. 8), Tatian adds that the Logos emerged by “partition” (kata merismori), not by “excision” (kata apokopêri), the difference being that

Tatian explains further:

(Or. 5).

Later, Tatian says of the “one God” that “all things were made by him and without him nothing has been made,” a remark that either misreads the subject of ginomai from John 1.3, or else designates Jesus as “God” (Or. 19).

Tatian presents a scheme whereby God is the incomparable creator (Or. 4), who generates the Logos from the same divine substance to be coauthor of creation (Or. 5; 19), who is set apart from intermediaries as one who was alone with the Lord in the beginning and is also the author of the angels (Or. 5; 7; 19).

Tatian, writing during the 170s, during his pre-heterodox phase, affirms the Logos’ same divinity with the Lord and the Logos’ superiority to the angels as a restatement of the tradition that he has received.

Irenaeus was arguably the first great biblical theologian of the church, who deployed his unique synthesis of Greek philosophy with Matthean, Pauline, and especially Johannine thought to confront the Marcionite and Gnostic heresies of his own day.

It is true to say that in Irenaeus “Athens and Jerusalem meet at Patmos.”¹¹²

Given the largely Johannine texture of his discourse,¹¹³ it is no surprise that more than one-third of Irenaeus’ references to John come from the Johannine prologue and that the Logos expectantly looms large.¹¹⁴

Irenaeus attributes preexistence to the Logos in Israel’s sacred history, in either angelic or typological form, as well as in the prophecies of his incarnation (Haer. 3.11.8; 3.21.1; 4.20.5; 4.22.1-23.2; Epid. 5; 10; 30-31; 43-66).

He rejects that Christ was a mere man born of normal procreation (Haer. 1.25.1; 1.26.1). Nor did he pass through Mary like water passing through a pipe without acquiring her humanity (3.11.3; 3.22.2).

Irenaeus repeats John 1.14 that the Logos “became flesh” (Haer. 3.11.3; 3.16.2; 3.19.1; 4.20.2; Dem. 31; 37; 39; 84; 94). The one who is Word of God, Son of God, and Lord became the Son of Man as the son of Mary, who was tested as a man and glorified as the Word (Haer. 3.19.3).

In his human life he recapitulates Adam, drawing humanity from Mary, so that he could draw humanity towards God (Haer. 3.21.9:4.6.2).

Irenaeus asserts that “God makes, [while] man is made” (Haer. 4.11.1), and he places the Word on the God-side of the creator-creature distinction. He cites John 1.3 (and Ps 33.2) to the effect that God creates nothing without the Word and the Spirit.

No other angel or power shared in this Creative and governing work.

The Word and Wisdom are God’s co-eternal collaborators in creation (Haer. 1.22.1; 3.11.1-2; 3.21.10; 4.7.4; 4.20.1-5; 4.24.1; 5.18.2-3; Epid. 5; 43).

Irenaeus refers to Christ’s “primal, powerful and glorious generation from the Father” (Haer. 3.11.8), the “pure generation of the Word of God … who became man” (Haer. 3.19.1).

Elsewhere, citing John 1.18, he declares that the Word made the invisible and inexpressible Father known to ail since the Son is the revealer of the Father from the beginning (Haer. 3.11.6; 4.20.6-7).

The Logos is united with God and with creation and so unites God with creation. To begin with, Irenaeus’ Son and Father share a oneness in being and redemption:

(Epid. 47).

The Logos is united with the Father and with the man Christ Jesus as “true God and true man.” This entails a unity in deity, dispensation, and deliverance with “one God, the Father, and one Word, and one Son, and one Spirit, and one salvation to ail who believe in him” (Haer. 4.6.7).

The operating premise is that Christ, the Son of God before ail the world, is with the Father and one with the Father, and close enough to commune with humanity (Epid. 52-53). This establishes a “communion of God and man” as “the Word became flesh, that by means of the flesh which sin had mastered and seized and dominated” (Epid. 31).

As a result, by becoming incarnate, the Word united “imperishability and immortality” with humanity so that humanity might become imperishable and immortal (Haer. 3.19.1). The economic unity of the Word’s incarnation, revelation, and salvation is found in Irenaeus’ aphorism that combines Johannine and Matthean language:

(Haer. 4.20.7).

In distinction to the apologists, Irenaeus rejected the Mind-Word analogy (1) because it was deployed in Gnostic schemes to multiple entities, (2) because of divine simplicity whereby God is “all Mind and ail Logos,” (3) because God’s generation of his Logos is different to the human mind’s generation of words (appealing to Isa 53.8), and (4) because the result would be a type of subordination and inferiority on the part of the Logos to God himself, which is unacceptable since the Logos is God (Haer. 2.13.2-8; 2.28.4-5).

In addition, Irenaeus identified the Son as God’s Word and the Spirit as God’s Wisdom, and likened them with the angelic orders of Cherubim and Seraphim (Epid. 10).

This falls into line with wider trends of associating John’s Logos with angelic characteristics.

In the end, Irenaeus is easily the most comprehensive and systematic exegete of the Johannine Gospel prior to Origen, even without writing a commentary on the Gospel.¹¹⁵

For Irenaeus, a truly divine Christology is paramount, as it is the point at which protology, eschatology, theology, soteriology, and cosmology ail intersect. How one interprets John 1.3,14 proves to be a shibboleth for apostolic Christianity as opposed to its allegedly unwholesome deviations.¹¹⁶

That is because Irenaeus takes John 1.1-3, 14, 18 to be definitive proof for Gods unity with the world, that the Logos is united with the Father, the Logos made the world, and the Logos was himself made flesh in order to recapitulate and sum up ail things in himself for a salvation that makes mortals partaker.

Clement of Alexandria tethers his theology of the incarnation to the Logos: “This Logos, who alone is both God and man, the cause of all our good, appeared but lately in his own person to men” (Protr. 7).

He frequently refers to “the divine Logos” (ho theios logos) and equates him with God’s divinity in an absolute sense:

(Protr. 110).

Clement thus argues for the unity of the preexistent Logos with the man Christ Jesus and the ontological unity of the incarnate Logos with the divine being of the Father.¹¹⁷

Further Reading

TRINITY IN IRENAEUS & TERTULLIAN

TATIAN ON THE HOLY TRINITY

Philo’s and John’s Logos

Athenagoras, Theophilus, Diognetus on the Trinity

JUSTIN MARTYR’S CHRISTOLOGY REVISITED

MORE ON JUSTIN MARTYR’S CHRISTOLOGY

AN ORTHODOX’S MISREADING OF JUSTIN

Justin Martyr’s Witness to Christ’s essential and eternal Deity

The Uncreated Word Becomes A Son

Were the Early Church Fathers Trinitarians?

WERE EARLY CHRISTIANS TRINITARIANS?