“The Lord Spat on the Ground and Made Clay”
Below is my presentation from the 2022 North American Patristics Society’s Annual Meeting, titled, “‘The Lord Spat on the Ground and Made Clay’: Irenaeus’s Reading of John 9 and the Demonstration of Divine Identity.” I wanted to share it here for those who were unable to attend the gathering last year. You may access a PDF of the draft on my Academia site.
Irenaeus’s use of John 9 against the background of prophetic texts was one my favorite moments of Against Heresies 5 when I revisited it at the end of 2021. I hope it benefits you to have reflected upon it.
Introduction and Thesis
Having sufficiently exposed the heretics and articulated the apostolic preaching, Irenaeus begins the concluding book of Against Heresies by reiterating the request of the friend who occasions his writing: “I will endeavor in this fifth book . . . to show proofs from the rest of the Lord’s doctrine and the apostolic epistles, complying with your demand, as you requested of me.”[1] Based on the preface to book five, the reader anticipates a series of apologetic exegetical procedures to follow; however, the book presents, instead, an anthropological interpretation of the scriptures that serve Irenaeus’s broader polemical purposes of refutation and overthrowal. Nearly as quickly as Irenaeus asserts his polemical intent of exhibiting proofs, he frames the Christian’s knowledge of God within the language of human sense-perception in AH 5.1.1: “We could have learned in no other way than by seeing our Teacher and hearing His voice with our own ears.” Indeed, one very well could argue that a central concern—perhaps, even, the central concern—of Irenaeus in book five of Against Heresies is not merely to show how the true Christian’s doctrine of God proceeds from that kerygmatic proclamation passed down by the apostles; it is, in addition, a display of those ways the Christian God uses what he has created to accomplish his purposes and reveal his divine identity. To put it more pointedly, in book five of Against Heresies, Irenaeus sets out to depict a God who uses both the act of making and the object which has been made to achieve divine ends.
This focal point becomes clearer in Against Heresies 5.15–16, wherein Irenaeus offers a short commentary on John’s account of the man born blind’s healing and uses it to deconstruct a tenet of Valentinian teaching. In this paper, I argue that Irenaeus cites John’s account in order to demonstrate the divine identity of Jesus Christ, associating him with the God of Israel who creates and resurrects.[2] By showing that Jesus manifests himself to be the Creator, Irenaeus offers two further conclusions: that Valentinian anthropology is incorrect and that humanity has been rescued through the therapeutic work of the incarnate Word. In structuring his argument this way, Irenaeus makes a larger claim that locates the human being’s creation as the instance for God’s redemptive work: because the divine Son becomes a visible human being to assimilate humankind to the invisible Father, anthropology and soteriology necessarily maintain a causal theological relationship.[3] I will explore this relationship between Irenaeus’s anthropology and soteriology in Against Heresies 5 by means of three primary points of departure. I will begin with an analysis of how Irenaeus introduces John’s account through the lens of the prophetic scriptures of Isaiah and Ezekiel. After providing this context, I will explore Irenaeus’s reading of John 9 on both literal and spiritual levels. To conclude, I will investigate the salvific implications for humankind that Irenaeus sees wrapped up in Jesus’s divine identity. Throughout the paper, I will contextualize Irenaeus’s work against the backdrop of his Gnostic adversaries, seeking to maintain the polemical undertones permeating Against Heresies as Irenaeus deconstructs the Valentinian creation myth.
Prophetic Scriptures and Divine Identity
Against Heresies 5.15 marks a turning point in the argument of book five.[4] Book five’s first major section (5.1–5.14) is concerned with the inability of flesh and blood to inherit the kingdom of God, showing the necessity of Christ taking on flesh and the ways human flesh renders the human being inable to understand and believe the gospel apart from the purifying work of the Son. Irenaeus, anticipating his opponents, recognizes the tension this introduces: if the scriptures claim that flesh and blood cannot inherit the earth, how may we understand those prophecies found in Isaiah and Ezekiel which show that the God of Israel and Creator of all “did promise a second birth after [man’s] dissolution into earth?”[5] To phrase the problem more pointedly, Christian prophecy requires human flesh and blood to inherit the earth, and this is a point Irenaeus’s opponents presume is forbidden by Paul’s delimiting in 1 Corinthians 15:50. In response, Irenaeus draws upon these prophetic scriptures to show how they establish the divine identity of the Christian God as creator of all. This intent may be deduced from the end of AH 5.15.1, which serves as something of a thesis statement wherein Irenaeus reflects on these prophetic texts:
As we at once perceive that the Creator is in this passage represented as vivifying our dead bodies, and promising resurrection to them, and resuscitation from their sepulchers and tombs, conferring upon them immortality also, He is shown to be the only God who accomplishes these things, and as Himself the good Father, benevolently conferring life upon those who have not life from themselves.
Irenaeus’s statement includes an observation (that the Creator is understood as the vivifier, resurrector, and resuscitator) and two consequences that follow his observation (he is the only God who accomplishes these things, and he expresses the benevolent act of bringing life to the lifeless). Following Irenaeus’s logic, then, God’s work as Creator is characterized in the scriptures by his operation as vivifier, resurrector, and resuscitator, which promises immortality to those whom he raises up.
The centerpiece text of Irenaeus’s discussion is Ezekiel 37. Ezekiel is famously given a vision of dry bones that grow enfleshed as he prophesies in obedience to God. Despite their flesh and sinews and skins, they remain without breath until Ezekiel declares the prophesy of the Lord: “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live” (Ezek. 37:1–14). The promise of life by means of Spirit occurs three times in the Hebrew text (37:5, 37:6, and 37:14) and two times in the LXX, which is quoted here by Irenaeus (37:6 and 37:14).[6] In these texts, Irenaeus understands the words of the prophet depict God granting his very own Spirit to the lifeless and embodied human being.[7] In both instances, this pattern of giving is followed by the command that the human being “shall live” as God’s Spirit enters the vivified clay: “καὶ ζήσεσθε.”[8] Thus, for Irenaeus, God’s creative act is defined by his taking clay, molding it into flesh, and giving his Spirit to this vivified clay. It is only through this process that the lifeless is granted life and may be called “created.”[9] Drawing upon the works depicted in prophetic scripture, Irenaeus uses these creative works of God to establish a central identifier of God: he is Creator who will one day resurrect and resuscitate his creation. This multi-faceted process of vivification, resurrection, and resuscitation is understood to be one singular expression of God’s goodness and the very definition of what it means to create. To phrase it another way, God’s creative capacity—and, thus, his divine identity—is revealed by the prophets through God’s ability to vivify clay and give Spirit to it.[10]
Recounting the Man Born Blind
Before moving to how Irenaeus reads John 9, we would be well-served to recognize why Irenaeus has chosen to bring this story into conversation with Ezekiel: what hath Ezekiel to do with John? Perhaps most immediately insightful for interpreting Irenaeus’s insertion of the story from John’s Gospel is a citation from AH 2.17, where Irenaeus retells a particular Gnostic system’s interpretation of John’s account:
For that perfect Nous, previously begotten by the perfect Bythus, was not capable of rendering that production which issued from him perfect but utterly blind to the knowledge and greatness of the Father. They also maintain that the Savior exhibited an emblem of this mystery in the case of that man who was blind from his birth, since the Aeon was in this manner produced by Monogenes blind, that is, in ignorance, thus falsely ascribing ignorance and blindness to the Word of God, who, according to their own theory, holds the second production from the Propator. Admirable sophists, and explorers of the sublimities of the unknown Father, and rehearsers of those super-celestial mysteries "which the angels desire to look into!”—that they may learn that from the Nous of that Father who is above all, the Word was produced blind, that is, ignorant of the Father who produced him![11]
Relying on Irenaeus’s representation of the Valentinians’ reading of John 9, they allegedly use this story to represent their broader creation myth. Though it is not identical to their creation narrative, it runs parallel via allegorical reading, offering an embodied account of ineffable mysteries: the Aeon produced as blind from the Monogenes, and ignorant of the Father, is like the man born blind who was healed by the Savior. From this allegorical reading, however, Irenaeus sees a second point which serves his larger polemical purpose and clues the reader in on why he has included this text in his discussion of divine identity: these allegorical readings of John minimize the Savior’s identification with the God who creates, attributing blindness to the Word. As Irenaeus understands the Valentinians’ reading of John, the story of the man born blind is an instance in which Jesus reveals this hidden mystery. Whereas the Valentinians see the healing episode recorded in John’s Gospel as a grounds upon which to distinguish the Word from the Creator, Irenaeus sees the healing episode as a demonstration of the Savior’s association with the Creator.[12] In considering this, then, it makes sense that Irenaeus would include John 9, as it fits into the overarching theme he has written about throughout Against Heresies 5.15: the marks of divine identity over against the more gnostic understandings of God that Irenaeus has addressed thus far. In short, Irenaeus turns to John 9 so he may continue grounding God’s divine identity in the creative enterprise, reappropriating the prophets’ words to reflect upon the identity of Christ.
Having looked at Irenaeus’s initial summary of the Valentinians in AH 2, and understanding why he has chosen to return to the text, it is to AH 5 that we now return to see how Irenaeus himself interprets this story. There are two primary levels of Irenaeus’s interpretation of John 9 to which I would like to draw attention. The first is Irenaeus’s reiteration of what takes place at the blind man’s healing, simply referred to as the “literal” reading of the text. The second level is the “spiritual” reading of the text, which Irenaeus will later use to advance his argument against the Valentinians. The literal reading is seen in AH 5.15.2:
And the Lord spat on the ground and made clay, and he spread it upon the eyes—displaying how the original creation took place—and revealed the hand of God to those capable of understanding how man was created out of dust. For that which the architect, the Word, let fall aside in the womb, he supplied outwardly, “that the works of God may be displayed in him” and so we would no longer seek another hand by which man was fashioned, nor another Father—knowing that this hand of God that formed us in the beginning and forms us in the womb has in the last time sought us, the lost, taking care of his own and taking upon his shoulders the lost sheep, restoring them to the fold of life with joy.
In addition to utilizing the imagery of vivified clay throughout the literal recollection of the story, Irenaeus’s commentary highlights that the blind man’s eyes had fallen aside in the womb and that the work of healing was performed in public. To tease these out even further, Irenaeus gives the novel contention that the blind man’s vision was neither diminished nor impaired, as many commentators have taken “blindness” to mean; instead, he insinuates the man’s eyes were non-existent and that Jesus’s healing returns their very “ὑπόστάσίν” to them.[13] And, because Jesus created the eyes from clay in public, the healing story could appropriately be read in accordance with two purposes: “that the works of God may be displayed,” as explained by Jesus in John 9:3, and that onlookers of this episode would be led back to the Father by the hand that fashioned them.
Even at the literal level, Irenaeus’s interpretation of John 9 is marked by a distinct involvement of the divine creative agent in the human world—it is, after all, the forming of clay via the earth’s dust and human spittle that is supposed to expose how the original formation of man took place.[14] To put this idea back in the scope of the previously-discussed prophetic texts, inasmuch as the man Jesus is capable of healing a blind man’s infirmities by means of spat clay, Christ’s identity may be associated with the Creator because the vivification of clay is the mark of divine creative abilities. In healing the man born blind, then, the Lord is not allegorically exhibiting an emblem of a Pleromic mystery, as Irenaeus suggests the Valentinians teach in AH 2. Instead, Jesus proves himself to be the Creator by means of public healing. To put it succinctly, because the Creator’s vivification of clay lies at the heart of divine action, Christ’s ability to create the blind man’s eyes from the earth without refusal from the body grounds Christ’s identity as Creator and dismantles Valentinian doctrines.
Understanding Irenaeus’s rhetoric in this way is supported by his insistence against the Valentinians when they say “man is not fashioned from the earth but from a flowing and confused material”—and it is specifically by means of this point that we may understand the “spiritual” level of Irenaeus’s reading. Though Irenaeus does not use an explicit allegorical framework as used by other allegorical exegetes of his milieu, he offers instead what we may call a “spiritual” reading of the John 9 text to rival Valentinian allegorical readings. These polemical elements may be seen most clearly in the ways Irenaeus draws upon the idea of “sameness” and the spiritual reciprocity with which he reads the story over against the Valentinians.
The concept of sameness is a significant one throughout AH 5.15, turning into a more central tenet as he begins to address Valentinian concerns. Irenaeus observes that “it were incompatible that the eyes should indeed be formed from one source and the rest of the body from another; as neither would it be compatible that one fashioned the body and another the eyes.”[15] If, indeed, the healing of the man born blind entailed returning the eyes’ ὑπόστάσίν to them, then the fact that the body did not reject them evidences their shared substance with the rest of the body. It is with M. C. Steenberg that I see this point as “a deliberate counter to the proliferation of anti-materialistic, dualistic views in the groups against which Irenaeus writes.”[16] Under a Valentinian reading, the healing of the blind man as recorded by John necessarily introduces duplicity into the formation of the human body if their origins lie in a fluid substance but their eyes are formed by clay. If the John narrative is significant for any purpose, it must be significant in highlighting the sameness of the Creator’s formative substance wielded in the beginning and that substance used by Jesus in forming the blind man’s eyes.
This theme of sameness is maintained throughout Irenaeus’s exhibition of spiritual reciprocity in AH 5.15.4. There are four instances of what I’ve deemed “spiritual reciprocity,” through which Irenaeus pulls the audience’s focus from the former times of creation and healing into the last days of God’s self-revelation: (1) that the use of clay evidences or calls back to the original fashioning of humankind, (2) that Christ reveals himself as the hand of the original Creation through forming visual organs for the man born blind, (3) that God visited Adam in his hiding and has, in the same way, searches out those who are lost, and (4) that God spoke to Adam at eventide and speaks in these last times with the same voice to us. In each, Irenaeus reappropriates his literal readings of the creation narrative and the Johannine healing narrative to spiritual matters, shifting from therapy of the body to therapy of the soul: it is by the same hand that forms us from the earth that was made manifest in Jesus’s healing of the blind man (AH 5.15.2–3), and this sameness matters so that Jesus may spiritually heal us from the same earth and call out to us from the same voice with which he called to Adam (AH 5.15.4).
Conclusion
Upon a close reading of Against Heresies 5.15, Irenaeus’s interpretation of the Gospel of John embodies those defining characteristic of Irenaean exegesis: the unification of Christian Scriptures through calculated logic and rhetorical excellence in a polemical mode. Contra his Valentinian counterparts, Irenaeus highlights the ways in which the Creator weds his divine identity to his creative agency through prophetic voices and shows how the works of the incarnate Word heal both human blindness and human lostness. While this paper focuses on Irenaeus’s reading of John 9 specifically, it is worth noting that Irenaeus does not stop here: he goes on to clarify that it is not by these things alone that the Lord has manifested himself. Instead, the works of the incarnate Word culminates not in those of therapy but the those of his passion, thereby “rectifying that disobedience which had occurred by reason of a tree, through that obedience which was upon the tree.”[17] The human being may only be truly created through the vivification of clay and the gift of God’s Spirit, and this could only happen once for all if the Son took on the form of fashioned man and surrendered his spirit—and, in having done so, enabling all the saints to proclaim alongside Irenaeus today, “the work of God is the fashioning of man.” In this context, Irenaeus’s reading of John 9 serves as a microcosm of God’s economy: creation through vivification and Spirit that leads to salvation, undoes the curse, and restores the human being to their true creation.
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[1] Against Heresies 5.Pr.1.
[2] In using “divine identity” in this way, I do not intend to evoke more specific theological categories of “identity” (like those put forward by Richard Bauckham and other New Testament scholars). Rather, “identity” as used in this paper is nothing more than the criteria detailed by the response to, “Who is Jesus?” For an example of this usage, Christopher Beeley is helpful on this point: “To declare Christ’s divine identity, together with that of God the Father and the Holy Spirit, is the primary meaning of ‘theology’ in Greek patristic writing.” See Christopher A. Beeley, “Christ and Human Flourishing in Patristic Theology,” Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 25, no. 2 (May 2016): 126–53.
[3] AH 5.16.2.
[4] Dividing book five at this point agrees with Behr, Moringiello, and Rosseau. Though my framework has slight divergences from Behr’s vocabulary, the overall content could be summarized similarly to his articulation of the work: one God, one Christ, one economy. For more discussion on the book’s structure, see John Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013), 98–103, particularly 100n40; see also Appendix, “Outline of Adversus Haereses” in Scott D. Moringiello, The Rhetoric of Faith: Irenaeus and the Structure of the Adversus Haereses (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019).
[5] AH 5.15.1.
[6] The nature and reasons for discrepancies within the LXX text and other manuscripts are beyond the scope of the present paper (but an interesting and worthy study nonetheless!).
[7] This promise reads literally in Irenaeus’s quotation “my Spirit” (Πνεῦμά μου).
[8] Even granting an exception for the discrepancy of Ezekiel 37:5 in the LXX, the Spirit is still connected with life by the use of ζωής; thus, the link between the two concepts—the giving of Spirit and the conferring of life—remains no matter how one reads the text.
[9] cf. Psalm 140: 29–30.
[10] This definition of what it means to create may also seen in Irenaeus’s Demonstration 11.
[11] AH 2.17.9.
[12] As Stephen Presley highlights in his monograph on Irenaeus and creation, the healing of the blind man “reveals Christ as the Word of God who mediates the creative purposes of God the Creator and Father.” See Stephen O. Presley, The Intertextual Reception of Genesis 1-3 in Irenaeus of Lyons, The Bible in Ancient Christianity, volume 8 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015), 198.
[13] AH 5.12.5. This line of reading is reflected by later commentators like Ephrem and Chrysostom.
[14] Relatedly, Daniel Frayer-Griggs suggests John and the authors of various Dead Sea Scrolls (and, thus, Irenaeus) “may have been drawing on a shared tradition that understood both elements [viz. spittle and clay] as the materials of creation.” See Daniel Frayer-Griggs, “Spittle, Clay, and Creation in John 9:6 and Some Dead Sea Scrolls,” in JBL 132, no. 2 (2013), 660.
[15] AH 5.15.4.
[16] M. C. Steenberg, Irenaeus on Creation: The Cosmic Christ and the Saga of Redemption, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, v. 91 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2008), 118.
[17] AH 5.16.3.
Bibliography
Beeley, Christopher A. “Christ and Human Flourishing in Patristic Theology.” Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 25, no. 2 (May 2016): 126–53.
Behr, John. Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity. Christian Theology in Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Ephrem, and Kathleen E. McVey. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1989.
Holsinger-Friesen, Thomas. Irenaeus and Genesis: A Study of Competition in Early Christian Hermeneutics. Journal of Theological Interpretation Supplements, v. 1. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2009.
Irenaeus, and John Behr. On the Apostolic Preaching. Crestwood, N.Y: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
Moringiello, Scott D. The Rhetoric of Faith: Irenaeus and the Structure of the Adversus Haereses. Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019.
Presley, Stephen O. The Intertextual Reception of Genesis 1-3 in Irenaeus of Lyons. The Bible in Ancient Christianity, volume 8. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015.
Steenberg, M. C. Irenaeus on Creation: The Cosmic Christ and the Saga of Redemption. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, v. 91. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2008.