Within the Second Book of Against Heresies, Saint Irenaeus endeavors yet again to lay bare the sophistries of the gnostic sects by demonstrating that neither the angels nor any supposed Demiurge distinct from a higher, supreme God created the universe. Instead, he shows that there is but one God – and it is this one God who created the Universe. Building upon his work in the first book, he further shows that the created world is neither an image nor a shadow of a higher spiritual plane. Such gnostic inventions, he claims, are the result of a wicked interpretation of scripture – a hermeneutic that he corrects by explaining the proper method of interpretation.
In the last portion of the book, Ireneaus explores the relationship between the body and the soul. In Chapter 29, he briefly explores their resting states after biological death. Later he touches on metempsychosis arguing that logic does not permit the passing of the soul from one body to another after death simply because the soul would remember the experiences in prior bodies. In Chapter 34, he notes that souls can be recognized in the liminal space of being separated from the body before the general resurrection – something possible by what Saint Augustine would call a quasi corpus in On the Soul and Its Origin, 4.34 (for more on the soul, check out my book here).
According to Irenaeus, it would seem that many of the issues that plague Christianity today were already present in the late second century (namely, restricting God to man-made systems designed to use human reason to explain things better left to the wisdom and mystery of God).
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