For as in Adam all die,
even so in Christ all shall be made alive.
And so it is written,
“The first man Adam became a living being.”
The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
First Corinthians 15:22 and 15:45
The theory of Recapitulation (as it is called by scholars) was formulated by Irenaeus of Lyon30 in the second century and is the least cited of the major theories of salvation, probably because it is wrongly considered to be theologically weak. In fact, there are elements of absolute importance in it, and we will see that it is founded on strong theological assumptions. We should not underestimate the influence of Irenaeus, one of the Fathers of the Church, whose writings and insights will be one of the points of reference for much of the Christian doctrine of the first millennium. Irenaeus literally spent his whole life refuting heresies, especially the gnostic heresy,31 which was threatening the truths handed down by the Apostles. It was also thanks to his work that these truths were not completely distorted by the proliferation of heresies that were infiltrating nascent Christianity, following the (not always genuine) conversions of pagans to the new religion.
2.1. Recapitulation theory
Referring to Paul's letters, Irenaeus argued that Jesus was the second Adam, who came to restore what the first Adam had corrupted. The word “recapitulation” comes from the translation of Ephesians 1:9-10: “Having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth—in Him.” To recapitulate therefore means “to gather under one head, into one”, it follows that Christ, in himself and through his life, retraced and re-established the order of all that humanity should have been but was not because of the unfortunate choice of Adam and Eve. He reversed the course of humanity, from Adam's disobedience to his perfect obedience. The incarnation of Jesus, the new Adam, is therefore the central and founding element of this theory:
The fully divine Christ became fully man in order to sum up all humanity in himself. What was lost through the disobedience of the first Adam was restored through the obedience of the second Adam. Christ went through all the stages of human life, resisted all temptation, died, and arose a victor over death and the devil. He thus became the new Head of our race and recovered what had been lost in Adam, saving us through a process of “recapitulation”. The benefits of Christ’s victory are available through participation in him.32
Specifically, Irenaeus believed that Adam and Eve were created infants and had to undergo a path of growth predetermined by God, that would allow them to fully develop their nature. Irenaeus believed that human beings were, in God's established plan, destined for perfection, to be eternally in the image and likeness of God. This development, however, required obedience but men, seduced by Satan, wished to hasten their progress and took from themselves that for which they were not yet ready. In this way they deviated from God's trajectory and became unable to live the life for which they were destined. Man's sin, according to Irenaeus, was therefore a sin of impatience; he wanted, so to speak, to rush things and was burnt out:
According to Irenaeus the fall is a mistake about means more than ends. Though God has always intended to give human beings a share in divine nature, it is necessary for them to become accustomed to bearing it over time. Instead, they forfeit this opportunity by trying to become gods too quickly. They try to take what can only be given, to grasp what can only be graciously bestowed on them.33
Jesus came into the world and, as the second Adam, went through all the stages of this trajectory in a perfect way; where Adam said “no” to God, in Jesus it was a full “yes” that culminated in the ultimate sacrifice of the cross, where Satan and death were defeated. The saving event for Irenaeus, however, was not relegated to the cross, but he saw in the entire life of Jesus, from birth to resurrection, the perfect work of reconciliation. Jesus undoes from the beginning what Adam had wasted and fulfils it to perfection, recapitulating all humanity in himself, renewing it and beginning a new genealogical line in which every believer becomes a partaker of the divine nature:
Christ became human to heal mankind by perfectly uniting the human nature to the Divine Nature in His person. Through the Incarnation, Christ took on human nature, becoming the Second Adam, and entered into every stage of humanity, from infancy to adulthood, uniting it to God. He then suffered death to enter Hades and destroy it. After three days, He resurrected and completed His task by destroying death.34
Man, in union with Christ, thus becomes free to fully develop his vocation: to become what he was created for, finally and fully “human” and in the image and likeness of God:
When He [Jesus] became incarnate, and was made man, He commenced afresh the long line of human beings, and furnished us, in a brief, comprehensive manner, with salvation; so that what we had lost in Adam - namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God - that we might recover in Christ Jesus.35 The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.36
Irenaeus also supported the idea that, since Jesus was the new Adam, his mother Mary was the new Eve, so that the salvation of humanity was a joint work between Jesus and Mary, the new Adam and Eve. By giving centrality to the person of Mary, he sought to consolidate the idea of the full humanity of Jesus, in stark contrast to the docetist heresy37 which held that Jesus was a merely spiritual being and not a real man. And it was in the context of this theological clash that Irenaeus strenuously sought to oppose the orientation that aimed at the divinization of the man Jesus, supporting instead his full humanity.
The centrality of the incarnation of God thus constitutes the foundation of Irenaeus' Christology38 which was to be debated at the various ecumenical councils, principally Nicaea (325 A.D.) and Chalcedon (451 A.D.), which sanctioned the coexistence in Jesus Christ of two natures, human and divine. We will analyse the various aspects of Christological doctrine in more detail in the first chapter of the second section of the book.
This recurring inclination to consider Jesus as a uniquely divine being has influenced the history of theology up to the present day and should be read in the light of the gnostic impulse, still alive in the Church, nourished by the human tendency and revealed in most religions (especially those of the East) to flee the material world, considered illusory, evil and corrupt, in order to ascend to the spiritual world. Well, to this attempt to escape from reality, Irenaeus opposed the man Jesus, God incarnate in the material world, who united himself integrally with human nature, restoring dignity and centrality to it in his plan. To the centrifugal thrust of the religious man who flees from the world, God counters his intention to be in the world, Immanuel, God with us.
The attempt to recover the full humanity of Jesus is at the centre of a highly topical debate that must necessarily take us back to the origin of Christian thought, before the gnostic contaminations:
All those who think that, in order to come closer to God, one must distance oneself from the human, deform Jesus (and God) to the point that it is impossible for them to believe and enter into a relationship with the Father of whom Jesus speaks to us. The only way to really get close to God is the way God did to get close to man: to humanise himself. But this way frightens us, because our instincts of “divinization” are stronger than the simplicity of the human [...] On the contrary of Gnosticism, for the theological strand that follows the Gospels, the point of encounter with God is not the evasion of the human and, even less, the conflict with the human, but the achievement of this degree of humanization that is realized, in fact, in overcoming all the inhuman that snoozes in each of us.39
2.2. Criticism of the Recapitulation theory
Criticism of Irenaeus' theory is mainly directed against the decisive role of Mary in the salvation of mankind; this interpretation will influence much of later theology, as is particularly evident in Catholic doctrine.40 Irenaeus states: “So also did Mary, having a man betrothed [to her], and being nevertheless a virgin, by yielding obedience, become the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race.”41
Furthermore, according to the critics, the death of Jesus on the cross, although a culminating moment in Irenaeus' theory, would not seem to be indispensable in its overall architecture. In this regard, Irenaeus saw in the event of the cross the apex of Christ's perfect obedience, as opposed to Adam's disobedience, and the place of the defeat of death and the devil, seeking in this way to recover its centrality.
2.3. Conclusion
Irenaeus' work, which may appear simplistic in some respects, should not be underestimated, since his theology, aimed primarily at opposing heresies, was particularly important for the formulation of Christological doctrine, which sought to consolidate the idea of Jesus as true God and true man, which was still being fiercely debated. The image of Jesus' victory over the devil was a precursor of the Ransom and Christus Victor theories, which, as we shall see later, remained the most widespread theories of salvation in the Church for almost a thousand years. In his theology, the idea of man's sharing in the divine nature through union with Christ, which we shall analyse in more detail in the next chapter, was already well defined. This transcendental union, in Irenaeus, takes on the contours of a humanisation of man rather than his deification, in stark contrast to the gnostic ideals. Finally, Irenaeus' ideas on the full development of human potential seem to anticipate some themes that are particularly popular today. Irenaeus was thus a veritable mine of ideas, which greatly influenced Christian theology and whose echoes are still very much in evidence today.