“for the perfect man consists in the commingling and the union of the soul receiving the…”
for the perfect man consists in the commingling and the union of the soul receiving the spirit of the Father, and the admixture of that fleshly nature which was moulded after the image of God
Irenaeus · Against Heresies · ANF I, Against Heresies, Book V, Chapter VI, 1
Against teachers for whom the body was a mistake to escape from, Irenaeus insists that a man is not a soul wearing flesh but soul, spirit and flesh together, and that God made the flesh in his own image along with the rest. The whole of the fifth book, and its argument for the resurrection of the body, rests on this sentence.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
Book V, chapter vi, section 1, in the region of ANF vol. 1 that carries the fifth book. The volume's own footnote 2654 records that Roberts englished the first two books and that the groundwork of the third and of the part of the fourth carried here was furnished by W. H. Rambaut, which is why this row names them and not Donaldson.
Read in Roberts & Rambaut, ANF vol. 1 (1885) · Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, revised by A. Cleveland Coxe
Also by
- Irenaeus every saying recorded of this person, and their page