“For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is…”
For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and every kind of grace; but the Spirit is truth.
Irenaeus · Against Heresies · ANF I, Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter XXIV, 1
The sentence Irenaeus closes his third book with, and the one most often quoted from him after the succession lists. He has spent the book arguing from a chain of named men; he ends by saying the chain is not the point on its own, because what is being handed on is the Spirit and not an office.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
Book III, chapter xxiv, section 1, the closing chapter of the third book of Against Heresies, in the region of ANF vol. 1 that carries it. The volume's own footnote 2654, printed in its introductory matter to Against Heresies, 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