Introduction

Previously, in In a State of Pilgrimage, I examined the developmental anthropology of St Irenaeus and argued that humanity is created good but not complete. Adam is not the finished form of humanity subsequently ruined by sin, but humanity in its infancy: free, innocent, and ordered towards participation in God, yet still required to grow into the likeness for which it was created. The purpose of that essay was to show that development belongs to humanity’s created condition rather than being introduced by the Fall. Sin therefore deforms an already existing movement of maturation, while Christ’s recapitulation takes up that interrupted history and carries humanity beyond the point at which Adam failed. Salvation cannot therefore be understood simply as a restoration of an original perfection, because no completed human perfection existed at the beginning. Eden was the beginning of humanity’s vocation, not its final outcome, for salvation is the completion of creaturely becoming in communion with God.

The present essay takes that argument as its starting point by turning from the fact of human development to the form that such development must take. In St Irenaeus’ account, the angels, the Devil, and humanity’s eventual lordship over Creation together present humanity as the child-heir of the world, while angelic government belongs only to the period of its minority.

The Devil’s stewardship becomes demonic when a provisional office hardens into permanent possession, and his authority comes to depend upon humanity remaining immature. Human maturity must therefore involve more than obedience. It consists in the acquisition of an agency capable of freedom, recognition, communion, and, finally, lordship without domination. Salvation, on this reading, is humanity coming of age.

Given to Man as His Domain: St Irenaeus on Human Infancy, Promised Lordship, and Angelic Administration

The difficulty in Irenaeus is that humanity begins simultaneously exalted and incapable. Adam is fashioned in the image of God and appointed lord of the earth, yet the first human beings remain children. Their infancy is not a metaphor for moral corruption, since it precedes the Fall. It belongs to the condition of being created. Things which have recently come into being, Irenaeus argues, necessarily “come short of the perfect”; being young, they remain “infantile,” unaccustomed to the discipline required for perfection (AH IV.38.1). The defect, if it can be called a defect at all, is therefore not wickedness but finitude. God could give, yet humanity could not yet receive.

This is why the familiar distinction between innocence and perfection is insufficient. Adam is innocent, but innocence is only the beginning of the story. The creature has a history precisely because it is not God. God does not acquire being, but the creature receives it; God does not grow into his perfection, but the creature must acquire the capacity to participate in what exceeds it. Irenaeus expresses this through the homely image of feeding an infant. The difficulty is not that the mother lacks solid food, but that the child cannot yet digest it. So too the Word, “the perfect bread of the Father,” comes as milk because humanity is still unable to contain the bread of immortality (AH IV.38.1). Creaturely perfection is therefore not simply a state bestowed from without. It requires the enlargement of the creature’s capacity to receive.

The political consequence of this developmental anthropology is that human minority is accompanied by an angelic administration of Creation. Irenaeus presents humanity as created for lordship over the earth, yet not initially capable of exercising it. Read alongside humanity’s infancy and promised lordship, that angelic government is necessarily provisional: the powers administer during the interval between humanity’s designation as heir and its capacity to assume the inheritance. Their superiority is functional rather than final. They hold Creation in trust for a creature still growing into the role for which it was made. Within this order stands the archangelic steward who becomes the Devil. The ensuing conflict is therefore not simply between rival powers, but between an authority whose purpose terminates in the maturity of another and an heir destined to assume what that authority had administered during its minority.

Irenaeus says that the world, prepared before humanity was fashioned, was “given to the man as his domain, with all things whatsoever in it” (D 11). Yet humanity remained a “little one,” not yet able to “be master of everything on earth” (D 11–12). During this minority, Creation is administered by another order: “the servants were angels, but the steward the archangel” (D 11). The arrangement therefore contains a distinction between inheritance and present capacity. Humanity possesses the inheritance without yet possessing the capacity to exercise it; the steward possesses the administrative capacity without possessing the inheritance. The apparent superiority of the angelic order conceals an eschatological reversal already contained in the arrangement. Humanity is beneath the angels because it is young, not because subjection to them constitutes its final condition. Angelic stewardship follows from precisely this conjunction of human infancy, promised lordship, and temporary incapacity.

A Natural Sense of Wicked Deeds: Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke, and the Formation of Human Nature

Human maturation can be conceived either as the progressive subordination of nature to moral order, or as the fulfilment of capacities already present within created nature. On the first account, human nature begins as morally indeterminate material upon which order must progressively be imposed. Maturity would then consist in the increasing conquest of nature by law, discipline, and reason: humanity becomes good insofar as it learns to suppress, redirect, or rise above what it naturally is.

Writing in Of the Law of Nature and Nations, German jurist Samuel von Pufendorf insisted that moral qualities do not “proceed from Principles ingrafted in the Substance of Things”; they enter human life through “Imposition,” directing and tempering creatures who might otherwise “pass their Life like Beasts, without Culture and without Rule” (LNN, pp. 1–3). On such an account, nature supplies bodies, passions, and impulses, while morality arrives afterwards to impose order upon them. The godfather of liberalism, John Locke, refined the separation still further with his notion that moral ideas are “not of Nature’s but Man’s making”: they are combinations assembled by the mind rather than moral qualities discovered ready-made in nature. Precisely because the mind constructs these ideas, and therefore knows what it has put into them, Locke can claim that “Morality is capable of Demonstration, as well as Mathematicks” (EHU, p. 516). Nature and normativity appear to stand on opposite sides of a conceptual divide.

Yet neither thinker is able to maintain this separation completely. The same Pufendorf who insists that moral qualities are imposed upon natural things also admits that God has “mingled” the passion of shame into the human constitution itself. So intimate is this response that “our very Blood” seems to possess “a natural sense of wicked Deeds” (LNN, p. 16). Moral formation has therefore already begun beneath the level of deliberate moral reasoning. For Pufendorf, shame is partly built into human nature itself: when we recognise that our conduct has lowered us in the esteem of others, the involuntary blush makes that loss of standing physically felt.

Coming from the other direction, Locke states that humanity is not driven into society by calculation alone, but is “urged to enter into society by a certain propensity of nature,” while speech and intercourse furnish the means by which that social inclination is exercised (ELN, pp. 157–159). Sociality is therefore not simply an artificial arrangement constructed after reason discovers the disadvantages of solitude. Human nature itself bends outward towards relation.

For Irenaeus, however, moral maturation cannot mean the suppression of creaturely nature. Humanity is created for growth, and what develops is precisely the nature God has made and directed towards participation in divine life. The relevant distinction is therefore not between the natural human and the moral human, but between humanity at the beginning of its development and humanity brought into the capacity to receive its proper end.

The Fall itself demonstrates the point. Adam is not wrong because he desires a condition alien to human nature. Humanity really is intended for incorruption and participation in divine life. The error lies in attempting to seize immediately what can only be received through maturation. This is why Irenaeus poses the question: “How then will you be a god, when you are not yet made a human?” (AH IV.39.2). Humanity is indeed ordered towards participation in divine life, but that destiny must be received through the maturation of creaturely nature rather than seized as an immediate possession.

Obedience, then, belongs to the process of maturation. It is not an external restraint imposed upon a completed human nature, but a discipline through which an immature creature learns to exercise freedom rightly. The command educates desire and judgement so that humanity can grow into the capacity required by its vocation. Its purpose is not to perpetuate dependence, but to form the creature for mature participation in divine life.

The contrast, therefore, is not between nature and morality, but between human nature in its initial state and that same nature brought to fulfilment. Immaturity is not itself evil, and maturity does not require the abandonment of what humanity was created to be. Moral formation is the historical process by which created capacities are ordered, enlarged, and brought towards their proper end.

With Jealousy and Malice: St Irenaeus and Samuel Pufendorf on the Tyranny of Envy

Envy, for Irenaeus, is a recurring form of evil, more insidious than mere jealousy. It repeatedly appears when one creature experiences the elevation of another as a threat to its own standing. Cain turns against Abel because the latter is received more favourably by God. Elsewhere, the Pharisees reproduce “jealousy similar to that of Cain” when they destroy Christ (AH IV.18.3). Finally, the Devil becomes jealous of humanity because of “the great gifts of God which he had given to man” (D 16). In this recurring pattern, envy is not simply the desire for something another possesses; it interprets another’s good as one’s own loss and therefore seeks to arrest, diminish, or destroy the person whose elevation has become intolerable.

In his account of the sibling rivalry between Cain and Abel, Irenaeus makes the connection between envy and domination explicit. Cain, “with jealousy and malice,” imagines that he can “domineer over” Abel and finally “tyrannized over and slew him” (AH III.23.3–4). The problem is not merely that Cain wants what Abel has, but that Abel’s favour before God has become an injury to Cain’s estimation of himself. Irenaeus then places the violence directly within the continuation of satanic revolt: the apostate angel, “not content with the first evil,” fills Cain “with his spirit” and makes him a fratricide (D 17). Envy therefore appears not as an incidental passion but as a recurrent logic of domination. Another’s flourishing is experienced as displacement, and violence becomes the means by which threatened standing attempts to preserve itself.

For Irenaeus, the Devil’s envy has a specific cause: humanity is destined to rise into a form of lordship that will displace the angelic stewardship under which it presently stands. The object of his envy is not humanity as it presently exists, since infant humanity is still weaker and less capable than the angelic steward. What provokes him is the future attached to humanity’s creation. Irenaeus states the motive directly: “the angel who, becoming jealous of the man and looking on him with envy because of the great gifts of God which he had given to man, both ruined himself and made the man a sinner” (D 16). The “great gifts” belong to the same sequence in which humanity has already been made lord of the earth and, in vocation, lord even over the angelic servants who presently administer it (D 11–12). The Devil therefore confronts a creature whose present weakness conceals a future reversal of their relation. Humanity is still under tutelage, but its maturation will end the stewardship under which it presently stands.

Envy here is not merely dislike, nor is it reducible to a general desire for power. It arises from a relation in which the good of one party is experienced as a diminution of the other. In Pufendorf, esteem is “the value of persons in communal life” according to which they are “ranked before or after” one another (PW, p. 253). Human beings therefore care not only about what they possess, but about where they stand in the judgement of others. He observes that when someone fears that “the estimation of his excellence is going to be lowered in the eyes of others,” he experiences profound distress (LNN I.2.7). An injury to esteem may be felt so sharply that some would rather “break the peace with another man” than allow an insult to remain unavenged (LNN III.2.7). Esteem becomes dangerous when the flourishing of another is interpreted comparatively, so that another’s elevation necessarily signifies one’s own descent.

Pufendorf describes the first fratricide as “caused by ambition,” because Cain was angered when Abel “was held more worthy in the eyes of God” (LNN VII.1.7). Abel has not deprived Cain of anything material. The offence lies in comparative estimation: another has been preferred, and Cain experiences that preference as an injury to himself. Pufendorf’s concern is broader than envy alone, since the desire for esteem can also lead people towards worthy actions; but the Cain episode exposes its pathology. Once self-worth depends upon remaining above another, the excellence of another becomes intolerable.

The same pattern appears again in Irenaeus’ treatment of the Pharisees. At Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, he describes them as “jealous wicked stewards” who are unwilling that the king should come (AH IV.11.3). Their fault is not simply disbelief. They occupy a position of religious authority which ought to serve the coming of the one to whom that authority ultimately points, yet they experience his arrival as the loss of their own standing. Elsewhere, Irenaeus says that they possessed “jealousy similar to that of Cain” and for that reason “slew the Just One” (AH IV.18.3). Cain, the Pharisees, and the Devil each turn a subordinate or provisional relation into something to be defended against the person whose elevation exposes its limits.

This clarifies what goes wrong in the Devil’s stewardship. His original authority is not evil simply because it places him above immature humanity. Its legitimacy lies precisely in the function it serves during humanity’s minority. He administers what humanity cannot yet administer for itself. The corruption begins when the office ceases to be understood in relation to humanity’s maturation and becomes an end in itself. Once the steward’s identity depends upon remaining superior to the heir, the heir’s growth can only be experienced as dispossession. Stewardship then passes into domination, because the continuation of power requires the continued incapacity of the one over whom that power is exercised.

The temptation of Adam follows from this, as the serpent does not merely persuade humanity to violate an isolated prohibition; he intervenes in the developmental relation through which humanity would have become capable of receiving its inheritance. By inducing Adam and Eve to grasp immediately at what must be received through maturation, he turns their proper end against the process required to attain it. The result is precisely the condition advantageous to the usurping steward: humanity remains alive to its vocation but incapable of fulfilling it, while the authority that should have disappeared with human maturity can now reproduce itself as domination. On this reading, satanic temptation is directed not only against human obedience but against human development itself.

Where pride seeks an exaggerated estimation of the self, envy makes the good of another intolerable because that good alters one’s own relative position. The Devil’s envy is political because it concerns the preservation of rank and rule. He can retain the position he has made his own only if humanity does not become capable of assuming the inheritance for which it was created. His power is therefore corrupted not merely because it is illegitimate, but because it comes to depend upon another creature’s continued incapacity. Stewardship becomes domination when authority ceases to prepare another for maturity and instead preserves itself by preventing that maturity from occurring.

A limited resemblance appears here to Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage. The bondsman initially exists as the dependent consciousness “whose essential nature is simply to live or be for another” (PS, p. 115), yet the lord’s apparent independence is itself sustained by that dependence: “what the bondsman does is really the action of the lord” (PS, p. 116). The lord therefore requires the subordinate consciousness whose autonomy he denies—his mastery can persist only while the relation of dependence persists. Something structurally similar occurs once Irenaeus’ angelic stewardship hardens into satanic domination. The Devil’s assumed sovereignty can endure only while humanity remains incapable of assuming its inheritance. The analogy ends there. Irenaean humanity does not acquire its vocation through servitude, nor does the Devil dialectically produce the freedom he opposes. Human lordship is already given as a divine vocation, while satanic domination arrests rather than generates the maturation required to exercise it.

A Dog or a Beast: Samuel Pufendorf and Adam Smith on Recognition and the Formation of the Self

Mature agency cannot be reduced to obedience, because moral capacity is formed through relation to others. Human beings learn to govern themselves by seeking recognition, judging their conduct from perspectives beyond their own immediate desires, and acquiring self-command within social life. Maturity therefore consists not in solitary independence, but in the formation of a person capable of governing himself while remaining rightly related to others.

Pufendorf begins from the elementary proposition that human beings demand recognition of themselves as human. An insult which reduces a person beneath this common standing provokes an almost visceral protest: “Surely I am not a dog or a beast but as much a man as you” (De jure naturae et gentium III.2.1; PW, p. 159). The moral requirement follows from the reciprocity of that demand. Since human nature belongs equally to all, “Everyone must esteem and treat every other man as his equal by nature” (De jure naturae et gentium III.2.1; PW, p. 159).

Equality here does not mean equality of capacity, as Pufendorf is perfectly willing to acknowledge radical differences of intelligence, strength, office, and accomplishment. Equality instead establishes the basic relation within which those differences may legitimately appear. However superior one person may be in ability, he remains obliged towards another by the same natural law whose obligations he expects the other to recognise.

This gives Irenaean maturity a more determinate moral content. Adulthood consists not simply in possessing greater power or freedom, but in becoming capable of exercising both within relations of recognition, reciprocity, and self-command. If maturity meant only acquiring greater capacity, the Devil himself would appear mature. He is stronger than infant humanity, more experienced, and initially capable of exercising the administration humanity cannot yet exercise. Capacity alone therefore cannot define perfection. It is precisely because the Devil possesses power without the proper relation to another that his apparent maturity proves spiritually sterile.

Pufendorf’s sociality introduces the missing element. A person capable of genuine moral life must be able to recognise another without understanding that recognition as self-diminution. The mature person can acknowledge the humanity of the other as equal to his own.

Human beings do not simply enter society carrying fully formed selves whose pre-existing interests then collide. Their desire for esteem draws them into relations through which their sense of themselves and their conception of what is desirable are altered. The social world forms the person who inhabits it. The desire to be regarded well by others can certainly issue in vanity, resentment, or rivalry—but it can also teach the self to see itself from beyond the enclosure of its immediate appetite. Esteem places moral formation between bare coercion and an already perfected conscience.

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, my fellow Fifer Adam Smith begins from the impossibility of remaining entirely within one’s own experience. We cannot literally feel another person’s suffering; the imagination must carry us beyond ourselves. “It is by the imagination only,” Smith writes, “that we can form any conception of what are his sensations” (TMS, p. 9).

But this movement towards the other eventually turns back upon the self. Smith writes that, in judging his own conduct, “I divide myself, as it were, into two persons”: one is “the examiner and judge,” the other “the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of” (TMS, p. 101). What begins as the judgement of others is thus internalised as a standpoint from which the self can judge its own passions and actions. Smith later names this internalised spectator the “man within the breast,” whom nature has established as the “great guardian, not only of his innocence, but of his tranquillity” (TMS, p. 115).

A person does not become morally mature merely by becoming harder, colder, or less passionate. Smith’s most perfect character combines command of selfish passion with the greatest sensitivity towards others. Hence his remarkable reformulation of Christian neighbour-love: the perfection of human nature consists in learning “to feel much for others and little for ourselves,” restraining selfish affection while enlarging benevolence (TMS, p. 19).

Self-command and sympathy therefore arise together. I become more capable of governing myself precisely because I become capable of encountering another standpoint. Freedom ceases to mean the unlimited expression of whatever impulse happens to arise within me. It becomes the capacity to bring those impulses into a form compatible with relation.

Adam’s immaturity, then, lies not in desire itself but in his inability to govern it rightly. Desire belongs to creaturely life; maturation changes the creature’s relation both to its desires and to others. The mature human being can desire without being immediately governed by desire and can encounter another without experiencing that other’s good as a threat to its own. Moral adulthood is therefore a form of relational self-government: self-command without self-enclosure, agency exercised within recognition and communion. By contrast, the Devil’s greater primordial power conceals a deeper immaturity. He can exercise authority, but he cannot rejoice in the elevation of another; he can recognise rank, but only competitively. His sovereignty depends upon the continued inferiority of those beneath him, and this inability to affirm another creature’s flourishing reveals the failure at the heart of his power.

A Morality of Aspiration: Nietzsche, Bergson, and James on Mature Freedom.

Moral maturity cannot mean simply learning to obey the norms of one’s society. A person may become disciplined, conscientious, and capable of self-control while the values by which he judges himself remain corrupt. In such a case, external authority has merely become internal: the person now enforces upon himself the standards he once received from others. Genuine self-government requires something further—the capacity to examine the values and habits by which one has been formed and, where they are false or destructive, to overcome them.

For Friedrich Nietzsche, life is not adequately understood as preservation, equilibrium, or successful adaptation, because its deeper tendency is towards transformation. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, life is defined as “that which must always overcome itself” (Z, p. 227). Self-overcoming does not mean the simple repression of impulse. Nietzsche’s objection is precisely to forms of morality which weaken the passions by extirpating them. The stronger achievement is to organise, redirect, and sublimate the energies already present in the self, so that what initially governs the person can become material for a more deliberate form of existence. Freedom therefore appears as self-mastery, but self-mastery is productive rather than merely prohibitive: the person does not cease to desire, but acquires the capacity to give form to desire. The self is not liberated by becoming passionless; it becomes free by ceasing to be the passive site at which inherited values and immediate impulses determine action.

Thus, Adam’s failure does not consist in possessing desire, and the mature human being cannot be defined as a creature from whom desire has disappeared. What is lacking is the capacity to inhabit desire without being immediately governed by it. Nietzsche therefore clarifies why adulthood cannot mean perfected compliance. A person who merely obeys remains dependent upon the value already given to him, while self-government requires the ability to appropriate, order, and transform the impulses from which action arises. Yet Nietzsche’s account also exposes its own limit for an Irenaean anthropology. Self-overcoming can culminate in the successful formation of the self without yet explaining what that formed self owes to another. A person may become capable of governing himself and still understand freedom principally as the achievement of his own power. The Devil, in this argument, is not deficient in force, intelligence, or command. His failure lies in the relation he establishes between his own excellence and the excellence of another.

The Devil’s problem is not a lack of self-command. He possesses power and discipline, but directs them towards preserving his superiority over others. Moral maturity therefore requires more than mastery of the self; it requires a way of exercising freedom that does not depend upon another’s subordination.

In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Henri Bergson makes this distinction possible because his opposition between closed and open morality concerns not merely how strongly a person acts, but the range and structure of the relations within which action occurs. Closed morality arises from the requirements of social existence. Habit, obligation, and collective discipline bind individuals into a workable whole, and in this respect closed morality is neither accidental nor simply vicious. Human beings require such structures. But the solidarity they produce remains bounded. A closed society secures cohesion among its members precisely by distinguishing the group from those who stand outside it, and therefore places obligations towards the group above obligations towards humanity as such. A person may consequently be scrupulously loyal to family, church, and nation while treating the suffering of those outside those circles as morally secondary.

For Bergson, the passage beyond that enclosure cannot occur through the gradual enlargement of the same social affection. The love binding family, tribe, or nation together does not become universal simply by adding more objects to itself. “The difference between the two objects is one of kind and not simply one of degree” (TS, p. 32). Open morality therefore depends upon a qualitative transformation of moral relation. Its characteristic movement is not pressure but aspiration. Bergson calls it a “morality of aspiration” (TS, p. 49): the saint or moral hero does not merely submit more completely to an established obligation, but embodies a form of life whose attraction discloses possibilities unavailable within the closed order itself. Freedom is no longer exhausted by the power to govern oneself; it becomes the capacity to enter a relation not determined by membership, reciprocity, or comparison.

Bergson himself associates the decisive opening of morality with Christianity, claiming that “the passage from closed to open morality was brought about by Christianity” (TS, p. 77). A mature person is not simply someone who can govern himself, because self-government can remain centred upon the self. Nor is maturity exhausted by learning to live successfully within a social order, because social recognition can still depend upon boundaries of belonging and exclusion. Maturity reaches beyond both when freedom becomes capable of communion: when the good of another can be affirmed without being experienced as a threat, loss, or diminution of one’s own.

For Irenaeus, the importance of this distinction is visible in the Devil himself. He possesses power, intelligence, and purposive agency, but the elevation of another appears to him as a diminution of himself. His power therefore remains bound to comparison. Mature humanity must exceed him not simply by becoming stronger or more autonomous, but by becoming capable of exercising freedom without requiring another creature to remain beneath it.

A developmental anthropology, however, carries another danger. Once human existence is understood as a movement from immaturity towards fulfilment, evil can be absorbed into that movement and redescribed as one of the mechanisms by which development occurs. The fact that good can be recovered after evil is then mistaken for evidence that evil was necessary to the good.

In Pragmatism, William James rejects both pessimism, which declares salvation impossible, and optimism, which treats it as guaranteed: “meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become” (P, p. 137). Improvement therefore depends upon conditions which must actually be created, preserved, and acted upon. The good is not concealed within every event simply because history continues beyond it. A loss remains a loss, and suffering is not converted into necessity merely because it can later be overcome.

Irenaeus’ chronology makes the same distinction unavoidable. Humanity requires growth before the Fall. Infancy, freedom, and development belong to its created condition, so sin cannot be the condition that makes maturation possible. It contributes nothing essential to the movement towards likeness to God. The Fall interrupts that movement; it does not complete it. Redemption therefore does not disclose evil as a hidden instrument of divine education. It overcomes an interruption and carries forward a development whose end had already been given before the interruption occurred.

James describes the pragmatist as willing to live within “a scheme of uncertified possibilities” and, if necessary, to “pay with his own person” for the realisation of the ideals he affirms (P, pp. 142–143). Moral hope therefore places its cost upon the agent who acts, not upon victims whose suffering is subsequently justified by reference to a greater good. One may accept suffering for the sake of the good without claiming that another’s suffering was necessary for that good to exist. The distinction is between sacrifice and theodicy: the former assumes a cost, while the latter risks making another’s cost necessary to an explanation.

The Ancient Form of Humanity: St. Irenaeus on Christ, Recapitulation, and the Final Victory

The developmental argument explains why, for Irenaeus, the defeat of the Devil must take place through humanity itself. If the problem were simply that Satan possessed greater power than Adam, divine omnipotence could remove him without incarnation, temptation, obedience, suffering, or death. Yet Irenaeus insists that the one who had conquered humanity through disobedience must himself be conquered “through humanity himself” (AH V.21.2–3). Humanity is therefore not merely the object liberated at the end of a divine contest. Human obedience becomes the means by which satanic rule is broken.

This requirement follows from the nature of the captivity. If God merely destroyed the false steward from above, the tyrant would disappear but human minority would remain. Humanity would have been released from domination without becoming capable of assuming the inheritance from which it had been dispossessed. Salvation would free the child from a bad guardian without bringing the child to adulthood.

Recapitulation does something more radical, as Christ assumes the human history that Adam interrupted. Irenaeus describes the Word as “recapitulating in himself the ancient formation of humanity” (AH III.18.7). The incarnation is therefore not simply the appearance of divine power within human history; it is the taking up of human development itself. Infancy, growth, temptation, obedience, suffering, and death belong to the work because humanity in Christ is carried through the movement which Adam failed to complete. The wilderness is not merely a contest staged between two supernatural powers. It is humanity encountering again the temptation to seize its end apart from the relation through which that end is properly received.

The result is a victory which is wholly dependent upon God without displacing human agency. Irenaeus can therefore speak of God preserving “freedom, and the power of self-government in man” (AH IV.15.2). Creaturely dependence and mature agency are not opposites. The human being does not become freer by becoming less dependent upon God, because the relation to God is not the domination from which freedom must escape. It is the relation within which human freedom becomes possible at all. The serpent’s promise had identified maturity with emancipation from dependence: humanity would become like God by grasping independently what God intended it to receive. Christ reverses that logic. Through complete dependence upon the Father, humanity reaches a form of agency which satanic power can no longer govern.

The victory over the Devil is therefore not complete merely when his authority is cancelled. It is complete when humanity itself has become the sort of creature whose freedom no longer provides demonic power with its point of entry. Christ does not merely remove the steward, but brings the heir towards the maturity that makes the steward unnecessary.

Conclusion

Irenaeus’ developmental anthropology implies that the decisive difference between divine and demonic power lies in what power makes of the one subjected to it. Demonic rule requires dependence to continue: the Devil can remain sovereign only while humanity remains incapable of assuming its inheritance. Divine rule has the opposite end. God brings the creature towards freedom, self-government, and participation so fully that human maturity does not diminish divine authority but reveals its character. Salvation is therefore not merely release from a tyrant or the transfer of jurisdiction from one ruler to another. In Christ, humanity itself is brought to the maturity that satanic rule exists to prevent.

That changes the meaning of humanity’s promised lordship. Humanity does not defeat the false steward by becoming powerful enough to occupy his place and reproduce his relation to Creation. It inherits rightly only when power no longer depends upon another’s inferiority. Theosis is therefore neither the perfection of submission nor the achievement of self-sufficient autonomy, but the formation of a freedom capable of communion: a creature able to receive without seizing and to exercise power without domination. God overcomes demonic power by producing a humanity that no longer requires domination in order to be free. Humanity becomes fit to inherit Creation only when it has ceased to understand lordship as possession.

Sources and References

~ (AH) Against Heresies, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume One (Hendrickson Publishers, 2004) by St Irenaeus of Lyons.

~ (D) The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920) by St Irenaeus of Lyons.

~ (LNN) Of the Law of Nature and Nations (Oxford, 1703) by Samuel von Pufendorf.

~ (EHU) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford University Press, 1975) by John Locke.

~ (ELN) Essays on the Law of Nature (Oxford University Press, 1954) by John Locke.

~ (PW) The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf (Oxford University Press, 1994) by Samuel Pufendorf.

~ (PS) Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, 1977) by G. W. F. Hegel.

~ (TMS) The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Liberty Fund, 1982)  by Adam Smith.

~ (Z) “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Portable Nietzsche (Viking Press, 1968) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~ (TS) The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Henry Holt and Company, 1935) by Henri Bergson.

~ (P) Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Harvard University Press, 1975) by William James.