Advent Reflection from St Irenaeus: 'Eve and Mary'

As Eve was seduced by the word of an angel and so fled from God after disobeying his word, Mary in her turn was given the good news by the word of an angel, and bore God in obedience to his word

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) - The great Bishop Irenaeus was educated in Smyrna where he learned the Christian faith from Polycarp. Polycarp was a friend of John, the beloved disciple, the author of the Gospel that bears his name.

He learned it from the One who proclaimed, lived, and—Himself—was the Good News—Jesus Christ. Polycarp sent his young disciple on a missionary journey to Lyons, France, to spread the same message of Love Incarnate.

He was later ordained to the priesthood under the Bishop of Lyons, St. Pothinus, and became one of the founders of the Church in that country. He succeeded Pothinus as Bishop in 178.

Filled with fervor for the full faith handed down from the Apostles, Irenaeus vigorously defended it against the early aberrations of the Gnostics,who warped the message into a hidden secret for only a few, and the Montanists who disdained the body and totally misunderstood the implications of the Word becoming flesh. Here is an excerpt from his famous work entitled "A treatise against heresies":

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Eve and Mary

The Lord, coming into his own creation in visible form, was sustained by his own creation which he himself sustains in being. His obedience on the tree of the cross reversed the disobedience at the tree in Eden; the good news of the truth announced by an angel to Mary, a virgin subject to a husband, undid the evil lie that seduced Eve, a virgin espoused to a husband.

As Eve was seduced by the word of an angel and so fled from God after disobeying his word, Mary in her turn was given the good news by the word of an angel, and bore God in obedience to his word. As Eve was seduced into disobedience to God, so Mary was persuaded into obedience to God; thus the Virgin Mary became the advocate of the virgin Eve.

Christ gathered all things into one, by gathering them into himself. He declared war against our enemy, crushed him who at the beginning had taken us captive in Adam, and trampled on his head, in accordance with God’s words to the serpent in Genesis: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall lie in wait for your head, and you shall lie in wait for his heel.

The one lying in wait for the serpent’s head is the one who was born in the likeness of Adam from the woman, the Virgin. This is the seed spoken of by Paul in the letter to the Galatians: The law of works was in force until the seed should come to whom the- promise was made.
He shows this even more clearly in the same letter when he says: When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman.

The enemy would not have been defeated fairly if his vanquisher had not been born of a woman, because it was through a woman that he had gained mastery over man in the beginning, and set himself up as man’s adversary.

That is why the Lord proclaims himself the Son of Man, the one who renews in himself that first man from whom the race born of woman was formed; as by a man’s defeat our race fell into the bondage of death, so by a man’s victory we were to rise again to life.