Isaac Soon: “Medicine to the Weak”: Irenaeus, Disability, and the Biopower of the Ecclesiain Adversus Haeresis

Surprisingly, the analysis of Irenaeus’s anthropology rarely includes discussions of disability. Approaching disability from a socio-cultural model (Waldschmidt 2017), this paper examines Irenaeus’s understanding of disability through how he conceives of its healing. Irenaeus appreciates healing as an act of restoring the body to its original condition (Haer. 5.12.5-6). For Irenaeus, like the disciples, and like Jesus before them, the Ecclesia is the “medicine to the weak” (Haer. 3.5.2.). As successors to Christ’s medical power, the local Ecclesia exists as the exclusive instrument able to restore the disabled to wholeness (Haer. 2.31.3, 2.32.4). In order to understand the significance of the Ecclesia in relation to disabled bodies in Irenaeus, I draw on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. Foucault’s use of bio-power (biopouvoir) and Agamben’s work on homo sacer allow scholars to analyse the relationship between the Ecclesia and the disabled from two perspectives. On the one hand, the Ecclesia can be viewed as the universal bio-power who holds the only technology available to improve the quality of life of the disabled. On the other hand, the disabled person in Irenaeus is a homo sacer, a liminal figure with no agency over their own body. This paper finds that for Irenaeus, the profitlessness of the Ecclesia is specifically what separates it from those who act simply as bio-political sovereigns (in his case, Simon Magus and the corrupt tradition of “miracle workers” after him). The Ecclesia instead acts as one with beneficent pastoral power.