Don Springer: Hands for Beholding: Adversus haereses IV.20, the “two hands”, and the visioDei

Adversus haereses IV.20.1 is a well-used Irenaean text. The pericope is typically employed for one of two purposes. First, as one of the most explicit references to the Father and his “two hands”, the text is employed to illustrate Irenaeus’ doctrine of the Trinity. Second, the picture of the Father’s hands fashioning the dirt into the first human is leveraged to express kinship and intimacy between creator and created. Both of these insights are important but too often the larger context of Haer. IV.20 is neglected. Through a close reading of Paragraph One, as well as a summary analysis of Chapters Nineteen and Twenty, this paper demonstrates that Irenaeus’ “two hands” motif is best understood when more clearly situated within its larger context. That context is dominated by the idea that humanity was designed for—and remains with the potential—to see and behold God. The nearly one hundred video(to see) references in Chapter Twenty are focussed not simply on a vision ofGod but on an encounter with him. I argue that the motif reinforces the theme of the chapter, namely, that God created humankind in order for there to be an ongoing embrace: an eternal fellowship between the fashioner and the fashioned. Emphasis on the Trinitarian nature of the creator and on the ontological connection to humanity is important, but a failure to root these elements in the context of beholding the Divine robs the pericope of its full meaning.