Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop & Doctor of the Church
June 28 · d. 202
also known as Irenaeus of Lyons, Irenaeus, St. Irenaeus
Irenaeus of Lyons was the great theologian of the second century, the man who heard the faith from those who had heard it from the apostles and then defended it against the Gnostics who claimed a secret, higher Christianity of their own. Bishop of Lyons in Gaul, he wrote Against Heresies to show that the gospel is public, handed down openly, that creation and the body are good, and that God became what we are so that we might become what he is. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 2022.
Irenaeus of Lyons was born around the year 130 at Smyrna, on the coast of Asia Minor in what is now Turkey, and the great gift of his boyhood was that he sat at the feet of an old man named Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, who had himself known the apostle John. Years later Irenaeus could still see it. I am able to describe the very place in which the blessed Polycarp sat as he discoursed, he wrote, his goings out and his comings in, the manner of his life, and the things he told of his conversations with John and with the others who had seen the Lord. That memory was the root of everything Irenaeus became, for it meant he held the faith not as a clever theory but as something handed to him, hand to hand, from the apostles themselves.
He carried that faith far to the west, to Lyons in Gaul, today in France, where he served as a presbyter in the same small, suffering church that gave the martyrs of the year 177, the church of the slave girl Blandina and the old bishop Pothinus. Irenaeus was away in Rome when the persecution struck, and when he returned he found his bishop dead and was made bishop in his place. He spent the rest of his life as a pastor on the frontier and as the church's clearest mind against a danger more subtle than persecution.
The danger was the Gnostics, teachers who claimed a secret knowledge handed down in private, who held that the world and the body were the botched work of a lesser god, and that salvation meant escaping matter for a realm of pure spirit. Against them Irenaeus wrote his great work, Against Heresies, and his answer was as simple as it was deep. There is no secret gospel, he said; the true faith is the one taught openly in the churches the apostles founded, the same in every place, passed down for all to hear. Creation is not a mistake but the good work of the one God. And that God did not despise our flesh but took it: the Word became what we are to make us what he is. He gathered the whole human story, from Adam onward, into himself and healed it, a teaching he called recapitulation. Against those who sneered at the body, Irenaeus proclaimed that God so loved this material, mortal flesh that he became it and would raise it, and he could put the whole glory of it in a single sentence. It is best known today in the modern paraphrase, often linked to the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, that the glory of God is a human being fully alive; what Irenaeus actually wrote is humbler and more searching: the glory of God is a living man, and the life of man consists in beholding God.
He died around the year 202. We do not know exactly how; a later tradition says he was martyred, though the earliest writers do not mention it. What we do know is the thing he gave the church, which was not a new idea but an old one kept safe: that the gospel is not a secret for the few but a gift handed openly to all, that the God who made the world is the God who saved it, and that a human being alive and beholding God is the very glory for which the world was made. The Gnostics promised escape from the flesh. Irenaeus promised its resurrection, and it is his hope, not theirs, that the church still holds.
How we know Irenaeus is chiefly through his own surviving works, above all Against Heresies, which comes down to us complete in an early Latin translation with large Greek fragments, and the shorter Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, recovered only in 1904 in an Armenian version. For his life, the principal source is Eusebius, who preserves precious fragments, including the letter in which Irenaeus recalls hearing Polycarp, and who reports that Irenaeus was a presbyter at Lyons during the persecution of 177 and was sent to Rome carrying a letter. The tradition that he died a martyr, around the year 202 under the emperor Severus, should be received with caution: it appears first in Gregory of Tours in the sixth century, some four hundred years later, and neither Eusebius nor Jerome, our earliest biographers, mentions it. The likeliest explanation is that because so many of the Lyons Christians were martyred under Severus, Irenaeus's death came to be assumed to be part of that number. His death date is reasonably secure; the manner of it is not.
Irenaeus is honored across the whole church, East and West, as the first great theologian after the apostolic age and the foundational opponent of heresy. In 2022 Pope Francis named him a Doctor of the Church under the title Doctor of Unity, a fitting honor for the man who taught that the faith is one and held openly everywhere, and who labored to keep the churches of East and West in peace. His feast is kept on June 28. He is remembered for the principles that became the architecture of all later Christian thought: the rule of faith handed down through the churches, the authority of the four Gospels and the apostolic writings, the goodness of creation, and the resurrection of the body. He belongs, too, with the martyrs of Lyons whose church he served, and his memory is bound up with theirs.
Further reading. Irenaeus's major work is Against Heresies, freely available in the public-domain Ante-Nicene Fathers translation. His short catechetical summary, On the Apostolic Preaching, is in print in John Behr's translation. The best modern study in a believing register is John Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (2013); Denis Minns, Irenaeus: An Introduction (2010), is a clear shorter guide.
Online resources. Against Heresies and the biographical fragments in Eusebius are in the public domain at New Advent and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
British (Received Pronunciation): Polycarp /ˈpɒlɪkɑːrp/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52
Almighty God, you gave your servant Irenaeus of Lyons special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.