Irenaeus of Lyons

Irenaeus was born around the year AD 130, in or near the city of Smyrna in Asia Minor, a region that was rich with Christian memory. As a young man, he listened to the preaching of Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, who had himself been a disciple of the apostle John. In later years, he wrote of the way that he recalled Polycarp's words and of how he kept them in his heart. That living link with the apostles formed the foundation of his thought. He was a man who valued what had been handed down from the beginning.

He moved west and settled in Lyons, in Gaul, where there was a church of Greek-speaking believers. He served as a presbyter in that church. In AD 177, a fierce persecution broke out in Lyons and Vienne. The bishop, Pothinus, who was ninety years old, was put to death. Many others also died, among them Blandina. Irenaeus was sent to Rome with a letter to the bishop there, and during this time, he escaped the persecution. When he returned, he was chosen as the new bishop of Lyons. He guided the church in the years that followed with great care.

His chief work is Against Heresies, which he wrote around AD 180. It is a long and detailed answer to the Gnostics, a group of teachers who held that the material world was evil and that salvation came by secret knowledge. They said that the Creator God of the Old Testament was a lesser being and that Christ was a spirit who only seemed to have a body. Irenaeus saw that this teaching undermined the gospel. He answered it from Scripture and from the teaching of the apostles. He stressed that there is one God, who is both Creator and Redeemer, and that the Son of God truly became man.

He taught that the church's faith was preserved in the teaching that had been handed down from the apostles through the bishops in the main churches. He argued that the true faith could be known by looking to those churches which could trace their teaching back to the apostles, and he spoke of the rule of faith, a short summary of what Christians believe. This became the basis of the idea of apostolic tradition. He also taught that salvation is the restoration of humanity. He spoke of Christ as the second Adam, who recapitulated or summed up the human race in Himself, undoing the effects of the fall. He said that the glory of God is man fully alive.

He wrote another book, The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, which was lost for many centuries and rediscovered in an Armenian translation in 1904. It is a short summary of the faith for new believers, and it shows his gentle and pastoral side. He was a peacemaker. When Victor, the bishop of Rome, threatened to cut off the churches of Asia Minor over the date of Easter, Irenaeus wrote to him and urged him to avoid division. He reminded him that differences in practice need not break unity.

He was a man of learning, and he wrote in Greek. He also learned the language of the Gauls in order to preach to the people. He is described as a gentle man, whose name means peaceful. Yet he could be strong in defending the truth. His writing sometimes shows a fierce tone against the heretics, though he insisted that he did so out of love.

The details of his death are uncertain. A later tradition says that he died as a martyr around AD 202, during a persecution under the emperor Septimius Severus, but there is no reliable early evidence of this. What can be said is that he was a faithful bishop who defended the faith in a time of great danger. His life shows that the truth of the gospel is guarded by those who hold fast to what was received.