The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Faustinus of Lyon
died c. 254Early Church
The bishop of Lyons who wrote again and again until Rome dealt with a bishop refusing mercy.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer — Jean-Léon Gérôme (1863–83), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 254.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
Faustinus became bishop of Lyons in Gaul around the year 250, in the middle of the Decian persecution. The record of his life is thin. What survives is a single episode, and it is the kind that shows a man.
South of him, at Arles, sat a bishop named Marcianus who had gone over to Novatian. The Novatianists held that Christians who had sacrificed under persecution could never be readmitted to communion, not after penance, not after years, not on their deathbeds. Marcianus applied it. Men and women in his diocese who had cracked under torture or bought a certificate to save their families came back weeping and were turned away, and went on being turned away as they died.
Faustinus could see it and could not stop it; a bishop had no authority over another bishop's diocese. So he wrote. He wrote to Cyprian at Carthage and he wrote to Stephen, the bishop of Rome, and when nothing happened he wrote again. Other bishops of the province wrote too.
Cyprian's reply survives, and it names him: Faustinus our colleague, abiding at Lyons, has written to me once and again, dearest brother. Cyprian then wrote to Stephen directly and told him, in plain words, to act, to send letters into Gaul, to have Marcianus excommunicated and a successor put in his place, so that the flock of Christ scattered and wounded by him could be gathered again. He pressed the point that the whole reason Christ gave the church authority to bind and loose was to heal, and that a shepherd starving the wounded had abandoned the office. The letter is dated to about 254.
What happened next is not recorded. Whether Marcianus was deposed, and when, the sources do not say.
So the fixed point in the life of Faustinus is one year and one fight. He is not known to have written a book. He has no surviving sermon. He was a bishop in a Gallic city that had already produced a famous crop of martyrs in 177 and a famous bishop in Irenaeus, and what he did with his office was refuse to let a cruelty go unreported until somebody with the power to end it answered him.
His own death is not on record. The date sometimes given, 254, is simply the year he last appears.
Sources: Cyprian, Letter 66 in the Ante-Nicene Fathers numbering, to Stephen concerning Marcianus of Arles (Letter 68 in Hartel); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2; McClintock and Strong, Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, article Faustinus.
What was happening while he lived3 moments · AD 100–313
- c. 203Perpetua and Felicity die in the arenaVibia Perpetua, a young mother of good family in Carthage, and Felicity, a pregnant slave woman, were arrested with several companions. Perpetua kept a prison diary that survives inside *The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity*, one of the earliest firsthand writings we have from a Christian woman. Felicity gave birth in prison days before they were sent out to the beasts.
- 250Decius orders the whole empire to sacrificeFor the first time the persecution was universal by decree: every inhabitant had to sacrifice before a commission and receive a signed certificate proving it. About forty-odd of those certificates have been dug up in Egypt on papyrus, ordinary paperwork of a very hard year. Fabian, bishop of Rome, was killed in January 250; thousands of others simply signed and lived, and the church spent the next decade arguing about what to do with them.
- 257–260Valerian targets the leadershipValerian went after the church's structure rather than the crowd: bishops, priests, and deacons first, then Christians of senatorial and knightly rank, and the cemeteries where they met. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was beheaded on September 14, 258; Sixtus II of Rome was seized in a catacomb the same year. When Valerian was captured by the Persians, his son Gallienus reversed the policy in 260, and the church got about forty years of quiet.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Faustinus of Lyon at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
A Gallic bishop who wrote to Cyprian urging him not to let a bishop who had denied Christ keep his seat.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Martyrs' Church · 40 on this stretch of wall
A 22-year-old mother who kept a diary in prison and walked into the arena at Carthage singing.
Stayed with his people through plague and persecution, then walked to his own beheading and paid the executioner.
Traced his teaching straight back to the apostle John through Polycarp, and wrote the first great takedown of the gnostics.
Kept wearing his philosopher's cloak after he met Christ, argued the faith to the emperor's face, and was beheaded for it.
Wanted to die with his martyred father as a boy, and spent the rest of his life laying six versions of the Old Testament side by side.
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The lawyer who gave the church the word Trinity and told Rome that the blood of the martyrs is seed.