Irenaeus

Irenaeus was born in Smyrna, in Asia Minor, around 130. As a boy he sat and listened to Polycarp, the old bishop of that city, and he never forgot it. Writing decades later to a former friend who had drifted into heresy, he described the scene from memory: where Polycarp sat as he taught, how he walked, how he looked, and how he told what he had heard from John and from the others who had seen the Lord with their own eyes.

That is the chain Irenaeus stood in, John to Polycarp to Irenaeus, and it is the thing he leaned on hardest when the fight came.

He went west, to Lugdunum in Gaul, the city now called Lyons, and served as a presbyter there. In 177 the church of Lyons was torn apart by a savage local persecution; the bishop Pothinus, over ninety years old, died in prison, and Christians were tortured in the amphitheatre before crowds. Irenaeus was away when the worst of it happened. The confessors in prison had sent him to Rome with a letter, on a peacemaking errand about Montanism. He came back to find his bishop dead, and was made bishop in his place.

His great work is Against Heresies, in five books. The gnostic teachers, above all the school of Valentinus, taught an elaborate scheme of thirty divine beings, a botched creation by a lesser god, and a secret knowledge that saved an elite few. Irenaeus's method was to set their systems out in full, in their own words, the first two books are largely description, on the theory that the plain statement would do half the work.

Then he answered: one God, who made the world and called it good; one Christ, truly human and truly divine; a resurrection of the body, not an escape from it; and no secret teaching anywhere, because the apostles founded churches and appointed successors whose names anyone could look up.

He also fixed the number of the Gospels at four, no more and no fewer, and argued Christ as the second Adam who runs the whole human story again and gets it right, what he called recapitulation.

A second work, the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, was lost for centuries and turned up in an Armenian manuscript in 1904.

When Victor of Rome moved to excommunicate the churches of Asia over the date of Easter around 190, Irenaeus wrote to him and told him to stop, the difference in practice, he said, had never broken the peace before, and the man whose name means peaceable ought to keep it.

He died about 202. Later writers, Jerome among them, call him a martyr; Eusebius does not say so, and the record of how he died is not firm.

Sources: Irenaeus, Against Heresies and Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching; Eusebius, Church History V.1–8, V.20, V.24; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.