Irénée De Lyon

Irenaeus ( or ; ; ) was a Greek bishop noted for his role in guiding and expanding Christian communities in the southern regions of present-day France and, more widely, for the development of Christian theology by opposing Gnostic interpretations of Christian Scripture and defining proto-orthodoxy. Originating from Smyrna, he had seen and heard the preaching of Polycarp, who in turn was said to have heard John the Evangelist.

Chosen as Bishop of Lugdunum, now Lyon, Irenaeus wrote his best-known work ''Against Heresies'' around 180 as a refutation of gnosticism, in particular that of Valentinus. To counter the doctrines of the gnostic sects claiming secret wisdom, he offered three pillars of orthodoxy: the scriptures, the tradition said to be handed down from the apostles, and the teaching of the apostles' successors. He is the earliest surviving witness to regard all four of the now-canonical gospels as essential.

Irenaeus is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, Anglican Church, Lutheran Churches, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in the Catholic Church by Pope Francis in 2022.

Biography

Irenaeus was a Greek from Polycarp's hometown of Smyrna in Anatolia, now İzmir, Turkey, born during the first half of the 2nd century. The exact date is thought to be between the years 120 and 130. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was brought up in a Christian family rather than converting as an adult.

During a local persecution of Christians around Lyon duiring the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor from 161 to 180, Irenaeus was a priest of the Church of Lyon. The clergy of that city, many of whom were suffering imprisonment for the faith, sent him to Rome in 177 with a letter to Pope Eleutherius concerning the heresy of Montanism, and that occasion bore emphatic testimony to his merits. While Irenaeus was in Rome, the Lyon persecution took place. Returning to Gaul, Irenaeus succeeded the martyr Saint Pothinus and became the second bishop of Lyon.

During the religious peace which followed the Lyon persecution, the new bishop divided his activities between the duties of a pastor and of a missionary (as to which we have but brief data, late and not very certain). Almost all his writings were directed against Gnosticism. The most famous of these writings is ''On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis'', usually known by the abbreviated title ''Against Heresies'' ( ''Adversus haereses''). Irenaeus alludes to coming across Gnostic writings, and holding conversations with Gnostics, and this may have taken place in Anatolia or in Rome. However, it also appears that Gnosticism was present near Lyon: he writes that there were followers of ' Marcus the Magician' living and teaching in the Rhone valley.

Little is known about the career of Irenaeus after he became bishop. The last action reported of him (by Eusebius, 150 years later) is that in 190 or 191, he exerted influence on Pope Victor I not to excommunicate the Christian communities of Anatolia which persevered in the practice of the Quartodeciman celebration of Easter.

Nothing is known of the date of his death, which must have occurred at the end of the second or the beginning of the third century. He is regarded as a martyr by the Catholic Church and by some within the Orthodox Church. He was buried under the Church of Saint John in Lyon, which was later renamed St Irenaeus in his honour. The church was devastated in 1562 by the Huguenots. Several relics supposedly of Irenaeus are held in various churches in Lyon. Two crania from different churches were dated by carbon-14 to the Middle Ages, but a piece of heelbone kept in the Lyon Cathedral is from the right time period.

Veneration

The Latin Catholic Church celebrates Irenaeus' memorial on 28 June. Pope Francis declared Irenaeus the 37th Doctor of the Church on 21 January 2022. Francis also conferred upon Irenaeus the supplementary title ''Doctor unitatis'' ("Doctor of Unity").

The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates Irenaeus, the feast being on 23 August.

Lutheran Churches honor Irenaeus on their calendar of saints on 28 June.

Irenaeus is honored in the Church of England and in the Episcopal Church on 28 June.

Writings

Irenaeus wrote a number of books, but the most important that survives is the ''Against Heresies'' (or, in its Latin title, ''Adversus haereses''). In Book I, Irenaeus talks about the Valentinian Gnostics and their predecessors, who he says go as far back as the magician Simon Magus. In Book II he attempts to provide proof that Valentinianism contains no merit in terms of its doctrines. In Book III, Irenaeus attempts to show that these doctrines are false, by providing counter-evidence gleaned from the Gospels. Book IV consists of Jesus's sayings, and here Irenaeus also stresses the unity of the Old Testament and the Gospel. In the final volume, Book V, Irenaeus focuses on more sayings of Jesus plus the letters of Paul the Apostle.

Irenaeus wrote: "One should not seek among others the truth that can be easily gotten from the Church. For in her, as in a rich treasury, the apostles have placed all that pertains to truth, so that everyone can drink this beverage of life. She is the door of life." But he also said, "Christ came not only for those who believed from the time of Tiberius Caesar, nor did the Father provide only for those who are now, but for absolutely all men from the beginning, who, according to their ability, feared and loved God and lived justly. . . and desired to see Christ and to hear His voice."

The purpose of "Against Heresies" was to refute the teachings of various Gnostic groups; apparently, several Greek merchants had begun an oratorial campaign in Irenaeus's bishopric, teaching that the material world was the accidental creation of an evil god, from which we are to escape by the pursuit of ''gnosis''. Irenaeus argued that the true gnosis is in fact knowledge of Christ, which redeems rather than escapes from bodily existence.

Until the discovery of the Library of Nag Hammadi in 1945, ''Against Heresies'' was the best-surviving description of Gnosticism. Some religious scholars have argued the findings at Nag Hammadi have shown Irenaeus's description of Gnosticism to be inaccurate and polemic in nature. However, the general consensus among modern scholars is that Irenaeus was fairly accurate in his transmission of gnostic beliefs, and that the Nag Hammadi texts have raised no substantial challenges to the overall accuracy of Irenaeus's information. Religious historian Elaine Pagels criticizes Irenaeus for describing Gnostic groups as sexual libertines, for example, when some of their own writings advocated chastity more strongly than did orthodox texts. However, the Nag Hammadi texts do not present a single, coherent picture of any unified gnostic system of belief, but rather divergent beliefs of multiple Gnostic sects. Some of these sects were indeed libertine because they considered bodily existence meaningless; others praised chastity, and strongly prohibited any sexual activity, even within marriage.

Irenaeus also wrote
The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching
' (also known as ''Proof of the Apostolic Preaching''), an Armenian copy of which was discovered in 1904. This work seems to have been an instruction for recent Christian converts.

Eusebius attests to other works by Irenaeus, today lost, including ''On the Ogdoad,'' an untitled letter to Blastus regarding schism, ''On the Subject of Knowledge'', ''On the Monarchy'' or ''How God is not the Cause of Evil'', ''On Easter''.

Irenaeus exercised wide influence on the generation which followed. Both Hippolytus and Tertullian freely drew on his writings. However, none of his works aside from ''Against Heresies'' and ''The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching'' survive today, perhaps because his literal hope of an earthly millennium may have made him uncongenial reading in the Greek East. Even though no complete version of ''Against Heresies'' in its original Greek exists, we possess the full ancient Latin version, probably of the third century, as well as thirty-three fragments of a Syrian version and a complete Armenian version of books 4 and 5.

Evelyn Underhill in her book Mysticism credited Irenaeus as being one of those to whom we owe "the preservation of that mighty system of scaffolding which enabled the Catholic mystics to build up the towers and bulwarks of the City of God."

Irenaeus's works were first translated into English by John Keble and published in 1872 as part of the Library of the Fathers series.

Scripture

Irenaeus pointed to the public rule of faith, authoritatively articulated by the preaching of bishops and inculcated in Church practice, especially worship, as an authentic apostolic tradition by which to read Scripture truly against heresies. He classified as Scripture not only the Old Testament but most of the books now known as the New Testament, while excluding many works, a large number by Gnostics, that flourished in the 2nd century and claimed scriptural authority. Oftentimes, Irenaeus, as a student of Polycarp, who he claimed was a student of John, believed that he was interpreting scriptures in the same hermeneutic as the Apostles. This connection to Jesus was important to Irenaeus because both he and the Gnostics based their arguments on Scripture. Irenaeus argued that since he could trace his authority to Jesus and the Gnostics could not, his interpretation of Scripture was correct. He also used "the Rule of Faith", a "proto-creed" with similarities to the Apostles' Creed, as a hermeneutical key to argue that his interpretation of Scripture was correct.

Before Irenaeus, Christians differed as to which gospel they preferred. The Christians of Anatolia preferred the Gospel of John. The Gospel of Matthew was the most popular overall. Irenaeus asserted that all four of the Gospels, John, Luke, Matthew, and Mark (which is the order presented in his four pillar narrative in ''Adversus haereses'' (''Against Heresies'') III 11,8), were canonical scripture. Thus Irenaeus provides the earliest witness to the assertion of the four canonical Gospels, possibly in reaction to Marcion's edited version of the Gospel of Luke, which Marcion asserted was the one and only true gospel.

Based on the arguments Irenaeus made in support of only four authentic gospels, some interpreters deduce that the ''fourfold Gospel'' must have still been a novelty in Irenaeus's time. ''Against Heresies'' 3.11.7 acknowledges that many heterodox Christians use only one gospel while 3.11.9 acknowledges that some use more than four. The success of Tatian's Diatessaron in about the same time period is "... a powerful indication that the fourfold Gospel contemporaneously sponsored by Irenaeus was not broadly, let alone universally, recognized." (The apologist and ascetic Tatian had previously harmonized the four gospels into a single narrative, the ''Diatesseron'' –160)

Irenaeus is also the earliest to say that the Gospel of John was written by John the Apostle, and that the Gospel of Luke was written by Luke, the companion of Paul.

Scholars contend that Irenaeus quotes from 21 of the 27 New Testament books.

He may refer to Hebrews 2:30 and James 4:16 and maybe even 2 Peter 5:28, but does not cite Philemon.

Irenaeus cited the New Testament approximately 1,000 times. About one third of his citations are made to Paul's letters. Irenaeus considered all 13 letters belonging to the Pauline corpus to have been written by Paul himself.

Apostolic authority

In his writing against the Gnostics, who claimed to possess a secret oral tradition from Jesus himself, Irenaeus claimed that the bishops in different cities are known as far back as the Apostles and that the oral tradition he lists from the Apostles is a safe guide to the interpretation of Scripture. In a passage that became a ''locus classicus