Saint Irenaeus
Doctor of the Church, Bishop and Martyr (120-202)
Feast-June 28
Before the Edict of Milan in 313, which declared tolerance for Christianity in the Roman empire the most common path to sainthood was martyrdom. Christians were persecuted by everybody. Rulers, pagans and Jews hated them because the followers of Jesus, through their pious lives, exposed corruption, but as it is written in Matthew 10;28 28 “And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” the biggest threat were and are deviations and heretical philosophies deceiving and dividing Christians.
Under those circumstances in the year 120, St. Irenaeus, one of the first Fathers, and first great theologian of the Church in the town of Smyrna in Asia Minor, now İzmir, Turkey was born.
His Greek parents, who were Christians, placed him while still young under the care of the great St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, a disciple of the Apostle John. It was in this holy school that he learned the sacred sciences which later made him a great ornament of the Church and the terror of her enemies.
St. Polycarp cultivated this rising genius and formed his mind in piety by his precepts and example, and the zealous young scholar was careful to reap all the advantages offered him by the solicitude of such a master. Such was his veneration for his tutor’s sanctity that he observed all the acts and virtues he saw in that holy man, the better to copy his example and learn his spirit. He listened to his instructions with an insatiable ardor, and so deeply did he engrave them in his heart that the impressions remained vivid even in his old age.
St. Irenaeus spent a number of years in combat against the eastern gnostics and philosophers of error. In order to confound the heresies of his age, he acquainted himself with the conceits of the pagan philosophers, and thereby became qualified to trace every error to its sources and set it in its full light. To counter the doctrines of the gnostic who took their name from the Greek word for “knowledge.” Claiming access to secret knowledge imparted by Jesus to only a few disciples, he offered three pillars of orthodoxy: the scriptures, the tradition handed down from the apostles, and the teaching of the apostles’ successors.
When many of the heretics of Asia Minor had migrated to pursue the Catholic religion in Gaul, a region of present day France, and were beginning to establish roots there, St. Polycarp decided to send the valiant soldier of Christ, St. Irenaeus with a company of about forty Christians to Lyons to aid St. Pothinus, its bishop who was already advanced in age.
During the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor from 161–180, St. 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 in 177 to Rome 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, a persecution took place in Lyons. The persecutors imagined that Christianity had been stifled in Lyons, and they ceased their pursuits for a time. Returning to Gaul, St. Irenaeus succeeded the martyr St. Pothinus and became the second bishop of Lyons.
During the religious peace which followed the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, the new bishop divided his activities between the duties of a pastor, of a missionary and of writings which were directed against Gnosticism. Through his preaching, St. Irenaeus converted almost the whole country to the Faith in a short time; the Christians of Lyons became models by their candor, their estrangement from all ambition, their poverty, chastity and temperance, and in this way confounded many adversaries of their religion. Through his writings he was already known to Tertullian, Theodoret and St. Epiphanus, who spoke of him as a luminous torch of truth in the darkness of those times.
The most famous of these writings is Adversus haereses (Against Heresies) where he concludes: “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.”
In Book I, St. 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 St. Irenaeus purports to show that these doctrines are false, by providing counter-evidence gleaned from the Gospels. Book IV consists of Jesus’ sayings, and here he also stresses the unity of the Old Testament and the Gospel. In the final volume, Book V, St. Irenaeus focuses on more sayings of Jesus plus the letters of St. Paul the Apostle.
As a bishop of Lyons, St. Irenaeus served God for twenty-five years until he finally suffered martyrdom there with many others, in the year 202 under Emperor Septimus Severus. The imperial decrees renewing the persecutions arrived at Lyons at the time of the celebration of Severus’ tenth year of reign; the pagans found amid the celebrations an opportunity to take vengeance on the Christians, who refused to participate in the debaucheries which accompanied these feastings. Assassins armed with daggers, stones and knives filled the city with blood, and thousands of Christians won, with their bishop, the crown they had always admired as the greatest glory God could grant His servants.
St. Irenaeus remains enormously important to the Church today—not only for professional theologians but also for devout Catholics who want to better understand and defend their faith.
The Slayer of Gnostic heresy, the first heresy in the Christian world shows the path to fight the next. His writings are a great source of reassuring belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. They help in developing devotion to Mary. They help us understand the importance of apostolic succession, centrality, and unity throughout the Roman Church and its role in the world. They also grant us an appreciation for the scriptural canon of the four gospels and adopting the concept that all things come together in Christ.
References and Excerpts
[1] F. Media, “Saint Irenaeus,” Franciscan Media, Jun. 28, 2016. https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-irenaeus/ (accessed Jun. 13, 2020).
[2] “Saint Irenaeus, Doctor of the Church, Bishop and Martyr.” https://sanctoral.com/en/saints/saint_irenaeus.html (accessed Jun. 13, 2020).
[3] “Memorial of St. Irenaeus, bishop and martyr – June 28, 2016 – Liturgical Calendar.” https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/calendar/day.cfm?date=2016-06-28 (accessed Jun. 13, 2020).
[4] “Ten Things You Need to Know about St. Irenaeus,” Catholic Exchange, Jun. 27, 2014. https://catholicexchange.com/ten-things-need-know-st-irenaeus (accessed Jun. 13, 2020).
[5] “Irenaeus,” Wikipedia. Jun. 11, 2020, Accessed: Jun. 13, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Irenaeus&oldid=962039252.