TRINITY · 1 JUNE & TRINITY · 28 JUNE Philosopher, Bishop & Martyrs
Justin Martyr & Irenaeus of Lyon
Philosopher, Bishop & Martyrs · Defenders of the Faith · d. c. 165 & 202
Irenaeus — ir-ih-NAY-us · Logos spermatikos — LOH-gos sper-MAT-ih-kos · Adversus Haereses — ad-VER-sus hay-REH-ses · anakephalaiosis — an-ah-keh-fal-eye-OH-sis · Lyon — lee-ON · Gnosticism — NOS-tih-siz-m
O God, who didst give to thy servants Justin and Irenaeus the courage to defend thy truth before the learned of this world and against the corruption of false teaching; Grant that thy Church may never lack such bold apologists and patient theologians, who gather all wisdom into the service of Christ, and hold fast the apostolic faith against every distortion; through Jesus Christ our Lord, in whom all things are gathered up and made new.
The Apostolic Fathers gave the Church its living memory of the Lord. Justin Martyr gave it its intellectual self-confidence, and Irenaeus of Lyon (ir-ih-NAY-us) gave it its theological spine. These are not small gifts. Without Justin, Christianity remains a sect of the Jewish world, unable to address the Hellenistic culture in which it was growing. Without Irenaeus, Gnosticism — the most sophisticated religious movement of the second century — might well have absorbed the Church into a version of itself, replacing the bodily Resurrection with a spiritual escape, the God of Creation with a distant and uninvolved absolute, and the scriptures of Israel with a private mythology available only to the initiated. Justin and Irenaeus are the two men who ensured that neither of these disasters occurred. Their feast days fall four weeks apart in Trinity-tide, both Red, and the closeness of the calendar mirrors the closeness of their vocations: one opens the door, the other secures the house.
Justin was born a pagan in Samaria, trained in philosophy — he worked through Stoicism, Pythagoreanism, and Platonism before finding in each of them some element of truth and some fatal insufficiency — and came to Christianity in middle life after a conversation on a beach with an old man who pointed him to the Hebrew prophets. The prophets, the old man said, had seen and spoken of Christ before Christ came. Justin, trained to follow an argument wherever it led, followed this one to baptism and to a life of teaching in Rome wearing his philosopher’s cloak. He never took it off. He was a Christian who remained a philosopher because he believed that philosophy belonged, at its deepest level, to Christ. His great insight was the doctrine of the Logos spermatikos (LOH-gos sper-MAT-ih-kos) — the seed-bearing Word, scattered through all human reasoning and culture before the Incarnation, so that whatever any thinker had ever thought truly was, without knowing it, a fragment of Christ. Whatever things were rightly said among all men, he wrote in his Second Apology, are the property of us Christians. Socrates was a Christian before Christ. The Stoic sages were reaching, however imperfectly, toward the Word who would become flesh. This is not syncretism or relativism: it is the most radical possible claim for the universality of the Incarnation, the insistence that the Word who was made flesh in Palestine had never been absent from the world he had made. Justin was martyred in Rome around 165 under the prefect Rusticus, refusing to sacrifice. He died as he had lived: following the argument to its conclusion.
Irenaeus had known Polycarp of Smyrna in his youth — he was thus one step removed from the Apostle John — and became Bishop of Lyon (lee-ON) in Gaul after his predecessor was martyred in the persecution of 177. The church at Lyon was a Greek-speaking community in the Latin West, and Irenaeus wrote in Greek, though his great work, the Adversus Haereses (ad-VER-sus hay-REH-ses) — Against Heresies — survives largely in Latin translation. The Gnostics he was writing against were extraordinarily sophisticated: they had scriptures of their own, elaborate mythologies of divine emanations, and a theology that flattered the intelligence of its converts by telling them that the material world was a mistake, the God of the Old Testament a lesser deity, and salvation a matter of secret knowledge (gnosis — NOH-sis) available only to the spiritually elect. Irenaeus dismantled all of this, systematically and at very great length, with a patience that only occasionally lets its frustration show. His counter-argument rests on a single great concept: anakephalaiosis (an-ah-keh-fal-eye-OH-sis) — recapitulation. Christ does not rescue souls from creation; he recapitulates creation — sums it up, gathers it in, goes back to the beginning and walks the whole of human history again from within, undoing at each stage what Adam had broken. The body matters. The material world matters. The God of Genesis and the God of Calvary are the same God. Creation is not a mistake to be escaped but a gift to be redeemed. This is not a minor theological point; it is the difference between Christianity and every form of spiritual escapism that has ever threatened to replace it, and Irenaeus made the argument so thoroughly that the Church has been living inside it ever since.
The four weeks of Trinity that separate their feasts give the reader time to sit with what each man offers before meeting the other. Justin is the open hand — the thinker who says that all truth, wherever found, leads to Christ, and that the Church need fear no honest question. Irenaeus is the firm foundation — the theologian who says that not every answer claiming to be Christian is in fact Christian, and that the Rule of Faith received from the Apostles is the measure by which all teaching must be judged. One without the other produces either an undiscriminating openness that dissolves into the culture around it, or a defensive rigidity that cannot speak to the world at all. Justin and Irenaeus held together — the philosopher and the systematist, the open door and the stable floor — are the model of a Church both intellectually generous and doctrinally secure. Together they stand as the second great pair in the Patristic tradition, receiving from Ignatius and Polycarp the living memory of the Apostles, and passing it forward, clarified and defended, to the great age of the Councils that was still to come.
O Almighty God, who by the labours of thy servants Justin and Irenaeus didst establish thy Church in wisdom and defend her in truth; Grant that we, like Justin, may seek thee in all things and find thee in all truth, and that, like Irenaeus, we may hold fast the faith once delivered, welcoming the whole world into its embrace while admitting no corruption of its substance; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.