Irenaeus Sets Out the Rule of Faith

Irenaeus says that as a boy in Asia Minor he had seen and heard Polycarp (Eusebius, Church History 5.20.5–6) (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4). Eusebius, in the fourth century, reports that at the time of the persecution at Lyon he was a presbyter there, and that he succeeded Pothinus as bishop (Eusebius, Church History 5.4.1–2; 5.5.8–9). He wrote among people he calls “the Keltae”. A friend had asked him for an account of the teaching of the followers of Valentinus, whose writings he had read and some of whom he had met (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1, preface 2–3).

These teachers, as Irenaeus describes them, appealed past the Scriptures to a truth handed down by word of mouth to the “perfect”, and claimed to be wiser than the apostles (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.2.1–2). He answers with three public tests.

The first is the faith itself, the “rule of the truth” that each Christian received at baptism (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.9.4). The church, scattered over the whole world, has received from the apostles belief in one God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth; in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, made flesh for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who foretold through the prophets the birth from a virgin, the passion, the resurrection, the ascension and the coming again in glory. The churches from Germany to Libya hold it alike (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.10.1–2).

The second is the written Gospel. What the apostles preached they later handed down in writing: Matthew among the Hebrews, Mark as Peter’s interpreter, Luke as Paul’s companion, and John, the disciple of the Lord, at Ephesus (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1). There can be neither more nor fewer than four Gospels, as there are four winds and four living creatures round the throne (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8).

The third is the succession of bishops. The apostles handed on their own place to the bishops they appointed, and the lists can be recited (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.1). Because it would take too long to list them for every church, he gives one, that of the “very great, the very ancient, and universally known” church founded at Rome by Peter and Paul (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.2), from Linus to Eleutherius, the twelfth (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.3). Of that church he says, in a sentence that survives only in the Latin version: “For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its pre-eminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who exist everywhere.” The translators say in a note that they are far from sure their rendering is correct, and the note adds another, in which every church must “resort” to this church “on account of more potent principality” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.2).

The churches read the sentence differently. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes it for the communion of all particular churches with the church of Rome (Catechism of the Catholic Church 834). The Orthodox patriarchs wrote in 1848 that Irenaeus does not say what the defenders of the papal claims take him to say, and that even on their reading he was praising a church that then kept the faith of the Fathers (Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848) § 13). A. Cleveland Coxe, the Episcopal bishop who edited the translation in America, argues in the same note that the faith was kept at Rome by those who came there from every side, so that Rome mirrored the faith of the churches and was not its source (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.2).

Irenaeus goes on to cite Smyrna and Ephesus in the same way, and peoples who keep the faith without any writings (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4) (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.4.1–2). Some years later, as Eusebius records, he wrote to Victor of Rome urging him not to cut off the churches of Asia over the date of Easter (Eusebius, Church History 5.24.11–17).