Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/538

 atrocities within his jurisdiction (Epp. xxxiv. xxxv. Galland.).

III. —There were three Gothic invasions of Italy—the first under Alaric, the second under Radagaisus, the third led by Alaric himself, who laid siege to Rome 408. Innocent was within the city, the emperor at Ravenna. Famine and plague having ensued during the siege, Zosimus, the heathen historian, alleges that Pompeianus, the prefect of the city, having been persuaded by certain Etruscan diviners that their spells and sacrifices, performed on the Capitol, could draw down lightnings against the enemy, Innocent was consulted and consented, but the majority of the senators refused (v. 40). Sozomen mentions the circumstance but does not implicate Innocent (ix. 6). It seems highly improbable that Innocent would sanction such rites of heathenism. In 409 the offer of a ransom led Alaric to raise the siege, and two deputations were sent to the emperor at Ravenna to induce him to sanction the terms agreed on. The first having failed, Innocent accompanied the second, and thus was not in the city when it was finally taken on Aug. 24, 410. Alaric's invasion was regarded as a judgment on heathen rather than Christian Rome, and as a vindication of the church, the pope's providential absence being compared by Orosius to the saving of Lot from Sodom. Undoubtedly the event was a marked one in the supersession of heathenism by Christianity. The destruction of the old temples, never afterwards restored, the dispersion and ruin of families which clung most to the old order, the view that judgment had fallen on old heathen Rome, which its deities had been powerless to protect, all helped to complete the triumph of the church and to add importance to the reign of Innocent. Soon after this great event Augustine ( 413) began his famous work, de Civitate Dei, though he took 13 years to complete it, in which he sees a vision of the kingdom of God rising on the ruins of the kingdom of the world—a vision which gradually took more distinct shape in the idea already more or less grasped by Innocent, of a Catholic Christendom united under the Roman see.

Innocent's Epistolae et Decreta are printed in Galland's ''Bibl. Pat.'' t. viii. and in Migne, ''Patr. Lat.'' t. xx. Cf. Innocent the Great by C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon (Longmans; 4 maps and 8 genealogical tables).

[J.B—Y.]

Irenaeus (1), bp. of Lyons. Very little is known of his personal history except that he was a native of Asia Minor; in early youth had seen and heard bp. Polycarp at Smyrna; afterwards came into Gaul, and during the persecution of 177 carried, as presbyter of Lyons, a letter from the Gallican confessors to the Roman bp. Eleutherus (174 or 175–189); after the death of bp. Pothinus of Lyons (177) became his successor (Eus. H. E. v. 5), and was still bishop in the time of bp. Victor, who succeeded Eleutherus at Rome (189–198 or 199); and that he took a leading part in all ecclesiastical transactions and controversies of the time. St. Jerome speaks of him (de Vir. Ill. 35) as having flourished in the reign of Commodus (180–192). His birth is assigned to widely distant epochs. The earliest and the latest dates proposed are 50 years apart (97–147). Various considerations lead us to fix on c. 126, or possibly c. 136, as the latest admissible date.

Of his youthful literary training and culture we can only judge from his writings, which shew some acquaintance with the Greek poets and philosophers; he cites Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Plato. Of his Christian training he tells us that, besides instructions from Polycarp, he had other teachers, "Presbyters" (of Asia Minor), whom he designates as mediate or immediate disciples of the apostles (Haer. ii. 22, 5; iv. 27, 1; 32, 1; v. 5, 30, 1; 33, 3; 36, 1). Whether he was personally acquainted with Papias, whom he mentions so frequently, is uncertain. If he was in Rome 156 he doubtless continued his studies there. The time of his removal into Gaul is unknown, but there were close ties between the missionary church of Gaul and the mother-churches of Asia Minor. At the time of the persecution, to which the aged bp. Pothinus fell a victim in the 17th year of Marcus Aurelius, 177 (cf. my Chronologie der römischen Bischöfe, p. 185), Irenaeus was a presbyter at Lugdunum. That Irenaeus wrote the epistle of the Gallican confessors to the churches of Asia Minor and Phrygia, which so vividly describes the persecution (ap. Eus. H. E. v. 1), is an uncertain conjecture. There is indeed a fragment preserved by Oecumenius and assigned to Irenaeus (Fragm. Graec, xiii. ap. Harvey, ii. 482 seq.), which really stands in very close connexion with that epistle, mentioning in a similar way the calumny about "Thyestean banquets," which rested on depositions wrung from tortured slaves, the endeavours of the persecutors to force the martyrs Sanctus and Blandina to make alike confession, and Blandina's answer, which, though not identical with that in the epistle, is nearly related to it. Irenaeus's mission to Rome was undertaken to intercede with bp. Eleutherus for the Montanists of Asia Minor in the name and on behalf of the Gallican confessors (Eus. H. E. v. 3, 4). That another object of the journey was that Irenaeus himself might obtain episcopal consecration at Rome is an unproved assertion of some Roman Catholic authors. The common assumption that there was then no episcopal see but Lyons in all Gaul is hardly warranted by the fact that in the narrative of the persecution at Vienne a deacon only and no bishop is mentioned. A better argument is that Eusebius (H. E. v. 23) appears to speak of Irenaeus as bishop of all the churches of Gaul. But neither can be regarded as a sure proof.

As bp. of Lyons Irenaeus was distinguished for his zeal for the conversion of the heathen (cf. the Acts of St. Ferreolus and his companions, Boll. Acta SS. 16 Jun. iii.), and yet more by his conflicts with heretics and his strenuous endeavours to maintain the peace of the church, in true accord with his name Εἰρηναῖος (Peace-man). His great work Against all Heresies was probably written during his episcopate. The preface informs us that he then first wrote as an ecclesiastical writer. We subsequently find him exerting himself to protect the churches of his native country (Asia Minor) from Roman pretensions and aggression. The Roman bp. Victor was