East and West in the Second Century

The meeting of Polycarp and Anicetus is remembered less for what it settled than for what it preserved: full communion between the churches of Asia and Rome across a real divergence of custom. A generation later the same Paschal question would be pressed to the point of rupture, when the Roman bishop Victor attempted to cut off the Quartodeciman churches of Asia — and would be rebuked, by Polycarp’s own disciple Irenaeus, in the name of the peace Polycarp and Anicetus had kept. The contrast between the two episodes, and the long road from them to the settlement at Nicaea, frames much of the Orthodox understanding of conciliarity, of honor and jurisdiction, and of unity-in-diversity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

Communion Across Diverse Customs

The first thing the visit to Anicetus teaches is that, in the middle of the second century, the unity of the Church did not yet require uniformity of liturgical custom. The churches of Asia kept Pascha on the fourteenth of Nisan; Rome kept it on the following Sunday; and the two practices coexisted within a single communion. When Polycarp and Anicetus could not persuade one another, Irenaeus records, “they communed with each other,” and “parted from each other in peace, both those who observed, and those who did not, maintaining the peace of the whole church” (Eusebius, HE 5.24.16–17, NPNF II/1; cf. Holmes 2007). The divergence in observance was acknowledged, named, and left standing — and the communion of the churches was held to be the greater good.

This was, moreover, not the only such difference. Irenaeus, in the same letter, points out that the very manner of the pre-Paschal fast varied widely from place to place: “some think that they ought to fast one day, others two, yet others more; some, moreover, count their day as consisting of forty hours day and night” (HE 5.24.12, NPNF II/1). Such variety, he observes, “has existed long before our time,” among forebears who “nevertheless all lived in peace, and we also live in peace with one another; and the disagreement in regard to the fast confirms the agreement in the faith” (HE 5.24.13, NPNF II/1). That last clause is the theological key to the whole second-century settlement: difference in discipline, far from threatening the unity of faith, could actually confirm it, by showing that the bond holding the churches together lay deeper than their customs. For the place of the fast and the Paschal reckoning within the later liturgical order, see Orthodoxy Guide: Great Lent.

The Contrast: Victor’s Attempted Excommunication (c. 190)

About a generation after Polycarp’s visit, the same question was handled in a very different spirit. Around the year 190, under the Roman bishop Victor I, the divergence between the Asian and Roman Paschal observances came to a head. Synods were held in many provinces and a broad consensus emerged in favor of the Sunday observance; but the churches of Asia, led by Polycrates of Ephesus, held firmly to their ancestral fourteenth of Nisan (Eusebius, HE 5.23–24, NPNF II/1).

Polycrates’ defense, preserved by Eusebius, exactly mirrors Polycarp’s own: he appealed to the great apostolic luminaries who had lived and died in Asia and whose tradition the Asian churches kept — the Apostle Philip and his daughters, the Apostle John “who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord,” Polycarp himself, and a long roll of bishops and martyrs, “all of whom observed the fourteenth day of the passover according to the Gospel, deviating in no respect, but following the rule of faith” (Polycrates, quoted in HE 5.24.2–7, NPNF II/1). “I am not affrighted by terrifying words,” Polycrates declared, “for those greater than I have said, ‘We ought to obey God rather than man’” (HE 5.24.7, NPNF II/1).

Victor’s response was to attempt what Anicetus had not dreamt of: he “immediately attempted to cut off from the common unity the parishes of all Asia, with the churches that agreed with them, as heterodox; and he wrote letters and declared all the brethren there wholly excommunicate” (HE 5.24.9, NPNF II/1). Where Anicetus had yielded his altar to a guest who differed from him, Victor moved to sever the churches that differed from him.

Irenaeus’s Rebuke

The attempt was not carried through, and it is here that the precedent of Polycarp returns with decisive force. Eusebius records that “this did not please all the bishops,” who “besought him to consider the things of peace, and of neighborly unity and love” (HE 5.24.10, NPNF II/1). Foremost among those who rebuked Victor was Irenaeus of Lyons — the very man who, in his youth, had heard Polycarp, and who now wrote “fittingly, exhorting Victor not to cut off whole churches of God which observed the tradition of an ancient custom” (HE 5.24.11, NPNF II/1).

Irenaeus’s argument, as Eusebius preserves it, rests squarely on the example of the earlier bishops, and at its climax he adduces precisely the meeting of Polycarp and Anicetus. He recounts how the predecessors of Victor — Anicetus, Soter, and those before them — though they themselves kept the Sunday, “were not on this account at variance with those who came to them from the parishes in which it was observed differently,” and “were none the less at peace with them” (HE 5.24.14–15, NPNF II/1). Then he narrates the visit itself: how Polycarp and Anicetus failed to convince one another, communed nonetheless, and parted in peace, Anicetus yielding the Eucharist to Polycarp out of honor (HE 5.24.16–17, NPNF II/1). The whole point of recalling the episode is to set the living memory of Polycarp against Victor’s threat of excommunication. The disciple of Smyrna’s bishop summoned his master’s example to restrain the bishop of Rome. The detailed narrative of that original meeting is treated in The Visit to Anicetus.

The Road to Nicaea

Irenaeus’s intervention, and that of the other bishops, evidently held: the threatened rupture did not become a lasting schism, and the Asian churches remained, for the time, within the communion of the Church. But the underlying divergence was not resolved by the second-century debates. The question of the Paschal date was finally taken up by the whole Church only at the First Ecumenical Council, held at Nicaea in 325, which determined that Pascha should be observed uniformly on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, and not in dependence on the Jewish reckoning. With the conciliar settlement the Quartodeciman observance, once the venerable usage of the Apostle John’s own churches, gradually passed away, surviving only in marginal and increasingly isolated communities.

The progression is instructive. A custom that in Polycarp’s day could be held in good conscience within the communion of the Church, and that even Victor’s pressure could not abolish, was at length set aside not by the act of a single bishop but by the common mind of the episcopate gathered in council. The mechanism of resolution that the Church ultimately reached for was conciliar, not monarchical (on the council and its authority, see Orthodoxy Guide: Ecumenical Councils; on the pre-schism shape of East and West, Orthodoxy Guide: The Pre-Schism Church).

What the Episode Means for Orthodox Self-Understanding

For the Orthodox tradition the Polycarp–Anicetus episode, read together with the Victor controversy and the Nicene settlement, carries a cluster of meanings that should be stated carefully and even-handedly.

First, it bears on conciliarity. The Paschal question was finally settled neither by Asian intransigence nor by Roman fiat but by the council, the assembled bishops discerning the common mind of the Church. The second-century episodes show the Church feeling its way toward this conciliar mode of resolution: Irenaeus restrains Victor by appeal to the consensus and the peace of the churches, not by counter-claim of authority. The road from Anicetus to Nicaea is, in this reading, the road from charitable toleration of difference toward conciliar definition of common practice.

Second, it bears on the much-debated question of primacy of honor versus jurisdiction. Here the episodes are genuinely capable of more than one reading, and an honest account notes both. On one reading, favored in much Orthodox interpretation, the contrast between Anicetus and Victor displays the limits of Roman authority: Anicetus did not, and perhaps could not, impose his usage on Polycarp, and when Victor attempted to do so he was rebuked and his sentence did not take effect — the Roman see exercising a primacy of honor and initiative, but not a jurisdiction over other churches that could simply command their conformity. On another reading, defended in much Roman Catholic interpretation, the very fact that Victor could attempt so sweeping a measure, and that the controversy turned on Rome’s action, witnesses to a real and recognized primacy of the Roman see already in the second century, however its prudent exercise might be questioned. The texts themselves — Irenaeus’s appeal to peace, Victor’s bold initiative, the eventual conciliar settlement — do not compel either conclusion, and the Orthodox reader is best served by holding the episode at the level the sources support: a primacy of honor and of initiative is clearly visible; a jurisdiction able to override the apostolic custom of other churches is precisely what Irenaeus’s rebuke calls into question. The episode is a piece of the larger evidence on early primacy, not a knock-down proof for either side, and it should not be pressed into anti-Roman polemic (per Methodology).

Third, and most simply, it bears on unity-in-diversity. Irenaeus’s phrase — that “the disagreement in regard to the fast confirms the agreement in the faith” (HE 5.24.13, NPNF II/1) — has become a charter text for the Orthodox conviction that the unity of the Church is a unity of faith and communion, capable of embracing a real variety of liturgical and disciplinary custom. The aged Polycarp keeping his Johannine Pascha at a Roman altar lent him by Anicetus is the icon of that conviction: difference acknowledged, communion unbroken, peace maintained.

References

Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica). Trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 1. (For HE 5.23–24, the Paschal controversy, Polycrates’ letter, Victor’s attempted excommunication, and Irenaeus’s letter of rebuke with the Polycarp–Anicetus precedent; esp. HE 5.24.11–17.)
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses). Trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. (For Irenaeus’s relation to Polycarp and the apostolic tradition.)
Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Polycarp and the second-century setting.)
The Canons and Decrees of the First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 325). On the universal Sunday computation of Pascha and the setting aside of the Jewish reckoning.