The Visit to Anicetus

Late in his long life, perhaps in the year 154 or 155, the aged Polycarp of Smyrna made the journey to Rome and conferred with its bishop, Anicetus. The two men discussed several matters, chief among them the date on which Pascha should be kept — the Asian churches keeping it on the fourteenth of Nisan, the Roman on the following Sunday. Unable to persuade one another, they parted not in schism but in peace, Anicetus yielding to his venerable guest the celebration of the Eucharist in his own church as a mark of honor. The episode, preserved in a letter of Irenaeus quoted by Eusebius, became for later ages a model of communion held intact across difference.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The Journey to Rome (c. 154/155)

The single best-attested public act of Polycarp’s later life is his journey from Smyrna to Rome and his meeting there with the Roman bishop Anicetus, who occupied that see from about 155 to 166. The visit is therefore conventionally dated to around 154 or 155, near the close of Polycarp’s life and only a year or two before his martyrdom. Our knowledge of it comes not from any document of Polycarp’s own hand but from a letter written a generation later by Irenaeus of Lyons — Polycarp’s disciple in his youth — to the Roman bishop Victor, a letter preserved for us because Eusebius of Caesarea copied a long extract of it into his Ecclesiastical History (HE 5.24.16–17, NPNF II/1).

That an Eastern bishop of such age and reputation should undertake the long sea-and-land journey to the imperial capital is itself significant. Polycarp was by this time the most venerable surviving link to the apostolic generation: Irenaeus describes him as having been instructed by the apostles and as having “conversed with many who had seen Christ” (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.3.4, ANF Vol. 1; cf. Eusebius, HE 4.14). His standing was such that, as Irenaeus records, he was received at Rome with marked respect, and his presence there was remembered as the occasion of several notable encounters. The Pascha discussion was the most consequential of these, but it was, in Irenaeus’s telling, only one of the things the two bishops took up; they conferred also, he says, concerning “certain other things,” minor points of usage on which Rome and the East had drifted into divergence (HE 5.24.16, NPNF II/1).

The Quartodeciman Question

The principal matter between Polycarp and Anicetus was the dating of the Christian Pascha — the annual commemoration of the Lord’s death and resurrection. Behind the disagreement lay two ancient and equally venerable customs.

The churches of the Roman province of Asia, of which Smyrna was a chief city, kept their Paschal observance in correspondence with the day of the Jewish Passover: they fixed it on the fourteenth day of the lunar month Nisan, the day on which, by the Mosaic reckoning, the Passover lamb was slain, and they did so regardless of which day of the week that date happened to fall upon. From this practice they later came to be called Quartodecimans — “fourteeners,” from the Latin quartadecima, the fourteenth — though the term belongs to subsequent controversy rather than to Polycarp himself. For the Asian churches this date marked the day of the Lord’s saving death, and their observance, with its fast and its concluding celebration, was tied to it.

Rome, by contrast, together with most of the wider Church, had come to keep the Paschal feast always on a Sunday — the Sunday following the fourteenth of Nisan — so that the weekly day of the Resurrection should always coincide with the annual one. On the Roman reckoning the fast was continued until that Sunday and broken only then. The practical effect was that in many years the two traditions concluded their fast and kept their festival on different days, an awkwardness keenly felt in a city like Rome where Eastern and Western Christians lived side by side.

What is striking in Irenaeus’s account is that each side grounded its custom in apostolic authority, and neither could be argued out of it. Polycarp, Irenaeus reports, “observed it with John the disciple of our Lord, and the other apostles with whom he had associated”; Anicetus, for his part, appealed to the practice of “the presbyters who preceded him” at Rome (HE 5.24.16, NPNF II/1). The disagreement was thus not between truth and error, nor between an ancient custom and an innovation, but between two streams of tradition each claiming descent from the apostolic age. Polycarp could not persuade Anicetus to adopt the Asian fourteenth; Anicetus could not persuade Polycarp to abandon a usage he had received, as he believed, from the Apostle John himself. On the underlying movement of the Paschal cycle within the Church’s year, see Orthodoxy Guide: Great Lent.

Agreeing to Differ in Peace

The resolution of this impasse is the heart of the episode and the reason it has been so often invoked since. Irenaeus’s words, as Eusebius preserves them, are precise:

The two bishops, having failed to convince one another, did not therefore separate. “Neither could the one persuade the other,” Irenaeus writes, and yet “they communed with each other” — that is, they remained in full eucharistic communion (HE 5.24.16–17, NPNF II/1; cf. Holmes 2007). More than this, Anicetus, as a deliberate mark of honor toward his aged guest, yielded to Polycarp the celebration of the Eucharist in his own church — conceding to the visiting bishop the presiding place at the Roman Liturgy. “Anicetus conceded the administration of the eucharist in the church to Polycarp,” Irenaeus says, “manifestly as a mark of respect” (HE 5.24.17, NPNF II/1). And so, the account concludes, “they parted from each other in peace, both those who observed, and those who did not, maintaining the peace of the whole church” (HE 5.24.17, NPNF II/1).

Several points deserve emphasis. First, the difference was real and was not papered over: each bishop went home keeping his own custom, Polycarp the fourteenth and Anicetus the Sunday. The meeting settled nothing in the sense of producing a common rule. Second, what it preserved was something the participants evidently judged greater than uniformity — the unbroken communion of the churches across the divergence. Third, the gesture of honor flowed, in this instance, from the Roman bishop toward the Eastern visitor: it was Anicetus who yielded his own altar. The episode thus furnishes no warrant for reading either an Eastern or a Roman supremacy into the encounter; it shows two bishops treating one another as bearers of a common and apostolic faith, differing in observance and united in love. It is in this sense that the meeting of Polycarp and Anicetus has been received as a model of “unity in diversity” — of charitable disagreement held within the bond of peace. The wider significance of this, and its bearing on the very different course taken a generation later, is treated separately in East and West in the Second Century.

Polycarp at Rome Against the Heretics

Irenaeus’s recollections of Polycarp’s stay at Rome are not confined to the Pascha discussion. In a passage of the Against Heresies that Eusebius also reproduces, Irenaeus records that during his time in the city Polycarp “converted many of the aforementioned heretics to the Church of God, proclaiming that he had received this one and only truth from the apostles” (Adv. Haer. 3.3.4, ANF Vol. 1; cf. HE 4.14, NPNF II/1). The visit thus served not only the cause of inter-church peace but the defense of apostolic teaching against the various Gnostic and Marcionite currents then strong at Rome.

It is in this connection that Irenaeus preserves the most famous of all the Polycarp anecdotes — an exchange he says he had “from those who were present.” When Marcion, the heresiarch whose dualist preaching and mutilated canon had carried so many away, met Polycarp at Rome and asked him, “Do you know me?”, Polycarp answered, “I do know you, the firstborn of Satan” (Adv. Haer. 3.3.4, ANF Vol. 1; HE 4.14, NPNF II/1). The retort, blunt to the point of harshness, has been variously read — as the natural severity of a man formed in the apostolic generation toward one he judged a corrupter of the Gospel, and as a deliberate echo of the dominical and Johannine language of light and its adversary. Whatever its tone, Irenaeus reports it to a single purpose: to show how complete was the breach between the apostolic tradition Polycarp embodied and the teaching of the heretics, and how little the guardians of that tradition would compromise with it.

Irenaeus joins to this a second anecdote, which he likewise traces to Polycarp’s own testimony: that the Apostle John, finding the heretic Cerinthus within the bathhouse at Ephesus, rushed out without bathing, crying, “Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within” (Adv. Haer. 3.3.4, ANF Vol. 1; HE 4.14, NPNF II/1). Polycarp had this story from John himself and was accustomed to repeat it, and Irenaeus reproduces it as one link in the chain by which the apostolic horror of heresy was handed down. The two episodes belong together: the recoil of John from Cerinthus and the rebuke of Polycarp to Marcion are presented by Irenaeus as a single continuous witness, master and disciple guarding the one truth across two generations (on which see Irenaeus on Polycarp).

The Episode and Its Witness

The whole of what we know about the visit to Anicetus rests, then, on the testimony of Irenaeus, twice mediated — once in his own Against Heresies and once in his letter to Victor — and preserved to us through the diligence of Eusebius. That Irenaeus had been a hearer of Polycarp in his youth gives his report a weight few second-century recollections possess; that he set it down precisely to instruct a later Roman bishop in the way of peace gives it, as we shall see, a polemical and pastoral edge of its own. For the Orthodox reception of the episode, the essential facts are stable and well grounded: the aged confessor of Smyrna went to Rome, kept his own apostolic Pascha, stood firm against the heretics, and departed in the unbroken communion of the Church — Anicetus’s altar having been, for one Liturgy, his.

References

Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica). Trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 1. (For HE 5.24.16–17, Irenaeus’s letter to Victor with the Polycarp–Anicetus episode; HE 4.14, Polycarp at Rome, Marcion, and Cerinthus.)
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses). Trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. (For Adv. Haer. 3.3.4, Polycarp at Rome, the conversion of heretics, the Marcion exchange, and the Cerinthus anecdote.)
Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Introduction to Polycarp and the witness to his life and martyrdom.)
St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna (commemoration February 23). Standard Orthodox synaxarial notices, used to locate the chronology of the visit (c. 154/155, under Anicetus, c. 155–166).