The Apologists: Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Irenaeus

The second-century Apologists turned the Church’s face to the empire and the philosophers: Justin Martyr claimed the “seeds of the Logos” scattered among the Greeks for Christ, Athenagoras argued the Christians’ innocence with an advocate’s precision, Theophilus of Antioch gave theology the word “Trias” — and Irenaeus of Lyons, the crown of the generation, forged against Gnosticism the instruments the Church has used ever since: the rule of faith, apostolic succession, and recapitulation. This file surveys the generation, deferring Justin and Irenaeus to their full collections.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Apologetic Turn

The Apostolic Fathers wrote to churches; the Apologists wrote to the world. From roughly 125 to 200, a series of Christian intellectuals composed defenses (apologiai) addressed — at least in literary form — to emperors, magistrates, and cultured despisers: Quadratus and Aristides under Hadrian, Justin under Antoninus Pius, Tatian, Melito of Sardis, Athenagoras and Theophilus under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, Utrecht/Westminster: Spectrum/Newman, 1950, the chapters on the Greek Apologists; the fragment of Quadratus survives in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History IV.3). Their immediate aims were legal and moral — to rebut the charges of atheism, incest, and cannibalism, and to protest condemnation for the mere name of Christian — but their permanent achievement was theological: they were the first to state the faith in the categories of Greek philosophy, and so began the long labor, completed in the fourth century, of baptizing Hellenism (Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966; Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, ch. 1–2; Florovsky’s account of “Christian Hellenism” presupposes exactly this generation — “Patristics and Modern Theology,” discussed in Section 09).

Justin: The Philosopher in the Martyr’s Crown

Justin, born at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria, came to Christ through the philosophies — Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean, Platonist — a pilgrimage he narrates at the opening of the Dialogue with Trypho (Justin, Dialogue 2–8; trans. ANF 1), and after his conversion kept the philosopher’s cloak, teaching in Rome as a Christian philosopher. His surviving works — the First Apology (c. 153–157, addressed to Antoninus Pius), the Second Apology, and the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew — are the first substantial corpus of Christian argument we possess (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, on Justin’s works and dates).

Two contributions govern everything after him. First, the doctrine of the logos spermatikos, the “sowing Logos”: the Word who became incarnate in Christ is the same Word in whom all rational creatures partake, so that “whatever things were rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians” — Socrates and Heraclitus were “Christians before Christ” in the measure that they lived according to the Logos (Justin, Second Apology 8, 13; First Apology 46; trans. ANF 1). This is the charter of the Christian engagement with culture, and Orthodox theology has never surrendered it. Second, his descriptions of baptism and the Sunday Eucharist (First Apology 61, 65–67) — the bread and wine over which thanksgiving has been made are “the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh” (First Apology 66) — are the fullest second-century liturgical witness, cited constantly in Orthodox sacramental theology. Justin was denounced, tried before the prefect Junius Rusticus, and beheaded with six companions c. 165; the court record, the Acts of Justin and Companions, survives and is among the most sober and authentic of the martyr-acts (Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Clarendon, 1972, no. 4; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1). The full treatment is deferred to St. Justin Martyr.

Athenagoras and Theophilus: The Advocate and the First “Trias”

Athenagoras of Athens, “philosopher and Christian” as the manuscript styles him, addressed his Legatio (Plea for the Christians) to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus c. 176–177, answering the three standard slanders point by point with unusual forensic elegance, and arguing for the unity of God from reason as well as Scripture; the treatise On the Resurrection transmitted under his name defends bodily resurrection philosophically [Disputed: the attribution of De Resurrectione to Athenagoras is questioned by some scholars on stylistic and doctrinal grounds; see Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, on Athenagoras, surveying the debate]. His precision extends to the Trinity before the vocabulary existed: Christians, he writes, know “God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and declare both their power in union and their distinction in order” (Legatio 10; trans. ANF 2).

Theophilus, sixth bishop of Antioch, wrote three books To Autolycus (after 180), a pagan friend; in them occurs the first extant application of the word Trias — “triad” — to God: the three days before the luminaries, he says, “are types of the Trinity (Triados), of God, and His Word, and His Wisdom” (Theophilus, Ad Autolycum II.15; trans. ANF 2; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, noting the priority). The Word here is God’s Word endiathetos (immanent) and prophorikos (uttered) — Stoic categories pressed into Christian service, an early instance of the borrowing that the fourth century would have to purify (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, 1971, ch. 4, on the Logos theology’s ambiguities).

The generation’s limits should be stated as honestly as its gains. The Logos-theology of the Apologists, construing the Son’s generation in relation to creation, left openings that third-century subordinationism and fourth-century Arianism would exploit; the Church needed Nicaea precisely because the Apologists’ categories, heroic as they were, were not yet adequate (Behr, The Way to Nicaea, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, on the Logos theology and its tensions). And one Apologist fell: Tatian, Justin’s own pupil, author of the Oration to the Greeks and of the Diatessaron gospel-harmony that the Syriac church long used, lapsed after his master’s death into the rigorist Encratite movement (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History IV.29; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1) — a first reminder, before Tertullian, that eloquence in defense of the faith does not by itself make a Father (see The Problem Cases).

Irenaeus: The First Theologian of Tradition

Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202), a Greek from Smyrna who had heard Polycarp in his youth and became bishop of Lyons in Gaul after the pogrom of 177, is the hinge on which the whole century turns — the man in whom the apologetic generation’s outward argument becomes the Church’s inward self-articulation (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V.4–5, V.20; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, on his life). His great work, the five books Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses), survives complete in an ancient Latin translation with large Greek fragments; his compact Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, lost for centuries, was recovered in 1904 in an Armenian translation (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1; the Demonstration in Behr’s translation, PPS 17, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997).

Against the Gnostic claim to secret apostolic traditions, Irenaeus answered with the public ones: the rule of faith (kanon tes aletheias), the Church’s proto-creedal summary received in baptism, which governs the reading of Scripture (Adversus Haereses I.10.1–2); apostolic succession, the demonstrable chains of bishops in the apostolic churches — he instances Rome’s list to his own day — as the public guarantee that no secret doctrine was handed down (Adversus Haereses III.3–4); and the mutual coinherence of Scripture and Tradition in the one Church where “the Spirit of God is” (Adversus Haereses III.24.1). His positive theology is governed by recapitulation (anakephalaiosis, from Ephesians 1:10): Christ the second Adam passes through and sums up the whole of human existence, undoing the disobedience at every point — “He became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself” (Adversus Haereses V, preface; trans. ANF 1) — the sentence in which the whole later doctrine of theosis is compact (on Irenaeus’ theology see Behr, The Way to Nicaea, 2001, chs. on Irenaeus; Florovsky treats him as the classic witness of Tradition in “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972). Against Gnostic contempt for matter he insisted on the goodness of creation and the reality of the Eucharist: “our opinion is in accordance with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion” (Adversus Haereses IV.18.5; trans. ANF 1).

For the Orthodox understanding of the Fathers, Irenaeus is not one witness among many; he is the pattern. He wrote no speculation for its own sake; every doctrine he articulated was forced from him by a concrete denial, and his authority was not personal brilliance but the tradition he received and handed on. That — the Father as confessing witness, not original genius — is what the title means, and the rest of this guide keeps returning to the Irenaean pattern (see The Four Criteria and Their Limits; full treatment deferred to St. Irenaeus of Lyons).

See Also

References

  • Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. Vol. 1: The Beginnings of Patristic Literature. Utrecht/Westminster, MD: Spectrum/Newman Press, 1950. (The Greek Apologists: Quadratus, Aristides, Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus; Irenaeus: life, works, the 1904 Armenian recovery.)
  • Justin Martyr. First Apology 46, 61, 65–67; Second Apology 8, 13; Dialogue with Trypho 2–8. Trans. ANF 1.
  • Athenagoras. Legatio 10. Trans. ANF 2.
  • Theophilus of Antioch. Ad Autolycum II.15. Trans. ANF 2. (The first “Trias.”)
  • Irenaeus. Adversus Haereses I.10.1–2; III.3–4; III.24.1; IV.18.5; V pref. Trans. ANF 1. Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, trans. John Behr, PPS 17. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
  • Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History IV.3, IV.29; V.4–5, V.20. Trans. NPNF II/1. (Quadratus; Tatian’s lapse; Irenaeus’ career.)
  • Musurillo, Herbert, ed. The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. (No. 4: the Acts of Justin.)
  • Chadwick, Henry. Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. (Justin, Clement, Origen and the philosophers.)
  • Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. (Chs. 1–2, 4: the Logos theology and its ambiguities.)
  • Behr, John. The Way to Nicaea. Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (The Apologists’ categories; Irenaeus.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (“The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church.”)
  • Scripture: Ephesians 1:10.