CHAPTER XX.

RECONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH OF LYONS—IRENÆUS.

The rage of the fanatics was not satisfied, it gratified itself upon the corpses of the martyrs. The bodies of the confessors who had died stifled in prison were thrown to the dogs, and a guard was set night and day lest any of the faithful might give them burial. As to the others, each day there were taken from the arena broiled bones, scraps torn by the teeth of the beasts, limbs roasted or blackened in the fire, heads which had been cut off, mutilated trunks; and these were left likewise without burial, and in the sewers, exposed to the air, with a guard of soldiers watching over them for six days. This hideous spectacle excited varied reflections among the Pagans. Some thought that they had sinned by excess of humanity, and that the martyrs ought to have been subjected to still more cruel punishments. Others mingled irony with a shade of pity. “Where is their God?” they said. “Of what use was this worship to them who preferred it to life?” The Christians felt a deep grief at not being able to conceal in their graves the remains of the holy bodies. The excess of cruelty on the part of the Pagans appeared to them the proof of a malice which had reached its height, and the sign of an 195approaching judgment from God. “Come,” said they, “this is not enough,” and they added, as they remembered their Apocalypse, “Ah, let the sinner triumph more that the good may more improve.” They sought to take away the bodies during the night, trying the effect of money and entreaties upon the soldiers. All was useless; the authorities guarded those wretched remains with tenacity. The seventh day having come, the order was given to burn the infected mass, and to throw the ashes into the Rhone, which flowed hard by, so that there might remain no trace of them upon the earth. There had been in this way of acting more than a mental reservation. They imagined by the complete disappearance of the corpses to take away from the Christians the hope of resurrection. This hope appeared to the Pagans the origin of all the evil. “It is by the trust they have in the resurrection,” they said, “that they introduce among us this new strange worship, that they contemn the most terrible punishments, that they walk to death with eagerness and even with joy. Let us see then if they will rise again, and if their God is able to take them out of our hands.” The Christians were reassured by the thought that they could not conquer God, and that he knew well how to recover the remains of his servants. They believed indeed in a later age that miraculous apparitions had revealed the ashes of the martyrs, and all the middle ages believed that they possessed them, as if the Roman authorities had not destroyed them. The people used to call these innocent victims by the name of Macchabees.

The number of the victims had been forty-eight. The survivors of the churches so cruelly tried rallied very quickly. Vettius Epagathus was found what he really was, the good genius, the guardian of the Church of Lyons. He was not yet bishop. Already 196the distinction of the ecclesiastic by profession and of the layman who shall be always a layman is felt. Ireæeus, the disciple of Pothin, and who had, if one may express it so, an education in clerical habits, took his place in the direction of the Church. It was perhaps he who indited, in the name of the communities of Lyons and Vienna, that admirable letter to the churches of Asia and Phrygia, of which the larger portion has been preserved, and which includes all the account of the combats of the martyrs. It is one of the most extraordinary pieces which any literature possesses. Never has a more striking picture been traced of the degree of enthusiasm and devotion to which human nature can reach. It is the ideal of martyrdom, with as little pride as possible on the part of the martyr. The Lyonese narrator and his heroes were certainly credulous men; they believed that the Antichrist would come to ravage the world; they saw in everything the action of the Beast, the wicked demon to whom the good God grants (one cannot tell why) that he should triumph momentarily. Nothing more strange that God, who makes a garland of flowers from the sufferings of his servants, and pleases himself to arrange his designs, expressly devoting some to the beasts, others to decapitation, the others to suffocation in prison. But the enthusiasm, the mystical tone of the style, the spirit of sweetness and good sense which mark the whole recital, inaugurate a new rhetoric, and make this piece the pearl of the Christian literature of the second century.

To the circular epistle, the brethren of Gaul added the letters relative to Montanism written by the confessors in the prison. This question of Montanist prophecies assumed such an importance that they believed they were obliged to give their own opinion on this point. Irenæus was probably 197again their spokesman. The extreme reserve with which he expresses himself in his writings on Montanism, the love of peace which he imported into all controversies, and which caused it to be said so often that no one had been better named than he—Irenæus (peaceful)—leads us to believe that his opinion was impressed with a lively desire of reconciliation. With their ordinary judgment, the Lyonese pronounced without doubt against the excesses, but recommended a tolerance which, unfortunately, was not always sufficiently observed in these burning debates.

Irenæus, settled henceforth at Lyons, but in constant correspondence with Rome, presented there the model of the accomplished ecclesiastic. His antipathy for the sects (the gross millenarianism which he professed, and which he held from the Presbyteri of Asia, did not appear to him a sectarian doctrine), the clear view he had of the dangers of Gnosticism, made him write those vast books of controversy, the work of a mind limited no doubt, but with a most healthy moral conscience. Lyons, thanks to him, was for a moment the centre of the emission of the most important Christian writings. Like all the great doctors of the Church, Irenæus found means to associate with his supernatural beliefs, which appear to us at this day irreconcilable with a right mind, the rarest practical sense. Very inferior to Justin in philosophic spirit, he is much more orthodox than he was, and has left a strong trace in Christian theology. To an enthusiastic time he united a moderation which is astonishing, to a rare simplicity he joined profound science, with ecclesiastical administration the government of souls; finally, he possessed the clearest conception which had yet been formulated in the universal Church. He has less talent than Tertullian; but how superior is he in heart 198and life! Alone, among the Christian polemics who combated heresies, he shows some charity for the heretic, and puts himself on guard against the calumnious inductions of orthodoxy.

The relations between the churches of the Upper Rhone and Asia becoming more and more rare, the surrounding Latin influence became greater little by little. Irenæus and the Asians who surrounded him followed already the Western custom for Easter. The Greek custom was lost; Latin was soon the language of these churches, which, in the fourth century, were not essentially distinguished from that of the rest of Gaul. Yet the traces of Greek origin effaced themselves very slowly; several Greek customs were preserved in the liturgy at Lyons, Vienne, Autun, until the middle ages. An ineffaceable souvenir was inscribed in the annals of the universal Church; this little Asiatic and Phrygian island, hidden in the midst of the darkness of the West, had thrown forth an unequalled brilliancy. The solid goodness of our races, joined to the brilliant heroism and the love of Orientals for glory, produced sublime episodes. Blandina, on the cross at the extremity of the amphitheatre, was like a new Christ. The sweet, pale slave, attached to her stake on this new Calvary, showed that the servant, when a holy cause is concerned, is equal to the free man and sometimes excels him. We say nothing of the rights of man. The ancestors of these are very old. After having been the town of Gnosticism and Montanism, Lyons shall be the town of the Vaudois, of the Pauperes of Lugduno, and shall become the grand battlefield where the opposing principles of modern conscience shall engage in the most impassioned struggle. Honour to those who suffer for such a cause! Progress shall bring in, I trust, the day when these grand constructions, which modern 199Catholicism raises imprudently upon the heights of Montmartre and Fourvières, shall become temples of the supreme Forgiveness, and shall include a chapel for all causes, for all victims, for all martyrs.