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25 ChAPtER twO The Cultural Geography of a Greek Christian Irenaeus from Smyrna to Lyons Jared Secord Seen within a broader context, Irenaeus is merely one among the thousands of Greeks—Christians and otherwise—who relocated themselves to Rome.1 But Irenaeus stands out in this company because of his final destination: most of those who came before and after him went no further west and north than Rome itself, and not as far as Lyons, the crossroads of Roman Gaul. Yet for all the uncommonness of Irenaeus’s ultimate place of residence, he says virtually nothing about Lyons and very little about Gaul. Little attention has been paid to this silence, apart from the occasional frustrated comments of historians of Roman Gaul,2 and the ingenious but misguided attempt by Jean Colin to relocate Irenaeus’s episcopate to an obscure see in northern Asia Minor.3 Suffice it to say, there is no reason to doubt that Irenaeus was a long-term resident of Lyons, but some explanation of his reticence about the city and the region as a whole is necessary. The goal of this paper is to offer such an explanation, and to consider more broadly his perspective on the Mediterranean world and its geography. As I shall argue, Irenaeus ’s view on living in the West remained that of a Greek raised and educated in Asia Minor. He is deliberately vague in his references to Gaul, and he refers to it and the rest of the Mediterranean world in ways that would be comprehensible to an Eastern Greek who was only dimly aware of the geography of the West. The result is a strange mixture, simultaneously Christian and Greek in outlook: Irenaeus regards Gaul as a barbarian land on the Western periphery of the world, but he also emphasizes the unity of the church throughout the entire world and its peoples, even among those who do not speak Greek. This last element is particularly jarring with Irenaeus’s own outlook on speaking a language other than Greek, and the paper will conclude by suggesting that he regarded even Latin as a barbarian language. Irenaeus took with him to the West his Greek education, which he acquired likely in Smyrna, a major center of sophistic culture and teaching.4 If his youth had been spent in Smyrna, he would have been a contemporary there of the sophist Aelius Aristides ,5 and there is good reason to believe that his teachers had much in common with the more philosophically inclined of the sophists.6 His Greek learning is often put on 26 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy display in the Adversus haereses, though in several cases the sources of his knowledge seem to be nothing more than doxographical handbooks, resources used by Christians and pagans alike.7 Certainly, in matters concerning natural philosophy, Irenaeus’s worldview is little different from that of his pagan contemporaries.8 A similarly common view is the basis for Irenaeus’s perspective of the geography of the world. The frame of his map is provided by a commonplace of classical geography, viz., that the world has four chief regions and winds.9 Irenaeus uses this fact as proof that there can be only four Gospels: “For there are four regions of the world in which we exist and four universal winds. And the church has spread out over all the earth, and the gospel is a pillar and foundation of the church as is the spirit of life. So it is natural that the church have four pillars breathing out incorruption everywhere and bringing new life to men.”10 In what follows, I shall fill in this map, starting in the East, and moving with a westward trajectory. In the East, Irenaeus’s geographical perspective picks up, as it were, where the Acts of the Apostles left off, with Christianity having spread to the world from Palestine.11 But for Irenaeus, Jerusalem—by now Aelia Capitolina—is only the former starting point for the Christian movement, and it no longer holds a central position. Thus Jerusalem is likened to a twig no longer useful for bearing fruit, as in John 15: “For just as the twigs of vines are not made chiefly for themselves, but on account of the fruit growing on them, so when it ripens and is picked, the twigs are discarded and borne away [a medio auferuntur],12 as they are no longer useful for bearing new fruit. So too with...

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