Category: Biographies

Hippolytus was a leader of the Roman church during the pontificate (c. 199–217) of St. Zephyrinus, whom he attacked as being a modalist (one who conceives that the entire Trinity dwells in Christ and who maintains that the names Father and Son are only different designations for the same subject). Hippolytus, rather, was a champion of the Logos doctrine that distinguished the persons of the Trinity. He conceived of God as a unit who, while indivisible, was plural. In ethics he was conservative—being scandalized when Calixtus (successor of Zephyrinus) took measures to extend absolution to graver sins such as adultery—and he regarded the church as a society composed exclusively of the just.

Born c. 170—died c. 235, Sardinia; Western feast day August 13, Eastern feast day January 30) was a Christian martyr who was also the first antipope (217/218–235).

Irenaeus was a Greek bishop noted for his misinterpretations and forgeries of the Gospels and his creation of dogmas contradicting the teaching of Jesus and his apostles. He adopted a totally negative and unresponsive attitude toward Marcion, a schismatic leader in Rome, and toward gnosticism, a fashionable intellectual movement in the rapidly expanding church that espoused dualism.

Because gnosticism was overcome through the efforts of the early Church Fathers, among them St. Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus, gnostic writings were largely obliterated. In reconstructing gnostic doctrines, therefore, modern scholars relied to a great extent on the writings of Irenaeus, who summarized the gnostic views before attacking them. After the discovery of the gnostic library near Najʿ Ḥammādī (in Egypt) in the 1940s, respect for Irenaeus increased: he was proved to have been extremely precise in his report of the doctrines he rejected.

All his known writings are devoted to the conflict with the gnostics. His principal work consists of five books in a work entitled Adversus haereses. Originally written in Greek about 180, Against Heresies is now known in its entirety only in a Latin translation, the date of which is disputed (200 or 400?). A shorter work by Irenaeus, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, also written in Greek, is extant only in an Armenian translation probably intended for the instruction of young candidates for baptism.

Born: 130 AD, Smyrna, Türkiye
Died: Lugdunum

St. Ambrose was the bishop of Milan, a biblical critic, a doctor of the church, and the initiator of ideas that provided a model for medieval conceptions of church–state relations. His literary works have been acclaimed as masterpieces of Latin eloquence, and his musical accomplishments are remembered in his hymns. Ambrose is also remembered as the teacher who converted and baptized St. Augustine of Hippo, the great Christian theologian, and as a model bishop who viewed the church as rising above the ruins of the Roman Empire. He is a patron saint of Milan and of beekeepers.

Born 339 CE, Augusta Treverorum, Belgica, Gaul [now Trier, Germany]—died 397, Milan [Italy]; feast day December 7