Faustin de Lyon

Faustinus of Lyon, known in French as Faustin de Lyon, was a bishop of the church of Lyon in Roman Gaul in the middle of the third century. He is one of the earliest successors of Saints Pothinus and Irenaeus about whom a contemporary document survives. After the martyrdom of Pothinus in the persecution of 177 and the subsequent episcopate of Irenaeus, whose death is generally placed near the turn of the third century, the names of the next bishops of Lyon are preserved chiefly in later medieval catalogues. Those lists typically insert Zacharias and Helios (Elius) before Faustinus, making him the fifth or sixth bishop of the see. The catalogues themselves were compiled long after the third century and cannot be controlled in detail, but the existence of a bishop named Faustinus at Lyon around the 250s is independently confirmed by the letters of Cyprian of Carthage.

The historical Faustinus is known from the controversy over Marcian, bishop of Arles, during the pontificate of Pope Stephen I. In the aftermath of the Decian persecution, the Roman priest Novatian had broken with the church over the question of whether Christians who had lapsed under torture or threat could be reconciled. Novatian’s followers, often called Novatianists, refused readmission to the lapsed. Marcian of Arles aligned himself with this rigorist party. Faustinus, together with other bishops of Gaul, wrote both to Stephen at Rome and to Cyprian at Carthage to denounce Marcian’s stance and to seek his removal. Cyprian’s surviving letter on the matter, written about 254, states that Faustinus had already written more than once and treats the bishop of Lyon as the leading Gallic correspondent in the case. Cyprian asked Stephen to send letters into Gaul so that Marcian would be excommunicated and the people of Arles given a bishop in communion with the Catholic church. The correspondence attests that Lyon still held a pre-eminent place among the churches of the Gallic provinces, a position it had enjoyed since the second century.

Lugdunum, the Roman city that is now Lyon, had been the administrative capital of Gallia Lugdunensis and an early centre of Christianity in the West. The letter of the churches of Vienne and Lyon, preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, had made the martyrdoms of 177 famous throughout the Mediterranean. Irenaeus had then given the see an international theological reputation. By Faustinus’s time the Christian community was more than a century old, had survived persecution, and was organized enough to act in concert with other Gallic bishops and to correspond with Rome and Africa. The Novatianist crisis was one of several disputes that followed the Decian edict; similar conflicts over the lapsed occupied Cyprian in Africa and the Roman church under Cornelius and Stephen. Faustinus’s intervention shows the Gallic episcopate taking a position against Novatianist rigorism and in favour of the more moderate policy of reconciliation that Cyprian and the majority of bishops defended.

Beyond this episode, the life of Faustinus is almost entirely unknown. No date of birth, place of origin, or length of episcopate has been preserved. None of his own letters survive. Ancient sources do not say whether he died in peace or in the Valerian persecution that began a few years after 254, and there is no early passio presenting him as a martyr. Later tradition in the church of Lyon counted him among its sainted bishops, as it did other obscure names in the early catalogue, but medieval martyrologies and local calendars do not yield a single, consistently attested feast day that can be verified with confidence, and no reliable notice of his tomb or of a specific patronage has come down. He remains, therefore, a figure whose historical importance rests on a single well-documented act: his role, as bishop of Lyon in the mid-third century, in resisting the spread of Novatianism in Gaul and in maintaining communion with Carthage and Rome.