The Life
Saint Polycarp is one of the most precious figures of the early Church. He was a disciple of the Apostle John himself — the same John who had leaned on the Lord’s breast at the Last Supper. Polycarp grew up listening to John tell stories about Christ. He became Bishop of Smyrna in Asia Minor and lived a long, faithful life caring for his flock. When he was eighty-six years old, the Roman authorities arrested him during the persecution under Marcus Aurelius and tried to make him deny Christ. He answered with one of the most beloved sentences in all the martyr-acts: "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?" They burned him alive. The flames would not touch him; they bent over his head like a vault. Finally a soldier stabbed him with a dagger. The early Church called him "the most admirable Polycarp" and counted him, alongside St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch, as one of the three chief Apostolic Fathers.
Polycarp lost both parents very young. He had no family to take him in. But an angel appeared to a Christian widow named Kallista and told her to raise the boy. She did. She raised him as her own son and taught him the Faith. When she died, Polycarp gave away whatever he had inherited from her and began to live a chaste, prayerful life, caring for the sick and the poor of Smyrna. The Bishop of Smyrna, a holy man named Bucolus, noticed him and ordained him deacon, then priest. The boy who had been an orphan was being prepared, by quiet providence and through the love of an old woman, for one of the most important episcopal sees in the early Church.
The Apostle John lived a long life. He was the youngest of the Twelve when the Lord called them, and he outlived all the others. He died around the year 100 in Ephesus, only a short distance from Polycarp’s Smyrna. The two cities were near neighbors. Polycarp, growing up in Smyrna, had the unrepeatable privilege of being a disciple of the last living apostle. He sometimes accompanied John on his apostolic journeys. He listened to John tell stories about the Lord he had known. He absorbed everything. Years later, his own disciple Saint Irenaeus of Lyons would write a moving letter recalling how Polycarp would tell his students about his "companionable wandering with John, and how he himself related, together with other eyewitnesses of the Lord, those things that he remembered from the words of others." The chain of memory ran from the Lord, to John, to Polycarp, to Irenaeus, to subsequent generations. The whole Orthodox tradition is, in some real sense, the long preservation of that chain.
Around the year 107, Saint Ignatius of Antioch was being marched to Rome under armed guard to be executed. The journey took him through Asia Minor. He stopped at Smyrna to see his old friend Polycarp. The two bishops embraced. Ignatius wrote a personal letter to Polycarp during this visit; it is preserved in the New Testament era collection of Apostolic Fathers. He told Polycarp: "This age is in need of you if it is to reach God, just as pilots need winds, and as a storm-tossed sailor needs a port." Then Ignatius continued on toward Rome and his death. Polycarp would carry the memory of that meeting his whole life. Decades later, when the Christians of Philippi wrote to Polycarp asking for copies of Ignatius’s letters, Polycarp had them in his possession and sent them, along with his own letter to the Philippians — the only surviving writing of his that has come down to us.
Around the year 154, Polycarp was already a very old man, but he traveled across the Mediterranean to Rome. He went to talk with Pope Anicetus, the bishop of Rome, about a disagreement that had arisen over when to celebrate Pascha. The churches of Asia Minor (Polycarp’s region) celebrated it on the fourteenth of the Jewish month Nisan, the day of the Crucifixion, regardless of what day of the week that was. The Roman church celebrated it on the Sunday following. The two bishops talked it over. They could not reach agreement on the date itself. So they agreed to disagree, each region keeping its own ancient custom. They parted in peace. Anicetus invited Polycarp to celebrate the Eucharist in Rome as a sign of their continued communion, and Polycarp did. They embraced. Polycarp went home to Smyrna. The whole episode is a beautiful early picture of Orthodox communion: bishops can disagree about secondary matters of practice while remaining united in the apostolic Faith.
Marcus Aurelius came to the throne of Rome around 161 and started a fierce persecution of Christians. The pagans in Smyrna demanded that the magistrates hunt down "the father of all the Christians" and "the seducer of all Asia" — their nicknames for the elderly Polycarp. His flock begged him to hide. He went and stayed in a small village just outside the city. When the soldiers came for him, he met them at the door and invited them in to eat. He asked them for time to pray. He prayed for two hours. Then he went with them peacefully to his trial. The Roman proconsul tried to persuade him: think of your age, swear by the genius of Caesar, curse Christ, and I will let you go. Polycarp answered: "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?" The proconsul threatened him with wild beasts. Polycarp said: bring them. He threatened him with fire. Polycarp said: you threaten me with a fire that burns for a hour and is then quenched, but you do not know about the fire of the judgment to come. They condemned him to be burned alive. The flames came up around him but, the eyewitness account says, would not touch him; they bent over his head like a vault, and he stood inside them like bread baking in an oven. So they sent in a soldier with a dagger to stab him. So much blood came from the wound that it put out the fire. The Christians of Smyrna gathered up his bones, "more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold," and buried them in a worthy place where they could keep the anniversary of his martyrdom every year.
When the proconsul told Polycarp to swear by the genius of the emperor, to curse Christ, and his life would be spared, this is what the old bishop answered. He had been a Christian for eighty-six years — essentially his entire life. The Lord had been with him through all of it. The Lord had carried him through every difficulty, never let him down, never failed him. How could he, at the very end, deny the One who had been faithful to him every single day of those eighty-six years? It would have been the deepest possible ingratitude. It was unthinkable. Polycarp’s answer is the answer of every Christian who has ever stood at the moment where fidelity was tested and ingratitude refused. It is, in some real sense, the answer of the entire Orthodox tradition.
In the second chapter of the Book of Revelation, the risen Lord dictates letters through the Apostle John to seven churches in Asia Minor. One of those letters is addressed to the Church at Smyrna, where Polycarp was bishop or would later become bishop. The Lord’s message to the Church at Smyrna ends with the words: be faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. Some Orthodox writers have wondered whether Polycarp himself, as a young man in Smyrna, was present when this letter was first read aloud in the church there. Whether or not he heard it that day, he certainly knew it. He was Bishop of Smyrna when its words came true in his own life. He was faithful unto death. The crown of life that the Lord had promised to the Church at Smyrna was given to her bishop on the day the flames bent over his head like a vault and the soldier’s dagger sealed his witness.
Polycarp matters to every Orthodox Christian for two reasons. First, he is the verifiable link between the apostles and us. He had walked with John, who had walked with the Lord. The Faith we hold today is the Faith John taught Polycarp. There is an unbroken chain. Second, he shows us what a long faithful life can look like — eighty-six years of service to the Lord, ordinary years of pastoral care for his flock in Smyrna, decades of teaching and praying and visiting the sick, all crowned by the willingness, when the moment came, to die rather than deny the One he had served. Most of us will not be asked to face the proconsul. But all of us are asked to be faithful, day by day, year by year, decade by decade, until the end. Polycarp shows us how. His prayers continue to surround the Church he served, and his pattern continues to instruct every Orthodox Christian whose vocation is the long obedient love that holds across a lifetime.