Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great (Part 3 of 3)

welcome back to the word on fire show I'm Brendan bought the hosts and the content director here at word on fire and joining us is Bishop Robert Barron Bishop Baron welcome Brandon always good to be with you you tuned I'm doing great New Year's wonderful lots of exciting things happening at word on fire I know for you we're recording this here in mid-january you're getting ready to go to Rome for your first ad Lumina visit what is that what do you experience are obligated in canon law to visit the to go oddly Mena apostille Orem it means to the threshold of the Apostles meaning Peter and Paul to go to their tombs to pray and then while we're there we also visit with the successor of st. Peter the Pope and then his Curia so the idea is to kind of give a report on the diocese to the Pope and also to have a dialogue with him and with his curial you know supporters so it's my first one so I'll see I'm going to be giving when the California bishops go to that I can Street for the New Evangelization they asked me to be the sort of lead figure there it just means to kind of introduce the discussion and raise some questions so and then we see the Pope on a very first day I know when we're at the last USCCB meeting there was other bishops telling who had just returned from their element of visits telling us about it and they said that Pope Francis and Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul each had unique styles of welcoming the bishops had has it worked you just come in a room and talk yeah that's a nice the format I don't know I what I've heard about Francis is he comes in and you sit kind of in a horseshoe you know around him and then he says okay you know no formality what's on your mind tell him and also I guess he says no pecking order no hierarchy does anyone that wants to speak you know speak and and they've all been very positive about that like an hour and a half or two hours of conversation with them all right well today we're gonna continue our seemingly never-ending series on the church fathers and week extending it it was meant to be one episode it's hard to believe we thought yeah one that I was too ambitious for sure the first episode which was episode 210 from a few weeks ago we looked at the Apostolic fathers and then last week we looked at the pre nice scene and the Nicene father so those church theologians and leaders from about 100 to about 400 but I figured in this episode we could tackle the post Nicean father so those from roughly 400 to 600 700 AD there's some major figures here as in the previous episodes that each are probably deserving of their own episode much less their own course you know but let's spend some time with each of them so we'll begin with st. John Chrysostom he lived from about 349 so he was born shortly after Nicaea he's kind of a first generation after Nicaea died about 407 what should we know about st. John Chrysostom yeah he's a wonderful figure and whatever you mentioned the fourth and into the fifth century there's this phenomenon that I've always been intrigued by the best and brightest people in that era all wanted to run to the hills and to live in caves so you see it time and again Chrysostom jerome is another example of it even the young Agustin who wants to withdraw from society and live as a kind of philosophical you know recluse there was something in the Society of a time that was driving the best people away from the cities and from civilization to an intense we call it now ascetic and monastic sort of experience Chris ISM is a good example of that so he's an Easterner he's from you know the Asia Minor Turkey with fate today eventually he becomes the Bishop of Constantinople one of the most important cities in the East but as a young man he takes to the hills and he lives in a cave and lives in radical asceticism which means I mean fasting and prayer and think of you know Saint Benedict another one from around that same time who was a young man runs and lives in a cave so what was it well I mean there's something societal about it but also I think there's a theological and spiritual they were seeking intense communion with God so the young Chrysostom does that lives that way for a while until it broke his health and you know - no one's great surprise imagine in those days especially when there was so little medical attention available and if you're you're fasting dramatically you're living basically exposed to the elements and so on so he experienced a kind of a physical collapse at which point he said well I guess I'm not cut out for this kind of really heroic life so I guess I'll be you know a priest I guess I I'll kind of go back and be an ordinary kind of religious servant of the people we don't think that way I mean today we'd probably say what's this weirdo doing out of cave but seeing his time no that's what the heroes did that was that was the highest life so he kind of settled you know and then through a series of interesting twists and turns he becomes the Bishop of this very important sea but imagine now he's Bishop of this Imperial City so the Emperor and his court and his family are they're the leading citizens think of you know today be New York or Paris or London some really big important city where the best and brightest of of the secular society are there well Chrysostom comes barreling in as it were out of his monks cave with all of that ascetic intensity and he begins to preach a very I'd say radical form of the Christian gospel those famous lines about you know if you've got two shirts in your closet one belongs to you one belongs to male with no shirt why do we have these tapestries up on the wall they don't need to be kept warm but the poor do dramatic radical things challenging the call it secular status quo - to live the Christian thing with seriousness well to Noah's great surprise Kristen finds himself exiled and so they don't take kindly to that kind of talk and you know the Emperor I'm sure wanted a bishop who is accommodating and you know would justify his ways and so on that was not Chrysostom so he's known as as the golden-throated one Chrysostom right because of his great preaching his sermons to this day stir us even though we read them you know through translation and many centuries later were still stirred by his language deeply biblical yes indeed but also taking advantage of all the rhetorical genius of his culture and that's what he's best known for his biblical commentaries his theological work but but especially his preaching and I love that image of the preaching bishop mind you I think I said it may be Brandon our first episode the church fathers were not academics in our sense they didn't have tenure teaching positions and universities so we tend to think theologians are like that no these were origins of catechist Christams a bishop Agustin's of bishop gregory of nyssa is efficient Irenaeus is a bishop and bishop i mean by our standards might mean pastor of a big parish so the preaching bishop the the bishop who teaches from his katha draw from his seat I think of Chris system as a prime example of that maybe there he's the eastern version of Ambrose in the West Ambrose the great preaching and teaching bishop in Milan this is probably a good point to talk about one of Chrysostom's titles which is Doctor of the Church so the Catholic Church has 36 of these doctors of the church Pope Benedict named two of them during his pontificate John of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen and then Pope Francis named number 36 Gregory of Nurik what is a doctor of the church what does it mean to be recognized as this and then maybe what's special about Chrysostom being a doctor of the church well doctor just means teacher right so dr. ecclesiae a teacher of the church means someone that preached and taught and wrote in such a way and with such depth that he or she speaks to the whole church about the most fundamental things so I mean a lot of us who in the name of the church but aren't doing it in a way that is is universally compelling and I would say that the doctors of the church so recognized are those that have precisely that quality you know most recently it's funny you mentioned the doctors of the church because at our last USCCB meeting we received from the French Episcopal see the summons to make Irenaeus a doctor of the church and to be honest with you I thought the RP was but he's not but of course Irenaeus who lived and died in lyon in france is the French bishops now proposing him for that title so a number of us enthusiastically rose to say yes absolutely you know so that that's what the doctors are and their doctors both east and west so Christian being one of the key Eastern doctors okay let's turn now to an almost exact contemporary of John Chrysostom and that's st. jerome so Chrysostom was born in 349 jerome was born just two years earlier 347 they lived into the early fifth century right around the same period who was Jerome what's he best known for and and talked about him a little bit oh gosh there's so much to say about Jerome you write that same period and another one of these people had a deep affection for caves and for asceticism Jerome ends his life living in a cave in Bethlehem right he's often pictured the famous painting that Leonardo did and many others of Jerome hitting himself with a rock you know it's an active asceticism while living in a cave in the desert so it's that same thing just recently Brandon when I was in Washington for USCCB meetings our hotel is on that Massachusetts Avenue where a lot of the embassies are and I'm going pass the Embassy of of Croatia and out in front of it is a statue of Jerome and then you remember oh yeah he was born in what's now Croatia in Roman times it was a you know Roman province so he's from that part of Eastern Europe to Rome in some ways embodies that tension I mentioned last time between the Irenaeus approach in the origin approach what I mean here is he's some who loved classical literary culture so he read and loved the great authors of both of the Greeks and the Romans loved them read them with great care but then becomes enamored of the Bible and right through his soul runs this tension between reading the classical authors with great affection and also acknowledging the supremacy of the Bible and at times he's tempted to say just simply no to all the classical literature and just simply yes to the Bible but I think the tension he felt is one that was bequeathed to the whole tradition and then it's a it's a happy tension as I say not a bad one he spends time in Rome and he as a secretary to the Pope and he is also the kind of leader of a group of mostly women who were interested in kind of deepening their spiritual life and he become sort of a master to them again through the end of his life he ends up in Bethlehem it's there that he does his most important biblical work and that's what he's most famous for deeply indebted to Origen by the way in his biblical commentaries but he does this work of affecting a Latin rendering of the Bible so the Bible that begins in Hebrew and Greek it flourishes in Greek forms of course in the East Jerome is the one now who gives great expression in Latin to the totality of the Scriptures he knows Greek by his educational background and then he learned Hebrew again there it's like Origen and learns them well enough and dialogue often with rabbis and so on that he was able to enter those texts and he gives us the Bible called the Vulgate so silly the the language of the ordinary people write Latin which becomes the text for of the tradition up until very modern times so everybody from you know of the medieval doctors Thomas Aquinas and up to the Council of Trent and up and really till modern times the Bible that we read was the Vulgate of Jerome so that's where he figures so prominently in the great route we get that famous quote from Jerome that says ignorance of Scripture senses ignorance of Christ and he's often held as a patron of biblical studies do we still need Jerome today oh gosh yeah and we need him both in terms of his his intellectual accomplishments but also I think his his style and his his feistiness Jerome is known as a as a kind of irascible figure you know didn't suffer fools gladly and I like that quality if there's something good about it one of my favorite things it's in a letter Jerome and Agustin wrote to each other they're the contemporaries so hard to imagine these two massively important figures at one point Jerome got so annoyed at Agustin that he referred to him as this new midian ant so agustín's from north africa numidia right and he called a new midian ant Acosta you know but I kind of like the arrest ability of Jerome all right well let's turn to the new midian ant next Augusta I think you'd probably agree with me the most important and influential church father he's kind of dependable of this whole series you of course have have written and spoken a lot on scene Agustin we've got our pivotal players episode on Agustin we also have by the way if you're looking for a good translation of Augustine's most famous book his confessions check out our word on fire classics edition it's a beautiful translation by Frank she'd Bishop Behrens got an introduction to it I think most people bishop know the name of Gustin maybe they know about the confessions but what are some things beyond that that we should know about this great figure you spend your life reading a custom I don't say that in a flippant way I think of my mentor Robert Sokolowski this had certain great books you should read every year of your life and put the trivial stuff aside and read the really great books over and over again well Agustin is in that category I've told students for years have the confessions of Agustin simply by your your nightstand just have it there all the time go back to it again and again Agustin is from born in the middle of the 4th century about 354 dies the beginning of the fifth century and for he dies right as the Roman Empire is coming apart and that helps to explain especially his great work called the City of God Agustin is a young man he's North African so he's a Roman culturally he never got seen never knew foreign languages very well he knew a little bit of Greek wasn't very good at it didn't know any Hebrew at all but he was a master of the Latin language because he's trained in in rhetoric and rhetoric in the ancient times they had a very philosophical overtone we probably speak of linguistics philology philosophy of language education all that would be under the heading of rhetoric that's what he studied as a young man he becomes in some ways the last of the great classical Latin authors so you know Suetonius and cicero and everybody else virgil then come right up to Agustin maybe the last of the great masters if you like language you like how language works that's one of the great reasons to study Latin you can read Agustin in his own language so he's a young student of rhetoric he wants nothing more than to be a famous speaker and a politico in a way someone that would be involved in the high affairs of state you know writing speeches for the Emperor etc etc so he goes through a number of schools in studying rhetoric he then becomes and this is one of the most important moments his life he becomes a follower of money who was a Persian mystic gave rise to a system called mana key ism and we could spend a whole semester course talking about that but Agustin for nine years is an adept of this kind of strange mystical religious system eventually under the influence of the great ambrose of milan he begins the process of he was it been exposed to Christianity's young man by his mother but the process of becoming a catechumen of being baptized once that happened he wanted to really bring the two parts his life together he wanted to bring to bear his gray studies of rhetoric and language and philosophy in service of Christianity and so he wants to be as I mentioned I think last time a philosophical recluse he wanted to head off to the country with a few friends and live a sort of isolated life of speculation and writing and so on he made his way home to North Africa but then is called upon to be a priest and then eventually Bishop of this little town of Hippo in North Africa and so that's how we know him as a custom of Hippo the bishop of that place and it's there that he does his truly great writing the most important texts the confessions that you alluded to his intellectual autobiography and in some ways it's the it's the first autobiography ever written he invents the genre you also have to read the de Trinity at a his great work on the Trinity there's no better work on this great Central Christian mystery and then the one I alluded to a few minutes ago the de civitate a day on the City of God which is the first philosophy of history written in the West without that book there's no Hegel for example but it's also a book that is filled with Bible and filled with the history of salvation and filled with Christian theology Augustine sets the tone for all of medieval thought he's the last of the classical thinkers and in some ways the first of the medieval thinkers all of them and I mean everybody I'm from Anselm to Bernhard - to Thomas Aquinas to Bonaventure they're all indebted to Augustine so that's sort of an outline of life and work he's one of the three or four indispensable figures to understand Christianity at home if you push me against the wall on ASBO who are they I mean you'd say Paul so I mean after Jesus himself Paul Agustin Thomas Aquinas now we might have to go and be careful picking the next one but but Agustin is one of those you know monumental figures we talked about some of his major books what would you identify as some of his key enduring I is that have shaped the theology of Christianity well he's called the doctor of grace for good reason that dr. grazie a right so one of his most important battles was against the Pelagian heresy toward the end of his life Pelagius who maintained that salvation is an issue really of the human will it's it's a matter of summoning the willpower to do what God's called us to do that we can as it were save ourselves through heroic effort that's a very enduring heresy by the way comes up time and again in our own time in all these kind of myths of progress and of self actualization all that language is very Pelagian Augustine realized if Pelagius is right christianity cannot endure because it's a salvation religion we don't need just a life coach we need a Savior Jesus didn't come just to teach us things that we can then do on our own he came to save us and so the necessity of grace I think is absolutely basic to Augustine and you can then see that running through the whole of us of his work you know I don't say Brandon that he's a great theologian of the divine providence read the confessions all under that rubric someone who's reading his life as the unfolding of a plan that was not clear to him at every moment but was clear to God God was luring him and drawing him in in a direction so I think the idea of the divine providence that fits in very much to of the City of God C which is God's providence now writ large so the confessions is the Providence of God in Agustin's own life that the City of God is the story of how God is working through all of time and space in history so I mentioned those as a few of the key issues for agustin well me Saint Agustin in heaven forgive us for shortchanging him in devoting seven minutes here to his entire corpus but let's move on I want to cover one final church father he's kind of near the end of what's typically considered the the range of church fathers around the 6/7 century and that's say Gregory the Great what should we know about him well Gregor the great he was great great a Benedictine monk from Rome and a man that wanted to devote his life to to prayer and to study and the quiet life and then through a series of interesting circumstances is drawn into the more political side of the church eventually becoming the Bishop of Rome and becoming the Pope Gregory writes where the most important works on st. Benedict so this is life of Benedict is how we know about the Saint that found that his order and it set the tone for much of the monastic life in in the West Gregory also writes this wonderful book and since I became a bishop some years ago I went back to it I've been going back to it more and more call the pastor Alice or the rule of the pastoral life it's Gregory reflecting on what it means to be a governor if you want in the life of the church what it means to be in a position of pastoral leadership and it's a book of of great theological depth but also a real practical insight he's someone that was actually involved in governing the life of the church so that's a text that I go back to a lot in in my own work as a that's his teacher but a governor a ruler in the church bishop let's close this entire series with one question we kind of teased it out at the very beginning in the first episode but I want to ask it one more time why should listeners read the Church Fathers why do they still have enduring value well maybe I'll cite again my old teacher Agnes Cunningham ever who said she patristic expert said to me when I was a very young guy at the seminary and she knew I liked Thomas Aquinas and she said we're we're just delighted Bob that you like Thomas Aquinas but you will never be a theologian until you know the Church Fathers and her intuition was was dead right because the fathers set the tone for Christianity again Paul is the first great theologian but then the fathers after Paul are the ones who give shape and form and sub to the Christian thing so all the issues that we talked about the questions that we entertain were issues that they talked about and the questions that they entertained in some ways if I can riff on on Whitehead all of theology is a footnote to the fathers I mean we're we're still playing the game that they inaugurated so until you know them you're not going to enter this game well you won't play it with panache until you know the way the fathers played it well that sound means it's time for our regular listener question every episode we pick at least one question to ask Bishop Baron if you have one send it in visit ask Bishop Baron comm you can record your question on any device today we have a question from all the way on the other side of the world George in Sydney Australia it's asking an interesting question about whether we should pray for people who are sick here's this question Hypatia baron my name is George I'm a medical doctor from Sydney Australia my question is regarding praying for the sick and how we can ask for the intercession of Mary and the Saints and God's help in helping the sick if we believe that our destiny is predetermined and the sickness should be seen as redemptive thank you and god bless ya thank you for that question and I guess it's a both/and I would see that as an either/or I think yeah we appropriately pray that sick people become well let's ask God the Bible certainly gives us a strong warrant for that Jesus was very interesting in healing bodies now again Jesus didn't heal everybody so we hear stories of Jesus curing the blind and the deaf and the crippled and so on didn't heal every single one of them so yeah pray ask intercede but then if it becomes clear that that's not the will of God then indeed you're right the right thing to do is to place that suffering within the context of God's providence so that the suffering itself becomes a ladder or a vehicle and perhaps it's what God wants you to wrestle with precisely to come closer to him and the great spiritual teachers have seen a thousand ways that that works right so I guess I would say do both when someone that you love is sick yeah pray if they might be healed pray that God would intervene but if God has determined no that's not what what he wants to do then dedicate that sickness to him whoever that lovely prayer of newman's you know that if if I'm if I'm puzzled me my puzzlement serve you if I'm if I'm lost may my being lost serve you so if I'm sick and it's clear I've been asking the Lord but it's clear that he's not going to cure me okay may my sickness give glory to him they might say this be a way to reach him so I think you do both well thanks George for that great question thanks to everybody who's listened not only to this episode but our long series on the Church Fathers we've gone ahead and to all of the books that we've been mentioning over the last few episodes so the best thing to do after learning about the Church Fathers is to read them don't be intimidated by them almost all of them we have accessible English translations that are extremely lucid and engaging so we've linked to a lot of them and the show notes for this episode you can also find the links at word on fire show calm well thanks again for listening we'll see you next week on the word on fire show [Music]

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 54,931

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Id: 61X8HsrIUw8

Length: 28min 19sec (1699 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2020