More Church Fathers You Should Know (Part 2 of 3)

welcome back to the word on fire show this is Brandon Vaught I'm the content director here at word on fire and this is our first episode in the new year of 2020 I'm here with the great Bishop Robert Barron Bishop Baron so good to see you after a little bit of a Christmas break welcome yeah thanks Brandon always a joy to see you hey catch us up on your Christmas I know you went back to Chicago got to spend time with your family how was it it was fun I was there just for about a week and I a little bit too over scheduled I saw all kinds of people I don't get back that often so I see my dear mother and and then my family and then all kinds of friends and people I've known for years so I was kind of going you know morning noon and night seeing folks but it was fun I know you got to spend a little more time with your niece right who you just baptized yeah my grandniece my niece my niece's first a child that's right that's right and you married them her pair and then you baptized your grand niece right that's right so a couple years ago I married them and then I baptize this baby last I think it was September and yeah she's she's grown up and I know you also sent a really cool picture of a great gift that you got all's about that yeah it was real surprised this is box and what is this and it didn't feel like a book or like clothes you know so I open it up and it's my mitt from when I was in Little League like from 19 to late 1960s and I think my mother must have had it in her house somewhere because my sister and brother-in-law somehow got it and I didn't know you could do this but it was sent away to be kind of you know revamped and they they old it up and they put new you know strings in it and everything so it was quite a surprise and I remember it vividly I remember playing with that mitt when I was a shortstop you know so anyway it was fun you have you had a chance to play throw-and-catch with the new night yeah no I I I still to this day I love playing catch and so like when the word on fire gang comes out here for events and retreats there's usually a bunch of us then we got some footballs here we throw those around but I love I loved his throwing the baseball around excellent well a couple weeks ago at the end of 2019 we did an episode on the Church Fathers and the plan was to do one episode on it but he started talking about others and introducing them we got in way over our head so we only had time to talk about the fathers in general and then we focused on the three Apostolic fathers Clement Ignatius and Polycarp those are the earliest figures but I thought for this episode we could walk through some of the significant figures throughout the next few hundred years after those Apostolic fathers so we're gonna break them up as they traditionally are broken up into three different eras the first one is pre nice seeing fathers that's before the Council of Nicaea which happened in 325 and then the Nicene fathers those who are active in and around the time of the Council of Nicaea and then post nice scenes so we'll kind of break them up into those three groups so let's start with this first group pre nice and fathers there's tons that we could talk about I've dozens but I wanted to highlight three in particular the first one is Justin Martyr so he lived from about a hundred to 165 so he's second century he knew people really early knew the earliest followers of Jesus second is the great Saint Irenaeus and in the third is that master theologian and biblical interpreter Origen so Justin Martyr Irenaeus Origen what should we know about these figures we could spend a course to several semester courses on these figures maybe just worried about Justin you say very early figure we have a text it's in the Catechism for my about 155 the Justin wrote that's a description of the mass what Christians do on Sunday that is remarkably familiar if you you read that account ancient account we can easily recognize yeah we still do the same thing that it's the structure of the mass on display that's from Justin the martyr also with Justin that idea that I love so much the semi NAVAIR be right the the seeds of the word he would have called them law boys Fermata coy in his Greek looking around at the environment culture and finding points of contact seeds of the law goes right fully honest Jesus but log Oy words that are available in the culture that's an instinct of Justin that had a massive impact on the rest of the great tradition next Irenaeus one of my theological heroes I think I've told you maybe even on these podcasts Brandon that I've got buried my computer somewhere you probably know better than anyone about thirty thousand words on Irenaeus I was writing a book on him many years ago and for different reasons it never came to fruition but I've done a lot of research on Irenaeus love him early figure so he says all the time I was taught by Polycarp and we mentioned I think last time who was taught by John so you're within two generations of one of the Apostles what do you find in Irenaeus we find first of all a very highly developed systematic theology within two generations within within you might say ideological earshot of the Apostles you have a fully blown systematic theology don't tell me that theology is somehow antipathetic to the you know the primitive simplicity of Christianity that voice has been heard from the beginning of Christianity until today that somehow if you're doing too much intellectual work you're violating this that primitive simplicity none sense from the very earliest days this very serious figure gives us a full-blown systematic theology Christians have been stubbornly thinking about the faith from the beginning second observation about Irenaeus you know he's battling Gnosticism that's sort of the that's the grit in the oyster around which the pearl forms I mean he's battling this Gnostic form I've argued this many times the most enduring heresy in the life of the church is Gnosticism it is a live and well today and so the insights of Irenaeus from the second century are still valid today third observation about Irenaeus is his theology is almost entirely biblical in other words he doesn't do and we'll see the reason now because origin is the one that really inaugurates this tradition of setting Christianity in dialogue with an antecedent philosophical system that's a path taken by many of the great thinkers Irenaeus doesn't do that it's a very biblical theology you can see this tension echo now up and down the centuries between a theology tending in a more thoroughly biblical direction and one that's more philosophical in style I don't think that's a bad tension I don't want to resolve it on one side or the other I like that tension I think it's a healthy one and Irenaeus is one of the first and greatest advocates of a thoroughly biblical approach to theology there's infinite more we could say about all these figures but Aaron a is - especially for those of us who you know in the West are largely trained in an Augustinian framework Irenaeus in significant ways offers not an opposing vision but a kind of alternative vision - Agustin one that's I think a bit more optimistic in terms of the salvation of the human race more optimistic in terms of even how to construe original sin and salvation very helpful in regards to understanding a certain evolution within the Bible itself so people even today will say well look the Bible seems to contradict itself Irenaeus knew all these tensions and what he said was the same way you use different language when you're talking to a child you're talking to a adolescent you're talking to an adult so the Bible uses different language when talking to Israel at various stages of its development spiritually that's a really seminal insight that he had anyway much more we could say about all these great figures you know what I like about both Justin and Irenaeus is very early in the life of the church 2nd century here we see a lot of people outside the church attracted to Christianity because of the way they love each other because of their you know unique charitable practices but very quickly people have all sorts of intellectual objections to Christianity yeah so here comes Justin Martyr who's maybe the first great apologist of the Christian faith here comes Irenaeus correcting distortions of Christian theology so as you say from the very beginning the intellectual tasks of apologetics and evangelization were evident it's not interesting brand new because I fought it all my life and to some degree it's a post conciliar phenomenon that's a long story but a revival of anti-intellectualism which is it's always a bad sign see I'm with Newman Newman who says in the spirit of Mary the mother of god who treasured these things in her heart see Newman takes that as the great sign of theology that you don't just dumb ly take in the date of Revelation you think about it you Mull it over you treasure it that for Newman is always a sign of a properly developing Christianity when Christianity turns anti-intellectual as it does and you can notice moments in the history of the of the church that's always a bad sign and so as I say I've been fighting it much of my life within within Catholicism but that's a bad strain go right back to Irenaeus and Justin the martyr and you'll see the insistence upon a law Gauss based system having to be logical if I can put it that way that's rotzinger by the way that's Yosef rotzinger if you're a law Gauss face system as we clearly are the law Gauss became flesh then an illogical or unthinking religion is antipathy to that inspiration okay end of rant let's say quick word about Origen I know he's somewhat of a controversial figure unlike Justin and Irenaeus he's not a canonized saint of the Catholic Church but he's universally venerated as a father of the church talk a little bit about who he was and his main contribution yeah I mean I would say with Agustin the most important father if I were saying whose most important Western father Augusta the most important Eastern father I wouldn't really hesitate to say Origen now why well first to maybe a little bit about him an Egyptian and his name Horace Janus born of Horace you know so it's an old Egyptian name he's from Alexandria this this major cultural center that goes back to the time of Alexander the Great but this the center of a thought that represented the coming together of many cultures think of of alexandria you know the Jewish influence and of course the hellenizing and platon izing influence I mean all of that is in Alexandria an origin becomes at the age of 18 the head of the catechetical school of Alexandria so he's in it he's in the mix from the very beginning now let me draw the contrast with Irenaeus I mentioned he's a thoroughly biblical theologian Origen knows the Bible in fact probably better than anybody in the ancient world one of the first truly great I would say systematic students of the Bible and of different versions and translations and someone that took the time to learn Hebrew well enough to translate it etc so all of that but at the same time Origen who comes up in this sort of neo platonic thought world by the way he's a contemporary of the great patinas right where the most important of the neo platonic philosophers so origin is trying in his deeply biblical way to effect a synthesis if you want between the Bible and the remnant philosophy of the time Neoplatonism and hence you get his great works without Origen there's no Thomas Aquinas so there's a straight line if you want between origins project even though the two of them disagree in a lot of ways but the style of the project to to reconcile the Rendy and philosophy of the time in origins case neoplatonism and Thomas's case Aristotelian ISM many centuries later but that represents a very important tradition within Christianity I think of someone who I read a lot when I was doing my doctoral work was Paul Tillich the 20th century Protestant theologian his colleague Reinhold Niebuhr said Oh Tillich he's the origin of a 20th century because what Tillich's project was was to take biblical Christianity and put it in dialogue with in his case a sort of post hi to Gary and existentialism so the the dominant philosophy of the 20th century anyway without Origen you don't have that whole tradition coming up all the way to Thomas Aquinas and then to lots of contemporary people you mentioned correctly that origins a controversial figure indeed so because he takes positions that the church recognized as problematic I'll name a couple one is his peculiar view that the world as we know it is to a large degree the result of sin that took place at a purely spiritual level so you and I have these Souls right that are in these these material bodies well why are we assigned to the level of materiality that we have what's because to varying degrees we sinned in a previous life if you didn't sin you stayed up in this high spiritual dimension think of Plato right so the Platonic that the spiritual is higher and so on material is a lower level if you sinned in that previous life you were assigned to varying degrees well the church of course all that is that's unbiblical it's just an Tim pathetic to Genesis that everything God made is good God we're not here as a punishment so Thomas Aquinas takes Origen to task on that one second thing would be his implicit subordination ISM it's a term he wouldn't have known or used but that's the view that in the Trinitarian life there's a subordination ISM of the Sun vzv the Father as though the Sun is kind of a lesser deity than the Father so it's ambiguous in origin and believe me Origen scholars will have will talk all day about this but it seems to be clear in his writings that the Father he calls hot day oz the god son he calls day oz he calls him divine but not the God and then is there are further subordination ISM what the holy spirit again the origin scholars will debate this all day but there seems to be a subordination ISM in his Trinitarian theology the third thing maybe most famously today is this a pocket hasta Sevilla at that all will be reconciled at the end of time all people will be saved and Origen claimed to know about now again to be fair to him the origin scholars I know say oh yes in some texts he seems to indicate that other texts no all right I'll leave that to the scholars to debate but the church did say no to apakah tosses as though we have a knowledge that all people are saved so for these and other reasons the church expressed a certain caution in regard to origin but see I want to stress something Oh Brandon and you've said it correctly despite all that the church has recognized enormous value in the rise of origin in his biblical commentaries one thing if you like agustín's biblical commentaries and sermons that means you like origin because agustin cribs it almost completely from origin the four senses of Scripture to read scripture in a allegorical way and a logical way all of that comes to us from origin and then this constructing of a of a systematic theology in dialogue with the Iranian philosophy the time which many of us would take almost for granted as yeah that's what theologians do that commences with with origins so for all those reasons he remains a very important figure all right we're gonna have to leave those three figures for now I know we're zipping through 300 years of church history in like 10 minutes but Justin Martyr Irenaeus origin how about bishop real quick we'll have some book recommendations at the end but if you could name one or two works by each of these three figures quickly what would you read of Justin Martyr irenaeus origin well origin U is the the Periyar cone is the Greek term the de principios in Latin yeah on first principles or first things yeah yeah you know that's the Richard John new houses magazine first things that comes from origin I got an edition of it it's a couple years ago now it's a really good book store here in Santa Barbara and I got a new edition of it I think Ave Maria Press has a classics line and they have a it's thick it's three or four hundred pages of on first Bibles and it's it's a wild book I remember as I reread it I thought yeah I mean a wonderful stuff and then you're like wow we there's some wild Egyptian craziness going on here you know so that's what's like reaction but the day Principia s-- is a great text Irenaeus of course is the adverse is her racist the against the heresies again massive book book four of it it's got the five books book four is offer the one that is cited with the most of his thinking and then the apologetic writings of Justin the martyr you know but you got your whole life to read these people all right let's move forward to the nice scene era so remember the Great Council of Nicaea happens in 325 one of the most pivotal moments in the life of the early church and we're gonna look briefly at two church fathers who are in and around those times one is a thony sheis and the second is gregory of nyssa who are these two guys oh gosh Athanasius is one of the most important figures in the life of the church not just intellectually but in its development another Alexandrian he was deacon an assistant to the bishop called appropriately Alexander of Alexandria and that worked out well yeah in that capacity he went with his bishop to the Council of Nicaea and it's one of those things you know we're in the lives of certain great people there's a moment that just defines them especially when they're young so Athanasius was a young man at the time he goes to Nicaea so he's there as these great debates are unfolding and when the church decided against areas and took it stand and we repeat it every Sunday when we were recite the Nicene Creed right God from God light from light true God from True God begotten not made consubstantial with the father well Athanasius his young man a deacon was there when that language was was hammered out well then as you know this is again another semester course but in the wake of the Council of Nicaea things were and weren't resolved in one way yeah the church came to its resolution but another way the debate continued and it was a very royal century politically and theologically Athanasius with the death of Alexander Alexandria becomes himself the Bishop of Alexandria but the hen is exiled not once not twice but three times from his see by his theological enemies that's why you know I today Brandon when those of us who were involved in the theological conversation and it stir of controversy there's nothing new about that that's always been the case and and poor Athanasius is hounded by his theological enemies because arianism didn't just go away in fact it became quite powerful in the years after Nicaea for details Reid Newman's great Aryans of the fourth century if you want that a whole story but ethany sheis is the great figure at this time and one of his nicknames comes here the Athanasius contra mundum Athanasius against the world because he stood for the Nicean formula against the world that seemed exiled to the far west he ended up in modern-day France and Germany at one point made his way back painfully you know the second time and a third time he writes his great texts in response to these concerns Trinitarian incarnation 'el his day in car nazione about the Incarnation that becomes a classic text his way of resolving issues of Trinitarian theology and especially soteriology when I used to teach Athanasius to my first year students at Mundelein I had them read that the great accent Christology and he makes this very simple but but penetrating observation if Jesus is not truly human then we are not saved in other words he hasn't gotten into our humanity if he's not truly divine then we're not saved if he's simply a human figure then he's in the same mess that the rest of us are right what spells salvation is the coming together of divinity and humanity that he's both divine and human so the great formula of Nicaea for him is not a just an abstraction it has huge soteriological implications so F&H is both as a thinker and as a great call of churchmen at that time maybe some people feel contra mundum even now like you know boy the whole world's coming down on me because of certain things well join the club that was issues I just reread his great on the Incarnation throughout Advent and I got this version of the book from st. Vladimir's press the Eastern Orthodox press but it contains that famous foreword by CS Lewis who one of the last things he wrote was this introduction to a tenacious book and in that florid he makes the case that we often get intimidated by these great figures these early philosophers the ancient Greeks are these early church father theologians and we're tempted to just read secondary and tertiary literature on them you know the commentators on them but he says one of the marks of their greatness is their readability like read these guys and you can take them in and I found that true of Athanasius his book is shorts maybe I don't know seventy pages or so but it's it's so lucid and beautiful it's not about the Incarnation like the Nativity story but it's the whole fact that the Christ took on human flesh that he became human so I highly recommend that particular edition okay how about let's hop to the east now and talk about gregory of nyssa who was he well of course at the nation's is Eastern too I mean he's an Alexandrian and and you're right that one of the great divisions of the fathers is east west and it's very interesting to look at that people that come out of Alexandria like origin like Athanasius like clement of alexandria for example i have a certain style of theologizing but with gregory your christ we're going further east from alexandria you're going into what's called Cappadocia so it's that far eastern end of modern-day Turkey so Gregory is I would say the greatest of the so-called Cappadocia and fathers this includes Gregory of Nyssa Gregory nezzie ANZ's and Basil the Great these three figures and they're all interesting are flourishing around the mid to late 4th century so now I see has happened Etha Nations is contra mundum and he's getting exiled and everything else they the Aryans are flourishing it's up many ways these three great figures begin to formulate the language and conceptuality by which and i see it could be defended against the Aryans so we owe that to the Cappadocia --nz and that's a giant contribution in a way without them no Agustin because Agustin and the way can take advantage of some of the conceptual distinctions made by these Eastern fathers see remember branded it maybe there's a comparison of the sciences or this applicable we can look with a certain condescension centuries ago like oh those poor scientists and they didn't know that much but yeah but we're standing on the shoulders of giants and we we know more than they but only because we're standing on their shoulders that they they made the distinctions and clarifications and did the experiments that ground modern science well in a way that's true of these people the Cappadocia --nz made some of the moves intellectually that made later Trinitarian theology possible you know when you mentioned greatness i I can't help but go back to my dr. FATA they say in German my doctoral director in Paris Michel Corbin one of the earliest classes ahead with Corbin he said to us you know I've just turned 50 and he said when I was a young man I read you know Hegel and Marx and Heidegger and he named all the you know big cultural figures and he said meant to know adjacent called own now that I have 50 years surely Clegg wada nice I'm reading gregory of nyssa and at the time i don't think i'd read much at gregory of nyssa but it just struck me that this great figure who knew the tradition exceptionally well knew the contemporary scene but said now that I'm kind of in the second half of my life I go back to gregory of nyssa he's one of what we'll call the life of Moses get that if you want an introduction to Gregory it's a origin ax stick in many ways allegorical reading of the Moses story as an allegory of the spiritual journey but one of the great Cappadocia and fathers all right well as predicted we have already hit are we autumn in there and we've barely scratched the surface if you're okay with it bishop how about next week we'll wrap up the third episode on the post Nicene sure fathers just real quick I know I got several emails after the first episode asking for more book recommendations so I got a copy hour for you Jimmy akin who is that Catholic Answers has a book called the fathers know best where he's arranged excerpts of the fathers right topically so you can look up a topic see what the father say about it rod Bennett has a great book called for witnesses the early church in her own words and these covered the four Apostolic fathers we mentioned last episode and then finally Marcelino D'Ambrosio has a book called when the church was young that looks at not just the church fathers but some of the non biblical early Christian texts from the first few centuries those are all great so if you want to dig more into the father's check those out but I'm with you too Brandon is saying you know to read the father's themselves and I'm furthermore with you I'll close with those I promise yeah the great falter Kaufman who was a 20th century of philosophical commentator made this observation I've always thought was dead right that it's the greatest philosophers are the best writers that write most lucidly we have this tendency it's a bad instinct he thought to associate like densely complex prose with deep thought Kaufman suggested Oh contraire that actually when you've got this densely unreadable prose it's masking bad thought that the best people now of course Thomas Aquinas comes to mind right in the most lucid way CS Lewis comes to mind right anyway so read the father's themselves I think you'll find that yeah actually I did have one more thing here if you want primary sources in other words if you want to read the father's own words there's a very famous series by William Jergens it's a three-set saying called the faith of the early fathers where he takes the most popular texts and excerpts from each of the fathers and just lays them out with helpful notes and stuff so if you want to just anthology of the fathers check that one out [Music] well that sound means it is time for our question from one of our listeners we love hearing from everyone who listens to the show if you have a question please send it in you can record it by visiting ask Bishop Baron comm today we have a question from Stephanie in your state bishop San Diego California because asking about purgatory heaven and its relation to time so here's your question hello Bishop Baron this is Stephanie from San Diego my question is about heaven and time I have heard that heaven exists outside of time but if people are dying or leaving purgatory to enter heaven doesn't that create a sequence of events and hence time as we understand it because someone was not in heaven and then they are there is a before and after or does this somehow tie into the reason for the final judgment thanks for your insights yeah thanks I always like these kind of searching philosophical questions and it's it's a famous conundrum in a way because you correctly point out we're talking about heaven or God's dimension we're not talking about endless time but something that's outside of time and we don't Reno what that means I would challenge anyone to say oh I got a clear and distinct idea of what it means to be outside of time because our whole experience is temporal it's like saying I know what it's like to be beyond space well we don't everything we experience is spatial and temporal so that's why the biblical citation right eye has not seen ear has not heard what God's prepared for those who love Him is always applicable here we don't really know what we're talking about I would say in terms of the transition between purgatory and heaven don't think of that in terms of ordinary space-time relationships whatever that succession is I wouldn't describe it as a temporal succession in the ordinary way but a an ontological transition if you want but you know I realized the dilemma of it because we're talking about bodies if if heaven is in a place where bodies are and indeed we say that then isn't there something like space yeah I think so something analogous to it what that is I'm not entirely sure and now the anybody is are there qualities of the resurrected body yeah says Aquinas he described some of them what they really mean for sure I don't know you know I is not seniors not heard so I would trust that there's something wonderful God has prepared for those who love him it's inclusive of whatever is good true and beautiful about space and time without the the negative qualities of space and time might be a way to get at it well thanks for your question Stephanie and thanks everybody for tuning into this part two on the church fathers again we'll try to do a third episode you need three probably three four five six seven probably but thanks again for listening couple quick things before we wrap up first if you would like to help support this show we invite you to become a patron you can do that by visiting word on fire show.com slash patron big shout out to Michael bison from Massachusetts he's one of our great patrons but we'd like you to join him so again help support the show help get it out to more people visit word on fire show.com slash patron thanks again for listening we'll see you next week on the word on fire show [Music] you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Id: I_tRPF-8qhY

Length: 31min 55sec (1915 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2020