The Genius of St. Irenaeus

gnosticism is the most enduring heresy in the history of the church we fight it in almost every generation it's a very very stubborn heresy irenaeus fought this heroic gettysburg-like battle against it in the second century and his book remains a sort of monument of how to deal with this problem welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vaught the senior publishing director pope francis has just announced he's planning to declare a new doctor of the church his name is saint irenaeus who was he what were his key ideas why does he still matter that's what we're going to be discussing today with bishop robert baron bishop good to see you hey brandon always a joy to see you how are you kids doing there in florida uh we're doing well flourishing i can't remember if if i told you recently but we got a new cow that's our our newest animal here at birthday our little homestead we've got goats pigs chickens bees and now a cow so i feel like we finally landed as farmers yeah well maybe your kids will all grow up to be farmers that would be delightful listen that word on fire yet another episode means yet another new book in this case three new books uh we just released since our last new episode they're new editions of books that you've published in the past over the years i want to show them on camera because they're so gorgeous um this one is titled the strangest way and then we have uh proclaiming the power of christ it's a collection of homilies previously titled word on fire and then we have and now i see and as you can see if you're watching the video version gorgeous stunning covers all hardcover editions beautifully produced uh bishop say something briefly about these three books well first of all as you say we bought the writes back from the original publishers and we've brought them out in these editions which really are beautiful and kudos to our design team our creative team just marvelous uh i wrote those a long time ago so now i see probably late 90s strangest ways probably in the early zeros that came out maybe in 2002 um very fond of both those books uh i was very much in a kind of literary frame of mind when i wrote those because they all have lengthy sections where i talk about dante william faulkner flannery o'connor um all kinds of other people so i was trying to bring together theology philosophy literature culture into sort of furago or amalgam um the strangest way i was very much reading a lot of the post liberals and postmoderns and people like stanley howarwass were very influential when i wrote that book that came to fuller academic expression a few years after that in the priority of christ but in some ways the strangest way was a warm-up for that and now i see i think of that as a uh i don't know a summary of a lot of what i was thinking in the wake of my doctoral studies i just begun teaching and it's what was on my mind then the other book of sermons as a collection as you say of sermons from many years ago uh that i delivered i think you know for radio and for the internet and all that and then we wrote those up as more formal uh presentations so you get a little bit of my sense of what a homily is or ought to be and what i argue in the preface as i remember is it's so different from the way i was trained to preach so my generation was trained to preach in a certain way what i discovered was almost nobody in the great tradition preached that way almost no one from the earliest days all the way through you know john henry newman no one preached the way we were taught to preach and i thought there was a problem there and i wanted to show with these sermons i think a better way to do it so you get all three books in the word on fire bookstore i'll have a link below this video but it's just bookstore.wordonfire.org and i think we're running a special right now where you can get all three of these books at a huge discount bundled together so be on the lookout for that all right bishop let's turn to the great saint irenaeus uh as i mentioned pope francis just announced informally i think it was part of another event he kind of just let it slip that he's planning to formally declare saint irenaeus to be a doctor of the church so i thought we'd kick around the significance of that announcement and then look at some of irenaeus's key ideas and impact so let's start with the basics who was irenaeus when and where did he live what's he best remembered for a great figure one of my favorite of the church fathers it's finishing brandon you mentioned the announcement from the pope as i remember now this is before kovid the u.s bishops conference uh discussed the matter because i think it was the french bishops conference had proposed irenaeus as doctor of the church and they wanted to get a a read from the other bishops conferences around the world so it was cardinal dinardo was the president of the time and he's a great patristic scholar and when he announced it to us he said what a lot of us felt he said i don't know i always thought he already was a doctor of the church because a lot of us are great affection for irony so there was an enormous response of like well yeah of course he should be a doctor of the church so that consultation process must have gone on until the pope finally said okay i'll make the declaration so very happy about it to your question irenaeus he's a figure from the second century of a very early figure he's born we're guessing around 130. we don't know exactly he died we're a little more exact here right around the year 200. irenaeus was born in the east so he's born in what today is called izmir it was called smyrna back in the day you might remember saint polycarp a famous martyr was the bishop of smyrna and irenaeus proudly says over and over again in his writings i was taught by polycarp who was taught by john the evangelist john the evangelist had evangelized and trained polycarp who in turn influenced irenaeus so he's from that part of the christian world where it began in the east then he makes his way we don't know entirely why we're not real clear first to rome and then north to what's present-day france and it was called lugdunum in those days it was a roman sort of colonial town it's now called lyon so lugdunum has evolved into the french word lyon so he's called irenaeus of lyon today but there he established himself and engaged in one of the great intellectual projects in the whole christian tradition you think of like you know the five or six greatest works of systematic theology and you'd mention you know the city of god of augustine you'd mention the sum of aquinas you'd come up through um you know carl bart barton people like that in the 20th century but one of the really earliest and greatest of these systematic presentations of the christian faith is the adversus heresies of irenaeus that just means against the heresies right what were the heresies of that time well they can be gathered under this sort of great global term of gnosticism so that's the way to name the central project of irenaeus was to present the biblical view of life over and against a gnosticizing interpretation of christianity and you know he's a bit there like athanasius now ethnicity is going to go a century and a half after irenaeus but his athanasius fought the aryans right in the fourth century and that was seen as like a gettysburg moment it was a it was a standing or falling battle if we had lost the battle with the aryans we wouldn't be christianity i think in a very similar way go back now a century and a half irenaeus against the the gnosticois he called them the gnostics if we had lost that battle we would have devolved into one more kind of boring um vague mysticism so he's he's that kind of a pivotal figure um the battles he fought in the second century determined the nature of christianity in many ways and resonate very much to the present day now he was murdered we're pretty sure we don't know absolutely for sure but likely martyred he becomes the bishop of lyon and then is martyred around the year 200. so not only is he a great intellectual figure he's a heroic figure as well so irenaeus um delighted he's being named the doctor of the church because he has a lot to teach us a doctor is just a teacher of the church right and he still has a lot to teach us today i like how the french bishops ask the other bishops do you think irony should be doctor of the church because it's hard to imagine a conference of bishops all voting no i don't think so no no we were like duh i mean i thought he already was that was our reaction tell us a little bit more about what a doctor of the church is i think we're up to what thirty four thirty five seventies like five or six years okay so these are like special sane special teachers but what makes someone a doctor i think it's someone who teaches the faith in such a rich and compelling way that the whole church could benefit from listening to him or to her so there are teachers i mean up and down the centuries every priest every bishop is a teacher of the church but there are certain doctors teachers that are so penetrating and so incisive and so maybe encyclopedic or so rich that the whole church should sit up and and listen so you know think augustine and chrysostom and aquinas and jerome and you know coming up to the present day um [Music] you know named a doctor of the church uh i would hope newman someday will be doctor of the church um these people that are of such key importance and incisive insight that the whole church should listen to them that's a doctor of the church tell us a little bit about your personal experience with irenaeus i know he's been meaningful to you for a long time and i think correct me if i'm wrong you've started writing a whole book on him i think we have the manuscript half finished somewhere in our archives but tell us about your personal experience with him it probably would have started i'm guessing now with sister agnes cunningham sister agnes who's still with us she's in her mid 90s now she taught patristics at mundelline seminary and agnes is a very interesting player she was the first female president of the catholic theological society of america back in the like 1970s a leading patristic scholar she was the first woman to get a doctorate from um the ants ducato league in lyon which is of course were irenaeus not the answer to catholic but lyon anyway so sister agnes taught patristics when i was a student at mundoline as i remember there was a project in our first year of theology where we had to take a father and and do some research and write a paper and she i think had given a lecture on irenaeus that i thought was really interesting and so i pursued that with her and said tell me more and tell me what i should read and that was the beginning of my um experience with him but i found you know he's like a handful of other people my own life aquinas most obviously but a few others who are touchstone figures that newman's another one too that i would just go back to a lot and say yeah you know he he was right about this and yeah he was right about that and boy irenaeus was so insightful so in the course of my own studies and research and writing he became a touchstone figure for me and remains that to this day and you write about the book it was our good friend matthew levering i kind of forget now brandon this is years ago but he was editing a series of books i'm not sure really what happened in that series but he invited me to write one on irenaeus and i made pretty good progress i think i had about 30 or 40 000 words written of that book and then you know what it was then they then they told me this was the brazos publishing that they wanted me to work on the second samuel book for their bible series and i said well now which one do you want first you want samuel or do you want irenaeus and they said samuel so then i focused on that book and then became rector of the seminary then became a bishop and so the irenaeus project was kind of you know lost maybe time to bring it back now that we have doctor of the church irenaeus we'll see yeah okay let's turn our attention now to some of irenaeus's key ideas and contributions you hinted at maybe the the main focus of his life earlier in this discussion when you said he focused on battling gnosticism including when we say gnosticism we often think of just pagans who were gnostic but including a lot of christians who were bending in a gnostic direction what was irenaeus's approach to gnosticism how did he battle against it he was a man of the bible um i think like a distinguishing feature between let's say origen of alexandria and irenaeus origen uh used the philosophical tradition in a big way now origen was a bible man too don't get me wrong he knew the bible extremely well but his project was that of in some ways augustine and aquinas too to to link together revelation with a dominant philosophical system in their case platonism and middle platonism thomas's case aristotelianism i'd say with with irenaeus though he's not playing that game at all he's not trying to reconcile christianity with the philosophy he's coming consistently out of the biblical vision of things and he saw the gnostic vision as deeply unbiblical now i'm going to kind of cut to the chase here we could talk for you know months about gnosticism under that term it's a kind of a furrago of ideas but put it this way it's an extreme prejudice in favor of the spiritual over the material you know brandon one way to get at this it's a perennial problem we human beings are hybrids right we're hybrids of the spiritual and the physical and a lot of the poetry of being human follows from that fact because there's like this built-in tension between the spirit and the body and think of a lot of the drama poetry and art of of human life is generated from that conflict so there's always a temptation to resolve it on one side or the other right to say no i'm all body i'm all matter now that looks morally like something i just give myself over to the goods of the body it also can look like something theoretical but it's all just materialism it's a reduction to matter right the spirit is just an epi phenomenon or it's an illusion that's more of a temptation today but the other temptation it goes right back to plato and you see it in the gnostics you see it in all forms of puritanism and say no no i'm all spirit i'm all spirit and matter is something kind of grubby and bad and fallen right and at the limit even illusory it doesn't even really exist so those two tensions i'm all spirit i'm all manner irenaeus it seems to me had the biblical sanity this wonderful balance of course he knew about the spiritual dimension and aspiration of the human being but here's the word that i think it's just it's like a refrain that echoes all through irenaes's writings the body the body the body the body because the creator god of the old testament makes the embodied world he makes the material world on the gnostic reading that god is a fallen god a compromised god who indeed has made this grubby world of matter but you know that's a fallen god and an even more fallen world and the idea that the gnosticoi have the knowers right those who really get it is i need to escape from that realm i have a little light of spirit within me that has to be let loose escape from matter well see irenaeus said no no that's completely repugnant to the old testament perspective moreover moreover god in the new testament becomes flesh enters into our flesh the incarnation right so both old testament and new militate against he knew a gnosticizing reading of reality and so at versus horace's i'm against these heretical positions here's something too brandon really interesting boy it haunts us to this day a suspicion of the old testament well the gnostics had that in in spades because the old testament fallen god fallen world yahweh of the old testament with all this thundering legalism and anger that's typical of this compromised fallen figure irenaeus said no no there aren't the two gods a fallen one and a true one god is god and um we have to come to terms with both the old testament and new and in fact we won't get the new without the old well that's irenaeus that's his anti-marcianite stance right marcian being an early figure who took up that position at the old testament is is no good irenaeus said no and so those moves are of extreme importance in the evolution of christianity away from a world denying or matter-denying um hyper-spiritualized system he kept insisting on flesh flesh flesh the body matter matter matters right and we can talk about this but that's why it's of enormous importance to this day you've written before that maybe the master idea in all of irenaeus's theology is that god has no need of anything outside himself in fact you've put it pivotally god doesn't need us and that's good news you say absolutely what does this mean and why is it good news it's so good you know who who mediated that to me would have been robert sokolowski years ago and he put it in probably in terms of anselm but the idea really goes back to irenaeus very old idea and he repeats it over and over again you see if if i need somebody well then that person is going to meet some some want that i have so i'm in a position now to use that person because i need something that you can give me that means i'm likely to manipulate you i can will your good but there's always going to be a bit of i will you're good for my own sake because i need something from you right god is god he's the creator of the whole universe the universe can't possibly give him something he doesn't have because he gave everything to the universe right that means that god can truly love because he doesn't need the world the world's not going to add something to him he's not playing a game of indirect egotism but god can can love in an utterly generous way and that's why as as i've said the fact that god doesn't need us is exceptionally good news that means that we can really enter into an utterly loving friendship with god and now press it press it when i get that divine way of being into me and we call that grace right when god gives me a share in his own life now i can love in that disinterested way even though as a creature heck i need all sorts of things i'm not god but yet through grace i can share in the divine life now we have saints saints are those who can love in this totally disinterested way because they're loving with the very love of god all of that is really plain it's really clear in irenaeus's mind i think for most catholics the name irenaeus uh calls to mind his famous line that the glory of god is man fully alive you've cited this line very often what does this mean well it follows directly from what i just said right it's a gloria day homo vivance the the glory of god is a human being fully alive if god needed us in some way well then his glory would be know if i can take advantage of you i can get something from you from my own benefit god would be glorified in the measure that we're kind of put down or used as his servants you want to see this in action look at all the ancient myths that irenaeus would have known very well in his world right the greek and roman myths are full of divine figures who need adulation they need something from the world and they end up manipulating the world and dominating the world their glory is that we be put down look at the myth of prometheus right as prometheus tries to steal fire from the gods well the gods are are outraged and they perpetually punish this usurper well sure that's the way a needy you know uh self-absorbed divinity is going to act but the true god and lead the world he he wants to give us what did jesus say i've come that you might have life and have it to the full i want to give you everything well that god's glory therefore is a human being fully alive that when when i'm i'm on fire with god's life god's glorified by that he's not he's not competing with it you know that's the language of grace and i've called that the non-competitive transcendence of god god transcends the world the s d but in such a way that he's not competing with the world i've used the image and this you know is very iron and of the um the burning bush as god gets close to his creation he he lights it on fire and makes it more beautiful and he doesn't consume it so the bush is not consumed it's more fully itself that's an irenaean idea that has huge implications for the moral life and the spiritual life as you said earlier irenaeus wrote systematically about almost every aspect of the christian faith including salvation and another of his master ideas if we can use a little bit of jargon is the recapitulation theory of atonement so uh yeah you know this is found a little bit in st paul then in justin martyr but irenaeus gives it its first full expression what does irenaeus mean by recapitulation yeah his word in the greek is anacephalyosis kefale in greek means head and so head gets translated as kaplot in latin so anakepolyosis becomes ray capitulazio in latin hence our recapitulation what it means and he writes borrowed from paul especially in ephesians that christ becomes the head under which all of creation is gathered in that sense he recapitulates all of time and space and history and humanity all of it comes together in him that great paul line image of christ come to full stature right well irenaeus loved that idea and and then rang the changes on it you're right brandon putting your finger on this age-old problem theology of you know why did the incarnation happen and there's a kind of reparative theory uh it's identified often with thomas aquinas that god became human that he might save us from our sin he might repair a fallen world well true obviously that's obviously right but there's also this view call it recapitulative that even if we hadn't sinned even if we had never sinned the incarnation still would have happened why because it's the means by which god was going to recapitulate or draw together all creation under the headship of the sun now that's associated later on with john don scotus and hence you've got a tomist versus a scotus view of salvation but you're right that in some ways the roots of the scotus view go all the way back to irenaeus who was deeply indebted to paul here it's a beautiful idea it's a hopeful idea it's god's desire for his creation that nothing be lost that god will gather all things together under the headship of christ it's a more lyrical sort of cosmic understanding of the incarnation of the cross see the danger i suppose of a purely reparative idea is it becomes very much focused on on us and on us fallen human beings where the recapitulative idea is cosmic in scope you know and it speaks of what god wants and desires for his whole creation and it's a beautiful lyrical optimistic uh construal we mentioned at the outset how the context of this announcement that pope francis will be declaring saint irenaeus to be a doctor of the church was he was speaking to an ecumenical group of catholic and orthodox theologians and he said this i'm quoting pope francis your patron saint irenaeus of leon whom i soon will be declaring a doctor of the church with the title dr unitatis doctor of unity came from the east exercised his episcopal ministry in the west and was a great spiritual and theological bridge between eastern and western christians say something about this idea of irenaeus as a bridge figure it's a very important idea and he's right first of all in the kind of geographical sense that literally he moved from the east to the west and so he's he's a bridge in his own person he carries a more eastern style of thinking into the west see keep in mind now this is a very interesting and long historical problem the definitive break between the east and west is in 1054 so long after the time of irenaeus but prior to that split you can see certain differences in theological style and emphasis for example in trinitarian theology the east tends to emphasize the distinction of the persons the west tends to emphasize the unity of god now each says the other as well but there's a kind of style you know of theologizing what do we see now in irenaeus and i think here in contra distinction to augustine again whom i reverence anyone that's ever followed me or read books of mine or no i reverend saint augustine but i think irenaeus is important corrective and here's what i mean there is a kind of pessimism about augustine when it comes to human nature and the fall he has the famous theory i'd say kind of infamous theory of the masa damnata that the overwhelming majority of human beings are damned and only a tiny handful through god's inscrutable grace are called from the masadam nada into salvation in augustine a great stress on original sin and the kind of dire consequences of it irenaeus i think it's fair to say and it's a more eastern style of thinking has a more optimistic anthropology less of a focus on the you know kind of awfully dire consequences of original sin with anacephalosis i think a more optimistic sense of the possibilities of of salvation now think of people like gregory of nissa think of maximus the confessor eastern figures who who have tended in a somewhat more universalizing direction in regard to the question of salvation the augustinian tradition tends in a more you know kind of darker more dire understanding of that that's why i think it's important that irenaeus having journeyed literally from east to west is in a way a certain injection of eastern thinking into the western context and that's all to the good i think i quite agree with the pope there that he's he's theologically a bridge and the west can benefit from that certain injection of a more eastern uh perspective again it's not to say boy the east has got it all together and the west is all no no not at all look i'm an aquinas man and so i love the western tradition but i think as john paul ii said you know we want to breathe with both lungs both east and west and irenaeus i think helps that process let's close with this final question about irenaeus's relevance today you know i discovered this fact while preparing this episode that the second vatican council cited irenaeus 14 times which makes him the second most cited church father after only augustine whom you just mentioned this connection between augustine and irenaeus so clearly the council fathers believed that irenaeus had something to say to the church in the modern world what do you think why is irenaeus still relevant today what can he speak to us today you know first of all brandon i was grateful for that i didn't know that that he was the second most cited father it doesn't surprise me really because think of the influence of of de lubbock and danielo and the the reso samoa movement and there was such a renewed interest in the fathers and especially in the greek fathers origin irenaeus and and gregory and those people so it doesn't really surprise me a lot of the uh the fathers of vatican ii and the theologians behind them would have been very open to irenaeus now why is he relevant today there's all kinds of reasons but i'll say this gnosticism is the most enduring heresy in the history of the church we fight it in almost every generation it's a very very stubborn heresy irenaeus fought this heroic gettysburg-like battle against it in the second century and his book remains a sort of monument of how to deal with this problem now where do we see it today i think in all kinds of ways but let me give you one indication whenever people say things like you know the real me that's my my will it's my interiority it's it's my my freedom my decision and my body well yeah i don't like my body and so i'm gonna change it i don't like my identity so i'm gonna i'm gonna maneuver things differently i don't like my gender i'm gonna change it well that's agnostic intuition that says the real me is this kind of spiritual power that lurks somewhere inside the body or alongside of it and the body is simply malleable matter which is there for the um the the good pleasure of of the spiritual power that's right out of the gnostic playbook in terms of anthropology you can trace it back as i would to the founders of a lot of modern philosophy look at descartes um kojito look at kant's privileging of the will in matters of ethics in all sorts of ways look at hegel's apothecizing of the ego those are all finely gnostic moves they've borne in my judgment bitter fruit today in in ways i've been describing whom do we need we need irenaeus we need a new irenaeus it's cool brandon just as john henry newman 19th century said we need a new athanasius he felt we needed something of course and he sort of claimed the mantle of the new athanasius um we do need a new irenaeus today because those those horaces are still around and we need his eloquent voice to speak against them [Music] well it's time now for our listener question every episode we like to have a question from one of our listeners that bishop baron answers here on the air so if you have a question send it in to us at the website askbishopbarren.com today we're hearing from nick in colorado he has a skeptical friend and he's hoping bishop baron can help him respond here's his question hi bishop baron my name is nick and i'm from colorado i have a friend who claims that nothing really exists because we can't prove that it exists what is the catholic philosopher's response to this worldview thanks well i just bad mouth descartes a little bit but let me claim him or even go back behind descartes to augustine because descartes famous cochito right cochito ergosoum so in the face of the most withering skepticism you know that i'm skeptical about everything because it could be an illusion it could be a dream etc what's the one thing i can't doubt that i'm doubting you know you could say do be toe ergosome i doubt therefore i am at the very least the doubting subject has to exist otherwise the doubt wouldn't be possible well the roots of that as i suggest are augustinian because he said in his latin see follower assume if i make a mistake well at least i am right so the skeptic says look i'm mistaken about everything well see follower assume if i'm mistaken at least i'm there as a subject of this mistake in judgment the point is you can't finally engage in an utterly destructive skepticism because the very act of being skeptical grounds you in something like reality right now once you see that that's that that truth is kind of self-evidently known i think it will follow by certain steps that other truths are self-evidently known now i'm with newman on this you know look most of life it's true is known not with certitude but with probability and that's true is is brandon really in orlando well i mean i don't know that this could be maybe he's next door and they're just sending this image on the screen you know do i think that's true well absolutely not i think it's it's extremely probable that brandon in fact is in orlando and i'm talking to him by means of this camera um so i mean sure we can play that game that certain things are known with an epidictic certitude otherwise the project would fall apart and then i think most things indeed are known to varying degrees of probability but we shouldn't let that us psychologically well as we wrap up here i'd like to remind you once again to get your copies of the new editions of bishop baron's three best-selling books again the strangest way uh proclaiming the power of christ and then and now i see again gorgeously designed hardcover volumes you can pick them up at the website bookstore.wordonfire.org i will also include a link in the show notes well thanks so much for listening we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video i invite you to share it and to subscribe to my youtube channel

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Published: Mon Oct 18 2021