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St. Irenaeus on Unity
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Pope Francis recently announced a new Doctor of the Church: St. Irenaeus of Lyons. In this episode of Formed Now, Dr. John Sehorn and Dr. Ben Akers discuss this second-century Church Father, explaining his importance to the history of Christianity and his title—the "Doctor of Unity."
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Narrator
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Hello and welcome to Catholic Saints. My name is Dr. Ben Akers. I'm the Chief Content Officer here at the Augusta Institute. And my special guest today is Dr. John Seehorn, the dean and professor of theology at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology. And today we're going to be talking about St. Irenaeus. His feast day is June 28th. Pope Francis just named him the Doctor of Unity, so he's going to name him a Doctor of the Church. He's already a Father of the Church, so maybe we can talk about that. Father of the Church. He's going to be named a Doctor of the Church, the Doctor of Unity. Pope Benedict XVI called him the first Church theologian who created systematic theology, so a great saint. So we're going to get into some of the history of his context, historical context, and some of the things he taught and what we can learn from him today. So thanks for joining me, John.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Oh, my pleasure to be here, Ben.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yeah. So what's the first thing we need to know about Irenaeus? When did he live?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, so Irenaeus lived during the second century. Right. So he was born probably about 100 years after our Lord's passion, around the year 130. We're not exactly sure. He lived in Asia Minor, actually, in the city of Smyrna. Smyrna, you might actually know from the Book of Revelation.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yeah, right.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Where we actually have a letter from our Lord to.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So is this like modern day. Is this like Turkey? Modern day, yeah, modern day Turkey.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Asia Minor is what they called it in antiquity. That's right. And as a kid, he remembers listening to the Bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, and Polycarp is pretty cool. He was martyred around the year, I want to say, 155. I might be a little bit off here. Yeah. But he talks about, in the account of his martyrdom, he says that he has served the Lord for 86 years, which a lot of scholars, I think, plausibly think suggests that he was baptized as an infant. Right. So like 86 years before that. So now we're back into what, around the year 70 or so. Right. And so this is actually someone who, growing up, would have quite possibly had a chance to know John the Apostle.
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Dr. Ben Akers
This is amazing, that. So John, who knows Jesus, this is, you know, John who lays his heart on the. On Christ at the Last Supper, takes Our lady into his into his home and take care of her. Is the bishop of this area. He's living in the same area.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Polycarp may have heard from him, met him, and then Irenaeus learns from Polycarp. So we're like, we're in touch with the apostles who know Christ.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yep, that's right. Yeah. Very early on. Right. So seems to have grown up in.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So when he writes something and teaches something, we can presume that it's actually coming from the mouth of the apostles. This is a solid tradition.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, quite a lot of it. Yeah. I mean, there are definitely places where Irenaeus is kind of, you know, like you mentioned that Pope Benedict referred to him as kind of the first systematic theologian. There are places where he's kind of expanding on that and trying to, you know, maybe make even further connections and so forth and go into more detail than what he would have heard, you know, directly from the apostles through Polycarp. But yeah, we're talking about a time when actually, in his own phrase, the, the teaching of the apostles was still ringing in people's ears.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Wow. Right, that's beautiful. Okay, so he's in Asia Minor, but his title is Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, which. That's in. In France or Monde. France, but Gaul.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
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Dr. Ben Akers
How do. What happens there? How does he get over there?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Well, he had these frequent flyer miles and he just. No, we, we don't actually know for sure, but. But it does seem to be the case that there was a community of Greek speaking Christians in Gaul, in Lyon and in nearby Vienne. And. And they also had connections, a lot of close connections with Rome. Rome was a kind of cosmopolitan city where people from all over the empire would settle. And so you had kind of different groups of Christians. We would almost think of them as like parishes today. Right. Who maybe came from different.
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Dr. Ben Akers
The Polish. The Germans.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Exactly. Right, yeah. So you had like Asian parishes, meaning from modern day Turkey, Greek speaking Christians. So there seemed to have been some, some connections in that kind of triangle, you could say, between Turkey and Rome and Gaul.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Okay. So he, on the way, goes to Rome, somehow ends up in Gaul, is still part of the Roman Empire.
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Dr. John Seehorn
That's right.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So do you think this is part of one of the reasons that Pope Francis wants to call him Doctor of Unity? Because we have an east and West.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah. In fact, in the declaration whereby Pope Francis made Irenaeus a Doctor of the Church, he actually says that he's giving him this title, at least in part, because he's a kind of bridge between the east and the West.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So, quick aside. So what's the difference between a father of the Church and a doctor of the Church?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah. So a father of the Church in general is someone who's distinguished by his antiquity. Gotta be old, right? His holiness, holiness of life, orthodoxy of teaching, and then also just ecclesiastical recognition. This kind of like, even if it's not in a kind of, you know, official act of the Church, a recognition within the Church that this is someone who particularly kind of contributed to the life of the Church in these formative. These formative centuries after Christ. A doctor of the Church is sort of one step further. And specifically with respect to teaching. Right. We usually think of doctor like a medical doctor, but we could almost translate it. A teacher of the Church.
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Dr. Ben Akers
I had a friend introduced to his son. He's like, he's. This is Dr. Akers, but he's not a doctor that helps people.
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Dr. John Seehorn
That's right, Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
I was like, no, I tried to help their brains. You know, I learned things about the faith. But he meant medical doctor. And so what we mean is a doctor, someone who teaches the faith. So they're known in a particular way to reflect the wisdom of God in the teaching.
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Dr. John Seehorn
That's right. Yeah. And Irenaeus did leave us. We have a couple of his works that have survived. One really short one called the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, which is a beautiful little text. And then a big fat one called Against Heresies. And it's interesting, you know, a renowned patristic scholar that I know once said to me that this work of Irenaeus against heresies would make more sense if it was like a 5th century forgery. Right. So like something written much later but claiming to be older in order to kind of, you know, get this air of authority about it. Just because it's so well developed that a lot of the things that Irenaeus.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Puts that systematic theology. That's right. Was referring to. Okay, so already in the early. And you go to new advent.org is a great resource to get these. If you want to read these texts, we always encourage you our conversation. We really hope that you actually go to the texts themselves and read the. The saints. And New Advent has both of those works on there. A. A translation for free.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Does it have both.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Sorry, the first, I guess, Heresies. And then makes fragments of some of his other possible writings. Okay. So already in the early Church, we're in the second century. We have heresy.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Which is, you know, I, you know, taking a particular teaching of the church and distorting it to an extreme. What's the heresy that they're. It. Kind of surprising, right? It's a persecuted church and yet they already have people that are distorting the teachings of Christ and the apostles.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah. So Irenaeus writes. He actually says that what he's writing about is the. And he's quoting here from the end of 1 Timothy, knowledge, falsely so called. And the Greek word for knowledge is gnosis, G N O S I s. And so Irenaeus kind of refers to these groups under the kind of blanket term of the. The false. The false gnosis. And so we often call them Gnostics. Now that doesn't mean that every, every group that Irenaeus is writing against would, would call themselves Gnostics. But that is again, and scholars debate whether it's really the most useful term. I actually think it is still really helpful as again, a kind of umbrella term to cover a lot of these different groups. And in addition to the Gnostics, he wrote against Marcionites who were followers of a man named Marcion who'd shown up in rome in the 140s. He was from Turkey as well, but closer to the Black Sea, so kind of the other end of Turkey from where Irenaeus was from. And he taught that the Old Testament was true, but it was bad news. It came from a different God who had created the world and was kind of all into justice and law, but not into love and mercy.
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Dr. Ben Akers
The angry God.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah. And that the New Testament, at least the true kind of kernel in the New Testament was about Jesus Christ and his father, who was actually a different God who had not made this world, but who took pity on us because we were sort of laboring under the regime of this just and unmerciful God.
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Dr. Ben Akers
That's fascinating because I still hear that today from people in the pew where it's like, I like the New Testament, I don't like to read the Old Testament. That guy's angry and mean and I don't understand what's going on there. So that heresy's still with us.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Oh, for sure. And it's actually something that Marcion and Marcianism sort of shares with the Gnostics. They kind of tell different stories behind it. But both of them thought that the Old Testament at the end of the day was sort of to be laid at the feet of. Of a kind of lesser God, like someone who wasn't the good and loving father of Jesus Christ and who may or may not have been responsible for this Creation. So they share these interesting things in common. Right. A disdain for the Old Testament, which we'll talk about more, but then also a disdain for. For this creation and the creator of this creation. It's interesting to see how these are connected. I don't want to leave this unaddressed, though. As you said, I do think that this is something that's still with us, even in really subtle ways. So I not uncommonly encountered the view, even among Christians and even sometimes among Catholics, that somehow Jesus rejected the Old Testament or some parts of the Old Testament or something like that. Now, it's true that the light of Christ illuminates the Old Testament and allows us to see the fullness of God's plan and to see each part of the Bible in light of that whole. But nonetheless, we believe that Jesus is the eternal Son of the Father. He is the same God who gave us the Old Testament. Right. And the Church teaches unequivocally. I'm pretty sure it's catechism. One, two, three, paragraph 123. Oh, you've got it there. That just says that we affirm that the Old Testament is truly the word of God. Is truly the word of God.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So what are the way. So I know, you know, for the. This is just a short podcast that we have, but what were some of the kind of the key points of Irenaeus arguments against those heretics? What are kind of the pillars on which he's going to argue from?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yeah, sure. So. So one of the things that Irenaeus really wants to show is, well, first of all, he. He really understands his opponents very well. And this is something that for a long time scholars said, well, maybe he's not very reliable. You know, he's kind of. He's their opponent. So, you know, and there are places where you might say, well, maybe this wasn't, you know, quite as precise as it could be. But as we've discovered some of these texts from these Gnostic groups, we've actually found that Irenaeus was. Was quite accurate. He knew exactly what he was talking about. So one of the things he does is he tries to show the internal incoherence of these sort of like, belief systems that the Gnostics were proposing. But then he also knows that he needs to kind of make the positive case as well. So especially in the last few books against heresies, he's no longer really writing against the heresies so much as trying to give an account of how the entire canon of Scripture tells us a single unified story about an economy, a system, a plan of creation, of redemption, of salvation. That is the work of one God through his one eternal Son who becomes incarnate. Right. Jesus Christ, and by the power of his one Spirit.
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Dr. Ben Akers
That's beautiful. That is a great lesson for us of if you're going to engage with people that don't share the same beliefs, understand their position, don't blow them off, don't ignore it or exaggerate, just actually like seek to understand their position so that you can give the correct response or at least the Christian response to that.
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Dr. John Seehorn
And you know, another, another kind of pillar. You were asking about the, the pillars of his response. And this kind of gets back to Pope Francis naming Irenaeus Doctor of Unity. Right. He comes from Asia, he spends time in Rome, he goes up to Gaul. And even though it's. They don't have email, they have, you know, they have a pretty good mail system in the Roman Empire, but they don't have instant communication. But Irenaeus really shows us how profoundly interconnected all these kind of far flung Christian communities were. And so one of the arguments he makes for the trustworthiness of the Catholic faith is the fact that you can find it anywhere you go. And he has a beautiful passage where he says you can go to Britain, you can go to Syria, you can go to Egypt, you can go to all these different places and you'll find Catholic Christians confessing the same faith. And that faith Christian comes to them from the apostles. And so Irenaeus, he's not the first, but he's one of the first writers outside the New Testament who teaches really clearly about what we call apostolic succession. Right. The idea that the apostles have entrusted the deposit of faith to their successors, the bishops, and that tracing out those lines of succession allows us to see not only kind of the unity of the faith in different places, but. But the continuity of the faith over.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Time handed it out over the church. I was struck as I was preparing for this, I was looking through, I opened the catechism as off to do and I looked in the back to see how many times St. Irenaeus is quoted. He's 28 times, which, that's actually a big number for saints. If you're going through the catechism and looking.
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Dr. John Seehorn
How many times are you quoted in the Catechism?
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Dr. Ben Akers
Zero. 100% answer is zero.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Life goals.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Life goals, yeah, exactly. Well, I love the answer to when Pope Benedict was asked that when he was just Joseph Cardinal Rassager and he was in charge of the editing, people complained that there weren't modern theologians and contemporary theologians in there, he said, because they're not Canaanite saints.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Right?
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Dr. Ben Akers
Like, you know, you're going to find saints. You're going to find people that have, you know, met Jesus Christ, were disciples of Christ, they can hand on the faith 28 times. But the very first time he's quoted, it's in 173. And this struck me, and it's under the heading of only one faith, about the unity. Because it starts off with the quotation from Paul about, you know, one Lord, one baptism, you know, that. That passage, one God, the Father of us all. And then in 172, it says, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, a witness of the faith, declared. And then 173 is a whole quotation from against the heresies. And then 174 and 175 as well. So three paragraphs in a row is just full quote of Irenaeus on this theme, where he said that about the apostles, those scattered throughout the church, scattered throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, have received the faith from the apostles and their disciples. So he's thinking of Polycarp, who had been disciple, guards the preaching of faith with care, as dwelling in but one single house, believing, have but one soul, one single heart with a unanimous voice, possessing only one mouth.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Beautiful.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So the unity, just 1, 1, 1. And so I was really struck when I did hear Pope Francis say that he was going to be declared the Doctor of Unity. I was like, oh, I wouldn't have put unity. I would have put maybe recapitulation. That idea of. That's a theme that comes out in his theology or something, a doctor of the church. But unity, the more I reread this is like, oh, that actually is kind of a fitting.
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Dr. John Seehorn
No, that's beautiful. And, you know, with that point about unity, one church, one faith, one God, working out one plan of salvation for his good creation and leading it to one end. Right. And that's maybe a beautiful place to end would be to think about how Irenaeus talks about what that's the goal brings us to, and then also the unity of all humanity. Right? Because Irenaeus is one of the first teachers of the faith to really emphasize what we sometimes call deification or divinization, the idea that we're created not just to, like, get off the hook, not just to avoid hell and not even just to end up in a paradise where we can eat delicious fruit or whatever, but actually to share in the very life of God. Right. I mean, this is something that's taught in Sacred Scripture with. That's really brought out beautifully by Irenaeus. He actually was the first to write explicitly the Son of God became Son of Man, so that sons of men, having received His Word, might become sons of God.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Unpack that for me because that is a troubling. Because there's a whole section in the catechism where it just has three saints in a row. Say that from different time eras and different.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Augustine, Athanasius and Aquinas. Yes, yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
And so Irenaeus also said it.
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Dr. John Seehorn
Irenaeus did say it.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So what, what, what? How am I supposed to understand that deification? So, like, am I supposed to be. Do I. Am I become a God?
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Dr. John Seehorn
Yes. The fathers will actually sometimes say that they will actually. So Augustine actually says that the true God makes his worshipers gods. Now, of course, that doesn't mean gods in the kind of a Greco Roman sense or like maybe the way Latter Day Saints talk about it or something like that, but rather the point is that because we're made in the image and likeness of God, our vocation goes beyond anything that we could even dream of in just our natural capacities. But that God by His grace, can elevate our hearts and our minds to share in his own love and knowledge. Right. So think about what Jesus says to his father in John 17. I think it's verse three, right. This is eternal life. That they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent. And that knowledge there, that intimacy, is actually what he himself shares with the Father. And so it's not just that we're sort of like elevated into superhumans. We should think of it more as being embraced into the trinitarian communion that Jesus has always shared with His Father in the Holy Spirit.
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Dr. Ben Akers
That's beautiful. And you mentioned John 17. 3. That's actually how the catechism begins. It's the very first. Before you even get to paragraph numbers, it's the very first passage of Scripture. And St. Thomas Aquinas did the same to begin his compendium of theology. So it's a great verse, John. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for all your work you do in the graduate school. If someone's interested in pursuing a degree in graduate theology, what would you say to them were to look, do it?
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Dr. John Seehorn
No, I mean, if that's something you're interested in. You know, we take students who don't have any background in theology beforehand, but we think it's really important for people to go deeper in their faith in service of the church. So if you're interested in that at all, I'd encourage you to get in touch with Rachel Gilmore, who's our admissions.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Director, and so they can also and I was just thinking that this is what Irenaeus did. Disciple of Christ, was called to be a bishop, became a great teacher and defender of the faith, possibly martyred, we don't know. It's kind of unclear at the end of his life, but definitely was willing to give his life if it was going to be asked of him. And we're all called to do the same, to know Jesus, Jesus Christ. And the more we know him, the more we're going to love him and be a witness to our family and our friends to build up the church. So thank you for joining us on this discussion about Catholic saints, especially Saint Irenaeus. Today.
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Narrator
You can watch these interviews in video format by visiting formed.org formed is an online Catholic streaming service created by the Augustan Institute and Ignatius Press with award winning studies and parish programs, inspiring audio content, movies, ebooks and family friendly kids programming to support the mission of the Augustan institute. Please visit missioncircle.org.