What Ireneaus Thought Philosophy Was Good For

“The tension between Hellenistic and Judeo-Christian conceptions of the relation between divine immanence and transcendence is apparent in the theology of the Apologists but finds a certain resolution in Ireneaus, who uses philosophical terms and  categories while virgoriously reinstating the biblical emphasis on divine greatness as conceived in terms of God’s involvement in the world.”

Kahled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought, p. 7

Rome…Schmome

“But a further rumour has reached me that you are in Antioch, and are transacting the business in hand with the chief authorities. And, besides this, I have heard that the brethren who are of the party of Paulinus are entering on some discussion with your excellency on the subject of union with us; and by “us” I mean those who are supporters of the blessed man of God, Meletius. I hear, moreover, that the Paulinians are carrying about a letter of the Westerns, assigning to them the episcopate of the Church in Antioch, but speaking under a false impression of Meletius, the admirable bishop of the true Church of God. [Meletius was not in communion with Rome for twenty years.] I am not astonished at this. They are totally ignorant of what is going on here; the others, though they might be supposed to know, give an account to them in which party is put before truth; and it is only what one might expect that they should either be ignorant of the truth, or should even endeavour to conceal the reasons which led the blessed Bishop Athanasius to write to Paulinus. But your excellency has on the spot those who are able to tell you accurately what passed between the bishops in the reign of Jovian, and from them I beseech you to get information. I accuse no one; I pray that I may have love to all, and “especially unto them who are of the household of faith;” and therefore I congratulate those who have received the letter from Rome. And, although it is a grand testimony in their favour, I only hope it is true and confirmed by facts. But I shall never be able to persuade myself on these grounds to ignore Meletius, or to forget the Church which is under him, or to treat as small, and of little importance to the true religion, the questions which originated the division. I shall never consent to give in, merely because somebody is very much elated at receiving a letter from men. Even if it had come down from heaven itself, but he does not agree with the sound doctrine of the faith, I cannot look upon him as in communion with the saints.”

Saint Basil the Great 375 A.D., Epistle 214

Ecclesiastical Synergy

“And to this end we brought to his remembrance the great examples left us by the Apostles, and the traditions of the Fathers. For although the grace of the Holy Spirit abounded in each one of the Apostles, so that no one of them needed the counsel of another in the execution of his work, yet they were not willing to define on the question then raised touching the circumcision of the Gentiles, until being gathered together they had confirmed their own several sayings by the testimony of the divine Scriptures.And thus they arrived unanimously at this sentence, which they wrote to the Gentiles: ‘It has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, to lay upon you no other burden than these necessary things, that ye abstain from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication.’

But also the Holy Fathers, who from time to time have met in the four holy councils, following the example of tile ancients, have by a common discussion, disposed of by a fixed decree the heresies and questions which had sprung up, as it was certainly known, that by common discussion when the matter in dispute was presented by each side, the light of truth expels the darkness of falsehood.

Nor is there any other way in which the truth can be made manifest when there are discussions concerning the faith, since each one needs the help of his neighbour, as we read in the Proverbs of Solomon: ‘A brother helping his brother shall be exalted like a walled city; and he shall be strong as a well-founded kingdom;” and again in Ecclesiastes he says: ‘Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.’

So also the Lord himself says: ‘Verily I say unto you that if two of you shall agree upon earth as touching anything they shall seek for, they shall have it from my Father which is in heaven. For wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’”

Fifth Ecumenical Council, Sentence of the Council

Before Photios: Giving philosophical content to Theological terms.

 In the case of the term begotten:

“If then God be as man, let Him become also a parent as man, so that His Son should be father of another, and so in succession one from another, till the series they imagine grows into a multitude of gods.” –St. Athanasius, Four Discourses Against the Arians, NPNF II, 4, p. 318-319

In the case of the term proceeds: 

“Furthermore, if the Son is begotten from the Father, and the Spirit (according to this innovation) proceeds from the Father and the Son, then by the same token another person should proceed from the Spirit, and so we should have not three but four persons!  And if the fourth procession be possible, then another procession is possible from that, and so on to an infinite number of processions and persons, until at last this doctrine is transformed into a Greek polytheism!” –St. Photios, Mystagogia 9, PG 103

Before Maximus

“They blaspheme the Creator, who is truely God, and who empowers us to find the truth. And they imagnie that they have discovered another god beyond God, or another Pleroma, or another dispensation. Therefore, the light which is from God does not enlighten them, because they have dishonoured and despised God, considering Him of little worth because, through His love and great beneficence, He has come within reach of human knowledge (knowledge, however, not with regard to His grandeur or according to his essence-for no one has measured or handled that-but such that we may know that the One who made and fashioned humanity, and breathed into it the breath of life, and nourishes us through creation, confirming all things by His Word, and binding them together by His Wisdom-He  it is who is the only true God). But they dream of a non-existent being above the true God, believing that they have discovered the great God, whom no one can know, who does not communicate with human beings, and who exercises no direction over earthly affairs. So it turns out that they have discovered the god of Epicurus, who takes care neither of himself nor others; a god without proviedence.”

 Saint Ireneaus, Against Heresies, Book 3, Chapter 24, section 2.

Before Honorius

“And if the Lord shall be gracious to us, what other support do we need? But if the wrath of God remain upon us, what help can we get from Western superciliousness? They [Pope Damasus] who neither know nor endure to learn the truth, but, preoccupied with false suspicions, are doing now just what they did before in the case of Marcellus, when they quarelled with those who reported to them the truth, and by their own action supported heresy. For I myself, without concert with any, was minded to writer to their leader [Damasus]: nothing indeed about ecclesiastical matters, except so much as to hint that they neither know the truth of what is going on among us, nor accept the way by which they might learn it; but generally about the duty of not attacking those who are humbled by trials, and of not taking disdainfulness for dignity, a sin which of itself is sufficient to set a man at emnity with God.”

Saint Basil the Great 376 A.D. Epistle 239

That good ol’ confusion between person and nature

I’ve been following Jonathan Prejean and Dr. Eric Svendsen silently on their debate over Christology, and I can’t help but notice how much of the conversation sounds like an interaction between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite. Where Svendsen appears to represents a Palamite paradigm that revelation is the sole starting point for answering theological questions, and Jonathan Prejean thinking that we need to get our “philosophy” straight before we understand revelation. Though I think much of Dr. Svendsen’s critique of Roman theology can often be polemical and bitter because he sees as a corrupt institution, he is undoubtedly right about his insistence on the primacy of revelation as this is probably the main point that also divides Orthodoxy from Rome. The ecumenical councils in the East are considered by the Orthodox Church as a long divorce from Gnostic and Hellenistic principles introduced in the East by Origen of Alexandria (as Alexandria ran deep with Middle Platonism and then later Neo-Platonism), as we celebrate in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy an anathema of the philosophers and those that follow their [dialectial] methods to solve theological questions. To make a short story long (pun intended) theology is not a science as Thomas Aquinas thinks, and I have reservations that the Reformed and conservative protestant exegetes are truly divorced from this principle inherited from Carolingian/Medieval Catholicism, as their grammatical-historical method seems to turn theology into a science too, rife with dialectics, divorced from the lived and liturgical experience of the Incarnate Christ. Nonetheless, Svendsen’s approach to the question at hand and insistence that divine revelation be the paradigm is far more acceptable of how an Orthodox approach these questions. However, it does seems that much of their discussion seems focused on philosophical paradigms. I will discuss briefly, from an Orthodox perspective, where I think they both confuse person and nature.

Jonathan Prejean remarks:

“A “person” is nothing other than the real instantiation of a nature, so this says nothing other than “something is what it is.””

What is wrong with this here? Does an “instantiation of a nature” pick out something that is absolutely and irreducibly unique? No it does not. Jonathan is still picking out general concepts that fall on the side of “nature” because they are things that we have in common and can be demonstrated and compared to other things that we experience in the world. At this point, you are still defining ‘person’ based on properties that are shared in common among one or more persons, since this is easily demonstrated. Ergo with Svendsen, though I much appreciate his somewhat silence for the biblical mystery, he does the same thing when he asks the question of Jonathan: 

“If he has a human body, human emotions, a human intellect, a human mind (the biblical “nous”), a human, spirit, a human soul, a human will, human understanding, human wisdom, etc., what, pray tell, is lacking for this to be a “human person”?”

Again, these are all things that fall on the side of nature, because they are properties that are shared in COMMON to persons. Why start with general categories and work to the particular? How could any of these things be unique when they are first considered apart from asking the Questions: “Who is He? and What is He doing?” Why focus on abstract properties like “human spirit,” “human intellect”? Why not consider first the Person and what He does and then make deductions about the content of abstract properties of spirit and intellect based on the type of acts of said Person that are being done? Svendsen seems to be trapped in that good ol’ Augustinian mindset of essence–attributes–persons in which a Christian doctrine of person will never be found. General concepts are started with, and persons in the final end are still defined by generalities. It is only when we first consider this ‘Who’ (the absolutely unique and particular) can we say that ‘intellect,’ ‘will’, wisdom, and such are given their uniqueness and particularity because each of us expresses this property uniquely and irreducibly. Dr. Svendsen, why the lapse into being ‘philosophical,’ where is the primacy of revelation at this point? Does revelation consider a ‘Who’ as defined and constituted by all these general categories? One of the things I’ve always felt intuitively about sola scriptura is that it wished to restore that primacy of revelation before doing what medieval theologians considered to be “natural theology.” Perhaps this is another part that should be further investigated. Likewise, with Jonathan defining a person as an ‘instantiation of a [rational] nature’ is not surprising given his presuppositions and does seem to prove Dr. Svendsen’s point about Jonathan being too rational and philosophical, because the very nature of the speculation built upon [fallen] human reason very well could be wrong. If something is speculative based on reason, how could it possibly be of any dogmatic value? 

Moving along.

If “a person is nothing other than the real instantiation of a [rational] nature,” and Christ has two natures (human and divine) as Jonathan confesses, then I would like to know how he doesn’t escape the same Nestorian charge. There is just no definition of a person that is categorized by natural properties or things that are considered to be in common. This is what makes Christianity so radically different from Hellenism. 

St. Cyril’s problem was that he did not always employ a consistent set of terminology to be faithful to the content he wished to express. This can be seen from his use of physis to designate the single subject (the WHO), which for him meant hypostasis and hypostasis meant person. From a ‘Cappadocian’ stand-point, where a consistent set of terminology had been used, the use of physis for hypostasis (= person) is unacceptable. It should be noted, however, that Cyril never used ousia to designate what is the single subject, and his compromise with John of Antioch in 433 for other formula usage shows his flexibility that his successors (i.e. Dioscoros, who I consider orthodox in content) did not have. I think it would help Dr. Svendsen if he gave Orthodox sources a shot and not take someone’s word for what they say.

Fundamentally, Hellenism—whether Aristotelian or Platonic—does not have a [christian] doctrine of person, and that is one of the things that makes Christianity so divorced and so unique from Hellenism. Philosophy is precisely not the hand-maiden of Theology and Athens does not supply the philosophical content for Jerusalem. St. Athanasios once remarked that opposite properties are reconciled in a single person (i.e. Christ). This is foolishness to the Greeks.