Saint Irenaeus and the Peace of the Church
St. Irenaeus of Lyons has always been a favorite saint of mine since I had my first deep dive into the Fathers almost 20 years ago. He was suggested to me by a Catholic friend of mine after I was introduced to Saint Justin Martyr, and I began to be dogged by the sneaky suspicion that those early Church people sounded a heck of a lot like Catholics. But at the same time, I was being introduced to St. John Henry Newman and the concept of Apostolic Succession. Like Newman, whose decisive conversion occurred upon reading the maxim securus judicat orbis terrarum, my discovery that the Church had from the earliest days a universal public creed shattered my belief of the principle of the validity of a purely private interpretation of Sacred Scripture, and so necessitated my embrace of a living Magisterium.
St. Irenaeus impressed me because he was a direct disciple of St. Polycarp, who was a direct disciple of Saint John the Beloved. To me, then, he is almost a grandson of an Apostle. In my own thinking, he was close to enough to an Apostle to know the Gospel, but far enough perhaps to have his own ideas on the subject, as so many others did at that time, especially as the Gnostic heresies began to proliferate around the Christian world.
What I found astounded me, and even though I did not yet know St. Vincent of Lerin’s concept of semper, ubique et ab omnibus, St. Irenaeus’ insistence on a universal, public Apostolic Tradition deeply impressed me. There is a real logic to it: if the Apostles had a doctrine in common, it ought to have been preached similarly all over the world, from Lusitania to Arabia Felix. And so it was. Although certain liberal academics may claim that the era had ‘competing Christianities’, especially as the living memory of the Apostles began to fade, the fact remains that all of the non-canonized writings, like cheap knock-offs of classic art or music, are derivative and fanciful.
But this essay is not meant to address the achievements of the life of Saint Irenaeus or his work Against Heresies. To explain what I want to accomplish, I want to borrow from the Roman Missal’s collect for his feast day, which in the 2011 translation conveys from the Latin pretty faithfully:
O God, who called the Bishop Saint Irenaeus to confirm true doctrine and the peace of the Church, grant, we pray, through his intercession, that, being renewed in faith and charity, we may always be intent on fostering unity and concord. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
The parallelisms in this prayer are beautiful. First, the Collect is clearly aware of the root of Irenaeus’ name, which comes from eirene, meaning ‘peace’ in Greek. It connects directly then to his work in promoting true doctrine, with the result being that of peace and unity. In this vein, Pope Francis declared him a Doctor of the Church on January 21st, indeed with the honorific Doctor Unitatis, the Doctor/Teacher of Unity. I especially find illuminating the parallel made between faith and unity, and charity and concord. That’s a very instructive and powerful sentence.
We often think as Christians that charity is the primary source of unity in the Church, but I am not so sure that that is exactly the case. Based upon Saint Paul’s own description of unity as stemming from one faith, one Lord, one baptism, it would seem that our commitments of faith are what make us one as Christians, even if our love for one another is imperfect. On the other hand, it is charity which makes us have concord, in so far as once we have received what we are to believe, we have to learn with the Lord’s help to love one another sincerely and from the heart. Is there overlap between the two? Absolutely. But I think the distinction is crucially important.
The Fathers of the Church, both through their teaching and their governance, preserved unity in the Church by what they taught and how they governed. Their preaching is still famous today, and is the source of so much profound spiritual, theological and philosophical reflection. But they didn’t live in a fools paradise. They knew well the price of true faith, and many endured the rigors of exile, persecution, torture and even death to cling to aspects of the faith which we take for granted, and we are eternally indebted to them for their courage. I often say that the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which we say at almost every Solemnity, is a Creed written in blood, because of how many how men and women who suffered during the Arian Crisis of the Fourth Century to secure that Creed for posterity.
We live in an age which excepts as axiomatic the belief that diversity is our strength, without being able to define what exactly that means. It may seem to be a sweeping statement, but I think it is patently obvious that history and common sense teaches us that completely diverse polities are inherently unstable. In order for people to come together for anything whatsoever, we need something or someone to rally around. If we don’t have common ground, whether by blood, soil, faith or even something as fundamental as food or profit, unity is an ephemeral and fleeting thing.
The Fathers of the Church, and most especially Saint Irenaeus, were adamant that the unity of the Church relied upon unity of belief. Their perspective is borne out by history. Although it is correct to acknowledge that divisions in the early Church can be at least in part attributed to divisions in language, culture, money and politics, that does not explain the entire phenomenon. The postmodern cynic says that dogma and faith were only a fig leaf to cover other, more banal sources of division, but those assessments simply do not take seriously the intensity with which ancient people held metaphysical and religious convictions. If anything, to say that faith was a secondary consideration is to import into the ancient and medieval world our own comparative apathy about the subject, rather than to describe the forces at play in these societies.
To emphasize this point, we cannot fail to acknowledge something which so many of us know by experience, that the metaphysical and philosophical divisions between people (which are related to, but not reducible to, simple cultural divisions) are far more divisive than questions of race and social class. Cultural misunderstandings and differences can be a root of discord in a society, but they need not necessarily be. I once heard a famous preacher put it this way: if you found yourself alone on a dark, rundown city street late at night, and you were being suddenly approached by four tall young men, would it change your level of worry to know that they were all coming from a Bible Study? Most people would answer in the affirmative, and that is precisely because you would know that is more likely that those men would have a moral and philosophical worldview which would discourage them from theft, assault, or any other wrongdoing. Even if we want to deny it, the fact remains that beliefs matter.
Years ago when I was in High School, I decided to found a High School Philosophy Club. It was an extremely informative experience, because I discovered there that true unity is not possible if our most fundamental convictions are incompatible. For this reason, I labored in vein to convince my peers that abortion or homosexuality, let alone lying and murder, were always and everywhere wrong, until we were able to address the first principles undergirding our thought. I remember that we used to hold debates about euthanasia one week, only to hold in the next week further debates on human nature, simply because we discovered that we could not cogently discuss the former without resolving what we believed about the latter. And that meant all the difference. One girl I remembered said, “Why do we think it is not acceptable for a pet to suffer unnecessarily from an incurable illness, and so we euthanize it, but we think it’s OK to let an elderly or sick human suffer in the same way?” After some thought, the group then asked, “but are humans the same as dogs or cats?” The question is apt: if we are no different from beasts, there is no objective reason why we should not euthanize our sick and our old. But if there is something different about us, then the moral question changes entirely.
Many Catholics who are well versed in the work of education and persuasion know this struggle all too well, and we are feeling it anew as old, erroneous arguments in favor of abortion that are now being dug out to justify that moral abomination. The problem now is worse than it was during the era when Roe v Wade was issued. This is one reason why Clarence Thomas questioned the legitimacy of contraception, same sex marriage, and more, and why the new left is so acutely aware that Dobbs represents a shot across the bow. Although I do not think any of those legal ‘rights’ will be challenged any time soon, and the left cannot necessarily articulate why, they know that the whole postmodern ‘moral’ system is under threat.
Returning to our Collect from Saint Irenaeus, unity and concord are difficult to attain where there are not faith and charity. Liturgy is a potential battleground in the Church because it expresses so clearly the faith we share. If we want to account for the centrifugal and divisive influences in the contemporary Church, we would be severely mistaken if we did not first examine whether we share common theological (and by extension, liturgical) commitments. Not to beat the point to death, but this is one reason, a crucial reason, why the Synodal Way in Germany is far more dangerous than the TLM, because certain members of the German Church simply do not believe the same things the Church has always taught regarding things too numerous to enumerate, from what human nature is as made in the image of God, to the nature of God, to what is the nature of the Moral Law, or whether there even is an immutable moral law. If we think this lack of creedal unity can be managed simply with appeals to ecclesial unity, we are putting the cart before the horse.
Saint Irenaeus’ life and work, as well as that of all the Church Fathers, teach us the reality of the Roman maxim, si vis pacem, para bellum. If you desire peace, prepare for war. If we are unwilling to reprimand error and call it out by name, we run the risk, as we are seeing now, of serious decay in our cohesion. It may be true that our ancestors were too ‘trigger happy’ in their desire to anathematize and to condemn opposing theological perspectives, and that led to unnecessary rupture. There has been a great deal of work done in that vein in the years since the Second Vatican Council, with critical and scholarly examinations of ancient polemical texts, which have helped us immensely to understand where the root of our division in certain cases may have been based on simple misunderstanding. While we did a lot of that work in the field of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue, why has that task not been done as seriously and as rigorously within the Church? Because while our ‘separated brethren’ have by and large adopted theological beliefs more and more alien to Apostolic Christianity, those within the Church who hold similar foreign beliefs seem to get away with almost anything.
If we seek true unity and concord, it is crucial that like Saint Irenaeus, we take our stand ‘against heresies’, because only in so doing can we restore a modicum of peace within the Church. It will be unpleasant work in the beginning, but every heresy in the Church is the forerunner to an even greater revival in orthodoxy. So may it be in our own time, that we may experience with joy the unity which comes from professing together our common devotion to Our Lord Jesus, who is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.
