'But his battle is not dialectical.',
Ephesians 4:32 (RSV)
and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as
God in Christ forgave you.
St. Irenaeus of Lyons: The First Great Theologian of the Church - Hans Urs von Balthasar
The Balthasar Reader.
Saints in the Church
98 People of the Church (1) Irenaeus.
... page 384.
flesh, in which the redeemability
and factual redemption and resurrection of the entire terrestrial world is
shown to be possible and actual. Against the separation of Old and New Covenant
then, it posits the unity of the Testaments in Christ and their diversity as
stages of a divine education of the human race. Against the cold flashing
pretensions of gnosis then, it posits the patience of God, visible in Christ
and his suffering, bestowed upon us as the grace of redemption in the form of
faith, hope, and love by which we know how to preserve a patient and humble
distance from the eternal and incomprehensible God. This stance is the great
condition of all salvation; indeed it is redemption itself. Ever anew Irenaeus
reduces every single question to the simple relationship of superior God and
humbly bowing creature, of the eternal majesty of the triune, self-contained
being and the eternal neediness and desire of fragmentary, ceaseless becoming.
But for Christians this relationship has lost the last shadow of the
tragic. In Christ-from God's side, then, and not from that of humanity-the
abyss is bridged. The person becomes God's vessel; the earth becomes God's
dwelling place; bread and wine, the fruits of the earth, seal in their Eucharistic
transformation the redemption of the world and the thanks of the creature. With
Irenaeus everything is radiantly warm joy, elevated, wise mildness. To be sure,
his word of battle is as hard as steel and clear as water. A compromise, a
synthesis of the Word of God and myth, does not even arise as a possibility of
thought. But his battle is not dialectical. He refutes by unmasking and, still
more profoundly, by setting forth the truth. He does not seek to persuade by
the use of syllogism; he lets the truth like the sun do its lighting and its
warming. He has the patience of maturity, and the two words,
"patience" and "maturity," recur again and again in the most
decisive passages. He is naive in the noblest sense of the word, just as the
Word of God in human form was naive: In this sign he has "overcome the
world."
99 . People of the Church [Il]: Origen
To overestimate Origen and his importance for the history of Christian
thought is all but impossible. To place him beside Augustine and Thomas simply
accords him his rightful place in this history. Anyone who has taken up
patristic research for any length of time will have the same experience as the
mountain climber. Slowly and constantly the peaks about him sink lower but even
so still seem threatening, and behind them looms up majestically the till now
hidden dominant middle of the massif. None of the great fathers, from the
Cappadocians to Augustine, to Dionysius, Maxirnus, Scotus Eriugena, and
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