Greetings to everyone, and welcome to the podcast. This is the first episode of this podcast, a podcast that I hope to produce every week. We are coming to you live today—well, I’m live at least; you won’t be hearing this live—from the St. Raphael studios in the teeming, bustling metropolis of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, home of such great notable podcasts as Lord of Spirits, The Areopagus, Path to the Academy, and, of course, Amon Sûl. I’m happy to be here, and I hope that you enjoy everything that we talk about. This is basically a look at the history of our faith, and today I basically want to talk about why is the past important.

And, of course, the past, as we should believe, as we are now at the beginning of Lent, the past is of supreme importance. Indeed, as Christians, we have to say that the most important thing in our life was in the past, that has continually relevance and presence in our life now. And as we go through this podcast, as this podcast progresses, we’re basically going to begin with the second century. Beginning with the second century, that is, we’re going to basically begin where the apostolic Church has ended, and we’re just simply going to go through, probably really slowly, through Church history.

Now, as we do this, there are going to be all sorts of things that we’re going to be looking at. We’re not simply going to be looking at names and dates and this event and that event and this name and that name—all of which are important, of course. We need dates, because without them history loses all perspective; it kind of becomes like a Jackson Pollock or a piece of modern art. There’s no way to know exactly what you’re looking at without dates. So we will have a number of them, but ultimately what we’re looking at is how this past that we’re discussing impacts our future: why we need to think about it, why it is so important. We’re actually going to begin on that note today.

From the first centuries of our past, even in the very first decades of the life of the Church, it became obvious that Christians, building on their Jewish past, had a very different understanding of the past than did those around them. Chiefly what I’m talking about is the Greek world. And we can see this even in the life of St. Paul, that the Christian faith maintained that the pinnacle of history was the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ. How and why is this?

Now, the how and the why actually go together pretty much as hand in glove. So as we look at this, the things that we need to think about are, first and foremost, that when we say, “The past informs the present,” we’re not merely saying that “Oh, we’re a republic because in 1775 we got into a fight up there in Concord, New Hampshire, and then it kind of spilled over, and a bunch of guys got together to say, “Oh, we’re independent,” then finally this was all recognized after years of struggle, so that’s why we’re a republic. That’s not what I mean. It’s true—it’s all true, of course, but that’s not what I mean. Nor do I mean that the past determines the present.

And this is essentially a thought that has become—I don’t want to say “everywhere present and filling all things” in the history journals, but it is fairly ubiquitous and moreso, I will say, moreso prior to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, when all of a sudden all the Marxist historians are like: “Oh no! History has betrayed us!” because this is what Marxist history was. Marxist history was a belief in the inevitability of the march of history and that humans are of little import; that is, human actions, human thoughts, human ideas. And this wasn’t just among the Marxists. I mean, the earliest socialist thinkers, particularly what was called scientific socialism, they basically believe that parliaments were immaterial to the course of events, because reason was ultimately immaterial to the course of events, that events unfolded according to the natural processes of history, meaning that history was just as much subject to law as are all atoms, because all atoms are subject to law.

There’s a lot to say there. Perhaps at some time I will unpack all that, but for the Marxists, history moved inevitably towards the culmination of the workers’ paradise. And of course when the wall fell, all of a sudden all of that collapsed. We know, of course, it is trying to make a resurgence, but we won’t go into all of this at the moment; perhaps at some point we shall.

But what do I mean when the past impacts the present? When I say the past, I’m actually talking about the past, that is, there is a place of eternal significance which then gives to all other things eternal significance. God acts in history, and when God acts in history, this becomes normative. So when God judges a human action, a culture, a city, what he judges them for, what he takes them to task for shows us a norm that God expects of us. Now the norms were present that they already knew God had spoken, but in particular the normative act—the normative act—is the Incarnation. The Incarnation actually tells us what the acts of the Old Testament meant. In this regard, the whole Old Testament is about Christ.

The whole Old Testament gives us Christ, and therefore in Christ what we now have is the Father handing his Son to us. The Son is the revelation of the Father; he is the express image of the invisible God. The Father gives him to us. He gives him to the Virgin Mary; the Virgin Mary then gives him to us. Christ gives his life to his disciples and his apostles. They in turn pass it on to others. Think of Paul to Timothy. Paul says, “Guard the deposit.” In this regard, the Father hands the Son over to the apostles, to the Virgin Mary. The apostles, the Virgin, hand him then on to their followers: Timothy, Titus. Their followers then hand him on to the Church, and this handing-on or handing-over, this giving-over, in Latin transdo, handing-over, from which we get the word traditio, tradition, is nothing but the handing-on of the gift of Christ, through history. And in this regard, then, the Liturgy becomes the central focus of Tradition, of this handing-over, where Christ comes and is present with us in a way unique.

Christ of course is with us through the Spirit all the time. Christ as God is everywhere, but in the Eucharist Christ comes to us in a way in which the Liturgy and the Eucharist become the living aspect of Tradition. The Liturgy makes the past present in a way that nothing else can. And of course the Liturgy, it’s not just like celebrating an anniversary. For those who are married, we celebrate our anniversary in some way or another every year. But it’s not just that. It is, but it is far more. In a sense, it is both the marriage-day in and of itself all over again, and it also brings us to the final marriage-day, the final feast of the Lamb. The Liturgy is a continuing revelation of God’s significant acting in history.

So when we think about this, then, history is then seen through what we will call a liturgical, sacrificial lens. But it also means that there is an eschatological lens. History begins and ends in Christ. This is something that Fr. John Behr has brought out in several places, his works, his lectures; that when our Lord says, “It is finished,” what is finished? The making of man; the creation of humanity. We, by Christ’s death, are joined to life. And so this life begins in the Old Testament, and it looks towards this coming. The prophets struggled to see what it is that they were actually talking about, and then in Christ this all comes to fruition. Christ as the full revelation of the Father is a condemnation of the thought of its day, of Greek thought, which had come to dominate the Mediterranean world, the world of the apostles.

In this way, the Incarnation actually makes an idiom, we could say, of that world, because it takes on the universal nature of not Greek thought, but it incorporates the Greek language; it incorporates Greek words and Greek metaphors. And in this regard when the apostles hand on Christ, what they are also doing is confronting the Greeks. What does this mean? Think about Paul at the Areopagus. Paul preaches Christ, and he basically says that God shall judge the world through the Man he has chosen, and he has shown this by raising him from the dead. It’s at this point that the Greek philosophers balked. To them, this notion of the resurrection, of a final judgment, this went against all Greek thought. To them, ultimately, history had no real meaning. It had none; it was either cyclical or it was a world of futility. This was especially so among the Stoics and the Epicureans, about which we can talk later. But the resurrection meant that history had a purpose. Death was not our final end, which in Greek thought it was.

Further, the judgment meant that time will end, which for the Greeks there was no way to conceive this. We see this in the struggle with the Gnostics. Irenaeus in his work, Against the Gnostics, that history’s significance is not to be saved from history, but that history is sanctified by Christ. The Gnostics basically believed we needed to escape this reality, but for Irenaeus, no, this reality is what is being redeemed; it is what is being saved.

Now, not everyone in the early Church truly appreciated this, and we can see this in Origen, for whom the spiritual creation existed before the material creation, and therefore the Incarnation comes not to make or to bring this creation to its fulfillment, but to restore the pristine, primordial order. In Origen, it’s almost like it was better that the creation had never happened; and this for the Gnostics: the Gnostics believed that creation was the Fall, that the created order was a revolt against the real divine order. But in Irenaeus, no: creation is what is the order.

And in this regard we can also see in St. Justin the Martyr that there was a struggle with this. And for him, all that was past had no real abiding significance; in other words, he saw Judaism as just a substitute for the garden, that was done away with, that there was never anything good in Judaism. Irenaeus goes against this.

And St. Gregory of Nyssa goes against this. For St. Gregory of Nyssa, history proceeds from beginnings to beginnings, by successive beginnings that have no end, he wrote. In other words, time, our life, is a beginning that shall have no end; that we, each one of us, had begun something significant. And since this is true of the past, all of our Fathers in the faith have begun something that has abiding significance, and it’s all built of course on Christ and his significance.

St. Augustine builds on this, that things in time have eternal significance, because all time—all time, beginning from creation, fulfilled in the Incarnation, and moving to the end that is the final judgment—all things have significance. He builds on insights from St. Irenaeus, that the Old Testament was a good, but a partial good. All things created need to find their fulfillment for Augustine. And the Old Testament is like a lamp at night: it’s a great good. Lamps are good; lights are good. But when daylight comes, we don’t need them anymore. They’ve finished their purpose. Material things are deficient at first, but in the Incarnation everything finds its reality.

This answers the quandary that Christianity also is just a form of endless progress, that it is some political stunt, or that it fulfills a political need. This also Augustine talks about; he talks about how there is a city that is moving towards the end, and it’s not to be identified with any temporal city. In this regard, we think in Byzantine history about symphonia, symphony, the working-together of the imperial government and the government of the Church. And this was an ideal that was hardly ever realized. At certain points, it is championed within the Church—it’s championed within the time of Justinian; it’s particularly championed by St. Photios the Great—but they all realize that there are times that the Church has to stand opposed to the emperors, because some of the emperors were heretics! And even when they weren’t heretics, so often the imperial government had an idea of what should be done that was opposed to the Church, and this creates enormous tension, as we shall see, within the Byzantine imperial polity, where we had at times a very strict monastic group, observant, but they were oftentimes opposed to the imperial policies that oftentimes were championed even by the patriarchs.

But it also means that Christianity is not to be identified with one particular form of government. While I certainly have my ideas about what is the best form of government, all governments are built on prudence apart from God’s government. And what is the best way to govern things? Well, it would seem that the best way to govern things is we could look at the family. How do husband and wife govern their family? And all these things have to be taken into account, so therefore the Incarnation sets the pattern that we are now working out. Therefore Christianity, because we owe ultimate allegiance to Christ, can never ever have an ultimate allegiance to any human individual.

But further, the Incarnation—as Christ said, “I make all things new.” He says this in Revelation about that which is to come. But also in the book of Revelation, Christ says, “I am”—in the English translation, it comes out: “I am the beginning and the end.” In the Greek, “Arche kai o telos. I am the principle of all existence, and I am the goal of all existence.” In this regard, Christianity stands opposed to the whole world of secular thought, secular historiography, secular notions about reality.

I certainly haven’t read everyone, but probably the most pertinent individual on this is Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the world is nothing but atoms, that can only be arranged because it’s limited; the universe is finite. Therefore, these atoms can only be arranged in a finite number of ways, which essentially means that, no matter how long it takes, they will eventually return themselves to what they were; it’s just physical law, meaning everything that’s happened is just going to happen again. For Nietzsche, this is called the eternal recurrence. It was one of the great quandaries in Nietzsche’s thought, because while he has this and while it was true and while it becomes the centerpiece for his work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche realizes that this means everything is insignificant. What’s the significance of what I’ve done? It’s happened before; it’s going to happen again, innumerable times. Time doesn’t stop; time doesn’t begin. Therefore, there is no meaning in history, and for Nietzsche this is what basically drove him to come up with the idea of the Ubermensch, the Superman.

But in Christianity, no. There is an eternal significance to that temporal act of the Incarnation, when Christ, once for all, as the author of Hebrews tells us, as St. Paul tells us… Therefore, when we approach the chalice, when we come to vespers and prepare ourselves for matins and work ourselves into the Liturgy, when we lay aside all those other cares of life, that we might receive the King of all, who comes to us invisibly upborne to us by the angelic host, we are taking part in the Incarnation; we are moving back into that time, that point, back there in Galilee, made normative by the presence of incarnate God. But now this Liturgy is taking part of that normative reality. This is why history is important; this is why history is significant.

We’re going to speak more about it in the next episode, and so I hope that you will join me for that. And so for today this is where I shall end, and I pray that you will be edified by this. From here on out, we shall get into some dates; we shall get into all sorts of other things, but for today, this is where we will end, talking about why: why history is important; why history is relevant to the present. It is not merely a matter of political continuity. It is actually a fact that our Lord Jesus Christ has done something for us that will never be diminished and will always be there for us. Christ is among us. I pray that you all have a good remainder of Lent if this episode actually airs before the end of Lent. But I pray all of you have a good day.