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of her and then we'll go on with some texts of her and then we'll go on with some texts That's Romans 13, 9, if you want to look at it later. Now the key one is from Ephesians. This is where Irenaeus gets his notion of recapitulation. Ephesians chapter 1. The closest thing to Irenaeus seems to be, besides John, it's those two letters, Ephesians and Colossians, in St. Paul. And the notion of the plural and also the Gnostics, you know, they went off in that direction. There's a curious axis that runs through Ephesus. Heraclitus or Heraclitus was supposed to be at Ephesus, it was a Greek philosophical place even before Christianity came along. Remember, John was at Ephesus, according to tradition. Irenaeus says that John was at Ephesus. The letter to the Ephesians of St. Paul is the one where this gnosis of Paul breaks out, this cosmic unity of all things in Christ, bursts out in that letter. You remember the letter starts out,

[18:30]

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in heaven and in the places of heaven. Now what he's doing is recounting the work of God, according to Vagagene. Now, Vagagene, when he took the course on grace, used this as his basic text for explaining grace, and he explained it in Trinitarian fashion, the work of the Father, the work of the Son, the work of the Holy Spirit, in three phases. In the first chapter of Ephesians, first the work of the Father. He chose us in him. He destined us in love. In him we have redemption through his blood. He has made known to us, in all wisdom and insight, the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time. It's kind of a solemn orchestration of this mystery of Christ, as St. Paul talks about. As a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him. Now, unite, that's the word, recapitulate.

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Anikephalaista is the infinitive. And it means, recapitulate, has that root capit, which means head. We don't have an English word which really carries it. Unite is not sufficient. Unite is very weak for that. It's the type of idea that Jesus is the head of the church, putting Jesus back on the head of a man. Not only that, it's a very complex notion. He's got these different threads, because he's the head, but he's also the center, and all things are in him. So he's not an exterior head, in the sense that he's on top of it. It's a summing up. I think they must have used heading up, it must have had that notion. A column of figures, or to head up a subject, in the end, like when you say a chapter heading, where does that word chapter come from anyway? Caput, or capitulum, or something like that, it's the same notion, possibly.

[20:36]

It's got more nuances to it, okay? It starts out being oneness, okay, it's oneness, but it's differentiated, because he's also the head. He's center, he's head, he sums it all up. And then, Boyer talks about two dimensions of this summing up, okay? One is he sums up all things in himself, he sums up the whole creation in himself, he brings it all together, unites it all, and the other is that he sums up the other line, so that the longitude and the line are the history of mankind, the history of the creation in himself. So you've got... Remember when St. Paul talks, in the same letter to the Ephesians, about the length, and the breadth, and the height, and the depth? See, all of that, somehow, is connected with this recapitulation. So there's a cosmic dimension, in that he brings together everything in the world. There's the dimension of uniting everything in heaven with everything on earth, which means God with his creation. Then there's a longitudinal dimension, the length, in history. That is, he takes the history of the planet, from the creation, he takes the history of mankind from Adam and Eve, okay, from the creation of man, and the fall, and all of that,

[21:47]

and picks it back up, redeems it all, you see. So the other sense that comes into it is this idea of gathering that which was lost. So it becomes quite a complex, quite a complex matter, he's got all these lives to live. He gathers up that which had been lost, he doesn't leave anything out. He gathers up matter, and he gathers up sin in some way, he gathers up that which is sinned, you know. He's got all of that to him. Yes. Question from audience. Sir, because we were whole before the fall, we lost our head in the fall, Christ comes as the new man, the new Adam, we regain our head, and that's the recapitulation, we had our head in the beginning, we lost our head, we sinned. Well, Adam, Adam was the head in a sense too. Adam was the head and contained all mankind and himself, so goes the idea of theology and St. Paul and so on, too. That Adam contained virtually the whole human race and himself, so he headed it up in some way.

[22:47]

You can say he capitulated it. Now, Jesus recapitulates it, but we have to be a little bit careful of the word we use. Now, we'll see as Ernest talks about it, we'll be able to bring out some of the, some of those dimensions more clearly. A word like this may seem to, I mean, you hit it and then you pass it by and say, that's fine, okay, now let's go on to something else. But in a sense, we never go on to something else, because that contains it. So, the problem here, I think, the quest is to get the center and then find how that center is attached to everything else. Now, the first name for that center is the Logos, is the word itself. And the second name is this key term of Erneas, which is recapitulation, with its combining of heaven and earth, God and creation, it's combining, uniting all the things in the creation and it's uniting the whole of history, gathering it up sort of, into eternity. We'll see that as we go on. Now, if you read those first chapters of the Letter to the Ephesians, you see that Erneas is very much in conformity with St. Paul. He's exposing St. Paul, he's sort of doing an exegesis of St. Paul, in a sense, and inserting

[23:55]

his own insights, of course, but he doesn't step beyond what St. Paul is saying. Note that St. Paul doesn't use the word Logos, which is curious, isn't it? In fact, you find, you have a sense after a while, that John and Paul are coming very close together, and what's holding them apart? It's like there's a thin partition between the Gospel of John, the Prologue of John, and these letters, the Letter to the Ephesians and the Letter to the Colossians, and what's separating them? It's partly vocabulary, besides the fact that John has a kind of more eternal point of view, you know, but St. Paul is pretty much that way in the beginning of the Ephesians. But Paul doesn't use the word Logos, as far as I know, he doesn't use it in this sense of the Christ mystery. So the key term in Paul would be either the mystery of Christ, or simply in Christ. To say in Christ for Paul means in the Logos, in Logos. Maybe, what is it, 40 years? Between the writings, say, of... Although I don't know about Ephesians and Colossians, you know, what time they were, 60s or 70s? That's the general assumption. Yeah.

[24:55]

It's not like John only comes into being at the end, you know, at the time of the final reduction. According to Brown, there are four or five stages. I think this is a demonstration that... The general impression I have is that Paul is a younger man than John, but that Paul finishes his final drafts of his epistles before John finished the final drafts of the Gospel of John in the latter days. Okay, about their relative age, I don't know, but about the dates of the writings, that's true, okay. But the final draft of the letters of Paul, even to the Ephesians and Colossians, are certainly a good deal earlier than the final edition of John's Gospel, which they put somewhere around 90 or 100 A.D. Okay, now, that mystery of Christ in St. Paul, which is the content of his Gnosis, you remember we find that in Ephesians and Colossians.

[26:19]

I won't go into it more now, but we might find reason to return to this, to St. Paul later on, for more names. Now this plan which God has made known to us, a plan for the fullness of time. Notice that the notion of fullness, it sort of booms out at you in these two letters, the plural. Plural means fullness, or to fill all things. Remember how it comes out in Ephesians 3, you may fill the world with fullness of God, that you may be full. And so, for Christ rose, he who descended is the one who also ascended, that he might fill all things. That's the glory of Christ. It's one of his fullness. The fullness of the fullness of the world. In him, according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things, according to the council of his will, we who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory, and so on. Okay, so that's the source of Irenaeus' term, recapitulation.

[27:22]

Now let's look at how he uses it. He loves to use it. Sometimes he'll use it three or four times in the same text, just a couple of paragraphs. To gather all things in one, and to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race, now that raising up that way is a recapitulation itself. You see, the body is raised up in its head. In order that to Christ Jesus, our Lord and God and Saviour and King, according to the will of the Invisible Father, every knee should bow, things in heaven, and so on. And that's from Philippians 2. Remember, that's also Paul. After the kenosis, then there's the filling. The kenosis and then the filling. Okay, and then he has this power of judgment and so on. Now, number two. As I have already observed, the church having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet as if occupying but one house. That's beautiful. And behind that, of course, he's got the image of the church as a house, as a temple of the

[28:25]

Lord, as a body, which is very strong in scripture, carefully preserves it. She believes these points just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart, and she proclaims them and teaches them and hands them down with perfect harmony, as if she possessed only one mouth. For although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same. Now, we're so used, maybe, to hearing things like that, and we've had such an authoritarian use of that language for such a long time, that it's hard for us to hear what he's really saying. But it's like he's observing, he's seeing the marvelous unity of the faith, which is an organic being. The faith is the life of an organism, and just like the life of an animal or of a human being is one thing. So he can see, it's an empirical observation, and it's so in the church, that this faith is one, and it beats with one beat. He's got another language, hasn't he?

[29:34]

Yes, yes. Yes. Later on, he goes to the apostolic succession, and he wants to give a kind of criterion, a checkpoint, but he's talking about another church. I wish I knew more about it. I wish I was able to say what his idea of church was. What was Martin's view of it? The common understanding of the notion of church. I don't know if they had an image, other than the biblical images, but it was those who believed in Christ, and who were somehow united by certain, also certain, you have to call them

[30:36]

institutional bonds, or certain visible bonds at that time. And for him, it's the bishops, it's for Ignatius, I think, that constitute that visible bond. The bishops and the Eucharist, and the same teaching, okay? So those three things. The bishops, the sacraments, and especially the Eucharist, which is the sign of communion. And if you were outside, if you were, say, heretical or something like that, then that would be breaking of communion, that would be the sign of it. And the one teaching. Actually, Professor Myers, at the last Eucharistic communion, came and played that sign of communion at this point in time, and he correctly, hierarchically, and very, very much, I'm sure, in the text, which is what you have to get from the liturgical point of view. This is what Ignatius is going on about, too. I think we can actually see the roots of the church. The connection between Eucharist and bishop is a liturgical one. And it's in some way verified by experience, that is, that being together with the bishop

[32:00]

in the Eucharist is, for them, an experience, even though they may not use the word, which has a kind of authority about it, I think, that very experience. This is why I can't say on my own privately that it would be a good thing to instill the experience of communion. You try to remember, of course, as part of the catechumen. John. This is something that Elgar had recommended to me as he read up on the philosophy of the study of the Promised. There's a section in here about Irenaeus' theology, about ecclesiology, which has to do with the relationship with the church. And there's a quote from this thing about false promises. Irenaeus against Harrison's rule isn't a good topic. This is not an attack on Harrison's, it's an attack on false promises.

[33:02]

There's a paragraph there. Go ahead, read it. Thank you. This is four lines of Aquinas introducing the quote of Irenaeus. Even the ecclesiology of the study of the church, the religion of the church, of Irenaeus, is linked up with this theory of the epitulation. God sums up in Christ not only the past, but also the future. Therefore he made him the head of the entire church in order to perpetuate through her his work of renovation and renewal until the end of the world. And this quote is from Book 3, Chapter 16. Thus there is one God the Father, as we have shown, and one Christ Jesus our Lord, who comes by universal dispensation and recapitulates all things in himself. But in all things man also is comprised, a creature of God.

[34:04]

Therefore he recapitulates man in himself. The invisible has become visible. The incomprehensible has become comprehensible. And the impassable is now passable. The lowliness has become man, recapitulating all things in himself. Thus, just as he is the first among heavenly and spiritual and invisible things, so also is he the first among visible and fourfold things. He takes the primacy to himself, and by making himself the head of the church, he will draw all things to himself at the appointed time. Yeah, good. We're going to get to that one in a little while. I think that's Chapter 16, isn't it? Book 3. That's a key text where he uses that term recapitulation about four times. Now, in regards to ecclesiology, that is the other side of the notion of the church for Irenaeus, I think, which is the totality of this which is gathered together, okay?

[35:08]

So, let's call it on the theological side, or on the theoretical side, or that more interior, invisible side. The church is the totality of that which God is bringing together in Christ, in a way. But on the visible side, it's kind of got those three dimensions to it. You have the teaching, the sacrament, and the bishops who are the successors of the apostles. And we're going to run into that continuity of the apostolic translation in a few minutes. Okay, now we're in number two here, on page 331. And he uses an image which I think is very important. But as the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same throughout the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shines everywhere and enlightens all men who are willing to come to a knowledge of the truth. So he compares this faith of the church and this revelation to the sun shining in the sky. Now, as I've repeated ad nauseam until you're tired of it, I think that the best image for

[36:14]

the Logos, actually, is the sun shining in the sky. And that's where Irenaeus is at, really. That's what he's saying, is that the simplicity and the power of the revealed Logos is comparable to the sun shining in the sky, which is a public fact, okay? Which is a kind of single public revelation, which is carried on by the church right out in the open, as it were, by the one church, which pulls all things together, and is so obvious that it's mysterious. I mean, it's got the mystery of the obvious to it. Which is not to say that it doesn't have mystery, it does. But it's the mystery of daylight, as it were, the mystery of the sun. Let's keep this, hang on to this image of the sun, because it will come back again and again. Clement of Alexandria is the one who loves to use the image of the sun for the Logos. Remember? We were talking about Sunday, Diae Solis. He's the one who really zeroes in on that. Irenaeus doesn't stress it so much, but here it is right at the outset. He's got it in the back of his mind.

[37:15]

The word of God, which is Christ, raised into the heavens is the sun. And now the truth is there in front of you, and it's up to you. He says, well, pick it up or make one of your own. The obviousness also of the creation, you see, the sun shines on all the creation, and all the things that God has made are illuminated by this sun, which unites all things, rather than dividing them, as his pseudo-Gnostics do. Okay, then he goes on about their methods of exegesis and so on. No matter how bright the teachers or the bishops are, they don't teach doctrines different from these, for no one is greater than the master. The thing about the Gnostics was that usually they had different classes of faithful. Remember? And you had the insiders, the esoteric people, the elite. The Gnostics themselves were really new. They had the inside knowledge. And then you had the kind of inferior stuff that was taught to everybody, and it was passed down in public. But Ernest says, no, it's not so. You don't have those grades. Grades of intelligence don't give you a different kind of knowledge.

[38:18]

And you don't have the insiders and the outsiders. You don't have a kind of inferior public revelation and a superior private revelation. Well, he comes to that specifically later on. For the faith being ever one and the same, neither does one who is able at great length to discourse about it make any addition to it, nor does he who can say but little diminish it. Gregory the Great likes to talk on that. So degrees of intelligence, they don't change the subject matter of the faith. Think of the one word, okay? The one word. It's like somebody pointing to it. It doesn't matter whether he points with a long finger or a short one, whether he points a little wider than that. The word is there. It's one, like the sun in the sky. You can't add anything to it. You can't really take anything away from it. You can hinder people from seeing it, but that's about it. It's got its own power. Now, then he goes on to say, well, there's something else here. These are the two abuses that are continually creeping up. One, to invent another God, to divide God, divide the Father, and the other is to divide Christ. And the two go together, right?

[39:22]

Because the reason for dividing God, for thinking up another God beyond the God that we know, beyond the Creator, is because you're not happy with the creation. In other words, you're not happy with the way things are, so you have to invent a kind of super-category, a kind of escape hatch. It's a spiritual escape hatch. Or it's a way of bypassing what's in front of you, bypassing the creation, bypassing life. Now, why would one invent another Christ? For the same reason. The other Christ provides you with the same bypass, the same escape hatch into the transcendent, without going through what's in front of you, which is life, which is the world, which is reality, which is matter, which is the body, which is the cross. All of those things. So they have to eliminate all of those and make this spiritual kind of tube that you get through. And that's what they do by separating the Christ from Jesus, the Savior, who is in front of them. Now, here he goes on to talk about what theology can be. This next paragraph is the explanation of what a person can do in explaining the faith. Boyer makes quite a point of this text.

[40:25]

Notice what kind of thing it is. Now, this is another one of those texts that can just weigh on us because it seems so monotonous. It seems like we've heard it so many times. Why are they repeating these things? "...bring out the meanings of those things which have been spoken in parables, accommodate them with sin." Then what's next? "...explain the operation and dispensation of God connected with human salvation, and show that God manifested on self-reliance. Set forth why it is." Now, he's got a whole string of why's there. In other words, instead of rejecting part of reality and devising a God which is higher than all of this, beyond it, as your God and your Christ, you accept what exists, accept what's there, and then try to explain why it's there. Now, what are you doing when you try to explain why it's there, why reality is there, why revelation is there the way it is, why the Word is there, why God's work in Christ is the way it is? Instead of changing it, what are you doing? You're showing the beauty of it. You're showing how it fits together. It's not just a matter of causality, it's a matter of harmony.

[41:27]

Because when Irenaeus does that, he does it in a rather musical fashion, not just a logical fashion. When he talks about this recapitulation of the successive stages, there's a kind of a ringing to it, there's a kind of a harmony to it, as he shows once again this kind of sphere of God's, this luminous sphere of God's work, its simplicity and its beauty, which are one. So the whys are connected with an aesthetic, with beauty, not only with logic and truth, and the two are inseparable. And this is exactly what he's going to be doing as he unrolls his own theology in the course of the five books here. And then he ends up with this kind of doxology, this exclamation of St. Paul, Oh, the depth of the rich is both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. But the skill of the theologian is not in this, that anyone should, beyond the creator and framer of the world, conceive of the anthymesis of an erring aeon. Remember that erring aeon is Sophia, and the anthymesis is her thought, is that hakamoth,

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which trails off out of the poem and goes astray, and which is supposed to be the source of the demiurge and then the creation, a strange way. It's a strange fragmentation of that. Now, does it consist in this that he should again falsely imagine as being above the creator, which is the demiurge, remember? The creator, for Valentinus, is a demiurge. And this is the real problem. What does that have to do with anything? I mean, in the religious terms, it's supposed to be for us to be one with God. And a forerunner, is it so? It's supposed to be a circle. So the creator is outside of that forerunner, outside and inferior to God's own sphere. At one time, it's supposed to contain thirty, and at another time, there are no more than five there. You've got thirty in there. The end of this, you don't have the next page, the end of this goes like this.

[43:38]

As these teachers who are destitute of truly divine wisdom maintain, while the Catholic Church possesses one and the same faith throughout the whole world, that's the end of the sentence. The Catholic Church possesses, it ends with pausa, one and the same faith throughout the whole world. They seem to have a multiplicity of schemes and also a multiplicity of sections and divisions within each scheme. Now, the danger, of course, of speaking a lot about the unity of a faith is that you can repress any pluralism or any speculation of thought. So we can talk about that later, what happens. See, Pagel's contention is that with Irenaeus you get orthodoxy coming down real hard and squeezing out more creativity than theology and in Christian thought. We can ask ourselves about that. Sophia does sort of get sent out into... She sort of disappears in orthodoxy, it's hard to find her again inside Christian tradition.

[44:40]

She's in Jewish mysticism and then reappears maybe in other forms of Christianity, but not into it. Any comments or questions? The Church possesses one and the same faith throughout the whole world. I think that's true, but it's not so much that the Church confines the faith and people are excluded, but I think it's a process of extending the faith or extending the faith all. What about the possibility of different expressions of the faith? Now, this is a very current problem today. Can different cultures and different nationalities and different religious traditions really have different theologies? Can they have different expressions of the one Catholic faith? Is that possible? I think the answer to that question is part of the reason why such a disappointment in

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the Catholic Church. It's as many languages and so on. So the basic sameness that he's talking about is the same core experience of Christianity and Christian faith, which then is kind of expressed in the one God, the one Christ,

[46:49]

the one work of God in the Spirit. That sameness has to be. And that's the experience. That's chapter two. It's when you're in the mystery of God's heart, you're in the mystery of the world, and then you're in the world itself. It doesn't mean the same. And Aaron Asch was the defender of a certain pluralism. The church wasn't there in France, where he was. It had a different date of Easter than Rome. And Rome was thinking of insisting that they change it. And Aaron Asch was completely reluctant. I was afraid of that church. Let them keep their own faith. That may seem unimportant to us, but it's very important to us.

[47:57]

Because there were people here who were claiming to be Christian. There were people who were Gnostics, pseudo-Gnostics, who were claiming to be Christian, and yet somehow they were not. They were broken up from the body. Now, how do you tell? Yes. Yes. It's true, but... Certainly the experience of each of us is quite different, and yet there's a commonness in that experience which makes us Christians. For that I'd like to recur to the New Testament, or the Acts of the Apostles. And remember when Peter goes to those pagans, those Gentiles.

[49:03]

They're not Jews, they're Gentiles. It was Cornelius, wasn't it, and so on. And the Holy Spirit falls on them. And their experience somehow is visible to everybody else. They've had the experience, therefore they're Christians just like we are. Okay? At that point. That was a decisive point. Even though they don't think like we do, they don't know what we know, all of that, they're the same as we are because they've had that experience and it's visible to us. So there was a verification like that. And that was the key. If they had the Holy Spirit in that way, with that fullness, that went with baptism, then they're the same as we are. I agree with that. But in general, I think, like Irenaeus knew whom he was dealing with.

[50:07]

He knew these other fellows. They were close together. And he knew that they really had a different experience. That somehow they had strayed from the Christian experience. Okay, when we talk about experience, it's very difficult to speak about it, okay? Because experience is in itself incommunicable, I think. Okay, first of all, I think it's the deliberate breaking off from certain things which were felt to be inalienable. One was the doctrine itself, okay? If somebody comes to you with a really strange scheme, and he thought it up himself, or he just met somebody down on Route 1 and thought it up, and he comes up to you with this thing and he says, here, I've got the right version of Christianity, what do you think? Secondly, they broke off from the church in the sense of obedience to the bishops, I think. That fact is maybe not number one, but it was there.

[51:09]

They broke communion somehow, okay? And it comes out later on that they denied the validity of the scriptures, okay? In other words, they would say, well, the scriptures are partly spiritual and partly carnal, partly psychic. Now, we're going to tell you what the spiritual part is. So they dig into the scriptures and they throw away what they didn't want, you know? And they find a kind of kernel and say, well, this is it, but only we know about it, that kind of thing. That's right. Yeah, well, that's what Irenaeus is pounding at all the time, okay? So those doctrinal things are clear enough. The other things, sometimes there were moral things, but not always. Sometimes these Gnostic people could live very good lives, it seems. Evidently, because sometimes they wanted to keep it secret lest they'd be rejected.

[52:14]

But on the level of experience, it's perhaps impossible to say how they did it. You can only see by the proofs, as it were. That's right, it does. Notice that that's something that fluctuates. Some people call the Word, they call Christ the wisdom of God, and some people call the Holy Spirit the wisdom of God, and then sometimes, in more modern times, they have thought of wisdom as being some kind of combination of Word and Spirit. Some of the Russians. When Irenaeus calls the Holy Spirit wisdom, it's as if he's deliberately rejecting that Sophia, that Akama, that the Valentinians talked about, okay? So he short-circuits that by going right back to the essence. That mysterious feminine figure of Sophia has always been a problem. The Logos is within the Spirit in some way,

[53:35]

so you can't even consider the Spirit in isolation. We try to make a scheme. We think, well, here's the Word, and then here's the Spirit, and how do they differ? But in the practical, just as we don't know God except through the Logos, except through the Word, and we don't know the Word except through the Spirit, you can't even think of the Spirit somehow without the Word, because as far as we're concerned, the Spirit always contains the Word, brings the Word to us. We don't know the Word without the Spirit, we don't know the Spirit without the Word. It is that in which the Word comes to us since the Ascension, since Pentecost. It's a pity that there wasn't more of a poetic expression that was able to maintain the tradition of the Spirit's insolence.

[54:47]

That got pushed away. We were left with some abstractions or analogies which... I was asking you about the Elizabethan people, and you said that the Lutherans were very interested, that only the Japanese had a spontaneous conception of sacred space. I was looking for a chance to come back to the old town museum, and the building with lots of objects in it. Yeah, the sacred space was... The Zen people have a particular sense of space. I remember talking to Baker Roshi one time. He started talking about space. He says, well, in the West we think about enclosure, and we think about the building. The Japanese would see it as a space. Probably...

[55:50]

Those papers that I passed out to you, let me give you the references for those, the parts that I think is worth our looking at, in case you get a chance to look at them in between before next week. First we touched Book 1, Chapter 10. Okay, we did that one. Then there's... I was going to refer just for a moment to Book 1, Chapter 22 on page 347. I don't think you have that. So you can skip that one. I'll just read a bit of it. Then there's Book 2, Chapter 28, which is a very rich chapter. That's what I gave you today. It's on those pages 399 and 400. Book 2, Chapter 28, the numbers that you have there. Next time I'll talk about that. And then I also gave you page 428 on the following page,

[56:56]

which is Book 3, Chapter 11, Numbers 17 to 9, where he talks about the four Gospels. He talks about why the Gospels are four, and then, surprisingly, he talks about four heretical tendencies there, which go, as it were, in the direction of the four Gospels. And remember the four living creatures and so on from Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation. As far as I know, that's the first time this comes up in the Fathers. So, you wouldn't want to pass it by. So we'll pick that up next time, too. Okay. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen. By the way, the latest successor to Irenaeus, I think, is Teilhard de Chardin. If you read certain of his writings, you find direct continuity with his Logos. Remember, the Logos is forming history in Irenaeus, and in Teilhard, he doesn't use the word Logos for it,

[57:58]

he uses the word word sometimes. It's forming evolution. In other words, it's forming history even in the cosmic way. And he really picks up Irenaeus' thought. I don't know whether it's conscious or not. The other time you said that, it was quite tangible, but he didn't have it. And I listened to what you said about Irenaeus, but he dropped off the senses if he had them. Yes, yes. He could approach it with just a glance and say, I don't know what you want me to say. Yes. But he didn't have it. But it's the same thought and the same excitement, in a way, that Teilhard has. And also, thinking of the Logos, the word is fire. This is one of his last writings that's come out. I had a little of it. I'll read you just a little. Radiant word, blazing power. You who mold the multiple so as to breathe your life into it. You always hear Irenaeus. I pray you, lay on us those your hands. Remember, the hands of God. Powerful, considerate, omnipresent. Those hands which do not like our human hands,

[59:01]

touch now, here, now, there, but which plunge into the depths and totality, present and past, of things, so as to reach us simultaneously through all that is most immense and most inward within us and around us. And Teilhard's doctrine is a doctrine of recapitulation. And with the accent on the cosmic, on matter itself. And you know how Irenaeus insists on matter, in terms of the human body, mostly. In terms of recreation. I may bring that up again later.

[59:27]