Transcript

Alright, so welcome back to History 1, and we're in the Middle Ages, and we're going to start tonight with the concept of sainthood, and veneration of saints, and what that's all about.

Because you know that there are several traditions within Christianity that have as exemplars of the faith these people that we call saints.

And even among Protestants, it's become part of casual conversation when you say, Happy St. Valentine's Day or something like that.

So these are people who are sort of held up as models, examples to follow.

But to talk about the saints, we really need to go all the way back to the early church, to the time of the martyrs.

Now you may remember that we talked about this a little bit when we were talking about the martyrs.

And you also have to remember that in the early church, and really throughout probably most of the church's history, baptism was considered a sacrament that washed away original sin and any sins committed up until the baptism.

So this is why I always say baptism was a clean slate, but not a free ride, because it was not thought to wash away future sins.

sins committed after the baptism.

Now, in the world of Reformed theology, you will often hear something like this, that baptism washes away all of a person's sins past, present, and future.

But that was not the thinking in the early church.

In the early church, baptism washed away pre-baptismal sin.

So, original sin that you're born with, And then any sins you committed up until the time of baptism.

I mean, this is why many people, especially men in the Roman Empire, postponed their baptism, right?

So that they could sow their wild oats, or have a political career, or whatever it is they felt they needed to do, and they didn't want to be accountable to the ethical standards of the Church, right?

So they postponed their baptism.

All of that implies that post-baptismal sin, sins you commit after your baptism, can, in effect, undo your baptism.

And early church documents talk about the baptism as the seal, S-T-A-L. It seals one for God.

And in fact, you see this in the book of Revelation, even, where there's the mark of the beast, you can be marked for the beast, or you can be sealed for God, and those are the two sort of opposites.

To be sealed for God, the seal is a reference to baptism.

But the seal can be broken.

The seal can be undone.

And so we have this idea that if you continue to sin after your baptism, you can undo your baptism to the point where you actually can lose your salvation.

Now again, in the Protestant world, you might be used to a more sort of Calvinistic outlook that says, you know, sort of once saved, always saved, or The idea of the perseverance of the saints in the sense that if a person is among the elect, that person will in fact be saved in the end.

This really comes from Augustine.

We looked at that.

But again, that was part of Augustine's teaching that didn't get accepted by the greater church in the end.

And so, in the early church, One could lose one's salvation.

There's an expression in the ancient world, and I think it pops up in Ecclesiastes or Sirach or some of the wisdom literature, and the expression is something like this, called no man blessed while he lives.

In other words, as long as someone's alive, It's too early to comment on their life, because there's still time for them to screw it up.

Once a person's dead, then you can look at their life and try to make an assessment.

But even then, people do things in secret that they take to their graves, that never come to light.

Even after a person's dead, you can never really know for sure if they are, in fact, There is one way, however, that you could know for sure.

Martyrdom.

Because martyrdom was considered a baptism in one's own blood.

So even if you had sinned to the extent of undoing your own baptism, by being a martyr, by dying for Christ and by refusing to give up So, martyrdom was the only sure thing.

The only thing that one could be absolutely sure got one into heaven.

And so martyrdom was understood as cancelling any and all sin, even previous apostasy.

So, let's say during the time of the persecution, If you made the sacrifice and you denied the faith to save your life, many people believed that your only hope after that was another chance at martyrdom, so that martyrdom could cancel out the apostasy.

So you get cases of people volunteering for martyrdom, even though the church frowned on that.

There were people who thought that their sins were so bad that their only hope of heaven was martyrdom, so they would volunteer to be martyred.

So all of that is to say that the martyrs of the early church are the ones whom the early Christians considered to be saints for sure.

In other words, all Christians are saints.

In the New Testament language, you read Paul's letters, he addresses his letters to the saints of whatever city.

He doesn't mean by that only the special Christians.

He means all believers.

because the word saint means holy ones, those who are made holy, not because they've become perfect, but because by their commitment to Christ, God considers them holy.

So, all Christians are saints in that sense.

But again, we don't really know about any particular person's life unless that person was a martyr.

Then we can be certain that that person is really a saint, that that person is really in heaven with God.

And so those people then are the people whom the early church could be confident were actually with God and close to God.

Now, if a person is close to God, one way that you could be closer to God is by getting closer to that person.

How do you get closer to a person who's died?

By going to their grave.

So you go to the place where they're buried, usually in the catacombs, and by being in close proximity to the person's remains, people felt like they were closer to God.

Now, remember, there's already a tradition in Roman culture of having what amount to picnics at burial sites.

So, to honor the ancestors, to honor the dead of your family, you would go to the gravesite, and maybe once a year, on the anniversary of their death, or whatever, you would have a feast.

And this tradition, in Latin, it's the refrigerium.

This is where we get our word refrigerator, right?

So the refrigerium is this tradition of having these feasts, like picnics, to honor the dead and to celebrate their life on the anniversary of their death.

This Roman tradition is a pre-Christian tradition.

It's combined with the idea of the martyrs as Christian saints, and so the feasts of the martyrs, or the feasts of the saints, are people going out to the catacombs and literally worshipping at the gravesites.

And when I say worshipping, I mean reading scripture, telling stories of the life of the person, the martyr, sometimes reading documents that are the Martyr Acts.

Sometimes a priest would come out and Mass would be celebrated.

In those cases, In situations where you could go down into the catacombs and the person was buried in a place where there was a sarcophagus, in some cases the lid of the sarcophagus literally became the table from which the food was served and from which the Eucharist was served.

So some of the earliest Eucharistic altars were the sarcophagi of the faithful departed.

And again, you read in the book, in reading the early Church Fathers, about the Martyr Acts.

These were documents that were written to honor the martyrs, to tell their stories, to glorify God through the stories of the martyrs and their heroic faith.

And of course, there's a lot of embellishment that got added on to those stories over time.

But these stories were read as a part of these celebrations.

And so, the sites where the martyrs were buried became Significant holy sites, pilgrimage sites, people would go there and eventually when Emperor Constantine starts building churches, some of the first churches that Constantine built are over the tombs of the martyrs.

Again, just like in the book of Revelation where it says that the martyrs are waiting under the altar.

And that's exactly where they were, because some of these first churches were built directly over the tombs of the martyrs, and to this day, some of the basilicas of Rome are still on the same spot, directly over the tombs of Peter, Paul, and some others.

So, these martyrs become the saints for sure, the ones whom you can be certain are in heaven with God, And if they're in heaven with God, they can intercede for you.

So the thinking is that just like we read in the letter of James or whatever that people should ask each other to pray for them, if we can ask our brothers and sisters here on earth to pray for us, why not ask our brothers and sisters who are already in heaven to pray for us as well?

Because of the resurrection that they have experienced, they are in fact more alive than they ever were And they're alive in Christ, and alive with Christ.

And so, you know, again, remember what you know about martyrs and confessors.

If a confessor could be kind of a spiritual director, and even someone who could forgive sins, you could go to the prison and visit a confessor, and they could forgive your sins.

If that's possible, well then, why not the confessors or the martyrs in heaven?

Not that they would directly forgive the sins, but that they would intercede with God on behalf of the living.

So, if a martyr or a confessor could do that for you on earth, imagine what he or she could do for you now that he or she is at God's side, so to speak.

And so people began to ask the dead saints to pray for them.

And so this tradition goes back at least to the second century.

We already see it in Clement of Alexandria.

We see it in the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

Cyprian, in the 3rd century, actually preached to his congregations.

He would say, by the way, if any of you are not alive when we come back here next week, be sure and pray for us.

So, in other words, sort of preemptively saying, if you have to die soon, we hope you'll pray for us.

That makes sense, I think, so far, right?

Until martyrdom goes away, when Christianity becomes legalized.

But you already know, once martyrdom goes away, what becomes the new martyrdom?

Asceticism.

So the ascetics, or the monastics, come to be seen as those who die to themselves daily.

They submit themselves to a daily martyrdom in their asceticism, And so they become the new saints for sure.

And so that when they pass on, they are held up as exemplars of the faith, examples to follow, and people whom you can be relatively certain are with God in heaven and who could intercede for you.

And so the church, historically, over time, We're going to talk about Mary in the second hour, but you can see where this is going.

Since Mary, the mother of Jesus, was considered to be without any sin, She becomes the queen of the saints for sure.

We'll talk about that a little bit more in the next hour.

But the point is that the ascetics become the new examples to follow, and they're alive.

Those who choose not only asceticism, but especially celibacy, those who choose celibacy are seen as living examples, or sort of living object lessons, almost in the way that the prophets of the Old Testament would create these object lessons of the faith with their own lives.

Hosea marries the prostitute as an object lesson about the faith of Israel.

So, the ascetics then, those who choose celibacy, are creating an object lesson out of their lives, and this particular lesson teaches a certain eschatology that emphasizes waiting.

In other words, it's as if to say, we know that God has given the command to be fruitful and multiply, but because we believe we're living in the last days, we're going to give that up, and we're going to live a life of waiting.

And think about the waiting parables in the Gospels, the bridesmaids who are waiting for the return of the grooms.

Five of them were smart, and five of them were foolish.

smart ones stayed awake, kept their lamps lit, etc. They stayed alert.

The foolish ones failed to stay alert.

But you get the idea.

So asceticism, especially celibacy, is teaching a lesson of that kind of eschatology that emphasizes waiting for the return of Christ.

The other thing you have to keep in mind is that in the ancient world they had a bit of a difference We are looking at the possibility of communication between the living and the dead.

Think of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

Remember this one?

Jesus tells the parable of a rich man and then there's this homeless man named Lazarus who sort of lives out at the gate but the rich man refuses to give him anything.

They both die and the rich man is described as being in torment In a hot place, because he wants water.

Lazarus, the poor man, is described as being in some sort of paradise in the bosom of Abraham.

He's gone to be with his ancestors.

And then there's this interesting conversation where the rich man yells up to Lazarus and says, hey, could you send some water down here?

And Lazarus is, sorry, there's this great chasm between between me and you.

The modern mind wants to focus on the chasm, but traditionally, the more traditional way of looking at it that you still find in the ancient denominations like Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, is that look at their talking to each other.

So in spite of the great chasm, there's this conversation that goes on.

So the point being that People believe and continue to believe that we can talk to the dead, in a way, because if we assume that they're with God, we're not saying that they are omniscient, that they can hear our prayers because they're divine in any sense, but by their proximity to God, it's sort of a gift of God.

So that's the idea.

And I've started by saying This is going to come up later.

This is going to be important later.

But I started by saying we're going to talk about the veneration of the saints.

And veneration is kind of a technical term.

But what it does not mean is it does not mean the same thing as worship.

So we're not talking about the worship of the saints or the worship of Mary.

That would imply that they are divine beings and that a relationship with them is somehow an end in itself.

It is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end, and that end would be a closer relationship with God.

Now, whether or not one thinks that's necessary is a different question, but I do want you to understand that we're working with two commandments here, because you know the commandment about having no other gods.

So, worship only the one God.

There's a commandment against worshiping anything or anyone else.

A commandment against idolatry.

At the same time, there's also a commandment to honor your father and mother, honor your parents, honor your ancestors.

So, veneration is a form of that same kind of honor that we are commanded to show to our forebears and our ancestors, even the ones who pass on.

So to pray to a saint, then, is not to worship the saint.

Prayer itself is not worship.

You probably instinctively know that the word pray is a fancy way of saying ask.

Prayer in and of itself is not worship because I can, in a more archaic form of English, I can pray So, prayer in and of itself is not a form of worship.

It's what you do with the prayer or what you say in the prayer.

To pray to the saint is considered not worship, but a form of veneration in which one asks the saint for intercession.

Again, another technical distinction, we're talking intercession, not intervention.

To ask a saint or any dead person to intervene in your life would be to ascribe power to that person, which is technically not what you're supposed to do.

So if any of you come from traditions that include prayer to the saints, you're not supposed to be asking them to actually do anything for you.

You're supposed to be asking for intercession.

You're supposed to be asking for them to pray for you.

And it's a subtle distinction, which, if you know folks who practice prayer to the saints, and if you hear the prayers out loud, you will run across people who don't get the distinction and who cross the line.

So, for example, let's say I want to, well, let's say Let's say I know someone who is ill, and I want to pray for that person.

So I would pray for that person.

I would ask my living friends and relatives to pray for that person.

But I might also decide to ask a saint to pray for that person.

So let's just use Saint Padre Pio, who is a relatively recent 20th century saint.

So let's say I want to ask for the intercession of Saint Padre Pio.

The right way to do it would be to say, St. Theo, I'm asking you to pray to our Father, to pray to our God, for my friend who is sick, that God might heal my friend.

That would be the right way to do it.

The wrong way to do it would be, St. Theo, please heal my friend.

That would be the wrong way to do it, because you're asking for someone who is a mere human to do something Now, having said that, there are miracles ascribed to many of these saints, and so there are healings and other miracles that are said to happen by the intercession of the saints.

But again, it's from their intercession, and it's really God who's doing the thing.

We don't assume that the saint is omniscient and hears our prayers on his or her own power, but only as a gift of God.

And we don't assume that a saint is omnipotent and can do things as all-powerful, because that also would be an attribute of God.

So, this is the distinction.

Asking for intercession But again, as I said, in popular piety, people mix that up all the time.

So you may hear it done incorrectly, but that's the way it's supposed to work.

The early reformers didn't really reject this sort of devotion, although Luther was worried that prayer to the saints, and especially prayer to Mary, might create the appearance of another mediator.

This becomes kind of the issue, and probably is for those of you who have put any thought into this.

Assuming you're Protestant and you have Catholic or Orthodox relatives or friends and you are aware of this tradition, one of the first issues that pops into your head is that we're supposed to have one and only one mediator, and that is Jesus Christ.

Doesn't the veneration of saints or devotion to the saints put other mediators between us and God, or in fact between us and Christ?

That can be the danger, especially if we allow The veneration of the saint to become a kind of end in itself.

But, in case you're worried about that, the Catholic Church has clarified that that's not what it's supposed to be, and that Christ is the only mediator.

Now, thinking back to the martyrs and the site of their burials in the catacombs, You can imagine how if people felt that being close to a saint's remains made them feel closer to God, what if they could actually touch the saint's remains?

What if they could handle, what if they could take something home?

You know, although that's frowned upon.

But the point is that the physical remains of a saint are called relics.

And the term actually comes from the Latin, relicta, that's plural, but things left behind, remains.

That's what it means.

So, when a person dies, what's left behind?

Their body, body parts.

So, as early as the document, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, from the middle of the second century, I don't think I signed that one, did I? But if you read the Martyrdom of Polycarp, what the document tells you is that after he died, his friends, fellow believers, collected his body, and his body was, his remains were considered relics.

So already this kind of thinking is there, and so it's interesting because On the one hand, a dead saint is considered close to God.

So, if you want to be close to God, you want to be close to the saint's remains.

On the other hand, though, wherever the remains are, the saint is considered to be present there in some way still.

So, again, to go to the sites where the relics are became a pilgrimage.

The shrines were built and people would make pilgrimages to the sites where the saints' relics were.

And eventually, when places outside of the Holy Land and Rome didn't have any martyrs' remains, the church would sort of divvy them up and send them around.

And so martyrs Body could be exhumed and maybe brought into one of the basilicas inside the city of Rome, brought in from the catacombs.

But in the process, maybe some of the body parts are given to another church in another city so that they can have a relic.

And so they kind of spread them around.

There's a church in Rome, Santa Maria Cosa Medina, has the relic of the skull of Saint Valentine.

And now we're not going to debate the accuracy or the historical reality of the skull of St. Valentine, just go ahead.

But the point is this, where is the rest of him?

The rest of him is in a Carmelite church in Dublin because it was given as a gift by one of the bishops of Rome to the Irish Catholics.

So if you want to see all of St. Valentine, you have to go to both places, Dublin and Rome.

But you get the idea.

And so relics become a way of connecting with the saints, and through them, a way of connecting to God.

Yeah, question?

Well, the shrine is the place where the relics are held.

And so, when the relics are buried, you know, in the catacombs or whatever, the shrine could simply be the chapel built over the spot.

But when they're brought into the city, or brought up to the surface, Sometimes, especially if you don't have the whole body, or if there isn't that much left, maybe you have a bone or something, it'll be put in a reliquary.

So it could be a fancy box with a window in the front, and on a red velvet pillow, there's the bone of the martyr, and there's a little ribbon around it with a tag that says, you know, Saint so-and-so.

And people would, you know, you could go and visit, feel close to the martyr.

Again, I'm not suggesting you go out and do this.

But you do need to understand the tradition behind this.

Okay, so any questions about saints and Rebels?

Alright, I'm going to switch gears here and talk about penance and reconciliation now.

You may know that in In the older traditions, this is a sacrament.

In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, penance and reconciliation is one of the seven sacraments.

But again, for this topic, we have to go back to the beginning.

From the beginning, it appears that confession was always a part of the Eucharist.

You didn't receive the Eucharist without first confessing your sins.

Now, in most cases, at the very beginning, this was probably a liturgical element, like a corporate prayer confession, which still exists in some communion liturgies, where you have a unison prayer confession.

But remember when we talked about the controversy over the lapsed.

And after the persecution, the question became, you know, what to do with the lapsed who want to come back into the church?

Because we had martyrs who gave their life rather than give up the faith.

And then we have other people who made the sacrifice to save not only their lives, but their businesses or whatever, their money, their livelihood.

And then when the persecution subsides, they want to come back to church.

And many people, if you remember Novation, many people felt that to allow these people back into church and back to the table of the Eucharist would be a slap in the face to those who gave their lives not to make the sacrifices.

And so, as is the case many times, there were sort of two extreme views, and the church landed somewhere in the middle.

You know, one extreme view was just let them waltz back in with no consequences, The other extreme view was excommunicate them forever and we never want to see them again.

And the middle way was a way of receiving them back into fellowship, but with consequences, so that it couldn't be said that there were no consequences.

And so what you get then is the concept of confession, and then reconciliation of the person who has been excommunicated, that person is reconciled to the church.

And the consequences are penance.

Penance is the outward invisible sign of the inward repentance.

Now already by the third century, you had some groups within the church, and I'm thinking specifically of some Celtic Christians, but you have folks who were already creating what they call penitential books.

In other words, a list that says, if you commit this sin, now here's the penance.

And I know, you know, probably your main access to this kind of thinking is Hollywood, which is always a bad idea.

But, you know, I know you can picture any number of movies where, you know, a person goes into the confessional booth and, you know, there's a screen, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

Blah, blah, blah.

And I did this, that, and the other thing.

And the priest says, okay, well, you shouldn't have done that now, Johnny.

Say, ten Hail Marys.

Ten Hail Marys and an Our Father or something like that.

And that's the text.

Well, that is sort of the watered-down version of it.

But the point was, from the beginning, that there ought to be a sort of standardized mix of What penance you would do based on what sin was committed.

Now, there's a couple things going on here that are important to understand.

First of all, I think we've been over this before.

No one in the early church believed that all sin was equal in the eyes of God.

That's another idea that comes up much later.

In the early church, some sins are worse than others.

And, you know, you have this idea that the worst kinds of sins, the precursors to the idea of mortal sins, sins leading to death, to quote one of the John letters, would be any sin that broke one of the Ten Commandments.

That would be the worst.

But the worst of the worst, and this comes out of the persecutions especially, the worst of the worst sins that you could commit would be apostasy, to deny the faith, adultery was like a close second, and murder was like a distant third.

Now, you might want to say, well, why is murder not as bad as adultery?

Well, I don't know if I'd want to say it's not as bad, really, but they probably just didn't deal with it as much.

Adultery was probably much more prevalent in the early church, and so they talk about it more and they emphasize how bad it is.

The other one, of course, that the church came to the conclusion that the only thing worse than heresy was schism.

But you get the point.

The point is that no one believed that all sins were equal in the eyes of God.

Some sins are worse than others.

And if that's true, then the penance for a worse sin ought to be more serious.

Not that penance is meant to make up for the sin, per se, but it's more that penance was meant to show the sincerity of one's repentance.

Because repentance is inward, you can't prove that.

But you can show your sincerity by doing penance.

Now, as you can imagine, in popular thinking, of course, it quickly became a kind of this-for-that mentality.

Do this, this makes up for it.

But the other reason why it was important to have a sort of standardized list, as much as possible, of course, the early church, almost nothing standardized, but you get the idea.

The reason is, So that no one plays favorites.

So imagine if I'm the priest, and my best friend comes to me and says, you know, I cheated on my wife, and I say, oh, you know, you shouldn't do that, but your penance is to wash my car.

And then my worst enemy comes to me and says, I cheated on my wife, and I give him a terrible, you know, a really harsh penance because I don't like the guy.

Well, it's meant to prevent that sort of thing, right?

If you sin and you are free, you must sacrifice a ox.

that if you're a priest, you have more of a responsibility not to sin because you're set in advance.

Is that what you're getting at?

In the Leviticus tradition, there's a list of if you sin and you are...

Oh yeah, you do this, here's the...

So this is where the idea of...

I imagine so, that it's based on that kind of an idea.

That there is something that needs to be done.

There's some consequence that needs to be taken care of in order to...

to reconcile to the Church and to God.

We may have covered this a bit when we were talking about the persecutions, but in the aftermath of the persecutions, when these councils in Carthage and Rome had to decide what the penances would be for certain things, people who had made pagan sacrifices to save their lives had to undergo serious penance.

And sometimes it took a long time, even years, before they were reconciled with the church.

And so the steps toward restoration or toward reconciliation after excommunication could be kind of elaborate.

There are basically four steps.

The first step was to be a weaver.

So the idea was you spend a certain amount of time outside of the assembly, not allowed in, And asking the people who come and go to pray for you.

And perhaps even, you know, wearing sackcloth and ashes or something like that.

But again, it's to be physically an outsider.

And then, you know, this idea that a lot of the early church writers talk about, you know, we will know the sincerity of their repentance by their tears.

After spending a certain amount of time as a weeper, you would become a hearer, meaning you can now go into the assembly and hear what's going on, but you cannot participate.

You can only listen to the service.

And probably, like, stand in back.

Maybe even behind a curtain, depending on the situation.

After spending a certain amount of time as a hearer, you'd become a kneeler.

Kneelers can come farther into the assembly but must kneel.

Everyone else is standing, remember, there's no pews, right?

Everyone's standing.

But the kneelers have to kneel.

Kneeling in the early church is a sign of humility and penance.

And then after during a certain amount of time as a kneeler, you become a co-stander.

Co-stander meaning standing along with the rest.

But still not allowed to the table until one is reconciled by the bishop.

And sometimes that would even require a public confession of the sin, and then the laying on of hands, which is sort of almost like another confirmation, but not really.

And then the person is reconciled.

But again, the whole thing could take over a decade.

But notice, If you were thinking to yourself, well, at least in the early church, the confessional prayer was sort of a unison prayer, and they didn't have private confession to a priest at the beginning.

Yeah, that's true.

They had public confession to the whole assembly before you got reconciled.

So again, you've sort of been through this story, you remember how the confessors are called confessors because people would go to them, these are people who had confessed their faith at the risk of their own lives, but then other Christians who had failed in that test would go to them and confess that sin to them, and ask forgiveness from the very people who did not commit the sin that they had committed, right?

But we had that whole problem with the charismatic authority versus the hierarchical authority because the bishops, like Cyprian, were worried that if confessors, who are lay people, are out there absolving sins, they're not going to be able to control them.

So eventually, that right, that authority to forgive sins, was taken over by really the bishops, but then the authority was also extended to the priests.

And of course, that is Based on the Matthew passage, Matthew 16, where Jesus gives the keys to Peter, and he says, you know, what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you loose or release on earth will be released in heaven.

This is a reference to the forgiveness of sin or not.

So to bind something is not to forgive the sin, the person is bound to it, they're stuck with it, it's on them.

To release it is to forgive the sin.

And so, the church understood Jesus as having given that authority to Peter and indeed to the apostles, who then passed that authority down to the bishops and priests through apostolic succession.

So, ultimately what ends up happening is the priests fulfill the role of confessor, as in the one to whom you confess, and they also begin to take on The role that we saw in both the confessors and in the ascetics, that role as spiritual director.

So then they would receive the confession of the penitent and they would tell them what their penance was based on these penitential books or based on their own discernment, whatever.

Remember when we were talking about, in the context of Augustine and Donatism, we were talking about ecclesiology.

What is the church?

And one of the images for the church that we talked about was the church as hospital.

Because the church is not a country club for the perfected, rather the church is a hospital for the sick of soul.

And if the church is a hospital, then the clergy are the doctors.

And the medicine is the sacraments, but in this case specifically we're talking about confession, penance, reconciliation.

That is the medicine that the hospital prescribes.

The same traditions kind of develop in the West and the East independently, and we do have some of what we might consider excesses with Self-flagellation.

Make sure you spell this word right.

In other words, mortification of the flesh or literally beating or whipping oneself.

I'm sure if you saw, I think they Focus on that a bit in one of those terrible Dan Brown movies.

Or maybe your experience would be from the Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the monks hit themselves in the head.

But you get the idea.

Again, it becomes a matter of finding the happy medium between the extremes.

I'll just mention this briefly.

There is another sacrament that evolves out of this, the sacrament of what used to be called last rites.

Last rites, or extreme unction, meaning like the final anointing.

Now it's simply called anointing of the sick because we don't wait until a person's on their deathbed to do it.

But the idea of the Last Rites and the Extreme Unction evolves out of the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation because it would often include a last chance at confession.

But keep in mind that penance is never thought to earn salvation because anyone who's doing penance is already a Christian.

This is not to earn salvation.

Salvation is presupposed.

Penance is the outward sign of repentance.

On the other hand, since you can lose your salvation, and since post-baptismal sin is considered to be on you on some level, you could think of penance and reconciliation as a way to keep your salvation.

So it's not to earn your salvation up front, but There is the danger of losing salvation, and so this is the way to keep it.

I guess that would be one way to think of it.

So there is a sense in which the penance does work toward the forgiveness of sins.

But over time, the emphasis shifted from the repentance, the inward feeling, the inward regret for sin, toward the penance, the outward act.

So you can see that in popular thought, over time, it was very easy for this concept to sort of degenerate into, you know, do this to make up for that.

In fact, some people felt like it was a license to sin, because if you already knew what the penance was going to be in, if you were okay with doing that, then you could sort of, you know, Sin, knowing that you can just make up for it later.

Which is obviously problematic, but it goes farther than that, because you probably know also that almsgiving has always been considered a form of penance.

Again, going back to the second century at least.

It's already in Clement, and it's in the Shepherd, and all over the place in the early writings.

you will find almsgiving spoken of as a penance, even to the point of where it will say, almsgiving covers many sins.

So, if almsgiving is a penance, okay, fair enough, if I commit a sin, I confess it, the priest might tell me to give alms, to feed the hungry, give to the poor, put some money in the poor box at the church, right?

But you can see where this goes, because it's a slippery slope from there to By forgiveness.

In other words, if I can make a donation as a penance, if I can give to the hungry, why not give to the church?

If I give to the church as a penance, then where the church is less scrupulous, it becomes very easy to see penance as a cash cop, you know what I'm saying?

So that by the time we get to the Renaissance and they need to raise money for building projects in Rome, specifically in St. Peter's, one of the things that happens is they send out the salesmen out.

Monks who are selling forgiveness in the form of indulgences.

An indulgence is a A certificate of forgiveness.

I mean, it's kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card, in a sense.

But not only can you buy one for yourself, you can buy one for your relatives who are already passed on.

I'll talk about purgatory in a minute, but...

Now, again, this is late.

This is actually, you know, this is really kind of even too late for our time period in this course.

But I'm telling you this to set you up for history, too.

Because one of the reasons that Martin Luther objected to what the Catholic Church was doing at the time was that he saw all this money being funneled out of Germany and into Italy in the form of a sale of indulgences.

You know, the story is that the indulgences sellers had a little jingle that they would sing as they walked through the countryside of Germany.

And the English translation is something like, as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.

So if you're concerned about your dead relatives, who might not be making it into heaven, they might be in purgatory, you can buy an indulgence for them.

And then, you know, it's all going for a good cause, building St. Peter's or whatever it is.

But you can see why the Reformers had a problem with this.

Because the whole thing had degenerated into selling salvation.

It got to the point where if I lived in the late Middle Ages and I was rich, I could create an endowment where I gave a large sum of money and instructed my parish priest to say Mass for my soul every day after I die.

So, just to be on the safe side.

So, you get situations where so many people are buying Masses to be said for the souls of the dead, that the priests are just saying, Mass, Mass, Mass, Mass, Mass, just one right after the other.

Nobody's there.

It just becomes this thing.

And so again, the Reformers are going to feel like that's cheapening the whole thing, right?

And you can imagine why they would think that.

And so, Now, before you think that's totally crazy, don't forget that there is a text, we skip over it, but there is a text in 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul says something about baptism for the dead.

Now, I don't claim to know exactly what that's all about, but the point is that there is such a thing as vicarious faith.

In other words, I wouldn't want to dismiss this completely, this idea that the faith of one person can be effective for another, because after all, if we baptize infants, that's what we're doing.

We're baptizing an infant on the basis of the faith of his or her parents or God's parents.

That's by serious faith.

The faith of one person standing in for somebody else.

At any rate, eventually, The Feast of All Souls Day will emerge, which is a feast for remembering the souls in purgatory.

Now, what's purgatory?

Let's take a couple minutes to talk about purgatory.

First of all, there are several passages of Scripture that appear to Speak about something that at least gets interpreted as purgatory.

I'm thinking of 1 Corinthians 3, 13-15. If anyone's works are burned up, he will still be saved, but his works are burned up.

1 Corinthians 3, 1 Peter 1.7, I'm blanking on what that says, but write it down and look at it later.

Matthew 3.11, Luke 3.16. There are some things in the Deuterocanonical books, Wisdom chapter 3, Sirach chapter 2. But it all goes back to this idea of fire as an image of purification.

Fire as an image of purification.

And you know that this is in the Psalms, you know, the imagery of gold refined in the fire, you know how that works if you have gold that's got impurities in it, you put it over the fire, you melt it, the impurities float to the top, you skim off the impurities, you do this all the time, right?

Anyway, then you purify the gold by melting it.

So in other words, gold is purified by fire.

And this becomes an image for how we as human beings are purified.

Not necessarily that the fire is literal, but fire is an image of purification.

And I haven't really done a study on this, but my sense is that if you were to take the whole range of Scripture, fire is an image of purification more than it's an image of destruction.

Even to the point where some of the things that we might think about as talking about hell are not talking necessarily about destruction as much as they are about purification.

So the idea of purgatory comes from this idea of purging.

It comes from this idea of purification.

You probably also have a sense of the old school, medieval or more pre-modern understanding of purgatory.

To be honest, a lot of people still look at it this way, and that is that if you die and your sins aren't all made up for by penance, then you can't get into heaven.

You have to do time in purgatory so that there's a length of time that's prescribed for you where you'll be in fiery torment, like hell, but it's only temporary.

Although it might last a thousand years, it's only temporary.

And that is kind of the old school way of looking at it.

In fact, most recently, the current Pope, Benedict XVI, wrote in his encyclical, God is Love, he took this little aside And he says something brilliant about purgatory.

He basically says, you know, look, you have to look at it not as having anything to do with time, because once one is outside the created realm, one is outside of time.

Time is meaningless outside the realm of creation.

It's not about time, but it's about purification.

In the same way that in the Old Testament, if a person sinned or touched a dead body or whatever it was.

There were reasons, there were things that made you unclean.

And in order to approach God in the temple, you had to go through a purification process that might require a ritual bath or something like that.

And so it's that idea extrapolated to the afterlife.

So we may be, we're not perfect.

Very few of us are.

I was gonna say none of us are, but I won't presume to know that.

Very few of us are perfect.

When we die, we are, in a sense, unclean and we need to be purified.

So the idea is that before we can approach the presence of God in the heavenly realm, we go through a purgation, a purification, where fire is symbolic of purification.

That's all I know.

But I wanted to throw that out there as what I consider A better way to look at purgatory than the old school way.

But, you know, feel free to look up those passages and see if you think that that can be interpreted in having anything to do with purgatory.

Okay.

Good.

Questions about that stuff?

We have one more topic to cover in the next 20 minutes.

No? Alright.

Okay.

Now I'm going to talk about icons.

One of the things I meant to say earlier that I didn't, when we were talking about relics, is that it's easy for the modern mind to start asking questions.

For example, with the skull of St. Valentine, is this really the skull of St. Valentine?

Never mind the fact that there were probably three St. Valentines.

Is this really a 3rd century It's easy to go down that road, but I would suggest that that's not helpful.

I would suggest that it's more helpful to think of relics as icons, and so now we're going to talk about icons.

So what's an icon?

Well, from the beginning of the church, I guess it's hard to say the beginning because we don't have very much in terms of artistic representations that remain from the early centuries of the church.

The earliest artistic representations of Christian faith are in the catacombs.

From the 2nd and 3rd centuries, you have carvings on sarcophagi mostly depicting Bible stories, Jesus raising Lazarus, stuff like that.

By the way, if you want to see pictures of this stuff, go on my website, romsic.org.

And then there's some wall paintings.

With, again, imagery, there's one very famous wall painting of Mary and the baby Jesus, but other than that, it's a lot of symbols and depictions of Bible stories, pictures of loaves and fish, which were not only a reminder of the feeding of the multitudes in the Gospels, but were a Eucharistic symbol.

So you have these things early on.

And then, you know, really not until like the fifth century that we get artistic representations of the crucifixion and the cross, etc. But the point is this, that, you know, from the beginning, icons are considered kind of like the poor man's Bible.

You know, when not everyone was literate, they could be reminded of the Bible stories from the pictures.

They would have heard the Bible stories in liturgy.

And then the pictures were not, you know, like cartoons, like with panels, you know, acting out the story.

But, you know, a single image that was sort of meant to be a vignette that reminded you of the whole story.

And it's exactly the same with stained glass windows later.

People could be reminded of the stories from the Gospel, the stories of Jesus.

They could express their devotion to God and Christ through these images, through these icons.

So icons are not just paintings.

I know when I say the word icon, you probably automatically think of the very stylized icons of the Eastern Church, which certainly you should think of that, but that's not the way it was at the beginning.

Icons can be paintings, they can be sculptures, they can be If you immediately think that icons are an Eastern phenomenon, they're really not.

They're universal at the beginning of the Church.

In fact, if you look at the earliest Christian art in the West, it looks What about the prohibition against What about the commandment that says you're not supposed to make graven images?

Are icons images in an idolatrous sense?

Because we're told in the Ten Commandments we're not to make graven images and worship them.

On the other hand, Moses makes an icon of a serpent.

And that, of course, you see where this is going in the typology of the early church, that serpent on the pole becomes a type of the cross.

But anyway, the problem is, I'll just foreshadow it a little bit, when you get into the later Protestant Reformation, you will hear about certain radical reformers going around smashing images, painting over paintings.

To this day, there are certain denominations within Christianity that don't have any art in their churches.

You go into the church and it's all white because they don't believe in graphic depictions because they're guarding themselves against breaking the commandment against images.

It really becomes an issue When the Eastern Church comes into contact with Islam, because the Muslims are very serious about not having images, and about keeping that commandment.

And so there were certain ways in which Islam critiqued Christianity in the early centuries by saying, you know, you Christians, you claim to base your faith on the Old Testament, but we're keeping the Old Testament better than you are.

And so some eastern Christians found themselves embarrassed by their use of icons.

And so in the 8th century, the eastern emperor issued an edict against icons.

Now notice, this is not coming from the church, this is coming from the emperor.

And so what we call the icon controversy, or the iconoclast controversy, is in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Let's see here.

The 8th and 9th centuries.

And again, you know, when I say the word icon, if you think of that sort of Eastern stylized imagery, you might automatically think that icons are an Eastern thing.

So if I say to you, well we're going to talk about the iconoclast controversy, When you see this, this suffix class means somebody was against something.

So an iconoclast is someone who is against icons.

And you might be tempted to think at the beginning, oh, I know where this is going.

The Western church was against icons and the Eastern church was in favor of it.

In reality, it was kind of the other way around.

Although, even in the East, again, it is the emperor who issues an edict against icons.

The height of the controversy is like 726 to 842. I'm not going to worry too much about a lot of the details of this controversy.

But what I want you to see is that we have a situation where the Emperor in the East makes icons basically illegal.

In the West, the Bishop of Rome says, whoa, wait a second.

Icons are good.

We need icons.

And so now you have a situation where there's a lot of Greek folks in southern Italy.

Southern Italy was a place where a lot of the Greeks emigrated to.

And so the question becomes, well, do we follow our emperor in the east or do we follow the bishop of Rome?

And we actually have riots breaking out in southern Italy.

And eventually, an empress named Irene, if you know Greek, Irene in peace, right?

Empress Irene calls a council, an ecumenical council.

We've looked at the first four ecumenical councils, right?

Well, we're skipping a few, because this is the seventh.

It's held in the city of Nicaea, where we had the first Ecumenical Council, so this is the second Council of Nicaea, or Nicaea II, but it's the seventh Ecumenical Council, and here is 787. Yes, question.

I know I saw you earlier, but I wanted to go ahead.

That's a good question.

Yes and no.

I mean, the icon doesn't have necessarily a body part of the martyr.

But if an icon is a depiction of a particular martyr, some did believe that the martyr was present in some mystical sense.

And so even to this day, if you go into a Greek Orthodox church, For example, you might see an icon in the end of your way to the church, and it's interesting to watch the different reactions to the icon by the people coming in.

Some people will nod to it, some people will, you know, cross themselves, touch it, some people will literally bend down and kiss it.

So, you know, there's different beliefs about that.

So it isn't quite the same as a relic, but it's in the same ballpark, if that's a good question.

Okay, so, The bottom line is this.

I know we're due for a break pretty soon.

The bottom line is this.

The results of the Council determine what you can and cannot do with or toward an icon.

So, the decision was this.

That it is appropriate to venerate an icon.

To venerate an icon is To honor or to show reverence to the icon.

But it is not appropriate to worship the icon, because that would be idolatry.

And again, the difference here is whether or not the icon is an end in itself or a means to an end.

If you worshipped an icon, you would be saying that the icon is an end in itself, that it is an object of worship, that that's it, that your devotion is directed at the icon, and that's it.

To venerate an icon is to say it is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end.

So it is not that the devotion is directed at the icon per se, but that it is directed through the icon to either the subject of the icon, if the subject is Christ, or ultimately to Christ and to God.

So the icon becomes a kind of a window into the spiritual realm.

Now again, just like with the prayer to the saints and these other traditions, these are ancient traditions that go back to the beginning of the Church, but they evolve and they evolve sometimes in multiple directions.

So what I'm telling you here is supposed to be the ideal, but you wouldn't have to look very far to find some people who don't really get the distinction between venerate and worship, and in their personal or private devotion, maybe cross the line.

But you get the idea.

The controversy doesn't end after Nicaea II. It comes back, and eventually another empress, Theodora, It took the women in the imperial household to fix this.

What we're getting at here is that when we say people use icons as a part of their devotion, Again, they are not the object of devotion.

People who use icons as a part of their devotion, if they're doing it right, are looking not to the icon, but through the icon, to the spiritual reality that it represents.

They don't adore or worship the icon, that would be idolatry, but they do reverence or venerate the icon.

And again, this is that same kind of honor that we're talking about, showing honor to it.

But ultimately, the point is that it is not an end in itself.

It's a means to an end.

Now, the icons, you know, when I say icon, the icons that you may think of are those very stylized Byzantine or Eastern icons that generally have like a Certain colors, a very stylized depiction of a saint or Jesus or Mary, gold around that.

And actually all of those things are symbolic.

And official icons, there's a certain way to make them, so it's actually regulated.

I mean, not just anybody can make a real icon.

You have to train to do it.

But the colors have symbolism.

So when you see the colors, the color red either symbolizes blood and then the person, the martyr, or it symbolizes divinity.

The color blue symbolizes holiness.

I mean, often Mary is shown wearing blue.

The color gold, obviously heaven, glory, that sort of thing.

There are certain conventions that icon makers have to follow.

Noses have to be straight and narrow.

Why?

Because the path to God is a straight and narrow path, right?

If you depict Christ, you have to show Christ with his hair parted.

Why?

Because the two natures, humanity and divinity.

The blessings with the three fingers showing the Trinity, things like that.

So there's very specific conventions that one would have to follow if one makes An icon.

But part of the reason that they're very stylized, and this is the point, I think, that is that they're meant to be very stylized, and some of them seem almost cartoony, right?

They're meant to be that way so that they don't look too realistic.

You would never want an icon that looks like a photograph.

Because if it's too realistic, it might tempt you to worship the icon, not to look past it.

And in fact, in the Eastern Church, icons have to be two-dimensional.

So you won't see statues in Greek Orthodox churches, because that's too close to being an idol.

So in the East, an icon has to be two-dimensional.

Again, to keep it front of mind that this is a symbol of something greater.

And finally, I'll just say one more thing real quick.

When you see Mary depicted in an icon, you will notice that she's never alone.

You won't see Mary by herself.

Mary will always be holding the baby Jesus.

And usually, if not probably always, will be pointing at Jesus, too.

So again, the point here is that Mary is not the focus, but Christ is, and she's supposed to be telling you that in the icon.

as if to say, what she says in the Gospels, do whatever he tells you.

Alright, any questions about icons?

Alright, well then let's take a break and we'll come back in 15 minutes.