week full o' saints

Saints Cyril of Alexandria and Irenaeus of Lyons.

We're approaching the end of Ramon Llull Week, so get those Lullian blogposts up, everyone!

Meanwhile, we've had the feast days of a couple of important Church Fathers. Yesterday was the feast of St. Cyril of Alexandria. St Cyril could have competed with our beloved St Jerome as patron saint of grumpy old men, and in addition Cyril was a man of grumpy actions as much as of grumpy words. Alas, "tolerant" is not the best word to describe him. The Franciscans at americancatholic.org recognize those failings, but they also point out the importance of his writings on the divine and human natures of Christ, expressed in his "theme":

Only if it is one and the same Christ who is consubstantial with the Father and with men can he save us, for the meeting ground between God and man is the flesh of Christ. Only if this is God's own flesh can man come into contact with Christ's divinity through his humanity. Because of our kinship with the Word made flesh we are sons of God. The Eucharist consummates our kinship with the word, our communion with the Father, our sharing in the divine nature—there is very real contact between our body and that of the Word.

Today is the feast of St Irenaeus of Lyons, one of our earliest theologians, whose most famous work, Adversus Haereses helped to solidify both the canon and the meaning of early Christianity. The Franciscans have a nice commentary about him:

A deep and genuine concern for other people will remind us that the discovery of truth is not to be a victory for some and a defeat for others. Unless all can claim a share in that victory, truth itself will continue to be rejected by the losers, because it will be regarded as inseparable from the yoke of defeat. And so, confrontation, controversy and the like might yield to a genuine united search for God's truth and how it can best be served.

Now get your Llull on, everybody.