What should we make of this Covid business? I would not belittle the grief of those who have lost elderly parents or other friends or relations to an untimely death. Yet from my vantage point it has seemed to me from the start like playing at the plague. No doubt the fact that it came from China helped; people have a vague memory of having learned in school that the Black Death did the same. If it had come from Brazil or Nigeria, I doubt it would have so impressed our minds.
I have been living, by chance, rather off the beaten track since it all began, so perhaps my information is inadequate, but I know of no one personally of whom I can say with confidence that he died from it. The only person whom I know who might have done so is an octogenarian who was also receiving chemotherapy. And they tell us that life can never be the same again? This is not a plague: that is when people wake up in the morning feeling fine and are dead by night-fall.
Some of St Paul’s words have been coming to mind recently: Because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved, therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying. Widespread acceptance of lying words of men about what is needful for the salvation of the body would at any rate be a just punishment for widespread rejection of the truthful words of God about what is needful for the salvation of the soul.
Josef de Acosta (1540-1600) was a Spanish Jesuit who became a missionary in South America, and was elected as provincial of a vast part of that continent. From what we read in Cornelius a Lapide, he seems to have been the first person to propose that the ‘beast from the land’ in Apocalypse 13 would be an apostate bishop. I just thought I’d mention it.
In Cajetan’s case, to speak of his commentaries on Scripture is to speak not of the feathers of the peacock but of its feet. For however much his great mind is worthy of admiration in his other works, yet in these, where he allowed himself to be led astray by a guide more versed in Hebrew grammar than in the divine mysteries, he remains inglorious (St Robert Bellarmine, Vindiciae pro libro secundo De Verbo Dei, ad cap. X).
In view of my recent speculations about the identity of the Great Eagle, I was interested in as well as pleased by the recent proclamation by the President of the United States asking that St Thomas Becket be honoured by ceremonies in churches:
NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim December 29, 2020, as the 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket. I invite the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches and customary places of meeting with appropriate ceremonies in commemoration of the life and legacy of Thomas Becket.
I suppose that an alternative interpretation of the sixth trumpet would be to see it as announcing the French Revolution, and, more generally, the advent of secularisation. On this account, the loosing of the angels at the Euphrates, that is, the elimination of the protective shield between the Church and the World, would be identified with the dissolution of Christendom. The precise ‘day and hour’ when everything kicked off might be identified with the decision of King Louis XVI not to break up the self-appointed tennis-court assembly, or perhaps with his own execution.
On the other hand, while the Revolutionary wars, and the wars of national self-aggrandizement which they spawned, killed a large number of people, it does not amount to ‘a third of mankind’, at any rate, not yet. There is also the point that secularisation is a logical consequence of Protestantism, and in that sense M. Robespierre and his friends would seem to pertain rather to the fifth trumpet than to the sixth. Gregory XVI implies this in Mirari vos:
This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth.
I am persuaded by the interpretation of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse (chapters 8 & following) which sees them as announcing seven great events in sacred history from the time after the persecution of Diocletian (itself alluded to in Apoc. 7:13-15) until the coming of antichrist. More exactly, they refer to seven great assaults of the enemy against the Church and Christendom. On this reading, the first five trumpets announce: the barbarians devastating the empire; the emergence of Islam; the Photian schism; the dimming of faith and the supernatural spirit toward the end of the Middle Ages; and the Protestant Reformation (I have written about this here.)
Hermann Kramer, the priest from whom I draw this interpretation, professed himself uncertain about the sixth trumpet. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, he thought that it might have something to do with Communism. I think that he was right, but from our vantage point a hundred years further on, it seems possible to gain an even clearer view.
This is how it begins:
And the sixth angel sounded the trumpet: and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before the eyes of God, saying to the sixth angel, who had the trumpet: “Loose the four angels, who are bound in the great river Euphrates”.
The river Euphrates, in Scripture, is a symbol of the limits of the domain of the chosen people, and later of the limits of the Messianic Kingdom. In Deuteronomy XI, Moses tells the Israelites: “From the great river Euphrates unto the western sea shall be your borders.” In Psalm LXXI, we read: “He shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth”. Under the New Covenant, therefore, the Euphrates must stand for the border between the Church and the unbelieving world. To loose the destroying angels who are bound there is thus to open the Church to destructive activity from outside.
What of the golden altar? St Methodius, who died in AD 311, says that it has been handed down that it represents “the assembly of the chaste” (Banquet of the Ten Virgins, V.6). Fr Kramer glosses this by saying that it may represent the religious orders, especially those leading the contemplative life. ‘Horns’ suggest power or authority, while the number four is commonly used to express the whole world. For a voice to come from the four horns of the golden altar, with an order to release the destroying angels, perhaps means, then, that the world has not profited by the graces which the religious orders, being “before the eyes of God”, have the power to obtain for it by prayers and sacrifices, and that therefore the world must be chastised.
The apostle goes on:
And the four angels were loosed, who were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year: for to kill the third part of men.
No such precision, in regard to the starting point of the chastisement, is given for the other trumpets. This is understandable, on the interpretation proposed: one cannot say of any one day that it was the day of the barbarian invasions or of the Islamic conquest or of the Reformation. I suppose that even the Photian schism took a while, as schisms generally do. Here, by contrast, we are bidden to look for an event so discrete that it can be assigned to an hour of human history. Whatever it is, it leads to a third of mankind’s being killed.
He goes on:
And the number of the army of the horsemen was twenty thousand times ten thousand. And I heard the number of them.
Fr Kramer observes that St John must have been aware that the event which he was witnessing was well in the future, since the empire in his time didn’t have 200 million people in it, which is also, he thinks, why the apostle emphasises that he hasn’t got the number wrong. But perhaps we are also meant to be reminded of the army with 10,000 that confronts the army with 20,000, in one of our Lord’s parables (Lk. 14:31), itself an image of the battle between simplicity and duplicity. When the duplicitous multiply their power by the aid of the simple, do we not have an army of twenty thousand times ten thousand?
These horsemen sit on horses with mouths like lions, and fire, smoke and brimstone come from their mouths to kill one third of mankind. This suggests that they destroy by speech. Fire, in Scripture, can mean various things, some good and some bad. Here perhaps it symbolises lawless passions. Smoke makes us think of “the pride of those who hate you”, which the psalmist tells God “ascends forever” (Ps. 73). Sulphur naturally suggests Sodom and Gomorrah. The horsemen and their horses kill, then, by a powerful propaganda which unleashes human passions, giving rise in turn to hatred of God and finally to unnatural vice. This seems like a pretty good description of the revolution against natural law fostered by many diligent horsemen in the media, schools, entertainment industry, parliaments, courts and elsewhere. As for a third of mankind getting killed as a result of their activity: how many pregnancies now end in abortion worldwide? Estimates vary, but I read recently of a study produced by the Guttmacher Institute in 2012 and published in the Lancet which calculated that in Europe it was roughly one in three.
All this helps us to understand what is meant by saying that “the duplicitous multiply their power by the aid of the simple”. The propaganda fuelling this revolution has often deliberately concealed its true goal by the use of slogans designed to appeal to those who had till then been simple and decent: “every child a wanted child”, “safe, legal and rare”, “ending stigma”, “marriage equality”, ” the population explosion”, “diversity is our strength”.
We are looking, then, for an event which can be dated to a year and a month and a day and an hour, when the border wall between the Church and the world was brought down, and which was followed by widespread, successful propaganda against the natural law and the deaths of countless human beings. It is hard not to think of the Second Vatican Council, and possibly John XXIII’s opening speech or else his decision to accept the Rhine Group’s insistence that all the prepared documents bar one should be scrapped. In the year of our Lord 1962, the mysterious sixth trumpet was sounded in heaven; while Pope John, all unwitting, played second trumpeter on earth.
If Archbishop Vigano is correct, the battle being fought in the United States of America is not so much political as cosmic: the holy and the fallen angels, that is, who at all times are in conflict over the souls and cities of men, are fighting, he believes, with particular intensity now and in that land. The mantle of prophecy seems to be upon him; at least, I know of no one of comparable rank who is currently telling so much truth. When he speaks, for example, of the convergence of a ‘deep State’ and a ‘deep Church’ – or, as we might say, of the synergy of the two beasts of Apocalypse 13 – he is surely pointing to an obvious fact.
Yet I wonder whether the United States of America might not turn out to be the ‘great eagle’ of Apocalypse 12. It is curious how lacking is a consensus on the meaning of that symbol. It designates, after all, something of the first importance: a power, apparently not God or Christ, which delivers the Church from the fury of the enemy so that she may survive in solitude. Fr Herman Kramer, in his long commentary on the Apocalypse, points out that the symbol seems to allude to the Book of Ezekiel, where in chapter XVII Babylon and Egypt are represented as two eagles: the symbol, then, denotes a sovereign power distinct from God’s people. It is not an apostate power, since apostasy is stigmatised in Scripture by some opprobrious image, such as that of the harlot, not represented by a magnificent bird. Fr Kramer writes: “The great eagle, therefore, as a nation, has never been Catholic […] This eagle will protect and shelter the Church during the reign of the Beast.” In particular, it will protect her against the river which comes forth from the mouth of the serpent, a river which in Scriptural terms, seems to represent slander and other evil speech.
This prophetic image fits the United States well. The European powers have all been Catholic, and the countries that have been included in their several empires may be said to have participated, even if sometimes guiltlessly, in their apostasy. That leaves hardly anywhere in the world, apart from China, Japan and the United States. It does not seem likely at the moment that either of the first two countries will become the ally of the Church against the enemy, and both of them have had governments which have martyred the faithful. America, on the other hand, though never formally Catholic, has been marked from the start, in the persons of many of its citizens, by a reverence for the bible and by a sincere desire to follow Christ. It has even adopted the eagle as its national emblem. What the ‘two wings’ might be, by which the eagle gives flight to the Woman, I do not know. If they represent the forces by which a nation is set in motion, perhaps they are the people and the executive; or else, if suggestion lacks symmetry, two cohorts of the people. In any case we should no doubt take ++Vigano’s advice and pray for America.
Some of the fathers of the Church speak of Christ and the saints reigning on earth for a thousand years, once six thousand years of history have passed; some others speak of the antichrist as due to arrive after six thousand years. Is there any way to reconcile this?
The Roman martyrology gives 5199BC as the date of creation. As I have mentioned before, Venerable Mary of Agreda says that the Blessed Virgin Mary told her that this date is correct. On the other hand, calculations of the date of Adam based on taking the genealogies of the bible at face-value yield a date of somewhere around 3950-4000BC. Is there any way to reconcile these?
We are given no indication by Holy Scripture of how long Adam remained unfallen. We are likewise not told anything about the nature of the ‘sleep’ into which God casts Adam before the creation of Eve, although the Septuagint calls it an ‘ecstasy’ (ἐπέβαλεν ὁ θεὸς ἔκστασιν ἐπὶ τὸν Αδαμ*.)
Presumably Adam’s life before the Fall was a contemplative life of an exalted kind. St Ambrose says in his commentary on St Luke’s gospel, chapter 10, that he enjoyed an untroubled beatitude (inoffensa beatitudine perfruebatur). Presumably, too, the more closely one is united to the eternal God, the less sense one has of time passing. Could it be that Adam, or both of our first parents, were rapt by God before the Fall into ecstasies that coincided with the passing of hundreds of years in the outside world, somewhat as an angel can stay fixed on the same thought for an indefinite period of time? If so, that would explain why the martyrology mentions a higher number of years than the bible, the latter reckoning Adam’s age only from the day on which he began to be a mortal man.
In this case, it would be possible to reckon ‘six thousand years’ from two different starting points, thus reaching two different ending points.
It is very striking, as I have also mentioned before, that exactly six thousand years after the date of creation found on the martyrology, the first holy Roman emperor was crowned by the pope, inaugurating a line that lasted a thousand years. We, or those who immediately follow us, will see what happens when the six thousand years based on a simple reading of the biblical genealogies have certainly finished.
* I don’t know why gaps appear in the Greek when one copies and pastes.
The traditional Roman martyrology gives the date of creation as 5,199BC. This is not a date that anyone would come up with by using the Vulgate bible. Hence St Bede, basing himself on the Vulgate, calculated the date as 3,592BC. The date on the martyrology apparently derives from some version of the Septuagint, from which the Latin version of the bible anterior to the Vulgate derives. Eusebius of Caesarea placed this date into his Chronicon, which was translated into Latin by St Jerome around AD 378. See here for a reasonably learned study, which is however strangely lacking a footnote for the reference to Bede.
Ven. Mary of Agreda says that she was told by the Blessed Virgin that 5,199 was the date of creation. Her superior or spiritual director, I forget which, told her to ask again, and Mary of Agreda says that she was again told plainly that this was the correct date.
There was a wide-spread belief in the early patristic period that the world as we know it would last 6,000 years, and that this would be followed by a thousand year reign of Christ and the saints. This is inspired, among other things, by Apoc. 20:22 – “And he laid hold on the dragon the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.” I’ve given some examples here.
One cannot help being impressed by the fact that, starting from the date on the martyrology, six thousand years would bring us to AD 801, and that Charlemagne was crowned by the pope as the first holy Roman emperor on Christmas day 800. Was not this a reign of Christ on earth? Likewise, it is impressive that the holy empire was brought to an end a thousand years later by Napoleon who became first consul in 1799 and extinguished it over the next few years.
For the end of the world was long ago,
And all we dwell to-day
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.
Do we read the story of the woman caught in adultery aright, I wonder? It is often supposed that the scribes and Pharisees were testing our Lord, in the sense of seeing whether He would follow the path of Law or of gentleness, so that they could accuse Him of neglecting one or the other. Again, it is also generally supposed that the words ‘he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’ are meant as a warning not to condemn others while having sins on one’s own conscience. I don’t deny either of these interpretations, but I wonder if they give the principal meaning of the dialogue.
Surely, the trap that the scribes and Pharisees had in mind was that if Christ told them not to stone the woman then He would, as everyone recognises, be seeming to deny the authority of the old Law, and that if He told them to stone her, then He would be seeming to usurp an authority that the Romans had reserved to themselves, that of capital punishment. I don’t know of any evidence that giving commands to stone adulterers was contrary to the popular picture of the Messiah, and would have therefore caused anyone to stop believing in Christ; even though such a command would have been incongruous with the work He had come to do, as perhaps the Pharisees half-understood. On the other hand, anyone who openly pronounced a sentence of death on another person would surely have been brought to the attention of the Roman authorities promptly.
If this is the test, then it throws light on our Lord’s reply: ‘‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’ One might be inclined to say: ‘Either the scribes and Pharisees had judicial authority or they didn’t; if they did, then they should have carried out the sentence of the Mosaic Law even if they were themselves sinful; and if they didn’t, they were not the proper people to carry it out, however perfect they were.’
But perhaps Christ’s words are meant to address this very question, of whether the scribes did have judicial authority to order an execution or not. As far as appearances went, they did not: the temporal sword, in 1st century Judaea, was clearly in the hands of the Romans, however much the Jews might dislike the fact. There was no realistic prospect of their wresting it from Roman hands, nor was it clear that the Romans were doing anything to them that would make such an effort lawful, even had it not been hopeless. Only one thing, therefore, could have justified someone’s taking the temporal sword to himself: the kind of surpassing excellence that Aristotle speculates about in Book III of the Politics:
When therefore it comes about that there is either a whole family or even some one individual that differs from the other citizens in virtue so greatly that his virtue exceeds that of all the others, then it is just for this family to be the royal family or this individual king, and sovereign over all matters. … It remains therefore, and this seems to be the natural course, for all to obey such a man gladly, so that men of this sort may be kings in the cities for all time.
If any of the scribes or Pharisees had surpassed all other men in this way, then he could have justly set aside the dominion of the Romans, and thrown the first stone. But seeing that none of them did so excel, it was just that they should continue to bear the Roman yoke.
Laodicea 