Is there some legitimate historical prophecy to which we may turn? Christendom replies to this question with a clear Yes. Christendom, after all, counts among its sacred scriptures the prophetic Book of the Apocalypse.

Hope and History, by Josef Pieper (106 pages, Cluny Media)

Is there some legitimate historical prophecy to which we may turn? Christendom replies to this question with a clear Yes. Christendom, after all, counts among its sacred scriptures the prophetic Book of the Apocalypse. That book, although not that book alone, has a great deal to say about the ultimate future of historical man. Not so much about how history will continue as how it will end.

Underlying this assumption of revealed historical prophecy are several fundamental premises. We had better state the most important of such premises, or else our disputation on the theme of “hope and history” will run into the sands. The chief premises are that human existence is played out entirely within the force-field of an infinite, suprahistorical, creative reality; that the empirical here-and-now can never be identical with the whole of existence; that, moreover, both the end and the beginning of human history as a whole and of the individual human life must necessarily remain beyond the reach of our experience. Another premise is that there is not only known truth, but also believed truth: information about reality which has its origin not in human thought, but in that suprahuman sphere. Men obtain such information, consequently, if they obtain it at all, not by the use of their own eyes, not by thinking things out for themselves, but solely—as both St. Paul and Plato say—ex akoés, by hearing.

It has recently been suggested that we should distinguish between “scientific” and “ideological forecasts,” the latter being defined by their “consistent reference to a central idea.” Prophecy is then included under this highly dubious category, which at any rate has a recognized place in the field of historical speculation. As a matter of fact prophecy has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Prophecy is either divinely authenticated information—or there is no such thing at all. On what other basis would it be believable?

Now theology—which we might define as the attempt to interpret the documents of revelation and the sacred tradition founded upon them—Christian theology has, remarkably enough, always maintained that the truths of faith for all that they have been revealed, “nevertheless remain hidden”; that the divine speech cannot be totally translated into the linear intelligibility of human language. Something is left over; its fullness of meaning cannot be exhausted by any interpretation. All this is especially true of prophecy, of not yet fulfilled historical prophecy—which by its nature is probably the most challenging form in which revelation can confront the human mind. To be sure, prophecy speaks of future happenings, of the future which no art of forecasting can calculate in advance, but it does not describe simply what will take place. The prophecy cannot be read like a bench warrant in which what has hitherto been unknown is concretely set forth, so that it can be carried around in the head like a detailed picture and so that by its aid the future can be made present. On the contrary, the key which will make the ciphered message readable is by no means easy to find. John Henry Newman went so far as to state that “the event is the true key to the prophecy.” We may wonder then what prophecy is good for. Karl Rahner answers this question by suggesting that prophecy does not, to be sure, make the future a “fixed quantity” which can be set down in our calculations, but nevertheless what has been said in prophecy ceases to be something that “we don’t worry about because we don’t know it.”

Impatient desire to know what the future holds leads to that well-known false apocalypticism, with its searching for specific “signs” and the exact when and where, or even with its claim to certainty in such matters—whereas the true guidance that we are given in prophecy shuns any such exactitude. In the opinion of the great theologians, the very fact that the events cannot be dated is itself part of the prophetic message of the Apocalypse. Nowadays, to be sure, we hear talk of the “imminent end of history” and find even so prudent an analyst as Alexander Rüstow calling the present situation “eschatological in the fullest apocalyptic sense of the word.” To such statements we can only echo the reply given by Thomas Aquinas to the apocalypticists of the thirteenth century. It is: “No definite span of time can be named, neither a small nor a large one, after which the end of the world may be expected.”

To accept as truth a revealed prophecy concerning the ultimate future of historical man therefore imposes no small strain upon the mind. We are called upon to make mental links between things which at first seem incompatible: history, the ultimately indecipherable, must nevertheless be considered not impenetrable, let alone chaotic. We must eschew any handy explanatory formulas, but also refrain from agnostic resignation. In regard to the end of history we are to believe and respect an extra-empirical statement which claims to reveal the future without actually showing it, and which does not remove futurity from what is to come—indeed confirms this futurity—but nevertheless claims to illuminate the darkness of impending events.

Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image is “Hope” (1886) by George Frederic Watts and workshop, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.