Let us move on now to something we have not considered: the beast kings of Apocalypse 17. What do we mean? Well, it would be very appropriate to consider the Book of Revelation at the end of scripture to be the wonderful counterpart to Genesis in the beginning of scripture. In fact, we see that in both instances, the endpoints of each book are allegorical and symbolic and have massive implications for the meaning of human history as we have seen so far in this work. Let us cite the Scripture:
The beast, which thou sawest, was, and is not, and shall come up out of the bottomless pit, and go into destruction: ...And here is the understanding that hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, upon which the woman sitteth, and they are seven kings: [10] Five are fallen, one is, and the other is not yet come: and when he is come, he must remain a short time. And the beast that was and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goes into perdition. (Rv 17:8–11)
Now, a very key citation—St. Hippolytus testifies that the beast kings could be ages:
“Under the name of five kings who have fallen out of the seven, Blessed Hippolytus understands ages, of which five have already passed. The sixth, in which the Apostle saw this, is still going on, and the seventh age, which follows upon the sixth, has not yet come, but when it comes, it will not continue long...”7
For us, the meaning of “five have fallen” is self-evident: St John is himself writing at the close of the age of the First Coming of Christ, which means he is just beyond the fifth light of human history and barely into the sixth night, pagan Rome, making five ages of sin preceding him, as we saw with St. Augustine above. In fact, the beast kings are just our nights of the days of creation, as we insinuated earlier in this writing.
1. The Fall and Noah’s Day of Wickedness
2. The Tower of Babel
3. PpEgyptian Enslavement
4. Pre-Exile Jewish Apostasy from Old Law
5. Maccabeean Persecution and OT Antichrist Antiochus Epiphanies
Admittedly, St Hippolytus does not seem to see an eighth age, even as St Augustine, from above, does not seem to see a literal eighth either. For now, we can concede the concern, seeing as, for ages, the Church has really only had one apostasy in view for Church history, the great apostasy from Public Revelation, which comes at the very end. When no intermediate, lesser apostasy has been in view until recently with a closer look at the approved [private] revelations, it is natural to see the eighth as something that must be purely figurative. However, now that we have a two-apostasy scenario for Church history from the mystics, one that seems more and more probable with time in conjunction with Church optimism amidst our darkness, the seventh and eighth kings can be seen as veritable ages in their own right. Consequently, the solution is immediate: the seventh that had not yet arisen in St John’s time is our modern minor godless day, and the eighth is the great apostasy.
With the above suggestion to make a literal eighth king plausible, and since the mystery of the kings in the Scripture suggests an eighth that arises again, all will fit as well.
The Beast Was, and is Not, and Will Be Again
“And the beast you saw was, and is not, and will be again…. And the beast that was and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goes into perdition.” (Rv 17:8,11) The connotation of the eighth bringing one back to the first will now be seen as utterly profound. Let us work it out. Here, the comparison is between kings one and eight and days one and eight. Day one is like day eight, just as note one in music is like note eight, the octave. The eighth returns you to the first. Day one is Noah’s day, where the whole world is wicked, sparing a remnant. Similarly, in day eight, the time of the great apostasy, the world is also nearly fully wicked, sparing a remnant of good Gentile Catholics and the Jews who have converted.
Moreover, in day one, the world is destroyed by water and made anew, the beginning of the redemption of the world. In day eight, the world is destroyed by fire and utterly made new in the unending New Creation. (see 2 Pt 3:4–7)
Likewise, the beast kings bear the sense; the eighth phase of sin brings with it the image of a former king (And the beast you saw was, and is not, and will be again). Here, common sense says, use the first king. This does work best and is most profound, as follows.
Essentially, in the beginning, the fall "reigned" ["was"] in human history because, before the Flood, God had not, as of yet, intervened to redeem humanity in any significant sense; I believe that this lends itself to the notion that the fallen nature, having never felt the blow of any redemptive act of God, clearly held sway over the majority of man in Noah's day (just prior to the Flood). Hence, in the first great darkness, the beast "was."
But, beginning with the Flood, God's first great act of redemption of humanity, the fallen nature ceased to be the prevailing force in human history, which is to say, the beast was "not." How, may we ask? Well, beginning with the Flood, God dealt the first lethal blow to the fallen nature. When God intervened in this first redemptive action, the renewal of humanity was underway—the progressive stages that will draw greater spiritual goods from the manifestations of the fallen nature—and, as it were, caused the fallen nature to take a secondary role in the course of salvation history, so that, precisely because God is in the process of redeeming the human race, the beast "is not."
How much more so was this true in St. John's day, in that the fullness of redemption had come: the Christ. Therefore, all the more does the fallen nature take a back seat to the spread of the Gospel. Consequently, especially in St. John's day, "the beast is not."
However, that the fallen nature is both wounded and secondary to God's redemptive process, it does not abrogate the fact that the fallen nature still manifests itself in the punctuated stages of resistance along the way, so that kings still rise and fall after the first (like the successions of darkness and light in our days of creation), who was, again, "primary." These secondary kings are then the intervening ones between one and eight. Subsequent nights of sin follow, but because God is redeeming humanity during the intermediate phases of sin, redemption still holds sway, that is, again, “the beast is not.”
However, when we reach king eight, the great apostasy, humanity’s culpability has reached its peak. The fall is back again to stay, effectively irredeemable. How? Let us probe it.
The Unforgivable Nature of the Great Apostasy
In the great apostasy, the world will come back to be like our modern age, and, for that matter, any of the great ages of sin before us. They will return to their former ways—just like Pagan Rome; just like the wicked Jews before the Babylonian exile; just like the blasphemous grandeur of Egypt in her pyramids, or Babel with its tower; just like Noah’s day, before the Flood, and so forth. They will be disrespectful of parents and authority, indifferent toward God and religion, complacent, superficial, drunken, using drugs, gossiping, bullying, slandering, vulgar, committing abortion and euthanasia, sexually immoral in all ways—cohabitation, promiscuity, artificial birth control, divorce, sodomy—greedy, dishonest, fraudulent, and on and on. But they will have no excuse.
How? Well, the world will have had two great dimensions placed before them in the past age precedent to this final apostasy:
• The powers of this world
• The powers of the age to come
More specifically, we know that the powers of this world are not enough to bring lasting peace and prosperity to humanity. “With man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.” (Mt 19:26) “In the condition of the fallen nature, it is morally impossible for man, without restoring grace, to fulfill the entire moral law and to overcome all serious temptations for any considerable period of time.” (Sent. certa.) 8
Without the knowledge Revelation gives of God we cannot recognize sin clearly and are tempted to explain it as merely a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness, a mistake, or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure, etc. Only in the knowledge of God's plan for man can we grasp that sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving one another.9
“God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for...For if man exists, it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.”10
In fact, if humanity fully casts aside the powers of the age to come, that is, authentic religion and morals, yet still carries the powers of this world, the result will be catastrophic—incomprehensible horror. Man, when left to his own devices, will destroy himself. The secular sciences that study the rise and fall of empires fully vindicate this claim: for a time, societies that have no God or gods and no morals but great materialistic power, as in wicked empires and kingdoms with great physical wonders and such, can prosper internally and externally for a time. But eventually, the moral corruption catches up with them, and they come crashing down, destroying themselves from within. I also discussed this in the apocalypse essay here.11
Hence, this leaves us a law: the powers of this world, when divorced from the powers of the age to come, spell doom for the societies that make this terrible mistake. On the contrary however, when the powers of this world are fully united and reconciled to the powers of the age to come, authentic peace and prosperity becomes a wonderful reality.
These truths set the stage for the two great spiritual developments prior to the great apostasy, namely:
• The minor tribulation
• The Catholic age of peace
Here, the definitive apexes of moral lessons to humanity are made incarnate, never to be repeated:
In the minor tribulation, humanity will be shown its final learning lesson: when the world rejects the fullness of all God’s revelation and grace in exchange for a brute and perverse pursuit of this world, however powerful, however magnificent materially, they will learn, I sense—horribly, and in an epic and apocalyptic manner—the full implications of their errors, their sins, and their blindness. They will see their need—down to the last jot and tittle—for every single doctrine of faith and morals from our wounded, sinful, and yet beloved Church and see such need desperately from great pain, agony, and suffering. Toward this end, humanity will never again be ¹ to tell God that they didn’t know the way, that they didn’t know the consequences, and this, with the fullness of God’s revelation and love. Other lessons have been learned in history, to be sure, but never with the effectively complete set of doctrinal development behind it, at least the primary brunt of it, and throughout the near whole of the world—never again. Hence, if another such secularly messianic apostasy arises later, it will be without excuse.
And yet! Even with this, God is gracious, “long-suffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” (2 Pt. 3:9) Our Divine Savior Jesus is not in the business of condemnation but salvation. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (Jn 3:17) Hence, far from condemning the wayward son who repents even far away, the Father runs to meet him and embraces Him with ineffable mercy. How sweet is the love and life forgiveness of the Infinite Father, Son and Spirit towards us sinners, who deserve eternal separation, but who are awarded the affection of a God who would rather forget we ever committed our transgressions, and invite us to love him forever in the wedding feast that shall never end.
Hence, the age of peace! Humanity repents, akin to how the Jews repented radically in the exile in their respective intermediate history, an exile that was a similar chastisement on their wickedness toward the Old Law, even as the Gentiles are now wicked toward the New Law in our own respective intermediate Church history. And what is even more marvelous is that in the age of peace, presumably, the powers of this world will not be lost. Indeed, and unfortunately for various reasons, the great powers of the world that were of Rome were largely lost in the Church’s transformation of Europe from spiritual darkness to light. For this reason, the modern world looks with disdain on Christendom, a phenomenon lasting from roughly 500 A.D. to 1700 A.D., seeing as temporal developments were lacking. Yes, for the most part, if it is true that today we have the powers of this world and not of the other, so in the Middle Ages and surrounding times, they had the powers of the other world but not this one. In the age of peace, they will have both! Science and faith, reason and faith—which our beloved Holy Father Emeritus Benedict persistently trumpets—are not in opposition to one another. In the age of peace, they will be fully reconciled, the fullness of both worlds’ wisdom and power.
Note, there will still be the cross, those elements of physical evil and misfortune that cannot be eradicated from this fallen world that is ever “journeying toward perfection.”
...with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world "in a state of journeying" towards its ultimate perfection. In God's plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.12
Nevertheless, despite the fact that the age of peace will still allow, presumably, disease, sickness, economic troubles, natural disasters, some poverty, and the like, the point is that there will be a civilization of love, per the hopes of the Church today flowing from the missionary call of Vatican II, and the hope of the renewed world of the Third Millennium. In this vein, though suffering of largely physical evil will persist, the world, being in a self-same renewed charity, will live in solidarity with others, and this will enable a true brotherhood of man—a world that more or less fully understands the material order as well as the spiritual, relative to what God desires humanity to know this side of the end of time. And this will last, at least temporarily, for as long as humanity chooses to keep a keen eye on the world that almost was not and to persevere in cooperation with the grace of God.
Consequently, precisely because the powers of this world, without God, brought unfathomable ruin, and, also because the powers of this world with God brought, love, peace and the best of both worlds, relatively speaking, humanity will have no other conclusion from brute and simplistic logic than to admit that the need for God is imperative to human well-being—that without it, no matter how much temporal advancement may be present, certain doom is inevitable.
So then, returning to the great apostasy, if the world goes back to godlessness and the powers of this world without the powers of the age to come after the age of peace, they simply can no longer say they have any mercy left from God in an apocalyptic sense. It will be, as it were, unforgivable historically. Here, one may object, God has persistently shown mercy on fallen civilizations. True, but this last civilization will do so with the fullness of divine revelation, and with a period of mercy already granted once in the minor tribulation. They will have taken the fullness of everything that God can give to a world on this side of the end of time and thrown it in God’s face. Once humanity issues the supreme insult upon the fullness of all that He has to give in this world, short only of eternity, nothing remains to remedy the situation.
Consequently, whereas any individual soul can always attain mercy in confession or the anointing, the world in a social structure, in a historical structure, will be unforgivable, and, dare we say, unrepentant. Here, we can argue this on two counts. One, consider Hebrews 6. The text is referencing Jewish apostates and saying that, mostly likely, they won’t come back (it uses hyperbolic language). I think we can argue a similar context: “It is impossible for those [the world?] who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance.” (Heb 6:4–5) Secondly, “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.” (Mt 24:22) Here, the connotation is clear: in the great apostasy and tribulation, if God did not intervene to end the world, the wicked world would destroy itself, since it is enmasse incurably unrepentant.
Consequently, to return to the discourse on the beast kings, when we reach the eighth beast king, or the great apostasy, then the fall, or the “beast,” is back, or “is again.” Humanity is, enmasse, both incurable and unforgivable historically. No further redemption of the fallen nature can be had within human history, saving the mass conversion of the Jews and that which is beyond the eschaton, the New Creation. Hence, the fall is back again, as it was in Noah’s day. It once again reigns in human history, casting out the Holy Spirit of redemption—getting St Augustine’s restrainer out the way.
And now you know what [the Holy Spirit, per St. Augustine] withholdeth, that he [Antichrist] may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity already worketh; only that he who now holdeth, do hold, until he be taken out of the way. And then that wicked one shall be revealed whom the Lord Jesus shall kill with the spirit of his mouth; and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming, him, Whose coming is according to the working of Satan, in all power, and signs, and lying wonders, And in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish; 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: That all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity. (2 Thes 2:6–11)
This, I argue, implies that once humanity rejects the fullness of divine redemption in history, which is the culmination of the Spirit, no further redemption becomes possible, so that the Holy Spirit is being irrevocably rejected, his restraining activity against iniquity being vanquished, bringing in the appearance of Antichrist. And that means, “the beast [is] again.” Hence, just as the fallen nature reigned in the beginning of human history (the fall and wickedness of Noah's day) [the beast "was"], so the darkness reigns again at the close of human history, where all but a remnant of humanity are in rebellion against God [the beast "will be again"]. And so our theology is perfect.
The Eight Ages: a Deeper Theology
Now that have we have shown a perfect correlation between the ages of the world and the allegory of the creation and beast—poignant Scriptures at the beginning and close of the Written Tradition of God— we can once again argue that these ages perfectly fulfill the outline we gave of the abstract stages of the world established in the first part of the book. That is, the first two phases of world history are the ages of the Fall digested and chastised one after the other; then the three great ages of the way of the saint for the prefiguring people; then the first coming of the Christ; then the way of the saint apocalyptically for the new people of God, followed by the second coming of Christ.
Hence 2 + 3 | 3, where the vertical bar symbolizes the separation between Old and New testaments.
Why Can the Church Still Rise? Why Now? Why Not in the Subsequent Darkness?
Our theology of the ages provides profound reasons why the Church can still emerge from our current darkness but not the next [at the end of time]. In short, the reason is that each People of God must reach “apocalyptic maturity” before the appropriate “coming of the Christ” can take place. And what should this maturity be? Well, how do we measure the maturity of the individual saint? Again, by the Ways! And if Jesus Christ himself is the ultimate of all holy persons of Old and New, the perfect type, how much more should our divine Savior—though Himself needing no redemption but nevertheless passing through the elements thereof (in order “to fulfill all righteousness” (Matt. 3:13–15; Luke 2:22–23)) –fill up these ways, even as, again, per St Augustine above, the three ages of the Jews are “declared in the Gospel”? For, where have we not in fact seen the threes:
Jesus fulfilled in his life and flesh the three ways so many times. For three days and three nights, Jesus lingered in the earth before rising. On the third day he arose from the dead, in accordance with the Scriptures. Christ fell three times in the way of the cross. Christ progressively prayed three times in the Garden to accept the will of his Father for the Passion. Three times Peter denied Christ, and three times He was reconciled (“Peter, do you love me?”). Three times Jesus spoke to Mary Magdalene at the tomb to open her eyes. For three days and three nights, Mother Mary and St. Joseph looked for the Christ before finding Him in the Temple.
And if these threes are filled up in Christ—and Christ’s literal Body is the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church—how much more so should the Church, the New People of God, fill up in Her flesh, the ways of the saint, so that, by way of implication, since the Church fulfills the People of Old, so, too, should the People of Old fill up these ways as well!
This unlocks a powerful explanation for why the Christ came when He did and why He will come back when He comes back. Toward that end, we have a powerful case from private revelation, from the theology of the ways, and from a systematic analysis of the Church’s doctrinal development thus far, that the Church is not at the end but is rather in “the dark night of the soul,” and I feel that that adequately resonates with the thinking and thought of many a wise person today in the Church.
Apocalyptic Blasphemy of the Divine Persons in the Ages
The final reason that I offer for the notion that the modern world is not fully culpable for its apostasy, so that the end-of-the-world condemnation is not yet warranted, is the idea of apocalyptic blasphemy against the persons of the Trinity. What do we mean? We mean that the three great phases of darkness for the ways—the dark night of the senses, the dark night of the soul, and martyrdom—can be seen as phases of progressive blasphemy against the self-same Divine Persons. Let us probe it.
Then he [Noah] sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. (Gn 8:8–12)
What, you ask, does this passage concerning Noah and the dove have to do with blasphemy against the divine persons? Well, have patience, it will become apparent momentarily. To begin, the dove is sent out three times from the ark in the midst of the waters. The first tiame he returns with nothing and with nowhere to rest. The second time he returns with an olive branch. The third time he doesn't return. The dove is clearly like the Holy Spirit. Here, then, the three moments of the dove are like the three ways.
1. The Purgative Dark Night of Senses: Pagan Rome
2. The Dark Night of the Soul: Our Modern Minor Secular Apostasy
3. Martyrdom: The Great Apostasy and NT Antichrist
Each of these phases of darkness clearly represent the Holy Spirit "departing," since when a great age of sin enters, man dispels the Holy Spirit. Consequently as well, when the dove returns it indicates a phase of light in our discourse. In two of these phases of darkness, the first two to be exact, the dove returns, that is, the Holy Spirit comes back, bringing renewal, whereas in the final departure, he does not return, indicating that renewal does not occur.
The Holy Spirit Returns After Pagan Rome
Noah releases the dove the first time, and it returns with nothing and nowhere to rest. In a similar vein, in Pagan Rome, the Holy Spirit went out the first time in Church History, and man blasphemed the Father because they said Caesar was greater than God Almighty. Indeed, pinching incense to Caesar was a primary litmus test in Christian persecutions many times. But God forgave the Empire, showing that Jesus leads the way: Constantine, Catholic Christendom. The dove, however, did not return with an olive branch, a symbol of peace, since in this first great age of Christianity, there has been no peace, no place for Christ to rest His head; bloodshed and division have been the lot of Christianity from its outset: Islamics killing Christians and Christians killing Islamics. Catholics killing Orthodox. Catholics burning heretics at the stake. Protestants killing Catholics, Catholics killing Protestants, and Protestants killing other types of Protestants. Protestants dividing into myriads of competing factions and mutually excommunicating all the others to hell. So again, there was no place for Jesus to rest his head in this first 1700 years of the Catholic history of light. Hence, the dove returns with no peace, no olive branch.
The Holy Spirit Will Return After Our Minor Apostasy, with Peace, an Olive Branch
In our modern minor apostasy, the Holy Spirit went out again; here, man blasphemes not the Father but the Son. How? Let us probe it:
Humanity, in light of the Son’s fallen disciples says: See, the Son's disciples are all divided and against one another, with competing doctrines and worship and hatred toward each other, with their hypocrisy—crooked TV Evangelists, pedophile priests, and merciless Inquisitors. The Son’s disciples are confounded hypocrites. Therefore, we need not the Son. All we need is science and material development.
As we have seen, God shall forgive this in the coming minor chastisement of the mystics, where humanity will realize its need for the Son; this terrible ordeal will show them the true fruits of their errors and sins. They will realize their need for natural law (abortion, euthanasia, drugs, fornication, cohabitation, artificial birth control, divorce and remarriage, sodomy, and materialism are all grave moral evils that spell doom for the stability of society.). They will realize their need for a supernatural God (the deists and rationalists will realize that they cannot be fully moral without God’s help, even Jesus’, and that they need Divine Revelation to receive the fuller picture of truth, even the Bible). The Protestants will realize their need for central, formal, visible authority to interpret doctrine, Bishops and Sacred Tradition, dispelling their countless factions of confusion with sola-scriptura. The Orthodox will realize their need for the rock of Peter and forgive him his many sins in order to allow him to serve them with the fullness of truth. And the Islamics will realize their need for the Trinity and Incarnation, to dispel their tendency toward violence and Old Testament harshness.
And the process whereby this will be attained will be apocalyptic, terrible. It has been said that those people who are not familiar with the fully approved apparitions of the Church will think that the world is ending. It will be that bad. Perhaps, God forbid, nuclear war or other weapons of mass destruction, and war everywhere, as in “entire nations shall be annihilated” [Our Lady of Fatima or Our Lady of Kibeho, who implied that the horror of Rwanda would happen in each nation in the world without repentance].
When I show myself to someone and talk to them, I want to turn to the whole world. If am turning to parish of Kibeho, it does not mean that I am concerned only for Kibeho or for the Diocese of Butare or for Rwanda, or for the whole of Africa. I am concerned with and turning to the whole world. The world is evil and rushes towards its ruin. It is about to fall in its abyss. The world is in rebellion against GOD. Many sins are being committed. There is no love and no peace. If you do not repent and convert your hearts, you will all fall into an abyss. - March 27, 1982, Our Lady of Kibeho19
But again, when it is complete, through this terrible cross on humanity, all the non-Catholics in the world, saving most Jews (the enmasse conversion of the Jews is reserved for the very end of the world, per Public Revelation), will come home to Rome, and there will be peace, an olive branch. The dove will have found that same olive branch of peace, the age of peace, when the Immaculate Virgin will reign and bring it back to Noah. Then shall all men live with the best of both worlds: spiritual and material.
The Holy Spirit Will Not Return at the Great Apostasy, Blasphemy Against the Spirit
Moving on with recollection of the previous discourse on the beast, we remember that eventually humanity will be get tired of their puny, little, pathetic crosses. They shall want complete heaven on earth. Therefore, they will forget that their world almost ended with materialistic power and science divorced from God, his truth, and his grace. They shall return to their vomit like the dog. The dove, then, shall go out a final time from the ark, the bark of the Church: the great apostasy.
Once again, they are without excuse, having been given the supreme learning lesson and blessing from God, the minor chastisement and the subsequent age of peace.
Hence, when, as this great apostasy starts to bring back what was a thing of the past: war and tribulation, I foresee that one man, the most wicked man of all existence, will rise up and say, “I can solve your problems, I can give you heaven on earth. You just need to hand yourselves over to me and check your faith and morals at the door.” And at that time, I also foresee the Catholic Church rising up and challenging this ultimate Antichrist, saying, “Sir, if we can solve, as you say, all world problems with just science, technology, materialistic grandeur, and wonder and, at the same time, without God and religion, and, if you say, in fact, that religion actually has to be utterly removed from public life to secure peace and prosperity, how do you explain that an age ago the world almost ended with the great worldly power lacking God, but that with great worldly power and religion, the world flourished in peace?
Now I foresee that the Antichrist shall commit the ultimate blasphemy ever uttered by man and humanity, an unforgivable, apocalyptic sin: He shall say, “That the world almost ended without religion is purely circumstance. Humanity got into a rut. But it didn’t have anything to with lack of your Church, to whatever degree; and the reason there was peace in your so-called age of Our Lady’s Triumph was only because of the worldly power, science, and prosperity. It had nothing to do with your religion!”
Blasphemy of blasphemies! The Lord forgave blasphemy against the Father, where humanity said that Caesar was God Almighty, for they had not received the Gospel in conversion. They did not fully understand Christians. Too, the Lord will forgive our current blasphemy of the Son because the Son is admittedly messed up. There are 102 versions of Jesus currently: one form of Jesus with a supreme Apostolic Successor, general Apostolic Succession, and the Bible; one form of Jesus with all that but a supreme Successor; and a hundred primary forms of Jesus with just the Bible, not to mention moral scandals galore, hatred, bloodshed, sexual crimes, and so forth. So God says, I can forgive this; the image of my Son has been tainted by my wayward children, and so I sympathize with a world that cannot have faith. I will fix it. Then shall the world know that I am the searcher of hearts, and the vindicator of my People.
But, if God shows the world the incomprehensible horror of what happens with materialistic wonder and complexity when it leaves all religion in the dust, and, if that were not enough, brings them all back to his Sacred Heart and his Mother’s Immaculate Heart, bringing peace, love and unity, and with the materialistic wonder and complexity restored—one faith, one Lord, one Baptism—then, if, after all that, the world spits in God’s face, and says they don’t need religion, and worse, that the peace and prosperity of this great age that is coming from Our Lady’s bosom had nothing to do with that same Woman of women, with Her Heart, with the Spirit, and with the dove that animates it, can God forgive that?
Apocalyptic-ally, no! For, the world will be blaspheming the Holy Spirit. How? As follows: saying that, all along, the only reason there was peace was because of the powers of this world will be saying that murder was restrained by the powers of this world since peace is the absence of murder.
But who is the murderer from the beginning except the devil? Hence the world will be saying that murderer from the beginning was cast out of the world by the powers of this world.
But who is the prince of this world we ask? The dragon! Hence the powers of this world are the powers of the dragon.
Hence, in the end, saying that peace was attained by the power of this world will be saying that murder was cast out of the world by the power of the murderer from the beginning. And this will be saying, in other words, that the prince of this world was bound and cast out of the world by the powers of the prince of this world [science, technology, affluence].
And where have we seen a passage in Scripture where some evil men said that the devil was cast out by the power of the devil? The Pharisees! And what was their sin? Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit! And what did Jesus say regarding this? He said, “Amen, amen, I say to you, all blasphemy and sin shall be forgiven men. And if men blaspheme the Son, it shall be forgiven them. But whosoever blasphemes the Holy Spirit, shall never be forgiven, neither in this age, nor the age to come!”
This can then give us a meaning to this mysterious “neither in this age”. The Catholic Church effectively condemns any belief that someone can commit a sin that is unforgivable before death. The sacraments of confession and anointing of the sick disprove ante-death unforgivable sin. The fountain of grace and mercy remains ever available unto the last breath. Saint John Paul II discussed this in his encyclical on the Holy Spirit: “Why is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit unforgivable? How should this blasphemy be understood? St. Thomas Aquinas replies that it is a question of a sin that is 'unforgivable by its very nature, insofar as it excludes the elements through which the forgiveness of sin takes place.”;20 for St. John Paul, the one who blasphemes the Holy Spirit is in fact rejecting the very action of the Holy Spirit to “[convince] concerning sin.” Such a person is “[radically refusing] to accept forgiveness,” “claiming to have a right to persist in any evil,” and considering conversion and remission of sins inessential to one’s life.21 Ultimately, St. John Paul attributes this sin to final impenitence, hence, making Christ’s words hyperbolic.
But the mystery persists: why would Jesus say, “in this age [will not be forgiven]...”? The apocalyptic theology above enables the solution: no individual human being will ever be unforgivable before death. Jesus will always take you back, right till the millionth of a second before your demise, but corporately, humanity will be unforgivable at the end of the world, an unforgivable apocalyptic sin; we see this for several reasons that are parallel to our consideration of St. John Paul above and the earlier discourse on the beast:
The rejection of the need for salvation: this calls into being the indifference that will exist at the end of time, just as how, above, St John Paul II envisions the sinner who does not consider salvation relevant to his life; I highlighted this indifference in my apocalyptic essay regarding the mystical “frogs”, or “unclean spirits” of Apocalypse 16;22 there; the frog symbolized humanity who exalts itself above God, even as the Egyptians exalted frogs above themselves as being gods,. Also, the frog’s amphibious capacity to live either on the foundation of land or the chaotic waters imaged that humanity considered itself able to live on the foundation of religion but also in the chaotic waters of godlessness. That is, you can have religion if you like, but you don’t have to. There is always the water. The very essence of this attitude implies indifference to the faith. This is humanity in any age of darkness but especially the last, and since humanity will have been shown the final lesson with the fullness of religion in chastisement, this depraved rejection of the same religion becomes the supreme blasphemy.
Comparison to the demons, a radical, irrevocable, and complete rejection: “Scripture speaks of a sin of these angels. This ‘fall’ consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who [radically and irrevocably rejected] God and his reign. .... It is the irrevocable character of their choice, and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angels' sin unforgivable.”23 (emphasis mine) Per St. Faustina in the Divine Mercy Diary, she petitions Jesus as to why humanity was given probation and mercy, as it were, but not the angels, who were immediately confined to damnation upon their fall. She is told, “Because of their profound knowledge of God. No person on earth, even though a great saint, has such knowledge of God as an Angel has.”24 Indeed, at the end of time, as we once again note, the world is rejecting the fullness of divine revelation, doctrinal development having been made relatively complete in the age of peace, although culminating with the mystery of iniquity at the very end,25 so that her culpability is on par with the demons in a historical degree. Too, with the beauty and love of temporal and spiritual blessings immediately in the past in the age of peace, shewing forth that with God, all things are possible, that with faith and love, there can be peace, and only by such, they are supremely spitting in the face of God in an ultimate sense.
Concluding, this sin will have reached the ultimate stab wound to the creator’s divine heart: even after Jesus will have put to death sin and wickedness in human history, perishing and resting toward the earth on the cross with his first four wounds of hands and feet, —even as His grace will rest on the earth in men’s hearts—still humanity will rise up and pierce his divine side to verify that he is indeed dead, the final thrust!
Indeed, again, the Antichrist ascribes the binding of the devil [“peace on earth”] to the powers of this world [materialistic power and affluence], and hence to the devil himself, who is “the prince of this world.” This is the supreme blasphemy, greater than against the Father, as with Caesar, and greater than with the Son, as when humanity today rejects and slanders the Son because his message is confounded and scandalized by sin in the Church and amongst Christians.
Consequently, the Spirit, dove, will not returnto Noah , and humanity must then begin the process that their fallen nature has brought themselves to: annihilation, so much so, that if Jesus did not interrupt the process, “no flesh should be saved.” Yet, Jesus, out of love for his Church, in order that His apocalyptic promise be fulfilled to the end, that the gates of hell should not prevail against it, shall come early like a thief, “for the sake of the elect.”
Hence, in this final time that the dove went out from Noah, he did not return, even as the Holy Spirit will not be able to return humanity to the ark of the Church in the final darkness. Only the Second Coming can usher in the light, the light that shall never end, the fire of judgment that shall form the New Creation, even as God drew the new world out of the water of judgment, the Flood!
"And as it came to pass in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man." (Lk 17:26)
The Parable of the Unclean Spirits
A surprising support of our theology can be found in the parable of the unclean spirits in Matthew chapter 12. In this Gospel, an unclean spirit who inhabits a house is cast out, and the house is swept; later, the spirit returns with seven others that are even worse than the original, and the house is subsequently also worse than when it started.
And when an unclean spirit is gone out of a man he walketh through dry places seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith: I will return into my house from whence I came out. And coming he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then he goeth, and taketh with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is made worse than the first. So shall it be also to this wicked generation. (Mt 12:43–45)
As far as some Biblical commentary, St. Thomas’s Catena Aurea on Matthew contains interesting quotes from certain Fathers on the text, which we can summarize here. Effectively, Sts. Chrysostom and Jerome see the house and man as the Jews, to whom the demons return when the Gentiles convert. Remigius sees similarly that the first spirit can find nowhere to rest in the Gentiles, since they converted. Blessed Rabanus sees the casting out of the devil as Baptism. St. Augustine sees the parable as of a man who believes at first, but has not the strength to persevere and so lapses, leaving the new state of worse affairs to involve not merely the iniquities but also hypocrisy.26 Effectively, these are all fine in and of themselves, but, for our purposes, I suggest the most broad layer possible: all human history and the ages of the fall, or of sin, therein, which is to say, also, our beast kings of the discourse.
Let us work it out. In short, the parable can be seen as an image of the fall within human history, with the unclean spirits as the fallen nature itself manifested throughout the divine plan, from beginning to end, inclusive, in the phases of sin or darkness that we have studied thus far.
The beast "was": this passage can image the first spirit. More specifically, as we saw with the Apocalypse discourse, in the beginning, before the Flood, the fall ruled the house of the world. No substantial redemptive action had, as of yet, been wrought by God. Hence, the fall was the prevailing force in human history at that time. The beast was.
The beast "is not": but with the Flood, the world was cleansed of all wickedness, the spirit of the fall was cast out the first time in history, and the house was swept clean. The fall ceased to be the prevailing force of human history because God was beginning to renew man, to recreate him in his image and likeness. Hence, although greater subsequent phases of sin would still arise after the Flood (namely, the other seven spirits), they are secondary manifestations of the fall (with the exception of the very last one, see below) because they are still in the process of being renewed at the progressive phases. Only at the end, when a supreme culpability and wickedness comes—one that, within human history, practically cannot be cured (namely, the great apostasy and Antichrist)—will the fall be back to stay and, therefore, the prevailing force of human history once again, as just before the Flood. This represents the final state of the house after the inhabiting of all seven spirits as they return with the original. Put another way, the revisitation of the same first spirit along with the seven can image this representation of the fall that was first manifested in the beginning, except this time, full culpability of man is attained.
Seven additional spirits: as just mentioned, after the Flood, the fall would then go on to re-exert itself in seven additional punctuated manifestations in human history. Too, we have seen, by all estimates, that we are in the seventh overall, leaving only the eighth to come at the very end, the great apostasy and Antichrist.
1. Babel
2. Egypt
3. Intermediate Pre-Exile Jewish Apostasy
4. Maccabees
5. Pagan Rome
6. The Fall and Noah's Day
7. The Minor Apostasy [our current age]
8. The Great Apostasy [yet future, to follow Our Lady's Age of Peace]
The Unclean Spirits Get Worse, the Ages of Sin More Culpable
As we see Jesus saying that the seven additional spirits “are even worse than the first” each successive "spirit of the fall", or king of the beast, in our ages discourse earlier is worse than all others before it! Why? Because of the culpability of the ones that embrace the darkness, so as to make humanity falling farther and farther down to the ultimate sin at the end, the great apostasy.
Let us look deeper: In Noah's day, no substantial divine revelation or chastisement had ever taken place, saving the minor revelation of the Flood. Hence, though the world is wicked in Noah's day, the historical culpability of the human race is minimal. They do not even have the Old Law, the signs of the Exodus, much less the New Law of Christ.
Too, without going through the full set of ages, let us look at two more sets of examples: firstly, let us probe the comparison between the Jewish apostasy of Maccabees with the one prior to the Babylonian exile. Clearly, when some Jews fell away and apostatized during Maccabees, they were more culpable than when the Jews who were wicked just before the exile in Babylon. That is, in Maccabees, the Jews had far more intimate history in their hindsight than the Jews before the exile did. The Jews in Maccabees had a renewed love of God after the exile that was stronger than when they had been so dreadfully wicked before that same exile. Moreover, the prophets were vindicated by the exile and restoration. Therefore, with such greater profundity and heart-felt love behind them, the Jews who apostatized in the times of Maccabees were worse, or more culpable, than the ones before the exile.
The second and final example just reexamines what we have seen in the discourse on the blasphemy against the Persons of the Trinity. There, to re-encapsulate, the world of pagan Rome is least culpable, since they are just beginning to understand the Church. The Church has not converted the world yet, the age of the Father. They must be given time.
When we graduate to the age of the Son, humanity is now more culpable for their rejection of the Gospel, for it has made its first great imprint in the mystery of human history. The world, at least much of it (effectively European civilization and its derivatives), has known the way—the truths of Christ—to some substantial degree, and the moral law to follow. But the way in this first age of labor, as we saw it—where the Church has had needs to work and slave to teach and purify against spiritual adversaries of all kinds—has been just that: a mess. So much division, hatred, bloodshed, scandal. For this reason, the world finds it hard to have faith. It rather places its faith in the powers of this world. Because of this, whereas its culpability is greater than pagan Rome, its culpability is not supreme.
When we graduate to the final age, however—the great apostasy—we once again see the supreme culpability of man: mocking the apocalyptic learning lesson that showed [will have shown] how humanity will perish without God even if he has unfathomable materialistic power, and, if that were not enough, God grants the world a period of grace: all Christians are one and a world of love, the will of the Father finally realized on earth as it is in heaven. Hence, the world of the great apostasy cannot tell God that they didn’t know the consequences of their sins and errors. They will have learned them an age ago, in incomprehensible horror, every last jot and tittle. Nor can they tell God, like today, that they have never seen the full fruits of the Gospel. God will have given them that in the age of peace. Hence, in this final age of the Holy Spirit, the world is fully culpable, which is to say, the last of the seven spirits is the worst of them all, and who is mystically also present with the first, who, as it were, comes back with them, which can image the re-visitation of the fall. That is, the world at the end is immeasurably worse than when it started, and seven spirits span the gap, as it were, seven great ages of sin.
“And the beast which was, and is not: the same also is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into destruction.” (Rv 17:11)
Thus, this parable does great justice to the theology of the beast.
Final remarks in summary are now pending:
Objections
I would like now to deal with what would be common objections to the theology discussed.
Objection 1: The Vatican’s official Scripture position on Apocalypse is effectively preterism. How can you give interpretations not in line with this layer?
Answer: Admittedly, the formal, literal sense that the Church sees at this time, although non-dogmatically, is effectively the preterist mode, or at least the view that ties most of the book to the first century of Church history. We should note, however, that the Church, in saying that this is most likely the literal sense, is not condemning other earlier layers of meaning.
Admittedly, futurism is the least valuable layer of interpretation since there is no way of knowing, at least now, that we are at the very end of history (and, in fact, in light of the approved revelations we have looked at, we are most likely not at the end of the world at this time.) And this is even beyond the point, namely, that the type of data that fundamentalists concoct from the text regarding this mode of interpretation through sensationalist eisegesis is laughable since it misses the end of the text: nations, kingdoms, wars, earthquakes, literal time periods of known duration, and helicopters are not the subject of divine revelation. “It is not for you to know times or seasons.” (Acts 1:7) “ And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that ye be not troubled. For these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places: Now all these are the beginnings of sorrows.” (Mt 24:7–8)
Toward this end, I have endeavored to show that the meaning of human history does not really depend on petty details of any specific time period—whether beginning, middle, or end history—but the ages themselves that are governed according to spiritual characteristics, as in, but not limited to:
• The Age of Intermediate Secular Apostasy: Anti-Reason, Atheistic Materialism, and Relativistic Materialism
• The Age of Protestantism
• The Age of Supernatural Death (rejection of all supernatural essence of existence and retention of merely natural existence: solo-ratio, including Enlightenment, French Revolution, Renaissance, Masonry, and so forth)
• The Age of the Martyrs, or Pagan Rome
• The Age of the Trinitarian and Christological Heresies
• The Glorious Age of Catholic Renewal, and so forth
• The Middle Ages
Each of these ages is governed by spiritual characteristics of negative or, sometimes also, positive elements that form the prima causa for the essential history of the age, barring minor exceptions. What the minor temporal history is within these ages is of no avail, as we see above with the testimony of our Savior.
For example, to get at a clear item of objection implied above, the beast kings of Apocalypse 17, suppose we have many parallel worlds like our own, worlds that have fallen and received an Old Covenant, and, after their respective Incarnations, have a persecuting worldly power on the New People of God. We have analyzed our beast kings as ages of sin, but by the Vatican estimate, they are Roman emperors in the first century. Toward that end, does it really matter that there were five emperors who fell before St. John wrote, that one reigned while he wrote, and that one or possibly two came later? What is the meaning or wisdom in that? In each of these parallel worlds, there could be endless possibilities of how the emperors are laid out in this first age of darkness for the worlds, but it wouldn’t matter. For example, if we let 5 | 1 | 2 denote “five have fallen, one is, [and so forth]”, we could have 4|2|9, 3|1|3, 8|3|6, and what would be the difference? For, regardless of how long any one emperor reigns to help contribute to the emperors’ chronological delineation, is not his spiritual condition the same: to consider himself divine and want to put to death anyone that does not recognize it? How then would the trajectory of major history for any of these worlds be any different, since, in the end, we know that the same spiritual principle will apply: the love and heroic courage of the martyrs will progressively move the empire to conversion, casting out the dragon as ruler above of this Gentile world forever and ushering in the first great victory of the Church: “And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying: Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: because the accuser of our brethren is cast forth, who accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of the testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death.” (Rv 12:10–11)
Similar arguments can be made against the five months of the first great woe. (Rv 9:5,10) In preterism and common evangelical futurism, the five months are taken literally in either case; in the case of preterism, it is the time that it took Roman soldiers to destroy Jerusalem; in the common futurist view, it is the time that it takes for helicopters to try and kill Jews; either way, if, again in our parallel worlds, we had the old place of worship under attack, knowing that it will destroyed by divine chastisement on the old people for rejecting the time of their respective Messiah. So again, what if the durations of time for the destruction of this edifice or such, however measured in each world, varied widely. Would just variances cause a radical change in the greater historical ages of those worlds? Obviously not, since, in the end, the place of old worship, or “temple,” is destroyed. The worldly persecution of the Church will follow, regardless of how many emperors reign and to what length, and in the end, the empire will still be converted, all without regard for these minuscule, inconsequential details.
This, consequently, brings us to the reality that it really wouldn’t make sense if many of the details of not only futurism but also preterism would ever be defined dogma, since they are useless data in and of themselves. On the other hand, the meaning and the theology of the ages, which we have pursued here in this writing, do provide profound meaning for the development of God’s plan, to the degree that this is speculative theology. As a consequence, I ask the reader to ask himself which is more appropriate from the traditional Catholic wisdom: largely temporal details of the very beginning or very ending of Church history, or a theology of the great phases of divine redemptive activity in all history, that is, spiritual historicism?
Objection 2: The interpretation of the millennium of Apocalypse 20 as the Catholic age of peace is condemned. The only permitted meaning of that text is what Protestants call amillennialism. See the Catechism.
Answer: Let us cite the Catechism:
The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.30
Now, it is true that since St. Augustine gave us the perennial understanding of the millennium, one of a few ways that he suggested, this view that is called by heretics “amillennialism” is effectively the standard view that the Church takes down through the centuries. It is also true that, per the quote above, any view that takes the literal, bodily return of Our Lord as anytime within human history, that is, at any time prior to the end of time, is condemned. It is also true that the Church condemns any permanent realization of a civilization of love and peace, even if by Christ’s merits, such that the age of love would persist right up until the parousia. And even if a period of love might be attained before the end but not persevere, the Church would condemn any view, per above, that would have such civilization of grace having been attained progressively. Finally, and most importantly, the Church decisively and virulently condemns any age of peace that should be attained on merely secular means, as if the powers of this world should secure an age of human brotherhood, whether temporary or permanent.
Good. But the age of peace does not fit any of these. Firstly, in the age of peace, Jesus has in no wise come again in the sense of the dogmatic reality of the Second Coming. Jesus still remains, in terms of a revelatory presence, in heaven; the reign of Jesus is spiritual in the age of peace, just like Augustine’s time between the two comings. Secondly, the age of peace is not permanent, for, as we have seen, it eventually, at some point, disintegrates into the great apostasy, so that Public Revelation of the state of great lack of faith at the very end is not abrogated. Thirdly, it is not attained through a progressive ascendancy of the Gospel but rather an epic crisis of faith, morals, and chastisement. Indeed, the last 500 years have been anything but an upward mobility of the Gospel but rather three great woes, steps down to the pit: Protestantism, age of solo-ratio, and secular apostasy. And finally, we have gone out of our way in this discourse to show that the only means that such age of peace is attained and maintained is by the grace of God, through His Church, showing, definitively, that a world without God perishes, the despicable futility of secular messianism.
The reality, rather, is that the age of peace interpretation is pretty much the same as St. Augustine’s typical view, sparing a detail: the age of peace is a proper portion of the whole age of the Church, instead of the whole age of the Church itself, as with St. Augustine. That is, in the Augustinian view, the millennium is the entire age of the Church, whereas in the age of peace view, it is a partial age toward the end of history, that period of light between the two apostasies of the end, the minor and the major.
It should also be noted that the resurrections on either end of the thousand-year reign are spiritual. In the typical view, the Christian rises to new life through baptism, and the Church comes to life again through the martyrs’ reign in heaven. Too, in the age of peace version, the resurrection of the just can image the glorious rising of the Church back to life spiritually after the horror of the minor apostasy and tribulation. Here, she draws back to herself the separated Christians and renews the whole world. Also, in both views, the resurrection of darkness at the end of the millennium symbolizes the resurgence of apostasy at the end of the world, when, after having renewed the Gentiles to maturity, humanity rebels in the great apostasy.
Objection 3: But, since in the millennium Jesus is reigning, and the age of peace view places this reign merely in that time of history, and not the whole age of the Church, it attacks the notion that Jesus’ kingdom is present from the outset, at Pentecost, through to our own age, into the age of peace, and beyond. Jesus’ kingdom is present because of the Eucharist from coming to coming.
Answer: Admittedly, Jesus Christ, the God-Man, reigns from the tomb to his ending of the human drama at the close of time. Too, the Eucharist means that from Pentecost unto the last breath of the last human, Jesus Christ is literally on earth in full presence—Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. So, the age of peace interpretation would indeed be heretical if it confined Jesus’ kingdom to Our Lady’s reign.
Here, I would appeal to the dragon scenes as a whole and the places where the Christ dwells in the context of the entire drama with the dragon, and not merely the millennium. Toward that end, we see that Jesus also reigns in Apocalypse 12 from above, or heaven, starting from the very point of his Ascension. (Rv 12:5) Toward that end, for all the subsequent scenes of the dragon until the chaining of chapter 20, Jesus, or the Christ-child, is reigning in heaven, yet we would never question in all these moments that Jesus’ Church is not in fact also present on earth, which is the very expression of his reign. Indeed, and in fact, after this very Ascension, the woman goes on to have several interactions of activity with the dragon, and we know from Catholic theology that the woman is not merely the Virgin Mother Mary but also the Church. In this precise view, then, we can view the collective scenes of the dragon in Apocalypse, from chapter 12 to, sporadically, chapter 20, as an image, if it were possible, of the entire age of the Church, and not merely idealistic pieces of recurrence. Then, without being able to fully lay out the interpretation for now, the sequence can be a revelation of the degree that Christ’s truth, grace, and Church reign in humanity at any one age, so that, in particular, whereas the dragon causes much trouble for the Church in Apocalypse 12, 13, 16, and such, he is brought into great subjection through his chaining in the abyss in chapter 20, symbolizing, again, that sin and iniquity are greatly diminished in the age of peace.
Objection 4: Isn’t this dispensationalism? Or chiliasm? It is one thing to say that there were five ages of the Old Law. But what we are to do with your supposed three ages of the New? St. Augustine omitted seven and eight for a reason: “It is the last hour.” (1 Jn 2:18) The age of the Church is the final age to end all ages. There are no other ages. It is the seventh that is eternity, not the eighth, which is an allegory. There are two dispensations, that is it: Old and New.
Answer: Admittedly, there are only two dispensations, the Old and the New. Yet, by the very theology of St. Augustine, the Old dispensation can be broken into five lesser ages. Are these five lesser ages themselves dispensations? Obviously not. But they are a way to divide up the Old Testament into lesser phases of redemptive activity on the part of God. God is still dealing with the Jewish People according to the same principles of charity: he expects the person of the Old Testament to try his best to find and keep the religious and moral truth that has been given to him or is available, so help him God. This is the same criteria God uses in New: the implicit desire for Baptism is the way that God expects, and so forth for those who have access to Baptism and know of its obligation. Yet, again, the Old Way still had five sub-periods. So why can there not also be sub-periods for the New? Yes, the New is the final dispensation, but are there not also sub-ages? For, is not the world of pagan Rome different from the world that saw the empire fall, which is different from the world of the Middle Ages, which is different from the world of Protestantism, which is different from the world of Enlightenment and French Revolution, which is different from the world of the modern godless irrationality, which will be different from the world of peace coming, a wondrous renewed Catholic Christendom?
Therefore, if the Old dispensation can have sub-ages, even five, and yet be such that the sub-ages are not dispensations but just a way to theologically partition the divine redemptive activity within that overall Old dispensation itself, and since the New dispensation has also exhibited phases of spiritual development that still remain confined to this self-same New dispensation and yet are not dispensations themselves, then we can argue that there is no reason to reorient the interpretation of the creation days or beast kings in a way that eliminates the seventh or eighth, especially considering that, in our analysis, the age-of-peace scenario that gives us eight total phases of darkness for human history in God’s plan perfectly fits the symbolism of the same creation days and beast kings.
Also, as an addendum, in the next essay in the Joyful Mysteries analogy discourse at the close of the writing proper, it was not made explicit but implied by the entire argument that the full eight day, or sixteen part, layout for human history was used, so that the model in question is vindicated by the self-same Joyful Mysteries. That is, the only way to work out the Joyful Mysteries analogy is to assume the new, renewed view of the ages of New rather than using the current Augustinian model. Here, also, since all other data in the pregnancies fits wonderfully for the Old Law, and considering that there is no way to allegorize away any particular month or months, it is fitting to argue that since the completion of the model absolutely requires the new eight-day scenario, the Joyful Mysteries provide powerful argumentation for our analysis of history.
Conclusion
In conclusion, brothers and sisters, we have seen that human history in God’s plan truly does follow, in the big picture, a trajectory of alternating darkness and light, spiritually speaking. Moreover, we see the ages of such, especially using fully approved private revelation, to truly match the Early Father testimony of the days of creation as eight total: five in the old, and three in the new. Moreover, we have a theology of those ages for the old law as two preeminent ages in the beginning to digest the two great lies of the fall, and then the prefiguring people journeying the three ages of the way of the saint. The new ages are then three likewise, the same three ways of the saint historically.
Further, we have seen that there really are two sabbaths in the divine plan: one imperfect sabbath in this world, the reign of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart, and the one beyond this world, the eschaton, the New, Eternal Creation. We have seen the profound parallels between the first age of history and the last age of history. “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.” We have seen that the Lord shall grant, before the first sabbath, a learning lesson, a dress rehearsal for the end of the world, followed by a glorious vindication of his love and truth, such that, a subsequent apostasy will be without excuse, warranting then, the ultimate sabbath, the Second Coming.
We have seen that this final spit in the face of God will be a veritable apocalyptic manifestation of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, a practically unforgivable insult to the love and immeasurable goodness of God, in much the same way in which the angels were not forgiven when they fell.
Also, we have seen that the parable of the unclean spirits provides a surprisingly appropriate analogy for our historical theology. As well, we have seen an astounding, theology-packed analogy in the Joyful Mysteries narratives on Mary and Elizabeth’s pregnancies that fully vindicates our entire discourse, in order that Scripture might, as we conjectured, contain a wonderful, humble, obscure, midway image of the plan in contrast to the more epic Scriptures of Genesis and Apocalypse at the poles of the Bible.
We have also handled objections. To wrap up then, we note that at the end, humanity will have full culpability before God, seeing as God will have shown them that science without faith spells ruin, but with faith, gives peace and prosperity. They will have no other option than to conclude that faith and love are absolutely necessary for relative beatitude in this side of the end of time, that without this faith and love of the Church, the world must necessarily face ruin. Hence, again, when they go back to godlessness after this coming age of glory and love, and, if it were not bad enough, betray the action of the Holy Spirit in this age by ascribing merely to the powers of this world the prima causa of peace and prosperity, they will be blaspheming God in the supreme sense. This explains why, not individually but historically, the world will be practically unforgivable at the end.
But that very end time is not our time, brothers and sisters. We are in the blasphemy of the Son, not the Spirit. Consequently, we can hold our heads high that very soon in history, the Virgin shall triumph, and the world will come back to God one final time, a time of wondrous love and serenity. Let us therefore rejoice that this time of darkness, too, shall pass, and we shall have light!
7Commentary on the Apocalypse, St Andrew of Caesarea, ch.54
8Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, (Rockford, Illinois, 1974), 236
9Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II. 2nd ed. [Vatican City]: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 387
10CCC 27
11Scott Pauline, "Armageddon and the 'Kings from the East'; Probing Deeper into the Meaning of Strife," Homiletic Pastoral Review, November 6, 2017, https://www.hprweb.com/2017/11/armageddon-and-the-kings-from-the-east/
12CCC 1997, 310
13St. Augustine, On the Catechising of the Uninstructed, ch. 22:39
14Scott Pauline, 'Sacramental Ecclesiology in the Loaves and Fishes," Homiletic Pastoral Review, September 27, 2016, https://www.hprweb.com/2016/09/sacramental-ecclesiology-in-the-loaves-and-fishes/
15Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, 81–82
161970 Roman Cathoilc Missal, Rite for the Baptism of One Child, Renunciation of Sin and Profession of Faith, B
17Ibid.
18Ibid.
19 The Messages of Kibeho, The Miracle Hunter,
20(ST II—II:14:3)
21Dominum et Vivificandem 46
22Scott Pauline, “Armageddon,” Homiletic Pastoral Review, https://www.hprweb.com/2017/11/armageddon-and-the-kings-from-the-east/
23CCC 392–393
24St. Faustina Kowalska, Divine Mercy in My Soul, (Marians of the Immaculate Conception, Stockbridge, MA, 3rd ed., 1996), par. 1332
25CCC 675
26St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea, commentary on Mt 12:43–45
27CCC 57
28Scott Pauline, “Armageddon,” Homiletic Pastoral Review, https://www.hprweb.com/2017/11/armageddon-and-the-kings-from-the-east/
29St. Augustine, On the Catechising, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1303.htm
30CCC 676
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