Human person is a true ‘cosmos in miniature’ – Wolfgang Smith

“Smith contends that, in the final count, Einsteinian relativity is founded on ideological grounds, not empirical ones”. John Trevor Berger Wolfgang Smith died on 19th July, 2024 (RIP) Surveying the Integral Cosmos: A Review of ‘Physics & Vertical Causation’ 29 August 2023 Book Review, Philosophy of Physics, Wolfgang Smith John Trevor Berger According to the experts of standard cosmology, we live in a universe which is uniformly egalitarian, a homogeneous mass of subatomic particles. And this purported ‘cosmological principle’, we are told, holds from the furthest observable (and unobservable) reaches of the universe, to the ordinary moment of lived experience. The problem is that this world-picture completely contradicts what seems to be manifest to us, self-evidently, by our five senses as well as our shared, ‘common’ sense of things. If what the experts are telling us is true, then we really are living in an illusion—and many of them have no qualms about telling us just that. For the better part of four decades, Wolfgang Smith has been gradually chipping away at this impasse, and his project breaks new ground in Physics and Vertical Causation: The End of Quantum Reality. First published by Angelico Press in 2019—and now available exclusively from the Philos-Sophia Initiative—the book is an indispensable companion to the Initiative’s feature documentary on the life and work of Prof. Smith, released in 2020, The End of Quantum Reality. It is also the true sequel to his paradigm-shifting 1995 monograph, The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key—now also available from the Philos-Sophia Initiative. Physics and Vertical Causation (PVC) picks up just where The Quantum Enigma (TQE) left off: namely, the discovery of ‘vertical causality’ (VC). Yet while TQE was primarily restricted to VC’s relevance to the resolution of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, PVC probes widely and deeply into the presence of VC throughout the cosmos en masse—not to mention the ‘microcosm’, man himself. Indeed, while it may not be readily apparent by the book’s title, the work is, fundamentally, a study in cosmology; the title simply indicates whence cosmology must, in our time, take its point of departure. For if, as Smith maintains, physics is the foundational science—and quantum mechanics “physics come into its own”—then our entire view of the cosmos is necessarily affected by how we interpret quantum theory. One should take special note, incidentally, that the author’s decades-long project reaches its summit in his last work, Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology (soon to be re-released in a second, Revised and Expanded edition). And these three books—The Quantum Enigma, Physics and Vertical Causation, and Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology, in this order—form a kind of ‘trilogy’, each one building upon the breakthroughs of the previous: a journey from the bare bones of quantum physics to a full-fledged renascence of Neoplatonist cosmology, wherein one finally sees how physics generally, and quantum mechanics specifically, fits into an ordered cosmological hierarchy.1 * * * Devoted readers of Wolfgang Smith know only too well the great care he takes—in the formulation of his position on a given issue—to articulate his ontological distinction between the ‘physical’ and the ‘corporeal’: to the world “as conceived by the physicist,” versus the world as originarily manifest to sensory perception. In PVC, he takes a great stride forward by the introduction of his etiological distinction between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ causation. But since the etiological distinction hinges upon the ontological, let’s first take a look at the latter. Owing in large part to his tremendous philosophical prowess—a rarity among contemporary scientists—when first confronted with the quantum reality problem, Smith saw something to which other theoretical physicists seem to be completely myopic: the conundrums and ‘paradoxes’ of quantum theory never stemmed from the side of physics in the first place. Rather, the origin lay in a deeply sedimented philosophical presupposition—one postulated by the likes of Galileo Galilei and John Locke, but most closely associated with René Descartes. Cartesian ‘bifurcation’—a term coined by Alfred North Whitehead, which Wolfgang Smith has put to good use throughout his authorial career—constitutes a dichotomy which divides the world into two substances, namely Thought (res cogitans) and Extension (res extensa). This gives rise to the belief that the ‘objective’ world can be wholly described in quantitative terms. In light of Smith’s ontological distinction, this is tantamount to the reduction of the corporeal to the physical. Therefore, qualitative attributes—such as color, sound, or taste—are taken, in the Cartesian paradigm, to be mental or subjective. On the other hand, the quantitative attributes—the ‘extended’ (i.e., measurable) aspects—of the world are taken to be the ‘really real’. Quantities are thought to have ontological priority over qualities, insofar as the latter are merely ‘in our heads’ (res cogitantes). What is left in the external world, then, are objects which can be accounted for, without residue, in mathematical terms (res extensae). Smith’s philosophy of physics rests squarely upon the rejection of bifurcation, and indeed he has demonstrated that quantum paradox is itself a byproduct of the Cartesian partition. It is this unexamined assumption which underlies and, in a way, defines what is commonly reckoned as the ‘scientific outlook’, and it is precisely this—not, that is to say, some remaining ‘incompleteness’ in quantum mechanics—that renders the quandaries of quantum theory insoluble from a technical standpoint. Remove this epistemological fallacy, however, and foundational physics starts to make sense. Nor is anything scientific sacrificed in so doing: what is rejected, rather, is a false philosophical dichotomy. The physicist, then, is not, in the strict sense, dealing with the corporeal world—that world in which we find ourselves via cognitive sense perception—but with a subcorporeal domain: one which has been discovered, and to a certain degree ‘constructed’, by the interventions of the physical scientist. And these procedures are what brings into the sphere of observation what the author identifies as the physical universe—the world, once again, “as conceived by the physicist.” Now the ontological distinction, as mentioned above, necessarily entails a complementary etiological distinction. For if there are these ‘strata’ in the order of being—these two different ‘worlds’ so to speak, the corporeal and the physical—then there must be some mode of causation which is capable of traversing between the two, on pain of not being able to conduct the business of physics to begin with. And this defines a causality which is unknown to modern physics: a causal mode that is not field-based, but acts instantaneously—‘above time’ as it were. Hence we have a distinction between horizontal and vertical causation. Horizontal causation may be generally thought of as ‘physical’—the well known relation of ‘cause-&-effect’ operating in space and time—whereas vertical causation is supra-spatiotemporal. The author has thus identified a causal mode whose field of action vastly exceeds that of physical causation. And the central objective of PVC is to bring out the immense scientific, cosmological, and philosophical implications of this discovery. * * * Although first recognized within the context of resolving the quantum measurement problem, Smith found that VC is ubiquitous; its effects come into view on all sides, even from the strictly operational viewpoint of the physicist. It makes sense of the fact, for instance, that corporeal objects do not ‘multilocate’; or that cats cannot be, at once, dead and alive. The intelligibility and stability of form that we find in the corporeal world owes precisely to VC. Smith also shows how VC demystifies J. S. Bell’s celebrated interconnectedness theorem: the phenomena of ‘nonlocal’ interactions become perfectly intelligible once we see that there can in fact be cause-to-effect relations which do not involve a transfer of energy through space. It is worth pointing out, in this connection, that the ‘instantaneity’ of VC is truly atemporal—not just ‘super-fast’. PVC argues as well for the crucial role that VC plays in biology, which for nearly two centuries has been basically reduced to physics, for no better reason than that the Cartesian axiom necessitates such a reduction; res extensae are, after all, governed by horizontal causation alone. Smith demonstrates the invalidity of said reduction, specifically, in arguing that a physicalist biology—by virtue of its inability to recognize vertical effects—is, in principle, incapable of comprehending the physiology of a living organism. In other words, a physiology based upon the contemporary paradigm is able to comprehend an organism only to the extent that it is inorganic! Finally, as he ascends to the anthropic level, the author explains how VC accounts for man’s ability to produce ‘complex specified information’ (CSI). Indeed, it follows upon the strength of William Dembski’s 1998 theorem that CSI cannot be produced by means of horizontal causality: our very ability to generate CSI—or, if you prefer, intelligible forms—necessitates the existence of VC. * * * What is perhaps the most astonishing about PVC—especially to those unfamiliar with premodern thought—is Wolfgang Smith’s analysis and appropriation of what he terms the ‘tripartite cosmos’, manifested, in its respective ways, in both the macrocosm (the world) and the microcosm (the human person). His analysis of the ‘cosmic icon’2 gives us a concise symbolic depiction which effectively encapsulates the cosmic tripartition. The book’s magisterial final chapter, “Pondering the Cosmic Icon,” brings into full view this fecund symbol—to which the author has referred in previous works as a kind of primordial archetype whose presence reverberates throughout traditional cultures—and we find in following Smith’s decoding of the icon the rediscovery of an integral cosmos. But the author really breathes new life into the cosmic icon, and what it depicts, insofar as his reflections on the import of modern physics play an important role in his definitions. First basing himself upon traditional sources, Smith posits that the cosmos consists of three tiers or domains: the corporeal, the intermediary, and the spiritual.3 What makes Smith’s account of the cosmic tripartition unique is that he differentiates these three domains vis-à-vis their spatio-temporal ‘bounds’. That is to say, whereas the corporeal world is bound by the conditions of space and time, the intermediary is bound by time alone, while the spiritual is bound by neither space nor time. One should note well here that the corporeal domain—the sensorily perceived world in its entirety—is actually the lowest stratum of the cosmic hierarchy. From the latter it follows that the physical, or ‘subcorporeal’, is technically ‘below the bottom’ of cosmic reality; hence the author’s characterization of physical objects as ‘sub-existential’. The architecture of this trichotomy, then, is accompanied by the realization that our vaunted differential equations simply do not apply above the corporeal plane, for the simple reason that said equations presuppose the bounds of space and time. Whereas VC acts from the highest reaches of the ontological hierarchy, physics—by virtue of its modus operandi—is restricted, once again, to the ‘lower third’ of the tripartite cosmos. As for man himself: the microcosm is constituted by the tripartition of body (corpus or soma), soul (anima or psyche), and spirit (spiritus or pneuma). Inasmuch as the human person is a true ‘cosmos in miniature’, whatever can be said of the macrocosm is echoed in the microcosm. For instance, while the body is bound by space and time, the soul is bound by time alone, and the spirit by neither space nor time. But it’s crucial to remember that, just as the macrocosm is one, integral being—whose tiers are distinguishable, but not separated, by particular bounds—so the human person is one, integral being. Neither macrocosm nor microcosm is ‘three beings’, but rather one being with three ‘levels’. The cosmic icon, in any case, depicts human nature as well as the cosmos at large. * * * What is also new in PVC—and which will no doubt come to the surprise (and consternation) of many—is Prof. Smith’s final and decisive break with the physics of Albert Einstein.4 While in previous decades Smith suggested that while the theory of relativity may well pertain to the physical universe, it does not, strictly speaking, pertain to the corporeal world. PVC, however, tells a new tale. Smith now lays it down categorically that, even on purely physical grounds, Einsteinian relativity is a no-go. And it turns out that relativity falls on shockingly simple theoretical grounds. The author also provides a brief exposé on several little-publicized falsifications of relativity on empirical grounds. Upon analysis of the basic premises of Einstein’s original 1905 paper on special relativity, Smith finds that Einstein’s Principle of Relativity is based upon little more than the fact that it offers a reason why the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 failed to detect any orbital velocity of Earth. That the principle of relativity preserves the Copernican cosmological principle may explain why—even in spite of adverse empirical findings from Einstein’s time to the present day—the theory remains sacrosanct by the physics establishment. Intriguingly, we also learn that the renowned formula E = mc²—perhaps the most celebrated ‘proof’ of Einstein’s theory—is derivable from classical electrodynamics. Smith contends that, in the final count, Einsteinian relativity is founded on ideological grounds, not empirical ones. …. https://philos-sophia.org/surveying-integral-cosmos/

Nature of the Modern Sciences

by Damien F. Mackey “Universities have drifted dangerously towards utility, collapsing into being mere technical institutes”. Dr. Gavin Ardley Gavin Ardley’s Marvellous Perception of the Nature of the Modern Sciences This, by far my favourite book on the philosophy of modern sciences, I have found to be highly enlightening with its explanation of the clear distinction between science and philosophy – a distinction that is becoming more and more blurred with the passing of time. Aquinas and Kant: The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950) is available on-line (for example at): https://brightmorningstar-amaic.blogspot.com/2010/06/gavin-ardleys-book-aqunas-and-kant.html Chapter XVIII is the crucial one, for it is there that Gavin Ardley, following an insight from Immanuel Kant, puts his finger right on the nature of the sciences, or what the modern scientist is actually doing. Whilst the precise realisation of this had escaped some of the most brilliant philosophers of science, it had not escaped Kant – who, however, then managed to bury this gem of insight under a mountain of pseudo metaphysics. Other minds went close to discovering the secret, but failed to recognize the Procrustean nature of modern science, that is, the active imposition of laws upon nature, rather than, as is generally imagined, the reading of laws in nature. Dr. Ardley will finally sum up his findings in this splendid piece (but one will definitely need to read his chapter XVIII): Chapter XXI THE END OF THE ROAD The solution to the problem is now before us. The quest of the modern cosmologist for a satisfactory harmony of Thomism with post-Galilean physical science is nearing its goal. The bifurcation made by the Procrustean interpretation of physics rescues the dualist theory from the impasse in which it has been struggling. With our discussion of voluntary active phenomenalism in Ch. XVIII in view, we can see precisely how there come to be two orders, each autonomous. The Scholastic metaphysician functions in one order, the modern physicist in the other, and there is no immediate link whatever between them. There is a clean divorce between the ontological reality, and the physical laws and properties which belong to the categorial order. The link between the physical laws and the underlying causes is no longer of the first remove but of the second. The fundamental dictum of Wittgenstein is our guide here. [See p. 98.]: that a law of physics tells us nothing about the world, but only that it applies in the way in which in fact it does apply, tells us something about the world. This all-important consequence of the Procrustean character of modern physics provides the solution to Phillips’ difficulty. [See p. 224. The difficulty of course arises from the failure to distinguish the physicists’ data from phenomena. We are careful to distinguish them.] It furnishes the essential supplement to the otherwise admirable doctrines of O’Rahilly and Maritain. This doctrine of the two orders, soundly based, is very much more satisfactory than such a palliative as hylosystemism. Now we can retain the Thomist doctrine in all its purity, but we have added to it another chapter, so that the post-Renaissance physical science may at last find a home in the ample structure of the philosophia perennis. It is from Immanuel Kant that this doctrine of the nature of modern physics ultimately derives. Scholastics thus owe to Kant the recognition that he, albeit unwittingly, has made one of the greatest contributions to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas. It is commonly stated that St. Thomas showed that there is no contradiction between faith and profane science. This is true of sciences of the real. But for sciences of the categorial we must look also to Kant. It is St. Thomas and Kant between them who have shown that there is no contradiction possible between faith and any profane science. Let us now summarise the contents of these chapters. The Bellarmine dichotomy between what actually is the case, and what gives the most satisfactory empirical explanation, has all along been the basic contention of the dualist philosophers. But the absence hitherto of an adequate explanation of how there can be these two separate orders has been the great stumbling block. It has driven other Scholastic philosophers virtually to abandon the dichotomy and try to work out a unitary theory. This has led to such a scheme as hylosystemism with its fundamental distortions of Thomism. We have shown how illusory such unitary schemes must be, founded as they are on the shifting sands of current physical theories. On the other hand we have supplied the missing explanation in the dualist theory. By pointing out the Procrustean categorial nature of modern physics, we have established its autonomy on a satisfactory basis. We have shown how the two orders can exist side by side without clashing. Hence the Thomist structure needs no alterations but only the extension of a wing to the house. We have traced in outline the slow recognition by Scholastic philosophers of the part played by artifacts, or entia rationis, call them what we will, in the new physical learning which has been developing since the 17th century. The time has now come for this recognition to be extended to a wider field than merely that of modern physics. We have seen in this work how systems of artifacts are to be found in a great variety of human pursuits. In nearly all our activities we avail ourselves of their assistance; we find at almost every turn a fabric woven of myths. Such a fabric is necessary to facilitate our passage through the world. But we must never lose sight of the fact that it is only myths and phantoms. We should never allow ourselves to be enslaved by our own creations: there are no bonds more insidious than those we impose on ourselves. Behind the shadowy world we have created to be our servant, there lies the real world. A phantom is but a sorry companion to any man. It is the real world, the world which ever is, to which we must turn our eyes, and from which comes our strength. [End of quote] Christopher Dawson summed it up “If the laws of mathematics are simply the creation of the human mind, they are no infallible guide to the ultimate nature of things. They are a conventional technique which is no more based on the eternal laws of the universe than is the number of degrees in a circle or the number of yards in a mile”. Christopher Dawson The insightful words of Christopher Dawson (d. 1970) here seem to me closely to echo the sentiments of Dr. Gavin Ardley, in his masterpiece, Aquinas and Kant. The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950), who wrote in his Chapter III (“The Nature of Modern Physics”): The Classical, or Realist, Theory of Modern Physics The classical writers on scientific method, men like John Stuart Mill, and the English empiricists generally, took it for granted that modern physics was, like ancient physics, endeavouring to discover the nature and functioning of the physical world about us. Only, they believed, it was doing it much more successfully than was the ancient and medieval physics. They saw the change that came over physics in the days of Galileo as a change occasioned by increased attention to observation and experiment. They accused the Aristotelians of paying too little attention to observation and too much to a priori notions. Liberation from the medieval straight-jacket, and careful experiment and measurement, coupled with the powerful instrument of mathematics, was believed to be the reason for the great strides forward in physical science from Galileo onward. Physics was thus regarded as a truly empirical science. The physicist was supposed to observe uniformities in Nature and to generalise these into laws. Some varied this a little by pointing out that physicists take hypotheses and then put them to the test of experiment. If experiment verifies the hypothesis then we have discovered a valid law or theory of physics. By these means, it was believed, were discovered such laws and principles as Newton’s Laws of Motion and the Law of Universal Gravitation, the Conservation of Energy, the Wave Theory of Light, the Atomic Theory of Matter, and so on. Physics was thus held by these philosophers and logicians to be slowly wresting out the secrets of Nature, to be steadily unfolding before us the constitution of the physical world. The uniformity of Nature is revealed in the true laws of physics, and renders them immutable. Physics is subject at every turn to the test of experiment, and anyone can upset a theory simply by showing that some observation is contrary to it. Thus physics abhors authority and anything that smacks of the a priori. Consequently the modern physicist reviles the old Aristotelian physicist who, he believes, was bound hand and foot by authority and a priori notions. By this slow empirical advance, it was believed, there was built up this great edifice of modern physics; an edifice which today occupies one of the most prominent positions in our intellectual horizon, while in practical applications it has transformed daily life by surrounding us with a countless multiplicity of instruments and amenities. Although the classical empiricist logicians were not all agreed on what was, precisely, the scientific method, yet on the general picture they were unanimous. [Footnote: See further Ch. XI, on Scientific Method.] The Eddingtonian Theory Nevertheless there has long been a minority which has held other views about the nature of physics and scientific method. In recent years these views have pushed their way more and more to the fore. The revolt has been rather tentative up to the present, but in this chapter we will extend it further and develop its consequences. The John the Baptist of the Movement was Immanuel Kant. In more recent times the principles were revived by Poincaré. [Footnote: Some account of the various transitional theories will be found in later chapters, notably in Ch. XVIII in the Section on Modern Physics and Scholastic Philosophy.] But the new interpretation has received its greatest impetus from the works of the late Professor Eddington, who gave a most elegant expression to what others had long been struggling to articulate. The new approach is based on the mode of acquiring knowledge in experimental physics. It pays little attention to what the physicist says, but much attention to what he does. It looks away from the world to the activity of the physicist himself. To Eddington and his school of thought, the laws of physics are subjective, arbitrary, conventional, dogmatic, and authoritarian. This is, of course, precisely the reverse of the classical theory which believes the laws to be supremely objective. But the new theory holds that the laws of physics are not the laws of Nature but the laws of the physicists. The laws of physics are always true, not because they represent uniformities of Nature, but simply because the physicist never lets them be untrue. Newton wrote in the Principia that ‘Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes’. The classical empiricist logician would heartily endorse this dictum, although he might be puzzled if asked how he knew it to be true. But the alternative view would insist that it is not Nature which is pleased with simplicity, but the physicist. Whether Nature is pleased with simplicity or not we cannot tell, at least not within the province of experimental science. But we know that the physicist is pleased with simplicity and will exercise all his ingenuity to achieve it. The simplicity of the laws of physics, then, tells us much about the physicist, but nothing immediately about Nature. This reorientation towards physics can be expressed very neatly by using the parable of Procrustes, and saying that physics is a PROCRUSTEAN BED. Procrustes lived in ancient Greece. He was a brigand who terrorised Attica until finally he was vanquished by Theseus. Now Procrustes had a bed, and it was his practice to make travellers conform in length to that bed. If they were too short he stretched them out until they fitted, and if they were too long he chopped of their legs until they were the right length. This is a parable of what the physicist does with Nature. He makes Nature conform to what he wants, and having done so announces that he has discovered a law of Nature: namely that all travellers fit the bed. Hence it is that the laws of physics are always true. It is because the physicist makes Nature conform to them. He runs Nature out into moulds, so to speak. A law of physics is not something discovered in Nature, but something imposed upon Nature. In brief, physics is a put-up job. The physicist puts it all in implicitly at the beginning, and then draws it out explicitly at the end. Physics is manufactured, not discovered. Eddington puts the matter in his own inimitable style. [Footnote: Eddington, A. S.: The Philosophy of Physical Science (Cambridge, 1939), p. 109.] [End of quotes] Christopher Dawson wrote, in Progress and Religion (Sheed and Ward, 1938, p. 236), concerning mathematics and the universe: The rise of modern physics was closely connected with a transcendental view of the nature of mathematics derived from the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition. According to this view, God created the world in accordance with numerical harmonies, and consequently it is only by the science of number that it can be understood. ‘Just as the eye was made to see colours’, says Kepler, ‘and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand Quantity’. (Opera 1, 3). And Galileo describes mathematics as the script in which God has written on the open book of the Universe. But this philosophy of mathematics which underlies the old science, requires a deity to guarantee its truth. If the laws of mathematics are simply the creation of the human mind, they are no infallible guide to the ultimate nature of things. They are a conventional technique which is no more based on the eternal laws of the universe than is the number of degrees in a circle or the number of yards in a mile. …. Why is Modern Physics so Successful? A reader queries: “I did read one review of Ardley's book and the reviewer (who seemed sympathetic to the philosophia perennis) said that [Ardley] doesn't really answer the question as to why modern physics is so successful”. This is the review to which the reader refers: http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/content/II/6/167.full.pdf REVIEWS Aquinas and Kant, Gavin Ardley, Longmans Green & Co., London, 1950. Pp. x + 256. 18s. THE author of this book is greatly perturbed about the ultimate basis of our knowledge of the universe, and the conflicting character of modern thought in philosophy and physics. And well he may be. The rise of Neo-Thomism in one form or another is a feature of our generation. No less marked, however, is the advance of theoretical physics associated with the names of Poincaré, Eddington, and one or two others of comparable calibre. Again, as Mr Ardley remarks, St Thomas Aquinas and Kant seem strange bedfellows indeed, as Aristotle and the Fathers were aforetime. Observing that the latter pair were eventually 'reconciled,' he believes that a corresponding state of bliss for the former couple is only a matter of time. Kant's idea of a physicist was that of an extremely active person, by no means content to receive laws from nature, but perpetually engaged in the task of formulating laws of his own which he 'fastened' upon nature, and to which she was obliged to conform. All that is said about the Procrustean bed and the chopper is most apt, and indeed on this view, deserved. Nevertheless, according to Mr Ardley, it is a grave error to imagine that this coercive technique is intrinsically necessary; it is merely a device to secure power for mankind. Over against this stands metaphysics in serene detachment, ready as always to admit the practical advantages of ‘saving appearances,' whether in classical physics or in modern metrical technology, but claiming the absolute title to the possession of philosophical truth. Seldom has the precept 'between us and you there is a great gulf fixed . . .' been restated in starker form. Why, therefore, it is asked, are we in fact confronted with physics heaping triumph upon triumph in almost every department of twentieth-century life? Mr Ardley replies in effect that had a divergent system of 'categorisation' been set up, things might have worked out differently. This riposte is very disappointing, being nothing short of wholly irrelevant, since what we want to know is why physics, as commonly understood, should be any good at all. No reasonable person has anything but reverence for the philosophia perennis, yet this book cannot be said to have helped to bring the natural sciences of to-day within its broad and generous frontiers. Unfortunately, too, Mr Ardley's style lacks attractiveness; it is rather that of a school-teacher admonishing an unwilling class, and underlining for them, as he goes along, what they are meant to learn by heart. IAN RAWLINS Introduction That modern science and technology (centred around modern physics) have been stupendously successful no alert human being today would probably deny. And it is due to its stunning success in our modern world that we humans have tended to elevate “science” to the virtual status of ‘deity’. We, for all intents and purposes, idolise it. Gavin Ardley, author of the book under consideration in this series, Aquinas and Kant: The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950), was not critical at all of the modern sciences as a legitimate human endeavour – a part of God’s invitation to man to “subdue the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Ardley’s Chapter XI: “The Quest for a Scientific Method” is relevant to this present article. Speaking of the early efforts to comprehend the methodology that was leading to such scientific success, Ardley wrote: The great success of physical science in the post-Renaissance world led to much speculation about the secret of its success. It has been the general opinion that this secret must lie in some way in the method employed in the new sciences. If we could discover precisely what this method is, and make it explicit, then, so it was thought, we should be able to use it more effectively, and, no doubt, extend its employment to even wider fields. Consequently ever since the 17th century much attention has been paid to the quest for this scientific method. We have already considered Francis Bacon as the ‘politician’ of the new movement to extend man’s power over Nature (Ch. IV). Francis Bacon was also the author of one of the first attempted formulations of the method of the new science. He laid down rules which he believed would, if followed, lead automatically to our complete mastery over Nature. His method consisted in collecting and recording all available facts, performing all practicable experiments, and finally, by means of certain rules, making out connections between all the phenomena so observed. However, this procedure or method, as laid down by Bacon, turns out on closer acquaintance to be barren. It is much too simple and naïve to meet the situation. Nature in fact is not nearly as simple and orderly as Bacon had supposed. The practising scientists went on developing their sciences along their own lines without reference to Bacon’s supposed automatic method. [End of quote] Dr. Ardley, who was both philosopher and scientist, far from reviling the “world of physics”, which he regarded as “a world of deep and abiding beauty”, was at pains, nonetheless, to explain just what kind of world it actually is, and - relevant to the question posed in this article - “why is it so successful?”: Chapter III THE NATURE OF MODERN PHYSICS Physics and Nature The world of modern physics is not the natural world. It is a remote domain of artifacts more removed from the world of Nature than the worlds in which Mr Pickwick and Hamlet dwell. The world of physics is austere and exacting, but withal a world of deep and abiding beauty. It is this aesthetic quality, perhaps even more than the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity and the desire for power, which explains its hold on its exponents. The beauty of pure mathematics has been recognised at least since the days of Plato. Pure physics has this beauty too, and in addition an intangible quality peculiar to itself which is well known to those who have entered its inner temples. This, rather than the exploration of nature, must be the physicist’s apology. But it may well be asked now: what is the relation between physics and Nature? If physics dwells apart, how does it come into contact with Nature. And furthermore, it may be asked, why is it so successful? In a general way, the solution of the first part of this question lies in the fact that the process of systematic experiment is selective and transforming. Hence it is that the transition is made from Nature to the abstract world, and vice versa. This is the link between the two worlds. As regards the second question – why, if physics is an abstract and arbitrary system, is it so successful? – we might ask in return, what is the standard of success? How much more or less successful physics might have been had it been developed in different ways from the way it was in fact developed, we do not know. If the net dragged through the world by the physicists had been quite different, the outcome might have been very different too. It may have been much more successful, or much less so. We have no standard of comparison for success, so the question is scarcely profitable. In discussing success it may be helpful to compare together two different branches of physics. The classical mechanics as applied to the solar system was generally regarded as a dazzling success. But on the other end of the scale the theory of electromagnetics is regarded today by most students of the subject as being in a state of well-nigh hopeless confusion, although with experience it can be made to work moderately well. Evidently some wrong turning was made early in the development of this latter branch of physics, and with the root trouble, whatever it is, firmly entrenched, the subject appears to be growing in disorder and chaos rather than improving. Evidently it would be better to start afresh from the beginning and drag some quite different net through the world in this particular realm. Such considerations as these should give us pause before we speak lightly of the ‘success’ of physical science. A variant on this question Why if arbitrary then success? is to insist that if a law or theory enjoys success, then, in the same measure, it is probable that Nature is really like the situation envisaged by that law or theory. E.g. if the law of Gravitation is well established in physics, then there must really be this Gravitation in the world, and so on. In answer to this objection we cannot do better than quote the words of Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where he propounds much the same doctrine concerning the laws of physics as we have in this chapter. In the course of a most penetrating discussion of the subject he remarks: The fact that it can be described by Newtonian mechanics asserts nothing about the world; but this asserts something, namely, that it can be described in that particular way in which as matter of fact it is described. The fact, too, that it can be described more simply by one system of mechanics than by another says something about the world. [Tractatus, 6.342.] If the laws of physics were really found in the world, then the laws would tell us something about the world. But if the laws of physics are superimposed on the world, then the laws themselves tell us nothing about the world. [Footnote: This incidentally provides the solution to the controversy which raged throughout the Middle Ages concerning the status of the various systems of astronomy. See Appendix.] Only the character of the particular description which we effect in terms of the super-imposed law has any bearing on the world. It is only in this second order manner that we make contact with the world. …. Hence there is no foundation for the assertion that in modern physics a law or theory, if successful, tells us what Nature is like. This is a most important conclusion. [End of quote] Yes, the key issue is, as Ardley has put it, “what is the standard of success?” In the writings of two recent popes, Benedict and the present pope, Francis - neither of whom could be accused of being anti-mathematics or anti-science (see below e.g. Benedict’s XVI “the magnificent mathematics of creation”) - one can discern the two orders about which Ardley has written, both legitimate, but with the higher order deserving of the more attention. Josef Ratzinger/Pope Benedict, writing in has this to say about the limitations of modern science, of “functional truth”, and how the total pursuit (idolisation) of it can make one blind to ““truth” itself”: …. Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognize truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world. At this point, modern man is tempted to say: Creation has become intelligible to us through science. Indeed, Francis S. Collins, for example, who led the Human Genome Project, says with joyful astonishment: "The language of God was revealed" (The Language of God, p. 122). Indeed, in the magnificent mathematics of creation, which today we can read in the human genetic code, we recognize the language of God. But unfortunately not the whole language. The functional truth about man has been discovered. But the truth about man himself — who he is, where he comes from, what he should do, what is right, what is wrong — this unfortunately cannot be read in the same way. Hand in hand with growing knowledge of functional truth there seems to be an increasing blindness toward "truth" itself — toward the question of our real identity and purpose. [End of quote] Recently someone on TV remarked that “technology has made everything possible”. That it “has improved our health, provided us with a far better lifestyle, and can even bring about peace”. No one argues that science and technology have brought massive material, at least, benefits to our world. And, following Dr. Ardley (and having to disagree with his reviewer, Rawlins), one could say that perhaps it could have provided us with even greater benefits, here and there, if researchers had, say, ‘dragged some quite different net through the world in this particular realm’. But has science and technology actually made our world a happier place in which to live? And is there really a technologically-achieved peace? No, because modern science has not within itself the capacity to bring a deeper peace. That is apparent from Benedict’s comment above that a full immersion in the pursuit of “the functional truth about man” must inevitably lead to “an increasing blindness toward “truth” itself — toward the question of our real identity and purpose”. Hence, the modern phenomenon of ‘identity crisis’, hence alienation, often leading to suicide. Pope Francis has, I believe, come to the rescue with his blueprint for the modern world, Laudato Si’, which, by no means decrying the pursuit of genuine scientific endeavour, warns of excess. Sometimes, less is more. Pope Francis puts modern ‘progress’ into a real perspective when he writes: Pollution, waste and the throwaway culture 20. Some forms of pollution are part of people’s daily experience. Exposure to atmospheric pollutants produces a broad spectrum of health hazards, especially for the poor, and causes millions of premature deaths. People take sick, for example, from breathing high levels of smoke from fuels used in cooking or heating. There is also pollution that affects everyone, caused by transport, industrial fumes, substances which contribute to the acidification of soil and water, fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and agrotoxins in general. Technology, which, linked to business interests, is presented as the only way of solving these problems, in fact proves incapable of seeing the mysterious network of relations between things and so sometimes solves one problem only to create others. 21. Account must also be taken of the pollution produced by residue, including dangerous waste present in different areas. Each year hundreds of millions of tons of waste are generated, much of it non-biodegradable, highly toxic and radioactive, from homes and businesses, from construction and demolition sites, from clinical, electronic and industrial sources. The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish. Industrial waste and chemical products utilized in cities and agricultural areas can lead to bioaccumulation in the organisms of the local population, even when levels of toxins in those places are low. Frequently no measures are taken until after people’s health has been irreversibly affected. 22. These problems are closely linked to a throwaway culture which affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish. To cite one example, most of the paper we produce is thrown away and not recycled. It is hard for us to accept that the way natural ecosystems work is exemplary: plants synthesize nutrients which feed herbivores; these in turn become food for carnivores, which produce significant quantities of organic waste which give rise to new generations of plants. But our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by-products. We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them. A serious consideration of this issue would be one way of counteracting the throwaway culture which affects the entire planet, but it must be said that only limited progress has been made in this regard. [End of quote] I have found some of what Pope Francis has to say in this Encyclical letter very Ardleian. This led me to write in my article: ‘For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing’. (Luke 12:23) https://www.academia.edu/13601104/_For_life_is_more_than_food_and_the_body_more_than_clothing_._Luke_12_23_ Quality Over Quantity What appeals to me personally about the pope’s Laudato Si’ encyclical letter is the resonance I find in parts of it with my favourite book on the philosophy of science, Dr. Gavin Ardley’s Aquinas and Kant: The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950). …. Whereas the ancient sciences (scientiae) involved a study of actual reality, the more abstract modern sciences (e.g. theoretical physics), involve, as Immanuel Kant had rightly discerned, an active imposition of a priori concepts upon reality. In other words, these ‘sciences’ are largely artificial (or ‘categorial’) - their purpose being generally utilitarian. Ardley tells of it (Ch. VI: Immanuel Kant): Kant’s great contribution was to point out the revolution in natural science effected by Galileo and Bacon and their successors. This stands in principle even though all the rest of his philosophy wither away. Prior to Galileo people had been concerned with reading laws in Nature. After Galileo they read laws into Nature. His clear recognition of this fact makes Kant the fundamental philosopher of the modern world. It is the greatest contribution to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas. But this has to be dug patiently out of Kant. Kant himself so overlaid and obscured his discovery that is has ever since gone well nigh unrecognised. We may, in fact we must, refrain from following Kant in his doctrine of metaphysics. The modelling of metaphysics on physics was his great experiment. The experiment is manifestly a failure, in pursuit of what he mistakenly believed to be the best interests of metaphysics. But, putting the metaphysical experiment aside, the principle on which it was founded abides, the principle of our categorial activity. Later, in Ch. XVIII, we will see in more detail how this principle is essential to the modern development of the philosophia perennis. Kant was truly the philosopher of the modern world when we look judiciously at his work. As a motto for the Kritik Kant actually quotes a passage from Francis Bacon in which is laid down the programme for the pursuit of human utility and power. [Footnote: The passage is quoted again in this work on [Ardley’s] p. 47.] As we saw in Ch. IV, it was Bacon above all who gave articulate expression to the spirit behind the new science. Now we see that it was Kant who, for the first time, divined the nature of the new science. If Bacon was the politician of the new régime, Kant was its philosopher although a vastly over-ambitious one. It appears to be this very sort of Baconian “régime” that pope Francis is currently challenging, at least, according to Stephen White’s estimation: While much has been said about the pope’s embrace of the scientific evidence of climate change and the dangers it poses, the irony is that he addresses this crisis in a way that calls into question some of the oldest and most basic assumptions of the scientific paradigm. Francis Bacon and René Descartes — two fathers of modern science in particular — would have shuddered at this encyclical. Bacon was a man of many talents — jurist, philosopher, essayist, lord chancellor of England — but he’s mostly remembered today as the father of the scientific method. He is also remembered for suggesting that nature ought to be “bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.” Descartes, for his part, hoped that the new science he and men like Bacon were developing would make us, in his words, “masters and possessors of nature.” At the very outset of the encyclical, before any mention of climate change or global warming, Pope Francis issues a challenge to the Baconian and Cartesian view, which sees the world as so much raw material to be used as we please. Neither Descartes nor Bacon is mentioned by name, but the reference is unmistakable. Pope Francis insists that humanity’s “irresponsible use and abuse” of creation has come about because we “have come to see ourselves as [the Earth’s] lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.” Not truth, but power lust, will be the prime motivation of these, the Earth’s “lords and masters”, or, as Ardley has put it, “not to know the world but to control it”: What was needed was for someone to point out clearly the ‘otherness’ of post-Galilean physical science, i.e. the fact that it is, in a sense, cut off from the rest of the world, and is the creation of man himself. The new science has no metaphysical foundations and no metaphysical implications. Kant had the clue to this ‘otherness’ in the categorial theory, but he took the rest of the world with him in the course of the revolution and hence only succeeded in the end in missing the point. Most people since then, rightly sceptical about Kant’s wholesale revolution, have been quite hostile to the Kantian system in general. Others, perhaps without realising it, have rewritten the revolution in their own terms, and thus have perpetuated Kant’s principal errors (as e.g. Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). A thorough sifting out of Kant has long been required in order to separate the gold from the dross. …. Kant’s mistake was to think that the world had to be transformed to know it. The truth is that the world may be transformed, if we so dictate, and then it is not to know the world but to control it. …. [End of quote] I went on to muse about a possible Ardleian connection: From what follows, I wonder if the pope - or at least White in his comments - may have read Ardley’s book. Dr. Ardley had (on p. 5) pointed out that there are two ways of going about the process of analyzing or dissecting something, depending on one’s purpose. And he well illustrated his point by comparing the practices of the anatomist and the butcher. When an anatomist dissects an animal, he traces out the real structure of the animal; he lays bare the veins, the nerves, the muscles, the organs, and so on. “He reveals the actual structure which is there before him waiting to be made manifest”. The butcher, on the other hand, is not concerned about the natural structure of the animal as he chops it up; he wants to cut up the carcass into joints suitable for domestic purposes. In his activities the butcher ruthlessly cleaves across the real structure laid bare so patiently by the anatomist. “The anatomist finds his structure, the butcher makes his”. Thus White: “Put another way, Pope Francis insists that the material world isn’t just mere stuff to be dissected, studied, manipulated, and then packaged off to be sold into service of human wants and needs”. And again: “The utilitarian mindset that treats creation as so much “raw material to be hammered into useful shape” inevitably leads us to see human beings through the same distorted lens”. White continues: The pope repeatedly warns against the presumption that technological advances, in themselves, constitute real human progress. In a typical passage, he writes, “There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.” The pope writes critically of “irrational confidence in progress and human abilities.” He writes hopefully of a time when “we can finally leave behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress.” Nevertheless: This isn’t to say that Pope Francis is anti-technology or even, as some have suggested, anti-modern, but he is deeply critical of both our technological mindset and modernity’s utilitarian propensities. While he acknowledges with gratitude the benefits humanity has derived from modern technology, which has “remedied countless evils which used to harm and limit human beings,” he also calls into question — forcefully — the idea that utility is the proper measure of our interaction with creation. [End of quote] There may be a better way of doing things in the pursuit of what pope Francis calls an “integral ecology [which] transcend[s] the language of mathematics and biology, and take[s] us to the heart of what it is to be human”. A too rigid mathematics can make for a cruel master. Gavin Ardley’s Obituary [This Obituary of her father was kindly indicated to me by Gavin’s daughter, Elizabeth. Taken from: http://prudentia.auckland.ac.nz/index.php/prudentia/article/view/783/739]. We received earlier this year the sad news of Gavin Ardley’s death on 12 March [1992?]. Among other achievements in his life, he was a founder of Prudentia, and devoted to its fortunes a great deal of energy and affection. He had also been a member of the Department of Philosophy in the University of Auckland for twenty five years, retiring in 1981. Since we announced his death briefly in our last number, several people have written to us, recording their sorrow and respect. Dr Bruce Harris writes from Macquarie: I first met Gavin Ardley in England, and then knew him as a colleague at Auckland for many years. It soon became apparent that Gavin had much in common with the Classics staff, particularly through his deep attachment to Plato and his love of teaching the Platonic text in the setting of Greek philosophy generally. He valued the study of ancient thought not only for its inherent worth but as the source of those humane values he sought to practise in his own work as an academic. The intellectual history of the western world was for him a continuum from its ancient past, and his religious convictions were also closely linked with that history. His contributions to Prudentia reflected the breadth of his interests and his essential humanitas. He had only a limited sympathy with the linguistic philosophy fashionable in modern Philosophy departments, and would like to claim that it began as footnotes to Plato! The journal began from conversations we had in the late sixties, springing from a feeling that the usual journals in our fields did not sufficiently encourage cross-disciplinary interests. It was launched on a shoe-string budget, dependent entirely on the good offices of Mr Mortimer of the University Bindery. It is good to see that its title has been retained and that its scope is still wide — ‘the thought, literature, and history of the ancient world and their tradition’. In these days of relative neglect of the humanities in universities (at least in funding), it is important that those working in ancient studies and the source of our whole western intellectual tradition be seen to present a united front. Gavin Ardley certainly adorned that tradition in Auckland. Dr Dougal Blyth writes: I knew Gavin only in the final years of his long teaching career at Auckland, when he supervised a research essay on Aristotle’s Metaphysics for me, and taught courses on Plato’s Laws and Republic, which I attended as part of my M.A. in 1979-1980. I was one of a small group of postgraduate students Gavin then had, including Hermann de Zocte, Paul Beech and Carl Page, among others. Gavin’s method of teaching was leisurely, ordered, measured. He displayed in his own pedagogic manner the aversion to that ‘enthusiasm’, as he called it, which he thought so little of in passionate polemic. Among the scholarship on the importance of leisure in education and philosophy to which he directed our attention was a paper of his own on the role of play in Plato’s philosophy, and the balance to be had between the pedant and the boor (a very Aristotelian ideal). In teaching the Laws, he emphasized the appropriateness and significance, for the meaning of the dialogue, of its speakers and their context: old noblemen, with nothing better to do in the heat of the sun than to rest in the shade and discuss government; a conversation neither idle nor practical. Just such a conception seemed to govern the pace and direction of his readings from lecture notes and small group discussion, which form his postgraduate teaching took. I found Gavin’s mode of direction of my independent work congenial, useful and, again, relaxed. In suggesting additions to my bibliography, he drew upon a wide reading knowledge beyond the confines of recent analytical criticism of Aristotle. He delicately elicited slightly more precise formulations of my points, indicating questions yet to be addressed, in a manner almost suggestive of the possibility that if one was so inclined, one might just as well overlook them. One day I was surprised to hear him encourage ‘the clash of ideas’; another to find him asleep in his office armchair. After he retired, I saw Gavin relatively frequently about the campus and in the University Library, researching in the New Zealand and Pacific collection, during the few years before I left to study overseas. He certainly approved, from a distance, of my efforts with the classical tongues. I met him again when I returned on a visit in 1986. He walked more slowly and had more time to chat, quite willing to stop and hear about my intervening experiences and plans. His ever urbane yet humble manner, his cheery yet reserved demeanour, and his kind eye, along with a spirit seemingly embodying a model of gentlemanliness from another, more refined age, will remain as a cornerstone for me of my memories of those years as a student at the University of Auckland. John Morton, Emeritus Professor of Zoology, wrote in the University News: Born in 1915, Gavin Ardley graduated from Melbourne University in both physics and philosophy. For a spell he lectured in nuclear physics and studied the beta ray spectrum of Radium E. From war service in northern Australia, he went to Britain where he researched on Galileo. He came back in 1948 to teach science at Geelong Grammar School. 1954 to 1955 saw him back in Scotland as a master at Gordonstoun. After the war Gavin had a year’s working spell in the Australian outback, moving about by railway jigger. This was an experience he was to value all his life. It was in the bush camps, with their assorted human company, that he determined his future should be in philosophy. This was to bring him to Auckland in 1957. In a University where we could still easily get to know each other, Gavin Ardley was a colleague to be valued. He came to stand for some important things. He’d have been wryly amused if told this. Yet he felt an intense privilege in belonging to the University. Drawing from the past capital of generosity and freedom, he believed we were also there to extend it. He knew how to use time unhurriedly. He’d have deplored nothing so much as crowded classes and syllabi, with students thinking themselves there to be crammed. Universities, he was one to say, ‘have drifted dangerously towards utility, collapsing into being mere technical institutes’. Right through the years Gavin was to take seriously the ties of friendship. As president of the Senior Common Room, in the old Pembridge days across Princes St, he did much to create its early bonds. In the University his personal links went well beyond his own discipline, spacious enough as philosophy (still with psychology and politics) must at first have been. But Gavin’s command also of science, history, theology, English literature, international politics was wide and impressive. With an acute, inquiring mind, there never seemed to be the astringence that would have made him a specialist or, in the modern research sense, a deep-sampler. More than analytic, his world view was reconciling, unfashionable for a philosopher as it might seem. ‘Today’, he once lamented, ‘world views are optional extras, a matter of personal taste, carrying no authority. So we all just muddle along’. For Gavin Ardley, as with Catholic St Anselm, belief needed to precede understanding. On such foundation, any accounting for the world had to rest; never, he would insist, to be ‘comprehended’. But enough of it could be ‘apprehended’ to be enjoyed. It was with this enjoyment — ‘play’ in its best understanding — that he believed philosophy, or even the stringent, self-critical discipline of science, was to be done. For Gavin it involved, too, the versatility to get along with all kinds of people and fortunes. Gavin Ardley’s lectures were beautifully structured and delivered. He was among the last of us to keep the traditional gown. For the last lecture I heard him give (it was on Martin Buber), he’d been called in from retirement and began without introduction. Fascinated, a student broke in, ‘But who are you? Where do you come from?’ With bland enjoyment Gavin explained, ‘I’m a gardener’. In retirement he was devoted to his home garden in Parnell. With the same temper he seemed to cultivate his scholarly field, and to see the world. He never lost his fascination with travel, as in Europe and the Middle East. Above all, there was his abiding love of outback Australia. In Auckland for many years he was a keen stalwart of a tramping group. In political caste Gavin Ardley had to be accounted a fine vintage Tory. Get an ideology, he’d have said, and you’re dead. So he revered Burke. And he most of all distrusted intellectual Pharisaism, and what used to pass for ‘enthusiasm’. He disliked supposed thought that was ill-thought or shoddy. Like modern Oakeshott he might have accepted politics as a civil ‘conversation’. Carried on with integrity, it could occasionally be serviceable to the world. Gavin’s interests in policy and diplomacy went almost globe-wide. As its president, he was to bring Auckland’s Institute International Affairs to a new level of life, with a choice of exciting contemporary speakers. Of his writings, the most pleasurable to a layperson is perhaps his Renovation of Berkeley's Philosophy (1968). Just as lucid was the early book Aquinas and Kant: the Foundation of Modern Science (1949). He jointly founded and edited the classics/ philosophy periodical Prudentia. Here I recall his elegant little essay on Aristotle’s respect for particulars and the diversity of things; it showed me — inter alia — why Aristotle is still the prototypal biologist. Almost to the close of his life Gavin Ardley kept his Common Room ties alive. Where else, but in the opportunity of such exchange, was the centre of a university? He was a generous man that books read, good talk, and the silence of the outback had all contributed to form. Like his own notion of the philosopher, he was himself a ‘grave-merry man on the side of common sense’. In his retired years we’d know where to find him, coming in to Old Government House late on Fridays with the familiar black beret Hilaire Belloc might have worn. As the years drew in, these visits got fewer. I wish that, on those last Fridays, I’d turned up more often. ….

US Founding Fathers were hardly Christian

“Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it!!!’.” John Adams Steven Morris has written (1995): https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-08-03-me-30974-story.html#:~:text=According%20to%20this%20Orwellian%20revision,the%20relevance%20of%20the%20Bible. America’s Unchristian Beginnings: Founding Fathers: Most, despite preachings of our pious right, were deists who rejected the divinity of Jesus. The Christian right is trying to rewrite the history of the United States as part of its campaign to force its view of religion on others who ask merely to be left alone. According to this Orwellian revision, the Founding Fathers were devout Christians who envisioned a Christian nation. Not true. The early presidents and patriots were generally deists or Unitarians, believing in some form of impersonal Providence but rejecting the divinity of Jesus and the relevance of the Bible. * Thomas Paine, pamphleteer whose manifestoes encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the War of Independence: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.” * George Washington, first President: He seems to have had the characteristic unconcern of the 18th-Century deist for the forms and creeds of institutional religions. Although he often referred to Providence as an impersonal force, remote and abstract, he never declared himself to be a Christian, either in contemporary reports or his voluminous correspondence. Washington championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When John Murray, a Universalist who denied the existence of hell, was invited to become an Army chaplain, other chaplains petitioned Washington to reject him. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed, Washington uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance. * John Adams, second President: Drawn to the study of law but facing pressure from his father to become a clergyman, he wrote that he found among lawyers “a noble air and gallant achievements” but among the clergy, the “pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces.” Late in life he wrote, “Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it!!!’ ” It was during Adams’ presidency that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” This treaty with the Islamic state of Tripoli had been written and concluded by Joel Barlow during Washington’s Administration. * Thomas Jefferson, third President and author of the Declaration of Independence: “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.” He referred to the Book of Revelations as “the ravings of a maniac” and in further criticism of the Bible he wrote: “The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and preeminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.” * James Madison, fourth President and father of the Constitution: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise,” he wrote. “During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” * Ethan Allen, whose capture of Ft. Ticonderoga while commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire the country to pursue the War of Independence: “That Jesus Christ was not God is evident from his own words.” Allen also wrote that he was generally “Denominated a deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian.” Allen stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked if he promised “to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God.” Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God referred to was the god of nature, and the laws those “written in the great book of Nature.” * Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention: “As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion . . . has received various corruption changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.” He died a month later, a deist, not a Christian. See also these articles: Benjamin Franklin linked to the occult https://www.academia.edu/62202808/Benjamin_Franklin_linked_to_the_occult and: Islam and early America (6) Islam and early America | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu

Theme of Apocalypse – the Bride and the Reject

by Damien F. Mackey --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “The Church is Woman”. Pope Francis --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction Every new disturbance in the world, be it of natural cause such as earthquakes, tsunamis or hurricanes; political, such as the Gulf War crises, Islamic Jihads and Russian aggression; or economic, for example the new wave of food shortages sweeping the world, finds its modern-day interpreter with the Book of Revelation in hand. Depending upon one’s political or religious proclivity the Beast of Revelation (Revelation 13:11) can be, now the President of the United States, or, previously, Saddam Hussein rebuilding the city of Babylon, or even the Pope ruling Catholicism. This sort of frenzied speculation became particularly apparent as Year 2000 approached, with the ‘millennium bug’ seriously biting the loony cultist fringe. For the Israeli government then had to deport a group of American ‘Christians’ for fear that they had violent intentions towards the Old City of Jerusalem, suspecting them to be amongst fanatics who believe that the ancient Temple of Jerusalem is destined to be rebuilt in the near future. This would mean firstly clearing away - even with a bomb if necessary - the great Moslem shrine, the Dome of the Rock, that now occupies the mount. Meanwhile, certain Protestant and evangelical groups continue to persist with the notion, conceived during the Reformation, that the Pope is Antichrist and that the ‘Roman Catholic Church’ is the “famous prostitute” of Revelation, “riding a scarlet beast which had seven heads and ten horns” (17;2, 3), the seven heads being also “the seven hills” (18:9). This latter, they insist, must be a reference to Rome with its Seven Hills. And they puzzle as to why prayerful, Bible-believing Catholics cannot see this. The Modernist crisis has only reinforced this view in their minds, especially when they learn of ‘Catholic’ bishops denigrating the Bible and supporting Gay Acceptance, etc. No doubt some of these non-Catholic brethren are genuine in their beliefs. They are certainly firm in them. Leo Harris for instance, writing the Foreword to Thomas Foster’s The Pope, Communism and the Coming New World (Acacia Press, Victoria), having acknowledged that: “In the present remarkable days, with the Holy Spirit touching the lives of many people in both the Roman Catholic and main-line Protestant churches, one may feel reluctant to expose the errors found in any church system”, feels constrained nonetheless to add a point that will be taken up more vehemently by Foster himself: “However, it is no light matter that any one man should arise and claim supreme headship over the church as Christ’s sole representative or vicar”. Foster himself will go so far as to identify the Pope as Antichrist (which name, he insists, literally means in the place of Christ). I personally know of Protestants who, whilst likewise being quite uncomfortable with the concept of the Papacy, are prepared nonetheless - in the current climate of ecumenism - not to make too much of an issue out of it, but to accept that there is presently going on throughout the world what they might call a ‘mustering of all people of good will’ (including even Roman Catholics). Perhaps this new outlook is the first stirring of unity; the graces of the ecumenical effort. We Catholics have of course a view quite different from these Protestants regarding the Pope and the Church. We acknowledge the Pope to be the appointed Vicar of Christ on earth (cf. Matthew 16:18), the very foundation of the Church, and infallible in matters of faith and morals. The Church we consider to be pre-eminently Marian (even before it was Petrine). The Blessed Virgin Mary, according to John Paul II, “is the image of the Church whom we likewise call mother” (Homily 18 November 1980. Cf. Lumen Gentium, #63). We therefore shudder at the accusation made by Luther-inspired Protestants that the Catholic Church is to be identified with the loathsome “Harlot” of the Apocalypse, which derogatory title we consider to be a most appropriate label for the Modernist ‘World Wide Church of Darkness’ (cf. Pope St. Pius X). In this article I shall be endeavouring to show - hopefully to assist ecumenical efforts by clearing away misgivings, but especially to provide Catholics with a defence against unwarranted accusations by Protestants - that the mystery Whore, “Babylon the Great”, is not Rome at all (either physical or spiritual) but the ancient City of Jerusalem where Jesus himself was crucified - and where many of the Prophets (beginning with Abel), Apostles and disciples of Our Lord were martyred. In this way I hope to establish that the Whore cannot possibly have anything to do with the Catholic Church. I shall be arguing here that the Book of Revelation has already been literally fulfilled; that it was fulfilled with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman armies under Titus in 70 AD, corresponding to the burning of “Babylon” in Apocalypse ch.s 17-18, and that its relevance for us today is allegorical and symbolical (e.g. the above-mentioned likening of the Harlot, which is a city, with Modernism, which is a system of thought with a corresponding praxis). Indeed this view accords perfectly with John Paul II’s statement to a C20th audience that the Book of Revelation is ‘symbolical and figurative in meaning’. Essentially Revelation is about the divorce of one ‘woman’ (one formerly just ‘woman’ who had gone bad), and the marrying of a new, faithful one. The scroll of Revelation 5:1 is actually a bill of divorce; the divorce being completed in the most emphatic manner with the annihilation of the harlot city, “Babylon”. I am indebted to Kenneth Gentry (Jr.) in “A Preterist View of Revelation” for spelling this out. E.g. [pp. 51-2]: When viewed against the backdrop of the theme of Jewish judgment, personages (a harlot and a bride), and the flow of Revelation (from the sealed scroll to a capital punishment for “adultery” to a “marriage feast” to the taking of a new “bride” as the “new Jerusalem”), the covenantal nature of the transaction suggests that the seven-sealed scroll is God’s divorce decree against his Old Testament wife for her spiritual adultery. In the Old Testament God “marries” Israel (see esp. Ezek. 16:8, 31-32), and in several places he threatens her with a “bill of divorce” (Isa. 50:1; Jer. 3:8). Also I want to clear up the serious problem (one of commentators own making) whereby the Apostles, expecting (according to such commentators) Christ’s final coming (Parousia), in their own day, were thus mistaken because that did not come about - still has not. Such an interpretation would suggest that Our Lord had passed on to his intimate friends the wrong time-table. This is, of course, quite unacceptable. My argument here will be that the Apostles were referring first and foremost to Christ’s victorious coming in 70 AD, thus freeing the early Church from her Judaïc (now corrupted and nationalistic) connections. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD may not mean a lot to us now in the C20th -especially we who have grown up with Western-based education that tends to eschew (or not understand) everything Semitic - but it meant a heck of a lot to those of the Apostolic era, who were mostly Jews, and who continued to worship in the Jerusalem Temple and the synagogues virtually to the very end. The emphasis here will be on the historico-literal. A. Some Illustrations of this Interpretation: The historico-literal level of biblical interpretation is the most basic one, and Popes and Saints have urged that Scripture scholars firstly identify that level. Saint Thomas Aquinas himself was utterly convinced of its importance; for, according to Monsignor G. Kelly, in his refutation of Fr. Raymond Brown and co. (The New Biblical Theorists, p. 13): “St. Thomas Aquinas is usually cited as a leading Church doctor who knew the importance of discovering the literal sense”. Obviously there can be only one historico-literal fulfilment of anything. I am now going to illustrate with biblical examples the approach to the interpretation of Revelation being favoured here: namely, of an early historico-literal fulfilment - but allowing for later, spiritual interpretations (The Catechism of the Catholic Church, #’s 115-119, identifies 3 levels of meaning in the spiritual category, as well as the literal level - thus four “senses” all up). Example 1: The sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in c.590 BC. This has many parallel likenesses to the sack of Jerusalem by the Roman armies under Titus in 70 AD (which last I claim to be the historical culmination of Revelation). That is not surprising since the same city, in the same geographical location, is involved. But the details of the first incident can never be entirely duplicated in the second (despite what certain psycho-historians seem to think). That is obvious! By 70 AD there would be no Babylonian armies, no King Nebuchednezzar, no prophet Jeremiah, and so on. The connection can be only an allegorical one - ‘like, but not the same as’. But let us take the better-known example of St. John the Baptist. Example 2: “In the Spirit of Elijah” Our Lord Jesus Christ confirmed that the Baptist was the one of whom the Old Testament prophet Malachi had foretold: “Behold, I will send you Elijah” (4:5; cf. Matthew 11:14). But St. John himself insisted that he was not the literal Elijah (John 1:21): he came “in the spirit of Elijah”. Obviously only Elijah himself could fulfil the literal conditions of his own day. Likewise, only one scenario can literally fulfil Revelation - and that I suggest is the scenario pertaining to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The many later scenarios are imbued, so to speak, with Revelation’s “spirit”; this being most emphatically true of our own era, with the Bride of the Lamb apparently following Her Spouse in his Passion, Death and Resurrection. But there can be only one literal fulfilment. Now, for the “Marian Dimension”, I turn for Example Three to the Books of Hosea and Isaiah, especially to the famous Virgin and Immanuel of Isaiah. Since this example will be important in the context of the entire article, I must now convert it into a whole new section in its own right. B. The Hosea/Isaiah Paradigm In 1998 I wrote an article entitled “Isaiah and His Six Children” (now in need of updating), in which I made a case for identifying Hosea and Isaiah as one and the same person, having, all up, two wives and six children. Hosea’s/Isaiah’s children had God-inspired names that were to be of symbolical importance to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Moreover, Hosea’s name, like Isaiah’s, indicates God as ‘Saviour’. The prophet Hosea was actually commanded by God to pantomime the tragic situation of Israel’s infidelity to God, by taking for his wife an adulteress from the harlot nation of Samaria (northern Israel). ‘Go, marry a whore, and get children with a whore, for the country itself has become nothing but a whore by abandoning Yahweh’ (Hosea 1:2). God knew that this woman, a product of her environment, would be unfaithful to the prophet, but He nevertheless urged Hosea to take her back after her infidelity, as a sign to Israel that God was patient and long-suffering and was also prepared to take back unfaithful Israel (3:1-3). The prophet Isaiah apparently married a good woman, entitled “prophetess” (Isaiah 8:2); who - if Hosea and Isaiah were one and the same - would be another of his wives. Be all that as it may, this bad wife/good wife scenario is in fact, I now believe, the whole tension of the Book of Apocalypse. The pantomime that Hosea/Isaiah had played out in c.700 BC would now be approximately re-enacted by Jesus Christ himself, the Saviour, in his divorce of the unfaithful earthly Jerusalem (Judaïsm) and his marriage with his new Bride, the heavenly Jerusalem. This time there will be no taking back of the adulteress, Jerusalem - even though He had passionately longed to do so: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem ... How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you refused!’ (Luke 13:34). His patience with her had at last run out, so to speak. When we read Isaiah’s prediction that the “young woman” [Hebrew: almah] was with child (Hebrew literally “has conceived”) and would soon give birth to a son, “Immanuel”, we immediately think of Mary and Jesus. And this is as it should be. St. Matthew, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, applying to the Isaian text a spiritual sense - indeed a fuller sense than Isaiah himself had intended - converts Isaiah’s “young woman” into “Virgin”. With the Blessed Virgin Mary, Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled spiritually - and, of course, perfectly. This does not mean, though, that Isaiah himself had foreseen in a literal (or photographic) way the fulfilment of this prophecy in Christ; but, rather, he expressed the hope that Christ fully realized. St. Matthew and the Church have seen in the birth of Christ from the Virgin Mother the perfect fulfilment of this prophecy. That Isaiah had in his own mind something quite contemporary, pertaining to his own era of c. 700 AD, is quite obvious from the terms in which the prophecy is stated. At the time Jerusalem was under threat from Syria and northern Israel (Ephraïm), and Isaiah was addressing Ahaz, the King of Jerusalem, and his father’s House (cf. Isaiah 7:17). Isaiah 7:10-22 all wonderfully interconnects: Once again Yahweh spoke to Ahaz and said, ‘Ask Yahweh your God for a sign for yourself coming either from the depths of Sheol or from the heights above’. ‘No’, Ahaz answered, ‘I will not put Yahweh to the test’. Then He said: ‘Listen now, House of David: are you not satisfied with trying the patience of men without trying the patience of my God, too?’ [Comment: Note how Isaiah has switched from calling Yahweh, ‘your God’ (Ahaz’s God), to ‘my God’. For Ahaz and his colleagues had rejected Yahweh as their God]. The Lord himself, therefore, will give you a sign. It is this: the maiden [almah] is with child [Comment: The Hebrew verb indicating conception, harah, is set in the past tense]. and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call Immanuel. [Comment: The Virgin Mary did not call her Son, “Immanuel”, but “Jesus”, as the angel Gabriel had specifically ordered her: “... you must name Him Jesus” (Luke 1:31). Nevertheless, Jesus is more perfectly Immanuel, ‘God-with-us’, than was Isaiah’s son of that name]. On curds and honey will he [i.e. Immanuel] feed until he knows how to refuse evil and choose good. [Comment: Isaiah will explain the significance of the “curds and honey” 7 verses further on, and later so shall I]. For before this child knows how to refuse evil and choose good [i.e. before this child already conceived has reached the age of reason], the land whose two kings terrify you [Comment: to identify the “two kings” and their “land”, we need to go back to verse 1 of this same chapter 7 of Isaiah - these two kings who terrify King Ahaz and Jerusalem are “Rezon the King of Aram (Syria) [and ...] Pekah ... King of Israel”, who had already tried once to take Jerusalem]. will be deserted. [Comment: And why did the land of Syria and Israel become “deserted”? Because within a few years - before Isaiah’s son Immanuel had had time to reach the age of reason, as the prophecy tells - Assyria’s Tiglath-pileser III (biblical “Pul”) [and his presumed son], Shalmaneser V, took away into captivity Syria and northern Israel, cf. 2 Kings 15:19; 16:7; 17:3. That all sounds like good news to King Ahaz, because the King of Assyria - whom he had called in to help him - would get rid of his two enemies. But Yahweh was not about to do the wicked Ahaz any favours. The King of Assyria would become a far worse menace to Jerusalem than ever had Syria and Israel, as we are now going to be told]. Yahweh will bring times for you and your people and your father’s House, such as have not come since Ephraim broke away from Judah [i.e. that had occurred 200 years earlier, in c. 920 BC, when Jeroboam took the northern tribes away from King Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, ruler of Judah]: namely, the King of Assyria. [Comment: The King of Assyria will cause trouble for Judah to parallel the tragic split in half of the kingdom in the days of Solomon’s son, 200 years earlier, when Pharaoh “Shishak” of Egypt came up and took Jerusalem and sacked the Temple of Yahweh]. That day [when this happens, in a few years time] Yahweh will whistle up mosquitoes from the Delta of the Egyptian Nile [i.e. the Egyptian armies that, coming ostensibly to help Judah against Assyria, will only cause further nuisance value, trampling the land, and getting defeated into the bargain by the Assyrians], and bees from the land of Assyria [i.e. the Assyrian armies], to come and settle on the steep ravine, on the rocky cleft, on the thorn bush and on every pasture [in other words, these armies will be a total nuisance in the land of Judah]. On that day [when this happens, in a few years time] the Lord will shave with a blade hired from beyond the River: namely the King of Assyria, the head and hairs of the body, and take off the beard, too. [Comment: “Hired blade”: what a fitting description of the Assyrian scourge! King Ahaz had indeed ‘hired’ the King of Assyria to help him, 2 Kings 16:7. But the Assyrians would eventually chop down the Judæans like an efficient blade, or “axe”, as Isaiah will call the Assyrian a bit further on, 10:15]. That day [when this happens, in a few years time] each man will raise one heifer and two sheep, and because of the abundance of milk they give, all who are left in the country will feed on curds and honey. [The feeding on curds and honey, that will be the lot of young Immanuel, does not mean prosperity, but that that is all that will be left on which to feed. Why? Because:] That day, where a thousand vines used to be, worth one thousand pieces of silver, all will be briar and thorn. Men will enter it with arrows and bow since the whole country will revert to briar and thorn. On any hillside hoed with the hoe no one will come for fear of briars and thorns; it will be pasture for cattle and grazing for sheep. [End of Isaiah 7] Christians, growing up with this OT reading, will immediately recognise it as pertaining to Jesus Christ. But parts of it have seemed strange, such as mention of “curds and honey”, even inappropriate, such as “the King of Assyria”. That is because the text cannot be made to fit literally the time of Our Lord; though it fits Him spiritually, and perfectly. It was not in his time fulfilled in the literal sense that Isaiah had intended, which was - as we have just seen - enframed in the context of the Syro-Ephraïmite and Assyrian wars of c. 700 BC. Whilst Isaiah prophetically ‘foresaw’ in the Holy Spirit the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus, his reference was, for himself and his contemporaries, a far more down-to-earth and immediate one. Remember that little Immanuel’s birth was meant to be “a sign” from God to King Ahaz and his House whom Isaiah was addressing outside the walls of Jerusalem (7:11). But what sort of immediate sign for Ahaz and his contemporaries would have been the virginal birth of Jesus Christ, 700 years later! I am not talking here of course about the salvific value of Christ’s Birth, which indeed embraced King Ahaz, his contemporaries, and indeed the entire human race. Whilst the point of this “sign” for us, with the hindsight advantage of the New Testament, is Salvation - the miraculous birth of the God-Child, Jesus Christ - the point of it from Isaiah’s perspective was very much a chronological one. What the prophet was telling King Ahaz and the people of Jerusalem was that even before his little Immanuel would reach the age of consent, “to refuse evil and choose good”, the Assyrian armies will have swept away Jerusalem’s northern enemies. (Was Isaiah’s young wife standing beside him when he told the House of David that she was with child and would soon give birth?) Now, Immanuel was not the only one in Isaiah’s family to serve such a symbolic purpose. “I and the children whom Yahweh has given me are signs and portents in Israel” (8:3, 18), Isaiah tells us. Then, in the next chapter, he goes on to relate that he “... went into the prophetess, she conceived and gave birth to a son ... Maher-shalal-hash-baz”. This boy-child, too, would be a sign for Judah regarding the progress of the Assyrian armies. Thus, in Isaiah’s mind, there would have been nothing miraculous about the birth of Immanuel. The young woman and Immanuel were of his own family; his wife and son. The ‘Holy Family’ of the Old Testament The prophet Isaiah’s outspokenness before young king Ahaz would not have endeared him to that proud monarch who went on to become one of Jerusalem’s most evil kings. Though Scripture does not spell it out, there is the implication that Isaiah and his family eventually had to flee Jerusalem to escape king Ahaz’s wrath. This would make Ahaz a forerunner of Herod (cf. Matthew 2:13-14). Here is the reasoning behind such an assumption (as fist pointed out by Charles Boutflower): Immanuel we are told, would, before he reached the age of reason, “feed on curds and honey” (Isaiah 7:15). What does that signify? It suggests that the family must have been obliged to head north, away from Jerusalem, to the region that had already been devastated and depopulated by the Assyrian armies, where briars and thorns had taken the place of abundant vineyards, and where “all who are left in the country will feed on curds and honey” (vv.22, 23). Now St. John the Evangelist, in the Book of Revelation, picks up this theme of Immanuel and his mother fleeing into the wilderness to escape the wrath of the ‘king’: The woman brought a male child into the world, the son who was to rule all the nations with an iron sceptre, and the child was taken straight up to God and to his throne, while the woman escaped into the desert, where God made a place of safety ready, for her to be looked after in the 1260 days (12:5-6). This “male child”, the victorious One, who rides the white horse, is the Christ, victorious in his Passion and Resurrection (cf. 5:5). Pope Pius XII stated unequivocally: “He is Jesus Christ” (as quoted in Opus Dei’s The Navarre Bible: Revelation, p. 70). This is actually quite obvious from Revelation’s further description of Him (19:12-16): ... the name written on Him was known only to Himself, his cloak was soaked in blood. He is known by the name, The Word of God. From his mouth came a sharp sword .... He is the one who will rule [the pagans] with an iron sceptre, and tread out the wine of Almighty God’s fierce anger. On his cloak and on his thigh there was a name written: ‘The King of Kings and The Lord of Lords’. He is also Immanuel, “God-with them” (21:3). As to Revelation’s “Woman”, the “Marian Dimension” of this has already been ably explained by others. The Woman also, of course, represents the Church; and, in literal terms, the fledgling Church of St. John’s day, the new Bride, which was forced to flee into the desert for the duration of 1260 days (i.e. 42 months or 3 and a half years - see below); no doubt in obedience to Our Lord’s Olivet command to his faithful to leave the city of Jerusalem on the eve of her destruction (Matt. 24:15-17,20-22; cf. Mark 13:14): So when you see the disastrous abomination, of which the prophet Daniel spoke, set up in the Holy Place (let the reader understand), then those in Judæa must escape to the mountains .... Pray that you will not have to escape in winter or on a sabbath. For then there will be great tribulation such as, until now, since the world began, there never has been, nor ever will be again. [Comment: That this “great tribulation” refers literally to a pre-70 AD scenario - and not to any later time, including the C21st - is obvious from the mention of the “sabbath” restricting the movements of peoples in Palestine. All that Jewish legalism went right ‘out the window’ after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD]. Jesus Christ challenges “the reader” to “understand” about the “Abomination that makes desolate”, from which the faithful must flee. But what might have been a riddle then for his contemporaries is really made easy for us by St. Luke, who, removing all the mystery, tells us that this refers to the pagan armies that will encompass Jerusalem (Luke 21:20). These are perhaps the Gog and Magog of Revelation 20:8 - the idea for which St. John borrowed from Ezekiel 38 and 39 - the multi-nation armies of the ruling empire that would attack Judæa and Jerusalem. “Armageddon” (Revelation 16:16) perhaps refers to Jerusalem’s strong northern fortress of Har Magedo. St. John picks up this, Our Lord’s command to flee, when he writes: “A new voice from heaven; I heard it say, ‘Come out, My people, away from [Babylon] so that you do not share in her crimes and have the same plagues to bear. Her sins have reached up to heaven ...’.” (Revelation 18:4, 5; cf. 18:2). The 1260 days (i.e. 42 months or three and a half years) pertain to the period of the Jewish war in the era 66-70 AD. Now the Virgin Mary did not flee into the desert at this time in history, and for that precise duration of time; for She was no longer on earth, having taken her place beside her Son in heaven. So, just as in the case of Isaiah’s young wife, the literal details cannot be made to fit Mary. And yet the Woman of Apocalypse, in the far-sweeping gaze of the Holy Spirit, does symbolise Mary, as does Isaiah’s “maiden”. Fr. Kramer was therefore quite wrong in his blanket assertion in The Book of Destiny (p. 276) that: “The woman of chapter twelve is not the Blessed Virgin Mary”. Opus Dei, on the other hand, is most emphatic about this Marian connection, based on Pope St. Pius X (ibid., p. 26): As in the case of the parables, not everything in the imagery necessarily happens in real life; and the same image can refer to one or more things - particularly when they are closely connected, as the Blessed Virgin and the Church are. So, the fact that this passage is interpreted as referring to the Church does not exclude its referring also to Mary. More than once, the Church’s Magisterium has given it a Marian interpretation. For example, St. Pius X says: ‘Everyone knows that this woman was the image of the Virgin Mary ...’. Less satisfactory, though, do I find Opus Dei’s implication that the Holy Spirit’s text has trouble fitting a specific, given scenario (p. 97): The mysterious figure of the woman has been interpreted ever since the time of the Fathers of the Church as referring to the ancient people of Israel, or the Church of Jesus Christ, or the Blessed Virgin. The text supports all of these interpretations but in none do all the details fit. Such a misalignment is, I believe, forced upon those who fail to recognise in the entire Revelation a consistent historico-literal substratum: namely, that of the era of the Apostles. All of Revelation’s prophecies strongly reflect actual historical events in St. John’s near future, though - as is obvious to any sound commentator - they are set in apocalyptic drama and clothed in poetic hyperbole. There will be no problem fitting details once one has the appropriate matrix; the matrix that the Holy Spirit has in mind. Having said that, there is no harm in one’s allegorizing (one of the three spiritual senses) the whole situation of the Woman fleeing into the desert from the great Red Dragon as the current banishment of Marian devotion, by the Modernists, to the desert of oblivion, or the rejection by Catholics of Our Lady of the Rosary (Fatima) and her message. It seems to me that the historico-literal sense is necessary to the spiritual sense in a way analogous to the need of the soul for the body. Admittedly the soul can exist without the body, even in Heaven, but there is an incompleteness there that will be resolved only on the last day. Unmasking the Whore, “Babylon the Great” St. Augustine, in his The City of God, juxtaposed two cities - the camp of the just and that of the evil - from Cain and Abel right down to his own day circa C5th AD. Taking a lead from this, but adopting alongside it the perspective relevant to this article, of the good and the evil woman - of divorce and re-marriage - I shall be contrasting Christ’s Bride with the Devil’s Harlot Woman. The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah (Jerusalem) are typified in many Scriptures (e.g. Isaiah 1:8, Lamentations 2:13) as a Woman. In Ezekiel, Israel is likened initially to a helpless girl-child upon whom God (as Father) took pity, nourishing her and watching her grow. Afterwards He dressed her in finery and (as Bridegroom) took her for His spouse; eventually crowning her with queenship so that she became the envy of the nations (16:4-14). But, with the passing of time, she became infatuated with her own beauty; using her fame to make herself a prostitute (v.15); even going beyond the excesses of a prostitute (vv. 21, 33-34). For her punishment, God handed her over to “all the lovers” [i.e., the nations], with whom she had been trafficking, but who had become sick of her filthy ways (v. 28). These were to treat her in the same way as were treated in antiquity “women who commit adultery and murder ... stripped ... stoned and run through with a sword” (vv. 38, 40). 1. Thus did Assyria do to the northern kingdom of Israel which Ezekiel calls Jerusalem’s “sister”. (Fulfilled in c. 720 BC, conventional dating). 2. And so, God warns through Ezekiel, would the Babylonians do to Jerusalem for not having learned from her sister’s mistakes. (Fulfilled in c. 590 BC, conventional dating). For the Lord Yahweh says this: “I now hand you [Jerusalem] over to those you hate, to those in whom you have lost interest. They will treat you with hatred, they will rob you of the fruits of your labours and leave you completely naked. And thus your shameful whoring will be exposed .... As you have copied your sister’s behaviour, I will put her cup in your hand”. The Lord Yahweh says this: “You will drink your sister’s cup, a cup that is wide and deep, leading to laughter and mockery, so ample the draught it holds. You will be filled with drunkenness and sorrow. Cup of affliction and devastation, the cup of your sister Samaria, you will drink it, you will drain it; then it will be shattered to pieces and lacerate your breast. I have spoken - it is the Lord Yahweh who speaks”. (Ezekiel 23:28, 29:31-33, 34). 3. And St. John is right in line with this Old Testament tradition. In Apocalypse he prepares the Jews for the second destruction of Jerusalem (by the Romans), just as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel had done for the earlier destructions, of Israel (by the Assyrians) and Jerusalem (by the Babylonians). Revelation is absolutely saturated with references from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and Ezekiel; for, according to Fr. Kramer (ibid., 3-4. My emphasis): The Apocalypse is a prophetical book (IV.1), and it ranks St. John with the prophets of the Old Testament (X.11). The “mystery of God” had been declared by His “servants the prophets (X, 7) .... [Apocalypse] is so largely a restatement of the Old Testament prophecies, that some have called it a mere compilation. All the seemingly idiosyncratic imagery used in the Book of Revelation by Saint John the Evangelist (e.g. “wormwood”, “burning mountain”; “blood sun”, “great hailstones”, etc.) turns out upon investigation to be ‘re-cycled’ imagery in the sense that it has already been used - and its meaning established - in the Old Testament. Thus the above graphic image by Ezekiel of Jerusalem as the drunken whore, holding the cup of wrath in her hand, is exactly the same image of Jerusalem that we find in the Book of Revelation; the harlot drunk with wine and holding a golden cup in her hand. Thus St. John (17:4-6): The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and glittered with gold and jewels and pearls, and she was holding a golden winecup filled with the disgusting filfth of her fornication; on her forehead was written a name, a cryptic name: ‘Babylon the Great, the mother of all the prostitutes and all the filthy practices on the earth’. I saw that she was drunk, drunk with the blood of saints, and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus .... Here the martyrs of the Old Testament (“saints”) are distinguished from those of the New Testament (“martyrs of Jesus”); but they all suffered their fate in the one same city. This city, this vile ‘woman’, is apostate Jerusalem! She is also called “the Great City” (e.g. Revelation 14:8; 18:10), and, again, “the Great City known by the symbolic names Sodom and Egypt, in which their Lord was crucified” (11:8). Derogatory names like “Sodom”, “Gomorrah” and “Egypt” were indeed code-names - or, rather, labels of contempt - applied by the Old Testament prophets to Israel and Jerusalem turned harlot. Thus Isaiah addressed Jerusalem’s leaders: “Hear the word of Yahweh, you rulers of Sodom; listen to the command of our God, you people of Gomorrah ... What a harlot she has become, the faithful city, Zion, that was all justice!” (Isaiah 1:10, 21; cf. Jeremiah 23:14). And St. John, in turn, picks up this usage for Jerusalem - clearly Jerusalem because she is the only city of which it can be said “in which their Lord was crucified” - and he applies to her the mystery name of “Babylon”, “a cryptic [symbolical] name” (17:5). And, in case we missed it, St. John goes on to tell us of this “Great City” that: “In her you will find the blood of prophets and saints, and all the blood that was ever shed on earth” (18:24). Now the Evangelist’s description could not possibly apply to Rome, despite what even good commentators seem to think. E.g: Opus Dei (op. cit.) on Rev 17:1-19:10: “This first section of the final scene begins with the depiction of the city of Rome (described as the great harlot, the great city, great Babylon), its punishment, and its connexion with the beast (the symbol of absolutist antichristian power personified by certain emperors (cf 13:18). Fr. Kramer (The Book of Destiny, pp. 387-8): “The name of the harlot was written on her forehead. Seneca (“Contro. V.i”) says that Roman harlots wore a label with their name on their foreheads. That would make this verse point to Rome, since this woman is the figure of the great city. St. Peter (I Peter, V.13) writes from Babylon, by which he surely [sic] means Rome. [Comment: Roman harlots may indeed have worn a label on their foreheads, which was ancient practice, but it was of Jerusalem that Jeremiah shouted: “You had a whore’s forehead” (Jeremiah 3:3)]. Note that Rome does not figure at all in the Old Testament until we come all the way down to its very last history, Maccabees (c. 150 years before Christ, conventional dating). Rome is there mentioned, but not at all in terms of St. John’s condemnatory: “In her you will find the blood of prophets and saints, and all the blood that was ever shed on earth”. Rather, Rome is spoken of most favourably, even eulogised, by the inspired Maccabean writer. Moreover, the Maccabees had actually formed an alliance with Rome (I Maccabees 8:1, 12-16). And obviously, from St. John’s description of “Babylon” in terms of great antiquity, it cannot refer to any modern-day (historically recent) city. No, St. John’s “Babylon” refers to Jerusalem! In fact Our Lord himself told the Pharisees in what great city the blood of all holy men had been shed, and was still being shed (Matthew 23:35-39): ‘... you will draw down on yourselves the blood of every holy man ... from the blood of Abel ... to the blood of Zechariah ... whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar [i.e., of the Jerusalem Temple]. I tell you solemnly, all of this will recoil on this generation. Jerusalem Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! ... Your House [Temple] will be left to you desolate [cf. Abomination that makes desolate], for I promise, you shall not see Me any more until you say: Blessings on Him who comes in the name of the Lord!’ (Matthew 23:35-39). ‘This generation’ There is a lot for us to chew over in this statement alone. For starters, here is mention of that coming of Christ that has so baffled exegetes, that seems emphatically to pertain to that generation. Yahweh God, who had conceded to Israel a 40-year probation in the desert under Moses (c. 1400 BC), would now again in the time of His Beloved Son allow for about 40 years (c. 30-70 AD), a full generation, to enable the Apostles to gather in whomsoever was destined to be saved. And just as Moses, with assistance from his loyal Levite priests, had to carry, cajole and exhort his people during the trying sojourn in the wilderness, so do we find St. Peter, with his loyal team of Sts. John, Paul, etc., doing the same. Thus St. Peter: “You must repent ... every one of you must be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ... Save yourselves from this perverse generation”. (Acts 2:38, 41). And St. John: “I am writing this, my children, to stop you sinning; but if anyone should sin, we have our advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ ...”. (I John 2:1). And St. Paul: “The Holy Spirit says: If only you would listen to Him today; do not harden your hearts, as happened at the Rebellion [Moses’s day], on the Day of Temptation in the wilderness, when your ancestors challenged Me and tested Me, though they had seen what I could do for forty years”. (Hebrews 3:9) St. Paul in fact most eloquently tried to lift the peoples’ minds above the earthly Jerusalem that was passing away, to the heavenly Jerusalem. “What you have come to is nothing known to the senses [as it indeed had been in the case of those at Mount Sinai, with fire, noise etc.] ...” (Hebrews 12:18, etc.). St. Peter again: “... men with an infinite capacity for sinning ....They may promise freedom but they themselves are slaves ... to corruption; because if anyone lets himself be dominated by anything, then he is a slave to it; and anyone who has escaped the pollution of the world once by coming to know our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and who then allows himself to be entangled by it a second time and mastered, will end up in a worse state than he began in. It would even have been better for him never to have learnt the way of holiness, than to know it and afterwards desert the holy rule that was entrusted to him. What he has done is exactly as the proverb rightly says: The dog goes back to his own vomit, and: When the sow has been washed, it wallows in the mud”. (2 Peter 2:14, 19-22). And St. John again: “Write to the angel of the church in Sardis and say, ‘... I know all about you: how you are reputed to be alive and yet are dead. Wake up; revive what little you have left: it is dying fast. ... Repent. If you do not wake up, I shall come to you like a thief, without telling you at what hour to expect Me’.” (Revelation 3:1-4). In this way many were saved, “a huge crowd” (Revelation 19:6). But “the apostasy” of which St. Paul warned (2 Thessalonians 2:3), and from which St. John, too, was trying to hold back the seven churches of Asia (Revelation 1), and from which, too, St. Peter and the other Apostles would have been striving to protect Judæa and Samaria, was ever working its way also - as it had with Moses’s generation as typified at Meribah and Massa in the desert (Psalm 94). The ‘fruits’ of this apostasy would ultimately be mass destruction. Thus I believe the above texts of the Apostles to be all approximately contemporaneous witness and exhortation - not writings separated by decades, before and after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD! The Jewish people (especially) would be given a full generation of 40 years to change, with the Apostles urging them not to fall back. Eventually the destroying angel would pass by those who had been marked with the sign of the Lamb, that is the baptised who had persevered in their faith. But those who wore the mark of the beast (Revelation 14:10), the apostates, would be destroyed, and violently. This is exactly what Jesus Christ had prophetically alluded to prior to his Passion, when he - having had placed before Him by “some people” the examples of (i) those slain by the Roman troops of Pilate, and (ii) others killed by a falling tower – had insisted: ‘Unless you do penance you will all perish as they did [that is, by a violent death]’ (Luke 13:1-5). [Not to mention the danger of spiritual death]. For at the end of the 40 years of probation thousands upon thousands of Jews did die violent deaths at the hands of the Romans, with towers likewise falling upon them, and missiles, stones and fire. Our Lord’s warning applies to all wicked generations, including our own. And we have also had a ‘John and a Paul’ (in John Paul II) telling us, specifically with reference to Revelation, that Vatican II is most essentially a Council of Advent, of the Coming. But let us once and for all get away from the idea that some modern-day Beast is going to implant 666 micro-computer chips in the foreheads of his followers. More plausibly the ‘mark of the beast’ is - like a Satanic aping of the tau marked upon the forehead by the angel in Ezekiel (9:4) - an invisible, spiritual character that the destroying angel could discern, to kill or to spare. Nor should anyone be living in fear of terrible storms of hail of unnatural size. [Comment: I first wrote this before Sydney’s awesome hailstorm in April of 1999, when some claimed to have seen hailstones even “the size of a bucket”]. The “great hailstones weighing a talent each” of Revelation 16:21 are undoubtedly the same as those of the exact same weight as described by the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, eyewitness to the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD (The Jewish War, 3.7.9, cf. 3.7.10, emphasis added): “... catapults ... threw at once landed upon them with great noise, and stones of the weight of a talent were thrown by the engines that were prepared for that purpose, together with fire .... which made the wall so dangerous that the Jews durst not to come upon it”. They were stones from the Roman catapults, not hailstones from the clouds. Josephus’s description of this doomed generation, fittingly punished, completely backs up Our Lord’s numerous complaints about it being “an evil and adulterous generation”, (e.g. Matthew 13:39; Mark 8:12; Luke 11:29), and even worse than Sodom and Gomorrah (Matthew 10:15; 11:24 Mark 6:11; Luke 10:12). Josephus wrote in retrospect (ibid., 5.10.5): “Neither did any other city ever suffer such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, from the beginning of the world”. Is there an analogous situation with the post-Vatican II generation - again one of history’s worst? Is its time of probation also running out? Those blessed to have the gift of Faith need to be exhorters and encouragers like the Apostles were to their “perverse generation”, to save some at any cost (cf. Romans 11:14; I Corinthians 9:22). “Must Soon Take Place” Revelation is a book of urgency. The events it describes were to happen soon. [When the Bible says “soon”, it means soon, as in the case of the birth of Isaiah’s Immanuel - not in the Third Millennium!]. We learn that lesson when we start reading Revelation at its beginning. Plato, in The Republic, had stated an important maxim: “The beginning is the most important part of the book”, and this principle holds a special significance for the would-be interpreter of Revelation. “Unfortunately”, as Gentry rightly notes (op. cit., p. 40), “too many prophecy enthusiasts leap over the beginning of this book, never securing a proper footing for the treacherous path ahead”. The key to Revelation is found in St. John’s beginning (1:1a, 3): This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants what must soon [Gk. tachos] take place .... Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near [Gk. engys]. Again, in case we missed it, St. John repeats this soon-ness at the very end (22:6): The angel said to me, ‘These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God of the spirit of the prophets, sent His angel; to show His servants the things that must soon take place’ .... Then he told me, ‘Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, because the time is near’. Just as it would have been senseless for Isaiah’s “sign” for king Ahaz to have been something that would not occur until 700 years later, so would John the Evangelist - according to Gentry (op. cit. p. 42) “... be taunting [the churches] mercilessly if he were discussing events two thousand or more years distant. God answers the anxious cry “How long?” by urging their patience only a “little while longer” (6:10-11). Revelation promises there will no longer be “delay” (10:6)”. The angel’s command to St. John not to seal up the scroll is also tellingly in favour of this “soon” interpretation. The prophet Daniel, by contrast, had been commanded by the angel to keep his “words secret and the book [scroll] sealed until the time of the End”, because the things Daniel was shown were not to happen for a long time in the future - in fact several hundred years later, in the time of the Apostles’ generation. For Our Lord himself had, during his important Olivet Discourse when facing the Temple of Jerusalem, referred to the “abomination that makes desolate of which the prophet Daniel spoke” (Matthew 24:15; cf. Mark 14:13). We know from Josephus’s history that the Roman armies of Cestius Gallus, that came up to (and surrounded) Jerusalem in 66 AD, and had all but conquered the city, had suddenly, most strangely, retreated. Even Josephus recognised the hand of Providence in this most unexpected turnabout. Many Jews, he said, fled the city at the time - no doubt e.g. those obedient to Jesus Christ’s Olivet warning. And Josephus is correct in seeing this intermission as only intensifying the pressure ultimately, so that with the return of the Roman armies the final destruction of Jerusalem, when it came (in 70 AD), would be total. Thus would be fulfilled Our Lord’s prophecy that ‘Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles are fulfilled’ (Luke 21:24). St. John recalls this in Revelation 11:2: “But exclude the outer court [of the Temple]; do not measure it, because it has been given to the Gentiles. They will trample on the holy city for 42 months”. As Gentry has observed (op. cit., p. 66): “... the trampling of the temple in AD 70 (Dan. 9:26-27) after its “abomination” (9:27; cf. Matt. 24:15-16; Luke 21:20-21) ends the Gentiles’ ability to stamp out the worship of God. In Daniel 9:24-27, Matthew 23:38-24:2, and Revelation 11:1-2, the “holy city” and its Temple end in destruction”. But how do the “times of the Gentiles” relate to the forty-two months of Revelation 11:12)? Well, the period would perhaps range from the spring of 67 AD to August 70, when the Romans breached the inner wall of Jerusalem, transforming the Temple and city into a raging inferno: a period of forty-two months. The five months of Revelation 9:5 pertain specifically to the period when the Jewish defenders held out desperately (one might say, fanatically), from April 70 - when Titus began the siege of Jerusalem - until the crescendo at the end of August. According to Gentry (61): “This five months of the Jewish war happens to be its most gruesome and evil period” (cf. Wars, 5.1.1, 4-5; 10:5; 12:4; 13:6). The Setting Palestine, not the world, is the stage for the drama of Revelation, despite translations that tell us of Christ’s judgment bringing mourning upon “all the tribes of the earth” (NIV). Literal translation of the text shows that St. John actually focusses on all the tribes of “the land” (Gk. tês gês), the well-known Promised Land in which the Jews lived. We should probably translate the Greek word hê gê as ‘the land’ rather than ‘the earth’ in the great majority of cases where this occurs in Revelation. According to Gentry (p. 72): After mentioning the redeemed/sealed of Israel in 14:1-5, John turns his attention to further judgements on the land by means of three woes (14:6-21) and the seven bowls (chaps. 15-16). Though the prophecies are crafted in dramatic hyperbole, they refer to historical events. For instance, consider the reaping of the grapes of wrath: “they were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia” (14:20). For compelling reasons, “the city” here appears to be Jerusalem: (1) John defines the city earlier as Jerusalem (11:8); (2) the “harvest” is in “the earth/land” (Gk hê gê; 14:15-19); (3) this judgment falls on the place where Jesus was crucified; “outside the city” (John 19:20; cf. Heb. 13:11-13); and (4) the Son of Man “on the cloud” (Rev. 14:14-15) rehearses Revelation’s theme regarding Israel (1:7). The distance of blood flow is 1,600 stadia, which is roughly the length of the land as a Roman province: The Itinerarium of Antoninus of Piacenza records Palestine’s length as 1664 stadia. This prophecy refers to the enormous blood flow in Israel during the Jewish war. Allow me to document this. In his Wars Josephus writes: “the sea was bloody a long way” (3.9.3); “one might then see the lake all bloody, and full of dead bodies” (3.10.9); “the whole of the country through which they had fled was filled with slaughter, and Jordan could not be passed over, by reason of the dead bodies that were in it” (4.7.6); “blood ran down over all the lower parts of the city, from the upper city” (4.1.10); “the outer temple was all of it overflowed with blood” (4.5.1); “the blood of all sorts of dead carcasses stood in lakes in the holy courts” (5.1.3); and “the whole city ran down with blood, to such a degree indeed that the fire of many of the houses was quenched with these men’s blood” (6.8.5). The Burnings The burning up of a third of the trees of “the land” (Revelation 8:7) reminds of the Romans’ setting villages on fire in conjunction with their denuding the land of its trees. Gentry (ibid.): Note what Josephus writes about the policy of the Romans: “he also at the same time gave his soldiers leave to set the suburbs on fire, and ordered that they should bring timber together, and raise banks against the city” (Wars 5.6.2). The Romans destroyed the trees in Israel for fuel and for building their weapons: “All the trees that were about the city had been already cut down for the making of the former banks” (Wars 5.12.4). “They cut down all the trees that were in the country that adjoined to the city, and that for ninety furlongs round about” (Wars 6.1.1; cf. 3.7.8; 5.6.2). Of Vespasian’s march on Gadara, Josephus writes: “He also set fire, not only to the city itself, but to all the villas and small cities that were round about it (Wars 3.7.1.; cf. 4.9.1). Galilee was all over filled with fire and blood” (Wars 3.4.1.). Vespasian “went and burnt Galilee and the neighbouring parts” (Wars 6/6/2). When the temple finally burns, Josephus moans: “One would have thought that the hill itself, on which the temple stood, was seething hot, as full of fire on every part of it” (Wars 6.5.1). And, of course, ultimately the whole city of Jerusalem goes up in flames so that as the Romans take the Jews captive to Rome, they relate that they are from “a land still on fire upon every side” (Wars 7.5.5.) “Babylon”, the code name for the impious city of Jerusalem, was “ruined within a single hour”. “They see the smoke as she burns” (Revelation 18:9, 19). A friend of mine remarked that, if our times are following a pattern parallel to all of this, then what sort of punishment is our world in for! ‘Great Tribulation’ Now the ‘great tribulation’ of which Our Lord spoke is none other than the ‘great tribulation’ of which St. John wrote in, e.g., Revelation 7:14 (cf. Matthew 24:21). These are not meant to be separated by millennia! No need to extrapolate to, say, the Third Millennium, to find the “great tribulation” [though, allegorically, modernistic Relativism today are ‘in the spirit’ of the religious persecution that the Jews were then suffering at the hands of their own people]; the seven churches of Revelation (1:9; 2:9-10, 13) were already feeling the strain of it. And no need even to go to Rome and any Nero for a terrible persecution of the early Christians. Jerusalem is far enough. We also read that there was a great famine that “spread over the whole empire” (Acts 11:28; cf. Matthew 24:7). “It was about this time that King Herod started persecuting certain members of the Church. He beheaded James the brother of John, and when he saw that this pleased the Jews he decided to arrest Peter as well” (Acts 12:1-3). Some Church Fathers thought that Nero was the Beast of Apocalypse, having shown that his name adds up to 666; the Beast’s heads being the succession of Roman emperors. Be that as it may, in Herod the Beast would have found an appropriate ally. Thus (Acts 12:21-23): ... Herod, wearing his robes of state and enthroned on a daïs, made a speech to them. The people acclaimed him with, ‘It is a god speaking, not a man!’, and at that moment the angel of the Lord struck him down, because he had not given the glory to God. He was eaten away with worms and died. Need we even necessarily go to the Eternal City of Rome for the martyrdom of Sts. Peter and Paul? I don’t know. St. Peter’s bones, we are told, lie beneath St. Peter’s in the Vatican. But that is not necessarily proof that he died there (cf. Exodus 13:19, where Moses carried Joseph’s bones from Egypt to Israel). In this regard, I was interested to read in the Opus Dei commentary re the two witnesses of Revelation 11, who definitely died in Jerusalem (v. 8), that “because the two witnesses testify to Jesus Christ and die martyrs, tradition identifies them with Sts. Peter and Paul ...”. But the two witnesses of Revelation could just as well - perhaps even more likely - be two other of the Apostles slain in Jerusalem before the city’s destruction by the Romans: e.g. James the Lesser. Eusebius (The History of the Church) wrote in detail about this great miracle-working Patriarch of Jerusalem whose martyrdom, he says, was “instantly followed” by the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans (13:1). Some of the Fathers thought that the two witnesses would be Enoch and Elijah, said not to have died. But this could be only in an allegorical sense; in the sense of the two witnesses coming “in the spirit” of Enoch and Elijah (like St. John the Baptist). The next thing we read in Scripture is Jesus’s telling his disciples re the Temple that ‘not a single stone standing here will be left on another’ (Matthew 24:2), and then afterwards telling His four chief Apostles, Peter, Andrew, James and John, privately (the famous Olivet Discourse), about what would happen to Jerusalem. The Book of Revelation is Our Lord’s revealing all of this through St. John now, several decades later, to an audience far larger than just the select four. The Book of Revelation is, I maintain, a continuation of the Gospels and especially of the Olivet Discourse. Why, then, don’t commentators realise the obvious; that Sts. Peter and John are referring to Jerusalem; but under the cryptic name of “Babylon”? And why “Babylon”, instead of, say, “Sodom” or “Egypt”? There is a sad and biting irony in this choice of epithet. Whereas the Babylonians had been they who had destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem the first time round, now it will be the Jews themselves, nick-named “Babylon”, who will be responsible for burning to the ground their very own Temple. And this time it would be irrevocable. Admittedly, what makes somewhat confusing the identifying of Revelation’s “Babylon” is that this scarlet Woman is portrayed as riding on a Beast whose description, “seven hills”, seems to point clearly to Rome. Commentators then take the whole package, Woman plus Beast, as pertaining to Rome; which city - according to tradition - did persecute the followers of Jesus. However, according to the following, this description could actually fit Jerusalem: http://musingsofanoldpastor.blogspot.com.au/search?q=seven The City on Seven Hills Jerusalem was known long before Rome as the city of Seven Mountains/hills. Rev 17:9: And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. 1. Mt. Gareb, 2. Mt. Acra, 3. Mt. Goath 4. Mt. Bezetha, 5. Mt. Zion, 6. Mt. Ophel, 7. Mt. Moriah. Revelation more naturally evokes the image of Jerusalem as the city seated on seven mountains in 17:9 than Rome. The view that Babylon is a cipher for Jerusalem in the Apocalypse cannot then be dismissed on the basis of this common objection; not only can it be defended that the evidence of 17:9 can fit Jerusalem, there are strong reasons to believe that it in fact does most properly fit Jerusalem. …. [End of quote] Nevertheless, we have already seen in the paradigmatical Old Testament cases of Israel and Jerusalem that two protagonists, not one, were involved, namely: 1. The once just Woman turned Harlot; and; 2. Her suitors who have wooed her in the past, made her rich, but who eventually come to loath her, then turn on her and destroy her. So some could argue that the same situation is to be found in Revelation: 1. The Woman, Jerusalem, rides on 2. Roman power, but is to be distinguished from the latter which will eventually cause her destruction. The Woman is Jerusalem; the Destroyer is Rome. When was the Book of Revelation Written? What has exacerbated the whole exegetical problem of properly interpreting Revelation on a literal level is, I believe, the conventional opinion that St. John wrote this Apocalypse in hoary old age, in c. 95 AD, about a quarter of a century after Jerusalem had been destroyed. Hence many commentators are loath to see any relevance for Revelation in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Protestant and Catholic writers alike accept the late 95 AD date of authorship (Protestant Thomas Foster sharing this view in common with Opus Dei and Fr. Kramer). However, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, there has emerged a new scholarship of great expertise as typified by Fr. Jean Carmignac, showing that the books of the New Testament literature (esp. the Gospels), were composed much earlier than was originally thought. And the signs are that the entire New Testament, including Revelation, pre-dates 70 AD. I believe that there is abundant evidence in the Apocalypse to indicate that it was written early. In fact the reason that prevented my writing this article initially was: Where to start? There is so much! My effort in the end had been greatly assisted by my finding Gentry’s preterist interpretation on the eve of commencing this article. The whole Book of Revelation is focussed upon the Holy Land and especially Jerusalem. The Temple; the golden altar; the 24 elders keeping watch at Beth Moked in the north from where an attack might come (and general Titus did in fact take Jerusalem from there, at the city’s weakest point); the sabbath restrictions; etc., etc. Apart from their late dating of St. John’s Revelation preventing commentators from recognising the obvious, that “Babylon” is Jerusalem, this path they have taken leads them into other awkward anomalies as well. It is commonly believed that St. Paul had already completed his missionary activity and had been martyred well before St. John the Evangelist wrote the Book of Revelation. Paul is given the credit for having established the seven churches to which John later wrote. This view forces commentators into making such strange observations as Fr. Kramer’s: “... St. John could not have interfered in the administration of the churches in the lifetime of St. Paul” (op. cit., pp. 7-8). Oh, no? Was St. Paul (who even refers to himself as a very late arrival on the scene, I Corinthians 15:8) greater than St. John, the Beloved Disciple of Our Lord? St. Paul himself would answer us an emphatic: ‘No’! Of his visit to Jerusalem after his 14 year absence, he tells us: “... James, Cephas and John, these leaders, these pillars, shook hands with Barnabas and me .... The only thing they insisted on was that we should remember to help the poor ...” (Galatians 2:9, 10). St. John was by no means subservient to St. Paul; but apparently gave orders to the latter. All the Apostles had a hand in establishing the churches throughout Judaea and Samaria, as Jesus Christ had commanded them, and then “to the ends of the earth”, which St. Paul boasted had been achieved even in his day (Colossians 1:23). And Our Lord told the Apostles, “solemnly”, that they would not have completed “the rounds of the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matthew 10:23). We had better look now briefly at that particular ‘Coming’. The ‘Coming’ for the Apostles The Son of Man refers on various occasions to his ‘coming with His kingdom’ in the context that it would occur whilst some of those present were still alive (e.g. Matthew 16:28; Luke 9:27). Liberal modernist exegetes, imagining that Christ could here be referring only to his final and definitive Coming, love to point out that, because it has not occurred to this day, Jesus Christ was prone to error, was not omniscient, and that the Apostles who had expected His coming in their day were deluded (especially St. Paul). But there may be more than one biblical ‘coming’. Only a matter of about a week after Our Lord had addressed the above words to His disciples, there had occurred the Transfiguration, to which St. Peter would refer back in later years in the context of “the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (cf. 2 Peter 1:16 and 1:18-19). At least, it seems to have been a kind of preview of the real thing. The risen Lord told Peter, in regard to John: “‘If I want him to stay behind till I come, what does it matter to you? You are to follow Me’. The rumour then went out among the brothers that this disciple [John] would not die. Yet Jesus had not said to Peter, ‘He will not die’, but, ‘If I want him to stay behind till I come’.” (John 21:21-23) Since the Apostles greatly yearned for the ‘coming’ of Jesus Christ, could that have been the definitive ‘coming’ at the end of the world? I suggest not. Too far away. Rather the Apostles were yearning for a ‘coming’ of Jesus in their own day; one that would, in some cases, coincide with their martyrdom, their being uplifted into Heaven (as in the case of the deaths of the two witnesses). Apparently Christ had apprised them of this; for St Peter wrote: “I know the time for taking off this tent is coming soon, as Our Lord Jesus Christ foretold to me” (2 Peter 1:14). Presumably the Master would also have told St. Paul; for did he not ‘show [Paul] how much he himself must suffer for My name’ (Acts 9:16)? Was this ‘coming’ for the Apostles therefore the kind of consoling heavenly visitation that St. Stephen Protomartyr had experienced just before his death (Acts 7:56): ‘I can see heaven thrown open ... and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God’? Did it, for many of them, coincide with his victorious coming in 70 AD as the Rider upon the white horse, to oversee the destruction of harlot Jerusalem and the now-corrupted Judaïc system? Because Our Lord’s predictions are - for those who believe him to be the Word Incarnate - infallible, there must have been a ‘coming” already in the days of the Apostles, of that particular generation. 70 AD (conventional dating) is then the likely date for it. The 40 years of probation for the ‘woman’ were now up. It was to be divorce and execution.