by
Damien F. Mackey
Some common factors here are
the references to the ‘Angel of Judgment’ of
the Book of Revelation and to
an impending terrible judgment.
Introduction
Fr.
Herman B. Kramer has brought some connections between St. John and St. Vincent Ferrer
in his captivating study on the Apocalypse, The
Book of Destiny (Tan, 1975).
According to Fr. Kramer’s interpretation of the Apocalypse, each chapter can be
linked literally to an important era of Christian
history.
For instance, Revelation chapters 8 and 9 Fr. Kramer
aligned with, respectively, the Great
Western Schism (C14th-15th
AD) and the Protestant
Reformation (C16th AD).
Perhaps Fr. Kramer’s lynchpin for all this was his
identifying of the Eagle, or angel of judgment, of Revelation 8:13, or 14:6,
with St. Vincent Ferrer, OP. (ibid., pp.
208-9):
By a wonderful co-incidence a great saint
appears at this stage [the Western Schism] in the history of the Church. His
eminence and influence procured for him the distinction of an eagle flying
through mid-heaven. This was the Dominican priest, St. Vincent Ferrer. When in
1398 he lay at death’s door with fever, our Lord, St. Francis and St. Dominic
appeared to him, miraculously cured him of his fever and commissioned him to
preach penance and prepare men for the coming judgments. Preaching in the open
space in San Esteban on October 3, 1408 he solemnly declared that he was the
angel of the judgment spoken of by St. John in the Apocalypse. The body of a
woman was just being carried to St. Paul’s church nearby for burial. St.
Vincent ordered the bearers to bring the corpse before him. He adjured the dead
to testify whether his claim was true or not. The dead woman came to life and
in the hearing of all bore witness to the truth of the saint’s claim and then
slept again in death (Fr. Stanislaus Hogan O.P.).
Just
as this, St. Vincent Ferrer’s extraordinary miracle, had convinced the
Dominican Fathers, his superiors, that he was correct in his claim to be the
angel of Apocalypse, so was it all the proof that I needed back in the 1980’s
to accept Fr. Kramer’s opinion that Revelation 8 (which includes reference to a
warning angel) was fixed to the very time of St. Vincent Ferrer. And so I,
quite content with the way Apocalypse had been incorporated into my book, The Five First Saturdays – now up-dated as:
The Five First Saturdays of Our
Lady of Fatima
–
moved on to consider other things relevant to that book, for example (in regard
to the many similarities found between the Book of Esther and the Fatima
events) to locate the precise era of Queen Esther, her uncle Mordecai, and
their foe Haman. This was in order to provide a solid historical foundation to
the whole Esther saga. Instead of my puzzling overmuch anymore about who, or
what, might be the seven-headed Beast of Revelation 13:1, I became preoccupied
now with trying to discover who in history was “Haman … the persecutor of the
Jews” (3:10); that most
ambitious and cruel character in Esther who, Hitler-like, had singlemindedly
set about to exterminate the entire Jewish race, but was thwarted at the
eleventh hour by Queen Esther and Mordecai.
See
now, e.g.:
Is the Book of Esther a Real
History?
I
know that many today will regard all this as quite ridiculous, a complete waste
of time. They will insist that one will never succeed in identifying the
historical era for Queen Esther because she never actually existed, never sat
on the Persian throne at Susa, was only a character of fiction. But my own
research has revealed a different trend, as in the case of the Book of Judith –
which contemporary exegetes likewise refer to as “historical fiction”. After years of research into
the Book of Judith I am convinced, from a detailed comparison of Judith with
the neo-Assyrian records, that the story about this Jewish heroine fits snugly
into the era of King Hezekiah of Jerusalem, when King Sennacherib of Assyria
invaded his kingdom in c.700 BC.
Judith
is indeed real history. See e.g. my:
and:
“Nadin went into everlasting
darkness”
Providentially,
I was invited in the year of 1999 to write a postgraduate thesis on this very
same era, that of King Hezekiah.
And
I am equally convinced that Esther is true history; though, as with Judith, it
has taken some time and intellectual effort to demonstrate this. I only made
real progress with Judith when I put aside peripheral details to track down the main incident: the defeat of the massive Assyrian
army.
The Book of Revelation
Despite
the superficial ingenuity of Fr. Kramer’s interpretation, it does not – on
closer scrutiny – match itself appropriately to St. John’s own words. Whereas
Fr. Kramer tumbled out, like far flung dice, the events that the Evangelist
described, spinning them right down through the centuries, even to our own
time, St. John – as we read in his introductory quote above – was clearly
talking about an early fulfilment of the events that Jesus
Christ had revealed to him. See my:
As
noted in that article, I am greatly indebted to the insights of Dr. Kenneth L. Gentry on this subject.
There
is a pronounced dichotomy here between the standard interpretations of
Revelation and the actual words of the author. St. John said emphatically that
these events were to happen “soon”; that is, soon for St. John’s era and
generation of the C1st AD. That St. John meant that soon-ness literally (indeed
he repeats it in various ways) is going to become more and more obvious in the
course of this book. Thus a literal fulfilment of Revelation 8 in St.
Vincent Ferrer’s time, almost a millennium and a half after St. John, as Fr.
Kramer had proposed, would not seem to be compatible with St. John’s “soon”.
This
does not at all shake St. Vincent’s testimony. The bull of canonization
compares him to an “angel
flying through mid-heaven”. The
breviary uses similar language. St. Vincent could well have been the
apocalyptical angel of judgment in the sense that Our Lord said of St. John the
Baptist that “… he, if you
will believe Me, is the Elijah who was to return” (Matthew 11:14); even though St. John
the Baptist had point blank told the priests and Levites who asked him, ‘Are you Elijah?’ … ‘I am not’ (John 1:21). The Baptist ‘was’ Elijah
in the sense that he came “in
the spirit and power of Elijah” (Luke
1:17).
Types
God
has apparently created ‘types’; a classical example being the one that we have
just looked at of St. John the Baptist being an Elijah type.
According
to Pope Pius XI, St. Thomas Aquinas is somewhat reminiscent of the Old
Testament patriarch Joseph, saviour of Egypt. See my:
That
Pope hinted at this in his encyclical, “Studiorum
Ducem” (29 June, 1923), when
he wrote:
Accordingly, just as it was said to the
Egyptians of old in time of famine: Go to Joseph, so that they should receive a supply of corn from him to
nourish their bodies, so We now say to all such as are desirous of the truth: Go to Thomas, and ask him to give you from his ample store the food of
substantial doctrine wherewith to nourish your souls unto eternal life.
This
passage became the inspiration for me to write an earlier article, “Go
To Thomas”, leading
me to discover various unexpected but striking parallels between the lives of
St. Thomas and Joseph.
And the intuitive reader will be able to discern many
others types as well of holy men and women down through the ages.
Now
St. Vincent Ferrer could likewise, as with the Baptist, have come so much “in the spirit and power of” a holy predecessor (angel or human) as
to be identifiable with, yet not literally, that predecessor. As we are going
to see, St. Vincent certainly shared a common vocation with St. John the
Evangelist inasmuch as he foretold a pending judgment that he insisted would
occur soon. Moreover,
his soon-ness has been just as misunderstood and misinterpreted as has the
Evangelist’s.
In
St. Vincent’s case, the matter of typology is further complicated by the
difficulty of deciding whether his type is the Eagle/angel of Revelation 8 or
Revelation 14; a difficulty that Fr. Kramer obviously has at least – just as he
also seems to stumble over the fact that the Dominican saint was, like the
Evangelist, utterly convinced that the judgments he foretold were to be fulfilled
very soon (op. cit., p.
209):
The above testimony [of the miracle] is
accepted by all biographers of St. Vincent as a proof of his claim. But they
make his reference to the Apocalypse indicate chapter XIV. 6, for they say he
often chose it as his text, ‘Fear God, and give Him honor, for the day of His
judgment is at hand’. They do not prove that he pronounced himself that
particular angel. And he seems to have had only the general revelation that he
was appointed “the angel of the judgment”.
By designating him the angel of chapter
XIV.6, the commentators run into inexplicable difficulties. For St. Vincent
emphatically and repeatedly asserted that the day of Wrath was to come “soon,
very soon, within a short time”, cito, bene cito et valde breviter. St. John announced that the judgment was to come very
quickly (Apoc. III. II), which meant that it would begin to operate soon. Since St. Vincent uttered these
prophecies, five centuries have elapsed, and the end of the world and last
judgment have not come. Some try to explain it by saying that the saint meant
the particular judgment; but that is meaningless. Others contend that he
predicted the approach of the last judgment conditionally, as Jonas predicted
the destruction of Nineveh …. But these are all conjectures of biographers. St.
Vincent did not aver that he was the angel of chapter XIV. or that the General
Judgment was very near.
Fr.
Kramer, after writing at some length in this rather tortuous vein, goes on to
wonder whether St. Vincent might not have been entirely correct about his own
apocalyptical identification, because he certainly estimated wrongly in another
major matter (ibid., p.
211):
Now that St. Vincent himself might have
been mistaken about the place assigned to him in the apocalyptic prophecies
need not appear strange. He adhered to the anti-pope, Benedict XIII, and
sincerely believed him to be the legitimate pontiff. This was a matter in which
his human judgment gave the decision. And this judgment can easily err. So
also, since it was not explicitly revealed to him what angel of the Apocalypse
he was, he may have drawn the mistaken conclusion that it was the one of
chapter XIV. 6. However, it has not been proven that he claimed to be that
angel or even thought he was. This latter angel has the commission to preach to
EVERY “nation and tribe, and tongue, and people”. St. Vincent, even though his
fame spread over it all, so that he was like “one flying through mid-heaven”,
personally reached only a small part of Christendom.
Fr.
Kramer’s entanglements here only reinforce me in my decision to consider St.
Vincent as, at best, an apocalyptical type only.
Confusion
is exacerbated by failure to recognise that the judgment about which St. John
was referring was intended for that
generation (c. 30-70 AD),
culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem (70 AD), and that it equates with
the “coming” that Our Lord and the Apostles
frequently referred to in regard to the generation that had crucified Him: a “coming” in judgment. Not to recognise this is
to make a mockery of Our Lord’s clear words and of other New Testament
prophecies. It also takes away the concreteness intended by Our Lord. When,
prior to his Passion, He had placed before Him by “some people” the examples of (i) those slain
by Pilate’s Roman troops, and (ii) others killed by a falling tower, He had
insisted: ‘Unless you do
penance you will all perish as they did [that is, by a violent death]’ (Luke 13:1-5). Whilst this
statement is also open to spiritual interpretation, it should immediately be
understood in the concrete sense, that this is exactly what was going to happen physically to that generation of Jews if they did
not have a change of heart within the allotted period of mercy.
At the end of the 40 years of probation thousands upon
thousands of Jews did die violent deaths at the hands of the Roman troops, with towers likewise falling upon them, as well as missiles, stones and fire.
The
same sort of warnings applied apparently to St. Vincent Ferrer’s generation.
And they apply also to ours. The Vatican II era has been an era of Divine mercy
extended to a wicked generation; but it also portends an Advent, or Coming of
Christ. Will the early Third Millennium witness the emergence of a new
apocalyptical ‘angel’ to proclaim ‘cito,
bene cito et valde breviter’?
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