Allegorical Meditations on the Scriptures and Tradition

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**St. Phillip and the 200 days wages at the Loaves and Fishes **

“Lord, even with 200 days wages, we could not afford to give these people even a little food.”

Now, we could work endlessly in natural goodness and never please God, we could think with our mere natural reason forever and never discover the deeper truths that would fulfill us, that we could never know unless God revealed it to us.

For, as Our Savior says, if you love those who love you, what good is that? Even the pagans do as much.

Hence, on our power, nothing is pleasing to God. Hence, also, does the Christ say, with man, it is impossible to be saved, but with God, all things are possible.

Hence, only Jesus can draw from natural food the supernatural food that is able to give us the power to love God as He loves.

And only Divine Revelation can satiate our desire to know the unknowable.

For this reason, again, St. Phillip is right: with 10 being a symbol of the world, and 2, per my theology, symbolizing basic religion, the base sacramental signs of all goodness, baptism and marriage–like the two horned false prophet who would mock this remnant goodness of heretics into the ultimate heresy, mocking the two horns left to separated Christians, the two of the Lamb’s seven, the seven Sacraments–so then 200 = 2 X 10 X 10.

Then, we could see 10 by itself as purely worldly effort and thought, then 2 X 10 as worldly RELIGION. Hence, even with taking purely worldly thought and efforts and multiply it with worldly thought and effort in merely natural religion, natural labor in goodness and truth, and then do it for that many days, with a day being a thousand years, and a thousand years a day, so that 200 days “wages” is 2 X 10 X 10 X 1000 years X 1000 years of wages, one would never please God, nor be satisfied, for only God’s supernatural love and truth can fill the human person.

Interesting isn’t it, too, that in another Gospel, Jesus says, count the cost. If you have an army of 10,000 and you are going after an army of 20,000, better to call a truce. Think of it, then, that the world in the Enlightenment called a truce between worldly religion (2 X 10 X 1000) and purely worldly thought (10 X 1000), and all that was gotten from it was supernatural death for the world, even as, in apocalypse 9, the sixth trumpet, the army of 2 myriads of myriads, or 2 10,000’s of 10,000s, like our number above, only “killed” a third of man spiritually.

But Jesus is the Divine healer, He creates from nothing supernatural grace in the seven sacraments, whether as five loaves and two fish (heretics have 2 sacraments lacking 5), or seven loaves and a few fish (schismatics have all 7 sacraments). Only this supernatural love can fill up in the human heart the love and truth that it longs for!

 

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The Catholic / Protestant Ten Commandments and Daniel 7

Just had a kewl idea.

In Daniel 7, I always wondered the apocalyptic meaning of the ten horns of the fourth beast. Three of them are uprooted and in their place comes up the little horn. It is greater than his other fellows and utters proud boasts and blasphemies, with eyes like a man and a mouth like a man, persecuting the Holy Ones, and thinking to change the “feast days and the Law”. The little horn is a type of antichrist in orthodox theology.

In Catholic Biblical theology, an apocalyptic passage usually has three layers of time fulfillment: immediate, intermediate, and long range.

Hence, for orthodox Catholics, the immediate meaning is the subkingdom that succeeded Greece–the four headed leopard (Alexander’s empire was split into four parts according to his four generals)–the Selecuids, and the little horn is Antiochus IV Ephipanies, who blasphemed God by claiming deity and attempting to force the Jews to apostatize to paganism or be tortured and killed. This was the final OT history before Christ came, recorded in the Maccabeean Scriptures. He also forced things against the discipline of the Old Law, forcing Jews to eat pork or be killed, or to fight on the sabbath or be killed.

The intermediate fulfillment is pagan Rome, where the little horn symbolizes the blasphemous Roman emperors, who, like Antiochus, claimed deity and viciously persecuted the Christians, the Holy Ones of New. The beast was cast into the fire when Catholicism triumphed over paganism with Constantine.

The final layer of fulfillment is rumored to be antichrist at the end of the world, where antichrist of New shall persecute the Holy Ones of the Catholic Church. It will be destroyed by Christ at the end of the world.

Now, for what I always wondered! What are these** three horns **that are plucked up, and in their place, a little one?

It is difficult to see how Antiochus laid low three kings. There is no immediate evidence. Similarly, there were many more Roman Emperors than ten, much less that any particular one laid siege to three others. (Seventh Day Adventists say the little horn is the Papacy, which conquered three of the Barbaric kingdoms surrounding Rome in its elderly condition, hence, usurping power as an apostate impostor of the true Church. This is obviously absurd for Catholics.) Finally, Fundamentalists like to say that the antichrist will come to power over the world by subduing three nations or regions of the world at the end.

The problem is, as I have illustrated before, that knowing how many “kings” or subdivisions of nations is meaningless and pointless in New Testament conception of apocalypse. It is only necessary to know the general ages as they are spiritually, not temporal specifics of end time things. Hence, to know that Antichrist were to take power over ten regions of the world, or rather thirteen, or lay low three of them, or seventeen of them, is irrelevant. It is only the NATURE of antichrist kingdom that matters.

And this brings us to a more Catholic approach: recall that I have written in one essay how some Catholic Fathers have seen the ten horns of the Beast and dragon of NT apocalypse as the Ten Commandments, which Satan and evil societies fight against in times of supreme evil. In that essay, we saw this theology corroborated by applying it to Apocalypse 17, in the discourse on how the ten kings shall burn up the Whore and eat her flesh.

Recall that we saw how, in the beginning of evil stages, the world is seduced by the Whore , evil humanity that divorces itself from the marriage and Covenant to God to join itself superficially and spiritually to the world and its flesh*, materialism and brute glory from the things of the CreaTION, instead of everlasting love with the CreaTOR.* And the essence of such spiritual condition IS the ten horns that fight with the ten commandments, for, in such materialistic societies as the Whore of Babylon, the world scoffs at God and His Law, thinking that they can preserve peace and fulfillment apart from any religion and with merely the material world and its glories, with man and his perverse ambition alone.

And for a time, like the teenager that first enjoys the fornication and alcohol, or the prodigal son with the father’s fortune, the world can enjoy its perverse infatuation with Created goods and deceive themselves that they can ignore God and His Law and still thrive and be fulfilled in prosperity.

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But eventually, the “war against the ten commandments” unveils the true fruits of evil, the beast’s ten horns of living defiant of God’s moral foundation “burns and eats the Whore up”, just as the teenager can become a homeless addict on the street or a person with great psychological wounds from multiple divorces, which are many times the consequences later in life of alcohol abuse and promiscuity. Or how, eventually, the prodigal son’s wealth runs out, and the famine comes. Similarly, the lawlessness and disregard for the natural principles of morals that are the only true way to secure peace and security produces its fruits in the collapse of the Whore civilization, for, if man is at war with God, how long before he turns inward toward his fellow man?

Hence, the godless society that initially prospers falls into ruin by its very godlessness, the fruits of unrighteousness unraveling its foundation (the fruits of abortion is murder of all human beings, of unfaithfulness in sex, the collapse of the family, eroding away peace in communities, giving rise to crime, violence. This in turn destroys economics, etc, forthe end is man at war with himself, family against family, community against community, city against city, nation against nation.)

Now we can see a Catholic allegorical view of the ten horns in Daniel 7. There are the ten commandments, which the beast attacks in all greater stages of evil, and which fill out the two bigger ones, according to Jesus Himself, who testified the two greatest commandments of all: Love God first and foremost, then your neighbor.

In Catholic theology, the first THREE of the ten commandments, the greatest of the ten, are dedicated to God. The remaining seven are dedicated to the lesser commandment of loving your neighbor.

Hence, the spirit of antichrist lays low the commandments of God, the first three, and sets itself up in their midst (2 Thess 2, the man of sin seats himself in the Temple of God, shewing himself as if he WERE God!). Hence, as in all three kingdom fulfillments above–the Seleucids, the Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of Antichrist–the antichrist firgure, whether singular or multiple, takes the place of God and claims to be God, determining truth independent of Him and determining for himself what is “good and evil”, as at the garden with the serpent.

Now for the Catholic / Protestant part: the Protestants make FOUR commandments for God and only SIX for your neighbor. They take the commandment against idolatry and split it in two, making the graven images commandment separate. Then they join the last two commandments into one: thou shalt not lust, thou shalt not have greed.

Lust and greed are two different things. To covet a spouse is lust, to covet goods is greed. Not the same thing, or else one is saying that adultery has the same nature as stealing.

Moreover, the whole point of graven images in the OT was IDOLATRY, not ICONS.

But behold, not all things of pagans are bad. For this reason, Mother Church took the Greek Philosophy and Christianized it, making it a weapon for reason, to enhance the intellectual defense and definition of the Church’s doctrine. Likewise, she took the blasphemous and idolatrous art of the Greeks, the statues of gods and goddesses, and made them Christian, creating images of the Divine grace in the saints.

See also, Apocalypse 12, the Woman, the Church is given two WINGS to fly to safety from the serpent for a time, in order that She may rest. Yesterday on EWTN, the priest spoke of the two wings of the head and the heart, the intellect and the will, which each elevate the human spirit to consider God and His Love. Hence, in the same Middle Ages, the Church takes from the pagans the mind, philosophy, to enhance HER mind in contemplation of God, and from them the heart, art, to enhance HER art, in order to draw us closer to God through the beauty of Sacred Images. And did not these two great pillars enable the Woman to “rest” for a time against the dragon in the Middle Ages, when the Church was largely free in Europe and whose cultural influence was at its peak in that AGE OF FAITH?

To return to the Sacred Icons, if it is true that possessing sanctifying grace makes one a partaker of the Divine Nature, in so far as sanctifying grace IS a very created sharing, even if finite, in the Love and Life of the Triune God, so icons of the saints are icons of God, for such grace DWELLS in all saints, in all those who loved God, ESPECIALLY the ones who did so HEROICALLY!

And that is also the issue: the pagans made idols of silver and gold, but Catholics make ICONS, not idols. For the pagans, the IDOLS were ends unto themselves, as if they were, in their gold, wood, silver or plaster, gods unto themselves! But ICONS are NOT the final end, they just POINT to the final end. They are images, or symbols, of God’s GRACE, which is godlike, and so glorify God.

Hence, the iconoclastic heresy: even as God put images of the holy Cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant, sacred art is not forbidden. And so, it is heretics who deny the glory and beauty of imaging God’s holiness within Himself, hanging on the cross, feeding the multitudes, Risen from the Dead, and of His children, who, again, bear His likeness and Image within themselves, Divine Grace, which makes their inner beauty shine in some sense like the inner beauty of God.

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And so, we say it again, icons of the saints and of the Christ, who has made visible God, are icons of God, which do not compel us to worship the wood, or plaster, or canvas ITSELF, but which draw our hearts to the Only One who can fill them, the One we worship, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

For this reason, Daniel 7 lends evidence to the right thinking of the Catholic Church on the Ten Commandments, in that, the antichrist takes the place of God and claims to be Him. For this reason, he tears out the commandments toward the Infinite God and sets up residence within them. But if such horns are THREE, so then the number of the commandments to GOD are three, and not four, as heretics would have it!

 

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Physical Death or Supernatural Death?

Apocalypse 9: A Chinese Army, the Black Plague, or the “Enlightenment”?

In Apocalypse 9, it said that an army of 20,000 X 10,000 (myriads of myriads) killed a third of mankind.

Which would be worse, that a war of 200 million soldiers kill a third of mankind literally, that is physically, or that myriads of myriads of worldly religious ideas and purely worldly ideologies killed a third of man SUPERNATURALLY, by “causing charity to grow cold in the many”, stripping them of a dependence upon God for revelation and grace?

For this reason, it would make more sense for the sixth trumpet, or second great woe, of apocalypse to be something like the so-called “Enlightenment”, which murdered supernatural goodness in its adherents, telling them they only need natural knowledge and goodness apart from supernatural revelation and assistance, rather than the Black Plague, in which a third of Europe perished only in a physical sense.

For which is worse? To die physically in pain but have the last rites and attain Eternal life, or to die supernaturally while still alive, thinking you don’t need God to tell you things or help you, that you can obey Him on your own power and figure out those truths of His that you need with your own brain, die in comfort, and pass into eternal emptiness?

“And because iniquity will abound, the charity of the many will grow cold,” Jesus, Matthew 24:10-13

For note, 10 is a symbol of the world in the Bible, at least on one level. For example, the beast and dragon of apocalypse have ten horns, as does the final, or fourth, beast of Daniel 7. We have seen that “2” sacraments summarize all of our religion, the Baptismal spirit (faith and repentance), and the heavenly Marriage, eternal life with God. Hence, 10 X 1000 can be purely worldly [10 ] ideologies confounded innumerable [1000], so that 2 X 10 X 1000 can be worldly [10] religion [2] confounded innumerably [1000], even as the Enlightenment deists and rationalists had as many theories of natural religion as their numbers, and the subsequent purely worldly philosophers similarly.

 

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Augustinianism does not answer all mysteries: the Conversion of the Jews

Christ said no other sign would be given to the Jews except Jonah. That is, in Christ, who slept in the body of the earth for three days and three nights and was expelled at the Resurrection, just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights and then expelled onto the earth.

What then, are these three nights and days?

And if their fulfillment in the literal Christ’s body did not do the trick to open the eyes of the Jews, what will?

Ah, but alas, Christ also has a Body that journeys in His Path, taking up the cross unto the resurrection at the end of time. And this Body is the MYSTICAL Body, the Church! In fact, the former Pharisee turned Apostle proclaims, “I fill up in MY flesh what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ!” Hence, if the sufferings of Christ’s body, bringing forth the symbolism of Jonah, could not convert, and no other sign shall be given, what other options are there except that what WILL open their eyes is that, somehow, such sign is given in the MYSTICAL body.
But then, we need to know the three nights and days?

And not only that, but what if Jonah’s allegory is deeper than three literal days and nights. What if the days and nights are AGES?

In fact, I argue this. The SAINT in the Catholic Church endures THREE nights:

The dark night of the senses in the PURGATIVE Way
The dark night of the soul in the ILLUMINATIVE Way
Martrydom of the UNITIVE way.

And after each darkness comes the stage of light: After the dark night of purgation comes the general light of illuminative way. After the dark night of soul comes the general light of the unitive way, a way of peace and rejoicing, reveling in the vindication of God’s grace and truth, every step in the will of God. And after the darkness of martyrdom comes the ultimate light, eternal life in heaven!

So then, just consider this: If the individual human saint always travels down this three part spiritual road, shouldn’t the People of God as a WHOLE, HISTORICALLY, do so?

All the more they have and most certainly.

First, look at the History of the People of Old?

For what was the dark night of senses for the Jews except Egypt?

What was their illuminative way except Moses’ Old Law and the Prophets?

What was the dark night of the soul except the falling away of the People before the exile, in which the righteous prophets were scoffed at, persecuted, and killed?

What was the unitive way except the repentance of the People in Babylon and their journey to restoration, back to their Holy Land, weeping tears of sorrow for how unfaithful they had been, and loving God to a much greater degree than they did before.

And what was the martyrdom for them except Maccabees, under OT antichrist figure Antiochus IV Epiphanies, who forced them to apostatize or face horrible torture and death?

And what was the light after Martyrdom except NEW Life, the Coming of the Christ?

And in a similar vein, have we not, as Gentiles in the NEW Covenant of Incarnate One not ALSO walked in a similar path till now?

What was OUR purgation except Pagan Rome’s persecutions in our first three centuries?

What was OUR illuminative way except the doctrinal development of the last 1700 years that started with Constantine, through the Trinity, the Christ’s Nature, the office of Peter, the office of the Bishops and Tradition, the meaning of the Scriptures and Sanctification, the necessity even of Reason to know God and the social order, summarized in Vatican II, on the border of the now secular apostasy that has reigned for a generation?

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And is this modern secular apostasy that reigns in most socieities that once knew the God of the Old and New now a DARK NIGHT OF SOUL? For just as the People of Old fell into total idolatry and wickedness just before the exile, and scoffed at the Holy Prophets who exhorted them to repentance, are not the modern GENTILES of Europe and her children not also scoffing at the NEW Covenant, and the Church’s holy witness, rejecting just about ALL components of the Gospel.

And, yet, what remains? Are the Augustinians right, that the time of ultimate maturation is at hand, and all will be either Catholic or utterly apostate, and then Antichrist comes and the world ends?

Is that REALLY what is coming?

But how would there be a UNITIVE way, a restoration of the GENTILES to the NEW Law, even as the JEWS were restored to the OLD Law?

Wherefore, Augustine and the Fathers of his time did not KNOW that the illuminative and unitive ways are not the same. Yes, some illumination happens in the unitive way, and some purgation and union happens in the illuminative way, but we now know in modern times that there is FIRST a general ILLUMINATIVE way, THEN a dark night of soul, THEN a unitive way of light free of purgation, and THEN martyrdom.

For, in the time of Augustine, the Church only saw this: there is first a general purging, then you walk in mixed illumination and uniion, then you are martyred and go to heaven.

No, we know it is not quite that simple.

No, now, there is purgation, then general illumination, then dark night of soul, THEN a general unitive way, THEN martyrdom.

For this reason, we must become deeper than Augustine, shedding amillennialism and taking chiliiasm and putting a little water in it so that it is no longer fully literal, but having some sense of it.

Therefore, what is now coming in our day is NOT Antichrist and great apostasy and tribulation.

It is, LIKE the Old Babylonian Exile, a time of chastisement for the Gentiles, in which they, like the Jews, will be carried away into exile, although this time, into the land of the CONSEQUENCES of their SINS and apostasy! And when they have reaped them in full, they will REND their hearts back to God and cry out for Him, as the Jews did in that painful land of Babylon!

Then, shall God gather all the Gentiles from their spiritual foreign lands into the Holy Land, Mother Catholic Church. For from the land of Islam, and of Orthodox, and Protestantism, and Enlightenment, and secular children of evil one, they will all be taken from these spiritual places that are, in various degrees, foreign to the Sacred Heart of Christ and the Immaculate Heart of His Mother, and be brought BACK to the homeland, the land of promise, the CATHOLIC CHURCH.
Then there will be peace, a unitive way, a long period in which Jesus’ grace RESTS in the hearts of men all over the world.

Then, eventually, they will forget their spanking and turn apostate again.

THEN, shall come the NT Antichrist, and the ultimate deja vu for the Jews: a blasphemous man, like Antiochus of their history, forcing CATHOLICS to apostatize from the NEW law or be tortured and killed, just as Antiochus forced JEWS to apostatize from the OLD Law or be tortured and killed.

Then, in the martyrdom of the Church, the THIRD dark night for the People of NEW, the People of Old will have finally seen THEIR three nights filled up in the CHURCH! The sign of Jonah in JESUS LITERALLY wasn’t enough, but in the MYSTICAL BODY, which fills up in Her flesh what Jesus could not do. it IS enough!

Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus, Come!

For this reason, if we stay with Augustine in the first answer to the Millennium, the mystery of Jewish conversion is NOT solved. We do not know WHY their eyes will be opened.

But in taking the Millennium into a little less allegory than St Augustine did, saying it IS an ending phase of Church history, a period of reign of Christ, but FIGURATIVE, spiritual, but PRACTICAL, men loving God in a day of rest, as in the seventh day of Old Creation, it is a little more beautiful than just the gray of all the Church in between pagan Rome and the Antichrist.

That is, in THIS view, the Miillennium is the period between our time of dark night of soul and martyrdom, the period between OUR apostasy NOW and the one of the end of the world, when, in between, we a stage of UNION with God, the will of God done on earth as it is in heaven, a world resting in God’s grace, so that God nor His People need to labor so hard against sin and error, since the world will finally rest for a great time and accept God’s truth and love.

Also, the new eschatology answers the question of the mystery of the Jews: They see Jesus literally fulfill the three days and nights in His flesh in the tomb, and they did not believe. These days and nights fulfilled their historical, spiritual days and nights, but they could not see it.

But when they see these three great spiritual darknesses and lights in the PEOPLE of New, they will finally see when it culminates: The third darkness of the Catholic Church fulfilling the third Darkness of Judah! Antichrist of OLD and Antichrist of NEW!
And then, just as Christ came the FIRST time after Antichrist of OLD, so He shall come AGAIN after Antichrist of NEW!