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“It is of the essence of prophecy that it can be understood only to the extent to which it is being fulfilled—and even then only by the believer.” —Josef Pieper
Seeking Wisdom about “the End”
Religion has much to say about the beginning of things, about first principles and the spiritual origins of mankind. It also has much to say about the end of things, where our lives are headed and what the final goal of the universe, if any such exists, is to be.
Philosophy can be of help in this quest. As Josef Pieper, the respected Thomist, puts it in his book The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History: “he who philosophizes asks whether this historical happening means anything over and above the merely factual, and what this meaning may be. He is therefore asking […] what the historical process is ‘leading up to.’” In religious terms, this is closely tied in with the idea of hope in a future salvation or redemption.
It is fair to say that such questions are ignored and shunted aside in today’s workaday world (another term of Pieper’s). And even in the world of religion, sad to say. Occasionally a homily might allude in a rote way to the end times (or the Last Things, a related concept having more to do with our personal destinies), but we do not emphasize or speak of eschatology in any detail. We may pay lip service to beliefs about the end times at Advent and Easter, but our ideas about them, to the extent that we have them, are vague. Few are actively engaged with thinking about what form Jesus’ second advent might take, and how this relates to the ideas of the Final Judgment and the other events seen as belonging to the end times. Hysteria and fear-mongering about the end of the world have given a bad name to the study of eschatology, to the extent that it appears the province of crackpots and the excessively morbid.
But if you take eschatology out of Christianity, you take out a good deal of the point. The idea behind the Christian faith is that God is working something in the world, is bringing things to their conclusion or goal. And there is a place for an honest, sober, and rational interest in the end of time as conducted by serious thinkers like Pieper. Christ himself calls us to a vigilance about the end of the world, bidding us to watch for the “signs of the times” and to be alert. Pieper goes so far as to say that the question about the end of the world is one that man must ask, one that he cannot leave unasked.
Christ’s command to “watch” implies a philosophical inquiry into the signs of the end times. This inquiry is a prime example of “faith seeking understanding”: starting from the standpoint of revelation (and particularly Revelation, the last biblical book), the inquirer seeks clues in the world around him for what the future may hold. This inquiry is not superstition, nor is it private mysticism, but a clear-headed investigation of the facts of experience in the light of faith.
For in the end, we have to make a decision about what we believe, and beliefs about the end times connect with our view of reality, time, and history as a whole. Either everything is going around in a mindless circle, or everything is progressing to a goal. If the latter, then we need to be clear about what the goal is and how we are to contribute to it. The philosophy of history is a way of tying together past, present, and future and seeing our place in the whole.
The Western-Christian view of history
It is distinctive to the “Western-Christian view of history” (Pieper’s phrase) that history is seen as leading to a goal, rather than being merely cyclical as some ancient worldviews saw it. I stress merely cyclical, since there can be cyclical elements within an overall goal-directed scheme.
Pieper points out that the word “end” (finis in Latin) has a double meaning: it can mean either termination or goal. The two are not necessarily the same thing, for a thing can be terminated without having reached its goal. But Pieper resolutely refuses to believe that the world is going to end without having attained its goal. I find this an extraordinary statement of faith, but Pieper does not seem to deem it capable of justification; perhaps for an Aristotelian-Thomist, it is unthinkable for things not to fulfill a proper end because this is in the very design of things.
This bedrock faith in the teleological nature of things relates to Pieper’s view of the relationship between philosophy and theology. The philosopher seeks truth, but he does so with the data of faith illuminating him from behind like the sun.
In our colloquial way of speaking “the end of the world” denotes an utter catastrophe. For the early Christians, however, it was greeted as a liberation, as the fulfillment of the history of salvation. The end of the world was very good news! For early Christians, “the world” denoted not merely the visible cosmos, but even more in a metaphysical sense, the state of creation as being in the thrall of sin and death. This is “the world” which according to St. Paul is passing away, due to the redemptive action of Jesus in dying and rising from the dead.
Pieper stresses that the “end of times” religiously understood is not an annihilation, not an end in the absolute sense, and this is because God wills to maintain all creatures in being. God does not revoke his creation. This means that any nihilistic understanding of “the end” is simply not to be entertained from the perspective of faith. Rather, the “catastrophe” of the end times is to be understood as a final apotheosis of evil, leading to the end of time and earthly existence and opening out into redemption and new creation.
The Structure of the End Times
One of the great virtues of Pieper’s short book is that it clarifies and analyzes, for a lay audience, the exact nature of Christian expectations about the end times, and contrasts this with the trajectory of modern Western thought. Pieper sees the Christian revelation about eschatology as having a definite structure including three elements:
- The fulfillment of history’s goal
- The transposition of time into eternity
And, leading up to these things,
- The final catastrophe within history, the reign of the antichrist
Further, Pieper sees the Christian revelation about the end times as having both an “intra-historical” and an “exta-temporal” dimension, both of which are necessary and linked together. The end times will take place within history, but they will at the same time open history and time into eternity.
The Drama of Antichrist
We don’t hear a lot about the reign of the antichrist in our Sunday homilies, but it is there in the New Testament and the church’s theological tradition. It only remains to be seen how the statements about the antichrist, highly symbolic as they are in the letters and Revelation of St. John, are to be interpreted and understood.
But there is a prior scriptural text for the end times, and it comes from the mouth of Jesus himself. It is the so-called Olivet Discourse in the Synoptic Gospels, where Jesus predicts an apocalyptic time in the future, a time that has been identified either with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple or with the end of the world. (And think about it: for a devout Jew, would the destruction of the Temple not be as cataclysmic as the end of the world?) Here, in Jesus’ speech, we already have an adumbration of the antichrist figure: “For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Mt 24:24).
St. John in his first epistle continues the theme of the pseudo-Christ: “Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour.” And who is the antichrist, according to John? The antichrist is quite simply “he who denies that Jesus is the Christ.” Scholars believe that John was thinking of the Christological heresies that were already brewing in the first generation of Christian life.
Consider: St. John was writing barely a generation after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus’ coming had effectively inaugurated the “last hour.” And so powerful were his message and his claims that the antichrist—the spirit that denies who Christ is—had already risen in opposition, whether Roman emperors or heretical preachers.
One would expect a figure called “antichrist” to be an inversion of the values that Christ embodied. So, for example, whereas Christ represented self-giving service and love, so the antichrist will represent demonic pride and self-asserting hedonism. But the twist is that the antichrist will present a benign front, similar to Christ in his outward appearance, and thus he will deceive many.
Some schools of thought, both ancient and modern, see the antichrist as a collective force of evil rather than an individual person. I am inclined toward this view: the antichrist is a recurrent character type whose final and definitive appearance is to occur near the end of history. The great totalitarian dictatorships of modern times certainly fit the description of powers that set themselves in opposition to God and Christ. There is too the metaphorical “dictatorship” of relativism, the large-scale abandonment of faith—in short, man’s prideful rebellion against God and self-deification, particularly in these days with the aid of his technological works. Really, there are so many evils at work in the world that there is no need for a single antichrist; what we have is, rather, the multifaceted spirit of antichrist.
Here is what Pieper has to say: “theology has, since time immemorial, understood certain historical phenomena, such as persecutions and the figure of the tyrant, to be prefigurations and preliminary forms of the end-state.”
This gives us a clue as to what the historical conditions at the end times will look like, in more specific and modern terms. And I think this is what many of us are looking for, over and above the pious generalities we get in many homilies; these are fine as far as they go, but many of us crave more detailed information.
Pieper has some intriguing things to say about this. In the first place, the antichrist is or will be a political figure, a ruler, one who seeks to bring the entire world under his dominion. This one-world rule will be facilitated by the increased interconnection of all parts of the world thanks to communication, transportation, and technology generally—what some today refer to as globalization. One concomitant of this globalization is that the gospel has now been preached to the entire world, and this appears to connect with Jesus’ prediction in the Olivet Discourse: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come” (Mt. 24: 14). And this interconnected state of the world creates the perfect opportunity for the totalizing power of antichrist to assert itself.
At the same time, with the progressive rise of the antichrist, the contrast between good and evil becomes ever starker to the eyes of those who believe and perceive, thus making the choice for God ever clearer and more pressing as history moves toward its conclusion.
Pieper insists on the political nature of the antichrist. The end of the world is not to be equated merely with the end of culture. Rather, the antichrist is a ruler demanding political allegiance and thus forcing one to choose between good and evil. One of the things that surprised me most about The End of Time is that cultural decline as such hardly figures in Pieper’s analysis at all.
On the nature of the antichrist’s reign, Pieper cites E. R. Curtius, who characterized it in modern terms as “planetary despotism with progressive technical development and the extinction of spirituality.” Pieper adds that “fear and self-interest” will be the foundation of the antichrist’s rule. He will gain adherents by pretending to be a salvific figure, but he will in fact be a false inversion to everything that Christ represents. The antichrist will have a great success, and this very success will point up his diametrical opposition to Christ, who was not “successful” but was persecuted and killed. In accord with poetic and theological justice, the antichrist will finally be defeated only through the affirmation, on the part of the church, of the opposing spirit of Christ through what Pieper calls “the blood-testimony.” What Pieper is saying is, soberingly, that the end times will involve widespread persecution and martyrdom.
Undoubtedly some of this has already occurred. Using the future tense points up the difficulty of talking about eschatology, for we are the middle of an unfolding story.
The Christian Vision of the End Times
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has two passages that I find particularly striking in regard to the end times. The first quote echoes the words of St. John cited above:
Since the Ascension God’s plan has entered into its fulfillment. We are already at “the last hour.” Already the final age of the world is with us, and the renewal of the world is irrevocably underway… (670)
The second passage is indebted to St. Paul:
According to the Lord, the present time is the time of the Spirit and of witness, but also a time still marked by “distress” and the trial of evil which does not spare the Church and ushers in the struggles of the last days. It is a time of waiting and watching. (672)
It is remarkable how the Christian revelation balances the “already” and the “not yet”—a sense of being suspended in time, suffering agonies yet with the promise of a new sunrise already visible on the horizon. Looking at this complex mixture of light and dark, it is clear why Pieper says that “the many layers of this attitude to history cannot be apprehended with the simplifying concepts “optimistic-pessimistic.” Instead, the Christian attitude is one of hope in God’s promises and providence, a hope that understands that the catastrophe is not final but a prelude to final salvation.
Yet, while keeping hope in the forefront, we can still carry out a rational analysis of “concrete historical reality” in light of eschatology. We should not pretend, ostrich-like, that we know nothing about what is happening or will happen. And according to Pieper, the believer is at an advantage when compared to the secular humanist, because the former is able, precisely because of his belief in the prophesies of the Apocalypse, to see more in the world around him that may be related to the end times. The example Pieper gives is the appearance of totalitarianism in the 20th century. To the liberal humanist it seems incomprehensible, surprising in the extreme; but the believer is able to “recognize” the rise of totalitarianism as a perfectly natural outcome of historical forces and as presaging the end of time. The believer, because he sees history sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), is less likely to be caught naively off guard by disasters that happen in history. Instead, he nods his head in sober recognition.
From Hope to “Progress”
According to Pieper, the close unity of the three elements in the Western-Christian view of eschatology unraveled as Western thought transitioned into secular modernity. Faith and hope in God were transformed into the liberal doctrine of progress, whereby a Golden Age was to be brought about, not by God acting in history, but by man himself. For Pieper, this process was a simplification and flattening-out of Christianity’s rich and multifaceted synthesis, its “tense and complex structure” giving way to a few naïve generalities. For example, Immanuel Kant argued for the perfectibility of humanity within history, not beyond it—a practice that later critics have called “immanentizing the eschaton.” Kant goes so far as to use the phrase “the hereafter” not to refer to the afterlife but rather to the future in historical time. In other words, the Christian doctrine of the end times has been not discarded, but reinterpreted in secular terms.
Pieper puts it this way: “the notion of a ‘City of God’ outside Time has been completely inverted to reemerge as the concept of an ideal social condition which can be realized within Time through cultural, political, and economic progress.” In the year 1792 (not coincidentally the eve of the French Revolution), Kant could in all seriousness write a treatise with the title The Victory of the Good Principle over the Evil and the Establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth.
But the shift from Christian hope to secular progress had another consequence. As the illusory nature of progress became more painfully apparent in the bloody history of modern times, it spawned an opposite reaction of extreme pessimism, which is just as far (if not farther) from the Christian view as the liberal gospel of progress is. According to this view, any end that takes place in history will spell a complete catastrophe and annihilation. With this view we lose any sense of God as the source of hope and providence.
So there are two extremes between which the Christian view of eschatology is situated. On one extreme we have radical progress, and on the other radical pessimism. In the middle is Christian hope. The hopeful Christian is called to live comfortably within paradoxes—darkness and light, goodness and evil, catastrophe and salvation.
When we discard the notion of man-directed progress and adopt the perspective of hope and providence, we realize that progress properly understood does in fact exist, and a clear-headed examination of the history of the church will show what positive change she has wrought the world—which of course is the same as saying that God is bringing about his kingdom through the operation of the church in the here and now.
Christian eschatological claims are a stumbling block precisely because they are unfulfilled, in the process of being verified, and moreover impinging directly on us and our future. Prophesies that have already been fulfilled from the Christian perspective (like the Messianic prophecies of Isaiah) cannot be very controversial. And the lack of belief in eschatology is part of the whole crisis of faith in our time. Like all religious doctrines, eschatological doctrine tends to be reduced to an imaginative poeticism—an interesting museum piece from the cultural past, but not something that compels belief today.
Yet Pieper reveals a strange countervailing phenomenon. Just at the moment when modern science appears to have made the miraculous less credible, religious expectations of a catastrophic end to human history have become perhaps more credible than ever before in the light of the destructiveness and nihilism of recent history (recall that Pieper was writing during the Atomic Age).
Beyond “Progress”: A Fresh Outlook
Finally, the end times will take place within history but will simultaneously signal the termination of history and time. Pieper draws a distinction between events that are historical and events which are not. Both science and religion tell us that the world as we know it will have an end; but the end posited by science merely relates to the heavenly bodies and does not relate to history. As Pieper observes, only the religious view of the end times relates specifically to history and to mankind, and it is that “end” with which we are concerned rather than the eventual burnout of the sun or the like.
In every age there are those who want the eschaton to speed along. Typically, these have been secular utopians, heirs of the Enlightenment, who want to bring about heaven on earth through their own power. The Christian hopes in God instead. Ultimately it is a question of who is in charge, and the believer can have no doubt that it is God. The end-state will not come about within history from man’s effort, but from God renovating and remaking Creation. The question then remains: what signs are there that this is coming about?
Here is what the Christian witness tells us, as best I understand and can express it. This is the “last age,” as it has in fact been since Christ left the earth. Christ’s coming was the beginning of the end, of the “passing away” of the sin-ensnared world and the gradual breaking in of God’s kingdom. The history of the church over the past 2000 years has overseen this spread of God’s kingdom, concurrently with the continued existence and growth of evil in all its forms. Continuing evil will build up, and the struggle between the forces of light and darkness will accelerate until it reaches a climax, an apotheosis that will see the triumph of the spirit of antichrist. This will be the final catastrophe of history, which will decisively inaugurate the end, an “end” which is at once a termination, a reaching of a goal, and an opening out into a new supernatural reality, a remade creation.
The catastrophe of antichrist will actually be the second such apotheosis of evil in history. The first occurred on Calvary. That catastrophe was overcome by Jesus in rising from the dead, thus inaugurating the first stage of the end of the age, the era of the Church. The second catastrophe, the triumph of antichrist, is now ongoing.
The spirit of antichrist takes on many forms and faces, but there is a common denominator in that the teachings of Christ and the Church are subtly twisted or perverted. St. John says of antichrist, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they are not of us.” Antichrist is a subtle deceiver, and “a radically secularized mankind” will be his dupe, interpreting the most catastrophic developments in culture and society as “a stupendous advance on the part of mankind.” Supreme moral disorder will be mistaken for the very highest state of order, and values will be inverted. Indeed, even believers will fall victim to the antichrist’s allurements, completely mistaking (and paradoxically at the same time fulfilling) the prophecies.
Regardless what name we give the spirit of antichrist—whether modern liberalism, secular atheistic humanitarianism, or what you will—the main point of all these considerations is that history is taking a definite shape or pattern, a pattern which can be discerned and analyzed, through faith, and which points toward the end. Interpreting these patterns and signs is the job of the intelligent, thoughtful believer. Such a believer should see everything that happens in the world and in his life as a sharp arrow pointing to the end—understood in Pieper’s double sense as fulfillment and termination leading to a new beginning.
Adopting this attitude will help us break free from the “business as usual” complacency with which we typically drift through life in its endless cycles. We will be able to recover something of the urgency, along with the joy and anticipation, that the earliest Christian disciples had.
Perhaps owing to the fact that the end did not happen as soon as the early Christians thought and the scriptures seemed to suggest, we have drifted into an attitude in which the cycles of birth, death, and passing generations seem to be the only reality and our only spiritual concern is for a disembodied afterlife for the individual. I wonder if this lack of spiritual imagination might also be a subtle effect of rationalism, of the stringent separation of matter and spirit that has increasingly influenced our way of thinking in the modern era. More and more we find it impossible to believe that transformation is happening right under our noses, in the world as we know it. We forget that the Gospel proclaims that God is coming to us to enact judgment and a new creation. Liturgically we still pray Maranatha—“Come, Lord”—but do we really believe it? Are we actively cultivating a lively “friendship with Christ” (as Pope Benedict beautifully phrased it) so that we ardently desire to meet him when he comes—whatever form that coming might take?
It seems to me that if we dismiss, even subconsciously, the eschatological dimension of Christianity as a superstitious relic and take refuge in an attitude of “business as usual” cyclicism, we make the Gospel out to be a fairy tale; we lapse into a pre-Christian mindset. We show a lack of faith in the principle that God makes his purposes known in the present-day, material/spiritual world. Pieper brings up an unsettling possibility on this score. In failing to recognize the signs of the end, we may be committing the same mistake that the members of Israel made who failed to recognize the Messiah in Jesus. In our indifference, we may be guilty of the same lack of vision as the Pharisees and scribes. All the more reason to sharpen our eschatological vision.
For in addition to the life journey of individual souls, there is an intersecting reality in which is God is bringing things on earth to their conclusion and fulfillment. In short: life is coming to a point, and it is doing so quickly. Let us by all means not miss the point.
The early Christian generations lived their lives in a spirit of joyful but vigilant preparation, as if the end was near. This is in fact the normal Christian attitude; or was, before secularism and the spirit of “business as usual” took over. So should it be for us. To that end there are, I believe, imaginative functions that can apply to the expectation of the end times. There are artistic and cultural resources that are natural adjuncts to eschatological hope. Humor and satire are important ones: think of how great modern writers like C. S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury, and Aldous Huxley conjured visions of an apocalyptic future in their fiction. These men saw grim consequences to the course the world was on, yet they expressed it with wit and brilliance that can make us laugh with recognition even as we shudder in dread.
This is the chiaroscuro that the serious Christian projects onto the canvas of his mind: already and not yet, the world diminishing, yet God’s Kingdom faintly glimmering on the horizon. For a visual model, consider the American painter Thomas Cole’s “Old Age” from his Voyage of Life cycle of pictures—the old man in the boat caught between darkness and light, with the angel pointing the way to the lightening sky on the horizon.
It seems to me altogether possible that the worst trials and tribulations preceding the end times are already past. It would be hard to think of anything worse than the two World Wars and the carnage and dictatorships of the last century. What form the dissolution and the transposition of time into eternity will take, we do not know. It is mystery, as it must be. In the meantime, prayer, repentance, and the care of the soul are of capital importance. I am in favor of the hypothesis of a gradual seeping into the world of God’s kingdom, a final destruction, a purifying judgment, and the appearance of a new creation. In other words, a final culminating darkness, and then… the endless sunrise.
In traversing the Liturgy of the Hours I recently came upon a bit of highly relevant scriptural prayer. Let me conclude with it:
We praise you, the Lord God Almighty,
Who is and who was.
You have assumed your great power,
You have begun your reign.
The nations have raged in anger,
But then came your day of wrath
And the moment to judge the dead:
The time to reward your servants the prophets
And the holy ones who revere you,
The great and the small alike.
Now have salvation and power come,
the reign of our God and the authority
of his Anointed One.
For the accuser of our brothers is cast out,
Who night and day accused them before God.
They defeated him by the blood of the Lamb
And by the word of their testimony;
Love of life did not deter them from death.
So rejoice, you heavens,
And you that dwell therein!
(Revelation 11 and 12, from the Liturgy of the Hours)
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The featured image is “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (1838), by Eduard Jakob von Steinle, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
