A blessed Christmas season and a happy new year to you all!
Not long ago, I read a work by Josef Pieper, a German philosopher of the 20th century, titled The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History. While the small book is philosophically dense, I recommend it, and I want to share a vital point in the work that Pieper expounds: the distinction between what he calls ‘prophesy’ and ‘prognosis’ within the sphere of history, whether it is past, present or future. A fitting topic, I thought, as we enter this new year.
First, a quick look at prognosis. Pieper writes that “the art of prognosis consists in discovering in the fund of experience itself pointers to the future, which is concealed in the present,” and that “it is essential to the concept of prognosis that it stands on ‘footholds’ in the present.” In other words, prognosis is a prediction of future outcomes based on the science—or what Pieper calls “the art”—of statistics, probabilities, and data; it becomes a type of guessing game presuming the status quo and the currently accumulated facts, and it presupposes a predictive, and perhaps determined, development of history. Pieper is correct to see prognosis more as an art, as it is hardly ever, like weather forecasts, very accurate. This is not to say that prognosis is without benefit—it can be quite so on a practical level—but dangers arise when it is conflated with prophecy, as many have done and now do.
That said, prophecy, the primary focus of this article, is indeed a different matter. According to Pieper, unlike prognosis, prophecy has no need of ‘footholds’ in the present. Why? Because it does not touch upon the accidents of history given by the vicissitudes of statistics, polls, and stock markets, but is in communication with the ‘essence’ of history. Pieper writes:
“Prophecy is the sole form of prediction coordinated with the essence of history…It is not some indifferent aspect of the future which is foretold, but an event related to the inmost kernel of history, to the realization of salvation and disaster; it is one of the conceptual elements of prophecy that it has its place in the history of salvation.”
Prophecy fundamentally entails salvation history. However, if this is so, then prophecy necessarily entails divine revelation as well. The trouble with this, Pieper believes, is that revelation is, “an announcement that comes to us ‘from without’ with a claim to absolute truth, at which human cognitive power could never have arrived of itself.” The issue here is that such truths are not easily accepted by the modern man who is awakened, so they say, to critical consciousness. While each age in the past has sought, in varying degrees, to reconcile its varied ways of thinking and seeing the world to divine truths, modern man, perhaps more than any other age, would have divine truth reconciled to—or in this case, diminished in—his own age and ways of thinking. If it does not fit perfectly according to his measure as the missing piece in his self-constructed puzzle of skepticism, statistics, or science, he dismisses it as irrelevant.
Yet knowing prophecy is only the beginning. It must also be believed, and, furthermore, on the condition that it is not reduced to our limited expectations. Pieper writes, “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” (emphasis added). He further points out, for illustration, that many Jews of Jesus’ time, especially the Pharisees, failed to see the prophecies that they themselves accepted as Divine Revelation being fulfilled by Christ in their presence (Lk 4:21). Therefore, prophecy is not simply a matter of knowing true prophecies but also believing them while, again, not constricting them to the narrow lens of our limited predictions and expectations.
Like the Pharisees, I believe we tend to falsely interpret by our own measures that which is true. The antidote to this inclination, then, is to prevent our expectations or fears (e.g., doomsday predictions) from hijacking that which is prophetic. While many of the Jews believed Christ would liberate them from the Roman occupation as He brought about the redemption of Israel (which He did do in a very unexpected way, seeing as the Church eventually evangelized the Roman Empire), we, too, allow our expectations to limit that which Christ will bring about in the fulness of the Kingdom through history.
Prophecy, unlike prognosis, is something available only to the believer, that is, he who has the eyes of faith and who is open to the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, much like Daniel, for example, interpreting the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast (Dan 5), to allude to the image above. In this regard, prophecy is not so much a matter of predicting the future as it is the gift of seeing the present times for what they truly are—that is, knowing the signs of the times as they correlate to the “essence of history.”
Christ’s life, passion, death, and Resurrection compose what we formally call the fulness of time (Gal 4:4) by means of the fulness Christ opened to us (John 10:10). Yet Christ’s coming could not have been the fulness of time in the fullest sense, however, unless it also fulfilled something within time prior to Christ’s salvific life and death, that is, through the fulfillment of prophecy. This fulness is not something that has simply passed in an historical sense but is a fulness present to us now, and most manifest to us in the Eucharist, mysteriously, until and beyond the end of time. This, among many other things, is what makes Christ the center of history.
Question: can modern man access truth in scripture or in prophecy from reason alone?
From the article: "The issue here is that such truths are not easily accepted by the modern man who is awakened, so they say, to critical consciousness."
The first person who comes to mind is Jordan Peterson. In his interview with Joe Rogan, he refers to scripture as "Roughly speaking ... a bedrock of agreement." He also seems to have adopted critical consciousness as part of his central philosophy. Yet, he is simultaneously pursuing a deep dive into the scriptures in his Genesis and Exodus series. Do you think that someone like him can ever grasp scripture, or the prophesies contained therein, in its fullest sense?