Priests Who Cry Wolf

History shows that, when preaching about the end of the world, zealous and holy priests have not always been prudent priests.

Take, for example, the preaching of Saint Gregory the Great. He lived in an era that many of his contemporaries considered “the worst of times,” flooded with many terrors which Gregory interpreted to mean one and only one thing: the end of the world is at hand! Thus he preached:

Look, we now see everything in this world destroyed, as we heard in the Holy Scripture that it would perish. Cities have been sacked, fortresses razed to the ground, churches destroyed and no farmer inhabits our land. A human sword is raging incessantly against the very few of us who have been left behind for the time being, with disastrous blows from above. Thus we look at the evils of the world that we have long heard were to come; the very destruction of the world has come to look like the pages of our scriptures.¹

Gregory is unshakeable in his belief that the events in the world around him are the fulfillment of the terrors that Christ foretold as signs of his second coming. Thus Gregory states, “The end of the present world is now close at hand, and the kingdom of saints is about to come, and it will not be possible for their kingdom ever to be terminated with any end. And as the same end of the world is approaching, many things threaten us that did not exist before, namely change in the air and terrors from the sky and tempests, contrary to the order of the seasons, as well as wars, famines, plagues and earthquakes in many places.”² Because of these “unprecedented” events, there is no doubt in Gregory’s mind that the historical clock is winding down, that Scripture is being fulfilled before his eyes, and Christ will be coming sooner rather than later.

Because 1400 years have now passed since such an imminent ending was preached, it is impossible to believe that the events surrounding Gregory were as apocalyptic as he understood them to be. Furthermore, in similarly disastrous situations, there were brother priests who preached a different message, and Gregory could have profited from their insight. One such priest was Saint Augustine.

In one of his letters, Saint Augustine responds to a zealous and holy priest named Hesychius who thinks almost identically like Gregory the Great: Hescychius says “the signs in the Gospel and in the prophets that have been fulfilled among us reveal the coming of the Lord.”³ Hesychius is crying wolf, and Augustine critiques this conclusion with unsparing acumen.

First, Augustine disputes the idea that any of the present difficulties are unprecedented, for many of the foretold apocalyptic events are “events that have often happened in this world even before Christ’s first coming.”⁴ Earthquakes, wars, famines, and pestilences all preceded the birth of Christ, and to see them in the present day is no real novelty and thus no conclusive sign of the second coming.

Some people think that these events are signs of the second coming not necessarily because of their novelty but because of their magnitude, and yet Augustine disputes this idea just as firmly, for Augustine believes that the history books tell of “more and much greater events than those that we dread as the last and greatest of all.”⁵ In his own age, Augustine experienced a large degree of social disorder and international dissolution, seeing the Roman empire collapse at the hands of vandals and enduring many wars and pestilences which afflicted his people. But Augustine nonetheless insists that such tragedies, including those that Hesychius and others are observing, should be considered lesser evils, not greater evils, than those of previous ages. While Augustine never belittles the religious zeal of Hesychius, he does express frustration over the shallowness of his historical insight.

According to Augustine, Hesychius’ distorted view of history contributes to other scriptural misinterpretations. While Hesychius is attached to John’s statement in Scripture, “My little children, it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18), Augustine insists that “we, of course, ought to bear in mind how long ago it was said.”⁶ For Augustine, authentic interpretation of this passage from John (and other similarly apocalyptic texts) requires astute historical awareness of the many years that had passed since it was stated. Thus he quips, “See how long this hour is!”⁷ Instead of using this passage as a reason to preach that the world is coming to an end, Augustine considers it to be Scriptural proof that apocalyptic quotes must be interpreted very loosely, even those from holy priests like John the Evangelist (who, as a “son of thunder,” was himself filled with great zeal).

It is from one specific passage in Scripture that all of Augustine’s rebuttals find their deepest source of conflict with the preaching of priests like Gregory and Hesychius. For Augustine, the end times are intrinsically and irrevocably uncertain because Christ himself stated, “It is not yours to know the times that the Father has established by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). Although priests like Hesychius manifest a deep-seated desire to identify the imminent timing of the Lord’s second coming, Augustine interprets any attempt to do so as a transgression of the intrinsic meaning of this passage from Scripture. Thus Augustine blends the passage from 1 John 2:18 with this passage from Acts and concludes, “During the whole hour, there are taking place the events that the Lord foretold would take place at the approach of his kingdom. But if in regard to how long this hour will last the apostles were told It is not yours to know the times [Acts 1:7], how much more should an ordinary human being, such as I am, recognize his limits so that he does not think more of himself than he ought!”⁸ Despite being a priest in persona Christi, Augustine counts himself among those human mortals who Christ himself foretold as unreliable authorities for determining when, even approximately, the world will end.

Neither Gregory nor Hesychius pin down an exact date for the end of the world, but even in their mere allusions to some impending second coming, to their not-so-veiled insistence on apocalyptic machinery that is now being set in motion because of the terrorizing events that surround them, Augustine thinks that they are harming the souls to whom such ideas are preached. He makes this argument when he generalizes the apocalyptic preaching of priests into two broad categories: the first category includes those who preach that the world is ending sooner rather than later (like Gregory and Hesychius), whereas the second category preaches that it is never possible for a human being to know when the Lord will come again. Augustine critiques the preaching of this first group in the following manner: if the Lord continues to delay his return, those who hear of an imminent coming “may be disturbed and begin to think that the coming of the Lord will not be late but will not be at all. And you see what great harm that is for souls.”⁹ By preaching approximate certainty around the timing of the second coming, either directly or in an allusive way, priests in this first group plant seeds that, in the long run, may not bear fruit into eternal life but rather contain the poisonous seeds of spiritual despair. This is why Augustine is unflinching in his critique of priests in the first category, and why he repeatedly affirms his identity as a priest in the second category.

There are other holy priests who have been convinced of Augustine’s logic. One such priest is Thomas Aquinas, who takes up the opinions of Augustine on this matter and makes them his own.¹⁰ But it is especially in the pontificate of Pope John XXIII that the spirit of Augustine has returned to the Church with docile firmness. In opening the Second Vatican Council, he expressed his weariness with the “Prophets of Doom” whose chief characteristics are the following:

Although filled with zeal for religion, [these prophets] evaluate the current state of affairs without sufficient objectivity nor prudent judgement. These prophets are not capable of seeing anything but ruin and woe in the concrete conditions of human society; they say that our times are definitely worse when compared with the past centuries, and they arrive ultimately to the point of upholding themselves as if they have nothing to learn from history, which is a teacher of life, and they act as if in the times preceding the Council all was proceeding happily with regards to Christian doctrine, with morality, and with the just freedom of the Church.¹¹

Like Augustine’s opinion of Hesychius, Pope John XXIII thinks these prophets fail, not in their religious zeal, but in their hyper-subjective interpretation of history, which leads to a lack of prudential judgment in their interpretation of the present. Contrary to the seeds of despair planted in such apocalyptic prophecies, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council with the certainty, not that the world was on the threshold of an imminent ending, but that there remained much to do before the second coming of Christ. Yes, things are changing, and “humanity seems to be entering a new order of things,” but the fundamental task of the Church within this new order is to impose its own Order, to “continue on the way (il cammino) that the Church has continued for almost twenty centuries.” Like Augustine, Pope John XXIII did not profess to know how many miles were left on this journey, but he did know that there was more to travel, and “what lies ahead” occupied his thoughts more than the imminent ending of all that “lies behind” (Philippians 3:13–14).

When the prophets of doom were crying wolf, Pope John XXIII proclaimed Christ, and the patient unfolding of all history (including Salvation History) continues to reveal whose words come from a heart filled with Wisdom. And wisdom, when combined with zeal, is a powerful instrument for bringing about Holy Order.