Prophecy as a Motive of Credibility

Article I — The Nature of Prophecy

I. The meaning of the word. De Quincey observes that the word “prophet,” in its primary and scriptural sense, means an interpreter of the divine purposes and thoughts: if those purposes lie hidden in the mysterious doctrines of religion, the prophet is simply an expounder of them; only if they lie hidden in the unfolding of future time does “prophet” carry the modern sense of a seer or reader of the future. This modern sense, De Quincey notes, is neither the Mahometan sense — where Mahomet is called “prophet of God” as the supposed organ of communication between God and man, not as a predicter of things to come — nor the sense that prevails in the New Testament, where St. Paul’s “gifts of prophecy” invariably mean an extraordinary aptitude for unfolding the meaning of Scripture, and bringing light and coherence to its teaching, never a gift of inspired foresight.

The Greek word prophētēs corresponds to the Hebrew nabi, and denotes one of enthusiastic spirit who speaks to men on God’s behalf. St. Thomas derives it from prophainein, “to appear” — “because, that is, things that are far off appear to the prophets” — while others derive it from a root meaning “to announce beforehand,” or “to announce on behalf of another,” namely of God. In this broad sense, prophecy simply means revelation. In the special sense relevant here, however, prophecy means the pre-knowledge and prediction of future events divinely given to the soul.

II. Prophecy as a motive of credibility. The Vatican Council defines prophecies as “divine facts” which, because they clearly show forth the infinite knowledge of God, are most certain signs of Divine Revelation, accommodated to the intelligence of all.

III. Heterodox notions of prophecy. Rationalists reject the idea of prophecy outright. Some identify it merely with the tendency to divination present in every form of religion, and rooted simply in credulity. Others reduce it to the a priori assumption that God rewards the just and punishes the wicked. Auguste Sabatier, representative of this school, held that the great seers of Israel possessed no genuine gift of foreknowledge at all, any more than did the pagan Sibyls or soothsayers; their apparent superiority, on his account, sprang not from any miraculous gift but from a purer idea of God, a more elevated sense of justice, and an unshakeable moral conviction in the ultimate triumph of the good and the chastisement of the wicked. On this view, the prophecies of John the Baptist, and even those of Christ Himself, proceed not from any special gift of divination but from a firmer moral conviction and a more disinterested life in God: the moral idea of prophecy survives, Sabatier concludes, but its miraculous element has vanished. Spinoza and Renan hold substantially the same reductive view.

IV. The Catholic idea of prophecy. What, properly, is the object of prophecy? Things may be “distant” from our knowledge in three ways: (1) locally; (2) through simple want of knowledge, as with the supernatural mysteries hidden in God; or (3) because of the intrinsic indetermination of future contingent events. It is this third class alone that constitutes the proper object of prophecy. Prophecy may accordingly be defined as the infallible foretelling of a future contingent event, which can be certainly foreseen by supernatural light alone.

Three corollaries follow. First, the prophetic light is a transient impression, not a permanent habit (cf. 2 Kings 4:27). Second, prophetic knowledge implies two distinct things: a representation of the future contingent event, and a judgment concerning it. Third, the principal element in prophetic revelation is the supernatural light itself, and not the mere representation of the future event — for such representations were given also to Pharaoh, to Nebuchadnezzar, and to Belshazzar, none of whom was thereby made a prophet.

V. The different kinds of prophecy.

(A) From the standpoint of the object known, there are four grades of prophetic knowledge, ranging from the least to the most complete: (1) the future event and its meaning are known, though the prophet may speak from a kind of instinct as well as from definite revelation — when he speaks from instinct, the divine origin of the prophecy is not itself clear; (2) the future event alone is known, while both its meaning and its divine origin remain hidden even from the one who utters it, as with Caiaphas’s prophecy (John 11:49ff.); (3) the meaning of a predicted event may be known, as with the Incarnation or the mission of the Holy Ghost, or the future event itself may be known with its appointed time, as in Our Lord’s announcement of His own Passion and Resurrection; (4) the future event, its meaning, and the divine origin of the prophecy are all three known together, as in Our Lord’s prophecy of the end of the world, where the destruction of Jerusalem is foretold as a figure of the world’s final catastrophe (cf. Matt. 24:1–36).

(B) From the standpoint of the mode of cognition, a prophecy may be received formally through an intellectual vision, through a vision of the imagination, or through the external senses; and it may be received materially in a state of wakefulness, in ecstasy or rapture, or in sleep.

A further division follows from the nature of the future contingent event itself: prophecy may be of prescience, unconditioned, or of commination, conditioned — as with Jonah’s prophecy against Nineveh (Jonah 3:4) or Isaiah’s prophecy to Hezekiah (Is. 38:1).

Article II — The Possibility of Prophecy

I. God can communicate prophetic knowledge to man.

Major: God can communicate to man whatever He Himself knows. Minor: But He knows infallibly all future contingent things. Conclusion: Therefore He can communicate to man the knowledge of future contingent things.

Proof of the Major. Knowledge of a future contingent event exceeds the capacity of our intellect not because the event possesses some intrinsic supernatural character, as does the mystery of the Trinity, but simply because of its contingency, its intrinsic indetermination. God can direct the human mind to such an event by infusing a prophetic light — and a light only modally supernatural, corresponding to a miracle of the first order, suffices for this purpose.

Proof of the Minor. If God did not know from eternity all future contingent things, He would pass from potentiality to actuality — a consequence flatly opposed to His infinite perfection. Eternity, existing all at once, comprises the whole of time within a single changeless present; and the divine prescience of future contingent things does not thereby compromise human freedom, since, as St. Thomas teaches, the divine will is so efficacious that it is accomplished not only in that what God wills is done, but in that it is done precisely in the manner God wills — some things necessarily, some things freely (Summa, I, q. 19, a. 8).

II. God alone can, by His own power, give man prophetic knowledge of future contingent things, since God alone is the absolutely universal and unchangeable Cause, and only such a Cause can infallibly know future contingent events.

III. God alone can communicate certain knowledge of the secrets of hearts. This knowledge St. Paul describes as the “discernment of spirits” (1 Cor. 12:10). Secret thoughts and the affections of the will, considered in themselves and apart from their outward effects, are known to God alone, since both intellect and will are subject to Him alone. The interior life is, in this sense, God’s special domain; history itself can tell us nothing of the interior life of St. Joseph or of the Blessed Virgin — “God hath hidden me in his tabernacle” (Ps. 26:5).

Article III — The Discernibility of Prophecy

Rationalists claim that even if supernatural prophecy were possible, it could never be distinguished with certainty from mere natural conjecture.

I. The prediction of a future contingent event, and its subsequent fulfilment, are facts entirely within the power of the human mind to verify.

II. Many prophecies can with certainty be differentiated from human conjecture and from the divination of spirits. It is commonly held that wherever (1) minute circumstances of a future contingent event are clearly announced well in advance, (2) the event lies far off in time, (3) the circumstances foretold are numerous and complex, (4) the event depends on the free choice of several persons, and (5) the event foretold is sometimes itself a miracle dependent on the free will of God, such prophecies can be discriminated with certainty from mere human conjecture. The theory of probability confirms this: if the probability of the fulfilment of each single circumstance is, say, ten to one, the probability of the joint fulfilment of two such circumstances is a hundred to one, of three a thousand to one, and so on — the possibility of a merely fortuitous fulfilment is very quickly eliminated for all practical purposes.

The argument from philosophic reason may be put syllogistically:

Major: It is impossible to predict, with certainty and naturally or fortuitously, long before the event, and down to minute circumstances, future contingent events that depend chiefly on human freedom and in some cases on the free will of God. Minor: But many predictions are of precisely this character — the propagation of monotheism, the Davidic origin of the Messiah, the characteristics of the Messiah, His passion and death, the conversion of the Gentile nations, and the like. Conclusion: Therefore these predictions are beyond human power, and postulate the infinite prescience of God.

(A) How prophecy differs from chance occurrence. Chance is the accidental meeting of independent causes: a man digs a grave and unexpectedly finds treasure — the digging was intentional, the original hiding of the treasure was intentional, but their meeting was purely accidental, and that accidental meeting constitutes chance. In five distinct cases, however, the possibility of chance is effectively eliminated: (1) when many diverse elements concur to the formation of a single perfect result, such as the faculty of vision, which could not be without a sufficient reason for its being; (2) when many interconnected parts proceed from a single principle, as the various parts of an oak from a single acorn; (3) when a single principle produces some entirely definite effect, as an act of intelligence proceeds from the intellectual faculty; (4) when things occur invariably or with great frequency, since such constancy could not exist without a sufficient reason; and (5) chance cannot be the first cause of any ordered arrangement of things at all, since a cause acting per accidens always presupposes some cause acting per se to which it is, precisely, accidental — otherwise order itself would arise from the mere absence of order.

These principles illuminate the difference between the fulfilment of a genuine prophecy and a merely fortuitous occurrence resting on natural conjecture. In the fulfilment of the great biblical prophecies, a great many distinct elements converge upon the realization of a single clearly predicted contingent effect; from the primitive and simple promise of a Redeemer sprang a great number of results admirably interconnected with one another; and from a single principle there could not, by mere chance, arise the unity and consummation of countless human souls — yet from the promise of a Redeemer has come the consummation of the Judaeo-Christian religion, which has drawn, and continues to draw, countless souls of good will into unity in Christ. Similar events, moreover, foretold repeatedly across the prophetic literature of the Old Testament — above all events concerning the Messiah and His works — cannot be attributed to chance; and the Jewish religion as a whole is itself a standing prophecy of the Christian religion, whose orderly historical development and fulfilment cannot be due to chance without supposing that order itself arose from disorder.

(B) How prophecy is distinguished from a conjecture only fortuitously verified. Renan held that the Messianic hope itself created an expectation among the Jews, and that when Christ appeared, His own followers gave Him the title and attributed to Him the qualities of the expected Messiah — Christ Himself, on this account, had at first no consciousness of being the Messiah, the conviction growing upon Him only gradually, while His disciples then set about showing that the Messianic prophecies had been fulfilled in Him.

Against this account several considerations tell decisively. Prophetic announcement concerns not a necessary future occurrence but a genuinely contingent one, dependent on the free choice of many persons; and in some cases the very event foretold is itself a miracle attributable to the free will of God alone — the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the mission of the Holy Ghost, the propagation and perpetuity of the Church. Nor did the Messianic hope arise naturally among the Jews in the form it was in fact fulfilled: the Jews frequently refused to believe their own prophets, and put many of them to death; and the Apostles and Evangelists were not alone in recognizing that Christ fulfilled the ancient prophecies — the fulfilment itself is and remains a historic fact, open to verification. Divine Providence, further, would not have allowed a false prophecy to be fulfilled down to its minutest circumstances, for that would mean God permitting men to be invincibly deceived in matters touching their eternal salvation. Just as the order of the world does not spring from blind necessity, so too the order manifest in prophecy and its fulfilment does not arise from natural necessity apart from the deliberate arrangement of Divine Providence.

III. Some prophecies, taken individually, can be discriminated from human conjecture or from the divination of spirits only with moral, not metaphysical, certitude. This moral certitude rests on a consideration of the surrounding circumstances — do they bespeak honesty, seriousness, virtue? Where the prophet is a man of manifestly holy life, one may reasonably believe that a prophecy he has uttered, and that has since been fulfilled, has truly come from God.

Article IV — The Probative Force of Prophecy

I. The teaching of the Church. The Vatican Council teaches that prophecies are most certain signs of Divine Revelation; the Apostles, and St. Matthew above all, repeatedly appeal to the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy as confirmation of the Gospel.

II. The probative force of prophecy is established by reason. A divine sign — the very seal of God — most certainly confirms Divine Revelation, and prophecy is beyond doubt just such a sign, one that can come from God alone. A fulfilled prophecy shows directly the infinite knowledge of God, just as a miracle shows directly His omnipotence; and it shows indirectly the divine origin of the revelation it accompanies, since otherwise God would be bearing witness to a false teaching, which is impossible. The connection between the prophecy and the revealed doctrine it is meant to confirm must be declared, explicitly or at least implicitly, by the prophet himself (cf. Matt. 12:39).

Some prophecies, finally, are intrinsic to religion itself — those announcing the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, or the indefectibility of the Church — much as certain miracles, the Resurrection and Ascension among them, belong intrinsically to religion, and not merely extrinsically, as does the restoration of sight to a man born blind.