The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

V. The Revolutionary Implications of Eberhard’s Interpretation

Why was this such a revolutionary idea? Why was the church so slow to realize that the Roman world power was a thing of the past? During the barbarian invasions Jerome had cried out that the Roman world was falling, ²⁶ but he had not lived long enough to see the accomplished fact. Indeed, long after his lifetime men could not bring themselves to believe that Rome had fallen. The spell of the Eternal City was upon even her conquerors, and after a lapse of several centuries Charlemagne made the unsuccessful attempt at restoring it. The fiction of the “Holy Roman Empire,” which, to repeat the cliché, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, was never a restoration, much less a continuation, of the real Roman power. PFF1 801.3

1. REASONS FOR LATE DEVELOPMENT

Although the church after Jerome’s day was certain that the fourth empire was Rome, and that the next stage was the dissolution of that empire, it was somewhat blinded by this persistence of the illusory afterimage of Rome’s continuance. It is doubtless true that Jerome’s influence actually operated to hinder the historical view for the simple reason that his commentary on Daniel, which was later enshrined in the medieval Glossa Ordinaria ²⁷ (so often referred to as “the common gloss”) places the divided kingdoms and the Little Horn in the future, although to him the end seemed near; ²⁸ and that future tense, remaining static on the margins of the Vulgate Bible for centuries, kept prophetic exposition forever looking ahead for the fulfillment. PFF1 802.1

Further, the formation of a concept of the Little Horn or Antichrist as a long growth of a religio-political empire emerging from gradual apostasy in the church would necessarily be a late development. PFF1 802.2

(1) The conviction of the imminence of the end would not have allowed the earlier expositors to imagine such a long period, even if the initial stages of such a process had been recognized. PFF1 802.3

(2) The popular traditions of an individual Antichrist—a Jew, an unbeliever, or a semi-demon-ruling for a short period as despot and persecutor, although derived largely from non-Christian sources, ²⁹ would tend, in combination with the expectation of the speedy dissolution of all things, to condition the early church against an interpretation involving Antichrist’s long development in history. PFF1 802.4

(3) In the nature of things, such a fulfillment could never be perceived until a long time after it had begun to develop, for not until its maturity could a system of that kind fill the specifications of the prophecy. PFF1 802.5

(4) Probably the most powerful influence that would pre vent the earlier development of a historical interpretation of the Little Horn and the Antichrist was the Augustinian view, which completely changed the direction of prophetic interpretation and dominated the church from Augustine’s time on. ³⁰ The concept of the millennium as fulfilled in the earthly church and of the hierarchy as rulers of the kingdom of God On earth blinded men to the departures of the church and made it seem all the more unthinkable that the bishops of Rome, the most venerated prelates of Christendom, could so depart from the original faith as to be represented by such prophetic symbols. PFF1 803.1

2. EBERHARD SEES PEAK OF PAPACY

Not until the apostasy and corruption in the church became more and more evident, and the pride and power of the pontiffs of Rome had grown until it not only used the temporal sword on dissenters, but even sought to make vassals of kings and emperors, could the accusation be raised that the pope was exhibiting the traits of Antichrist. Not until a Gregory VII had claimed to be Vicar of Christ with authority over kings, and an Innocent III had set himself up as Vicar of God over the whole world, wielding the two swords of spiritual and civil penalties over great and small, ³¹ did Eberhard stand forth to level his finger at the Papacy as the Antichrist and the Little Horn “speaking great words against the most High.” PFF1 803.2

He could not have made that application in the infancy of the Papacy. The claim to primacy, the imperious tone, and the political influence were already growing in the time of Gregory I, but the prophetic expositors of that day could hardly have applied to him the epithet with which he denounced the pride of a fellow prelate. In spite of Gregory I’s denunciation of the claim to universal bishopric as a manifestation of Anti- Christian spirit, ³² the application was not made to the Roman popes when they afterward assumed the same dignity. PFF1 803.3

The modern conception of religious liberty had not developed, and its early gleams in the pre-Constantinian church had been lost in the deceptive glitter of political power under the Christian emperors; consequently the sinister aspect of the persecution of minorities was lost on the church. Not until the papal sword, after centuries, had been wielded with increasing ruthlessness upon multiplied victims, did the description of the Little Horn wearing out the saints become attached in men’s minds to the Roman See. PFF1 804.1

3. THIRTEENTH-CENTURY DISILLUSIONMENT

But in the thirteenth century the corruptions of the hierarchy had long been apparent. Men had become weary of the worldliness of the clergy, the avarice, the simony, the injustice. The failure of the monastic reforms to cure the corruption of the church increased the protest of the laity against the contrast between the life of the clergy and the Christian ideal of self-renunciation and service, a protest which expressed itself variously, in the voluntary poverty of various lay groups, such as the Waldenses, in the wistful dreams of Joachim, and in the original zeal of the Franciscan and Dominican friars. These ideals, even among those loyal to the pope, such as Joachim, inevitably threw the worldly Papacy into an unfavorable light by contrast—at least for many who had eyes to see. PFF1 804.2

It was natural that Eberhard in Germany, in contact with the emperor, saw more clearly than did Joachim in Italy the menace of the Papacy’s struggle to control both spiritual and civil power, and doubtless there he had more opportunity to hear the pontiff called Antichrist in the contest with Frederick. But his “Little Horn” application was not merely name-calling. He was not an enthusiast for voluntary poverty, for he was an influential archbishop; nor was he a disillusioned Joachimite, for Joachim’s writings—genuine or pseudo-had not yet spread PFF1 804.3

so far. But he was in a position to see three things: (1) that Rome had fallen long ago when her domain was divided into barbarian kingdoms; (2) that the Little Horn rising out of the divided successors to the empire, growing “among them” and coming into power “after them,” was connected with the breakup of Rome, which no illusion of a Holy Roman Empire could push into the future; and (3) that the description of the Little Horn, with “eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things,” “whose look was more stout than his fellows”—a kingdom among kingdoms, yet diverse from the rest, and at the same time a religious power, speaking “great words against the most High,” and a persecuting power wearing out the saints—fitted the Papacy most remarkably. And the reader of medieval history as it is written today—even allowing for bias on the part of a supporter of Frederick—can see that the picture is not overdrawn. PFF1 805.1

Eberhard’s historical interpretation of the Little Horn and the Antichrist doubtless had less circulation in Italy, and especially in papal circles, than in Germany. The Joachimites at first looked to Frederick as the Antichrist, and not until the Spirituals had experienced persecution do we find the application of the term “mystic Antichrist” to a future pseudo pope and then an individual, actual pope. PFF1 805.2

Eberhard was not the first to call a pope Antichrist, for he says that he was accustomed to that. Gerhoh of Reichersberg a century earlier had applied the term to the worldliness in the church and to the contest between pope and emperor. But Eberhard was a pioneer in seeing in the Little Horn, which sprang out of the divided kingdoms of the fourth prophetic empire, the Roman Papacy, which had slowly emerged to world power out of the breakup of the Roman Empire many centuries in the past. PFF1 805.3

Both true and false concepts of the continuance of Rome powerfully influenced not only churchmen but statesmen, but the position taken by Eberhard in 1240—that the breakup of Rome gave rise to a group of smaller kingdoms, among whom afterward came up the religio-political power of the historical Papacy’ as the Little Horn—became the standard interpretation of fourteenth-century Wyclif in Britain, ³³ then of sixteenth-century Luther and most of his associates, and next of Cranmer, Knox, and the bulk of the British Reformers. ³⁴ Practically all the post-Reformation writers on the Continent and in Britain and America declared the same. ³⁵ Even the Jewish expositor Don Isaac Abravanel of Spain, in 1496, made a like explanation, ³⁶ PFF1 805.4

This Reformation view was the sort of belief which helped to nerve men to withstand the powerful forces under the command of the Papacy, and to go to the stake rather than yield to her spiritual despotism; for Protestant martyrs dared not obey her injunctions or follow in her apostasies, and thus incur the displeasure of Heaven. Therefore they no longer feared her anathemas. PFF1 806.1