Three Biblical Peoples in their Struggle for World Domination

The Three Biblical Peoples in their Struggle for World Domination

By Father Julio Meinvielle

From Tres Pueblos Bíblicos en su Lucha por la Dominación del Mundo 

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

Part I

Notes for a philosophy of history

God has spoken to man. And His word is kept intact under the indefectible custody of the Sacred Bible by the Holy Roman Church. The mind of God is thus open to man. And even though it is not open but only to enlighten him in the way to his eternal salvation, illumining him on the substance of Faith and Morals which he needs to know to attain his ultimate end, there is no doubt that indirectly and as if by a superabundance, He illumines man in the dark paths of history and in the course of human events. Theology is a positive aid for man, because, out of innumerable equally possible hypotheses, according to which history might have developed, it manifests the one that the most free Will of the Almighty has willed to choose. So, for example, man knows by Sacred Revelation that, after Christ, the world has entered its last hour (Saint John's Epistle 2, 18), so that we should no longer have to await any salvation economy other than in the Church founded by Christ and the apostles, and that the Church should last until the end of times. The Christian philosopher who may wish to scrutinize history knows this with certainty, that future history cannot be conceived without the action of the Holy Roman Church, who will exert her influence on the events with its hierarchy, its doctrine, and its sacraments. He will not then incur in the delirium of imagining a new era for the world in which Jesus Christ has been banished from the bosom of human history. The gates of hell will not prevail against her (Matthew XVI, 18) is a word that the historian should never forget if he does not wish to be wrong in his interpretation of historical phenomena.

This shows that if God speaks to us of three or four different peoples in Sacred Scripture, and speaks to us of them at all times, from Genesis through the Apocalypse, it is evident that these peoples must have a singular historical transcendence to explain the course that human events shall take. A Christian philosopher who has committed himself to finding a sense in those events cannot in any way neglect consideration of these peoples, under penalty of not going beyond the surface of the facts and of being wrong about their historical significance.

It is likewise evident that, if an epoch in history arrives in which humankind gets divided in a manifest way into these three or four peoples, and how a combat to death arises between them, this epoch must render a decisive historical significance and reach, this epoch must be an apocalyptic one because in it a biblical struggle is being waged, since it is no longer a political or economic struggle, like so many others that humankind has recorded, but it is a meta-political struggle, beyond the political order, even beyond the human order itself, since it gets to be waged between those formations which God has willed for the entire course of humankind.

Now then, our time presents in a manifest way a struggle between three or four biblical peoples, namely pagans, Jews, Muslims, and Christians. And a decisive struggle to death because these peoples fight, being conscious of the struggle and of the decisive character of the struggle for world domination.

Theology and history

That such an epoch should render a purely providential historical significance, is demonstrated precisely by the fact that the struggle is waged between these biblical peoples precisely in such their characters. History moves, and it does not move haphazardly as if it had no sense. Above all human contingencies, taking advantage of all the clashes between human groups, religious, political, economic, individual clashes, history gets weaved, and gets weaved not by chance, but as it is willed to be written by the inscrutable will of God, who knows how to right straight in men's crooked lines. And this straight writing of God cannot consist of anything other than that all things, even the most crooked ones of men, be directed softly but firmly toward the providential ends, which in part have been revealed to us by God in His infinite mercy. History is then God's mind written over time. Where men do not read, angels can read. History is an eternal struggle between the rights of God over His creatures and the pride of the creature over the rights of God, with the final triumph of the City of God. God's Mercy shall finally triumph, and themselves the revelry and blindness of man must cooperate toward this triumph. The words of Saint Thomas with respect to the allowing of evil in the providential order, provide much light about this "Being God the providential cause of all being, it is proper of His providence to allow certain defects in some particular things so that the perfect good of the universe be not prevented, there would be no life for the lion if there were no killing of animals, nor the patience of the martyrs if there were no persecution by tyrants." (sum. 1 q 22 a. 2)
                                                        
If historical events were analyzed isolatedly, without putting them together under a unique light projection, these events would have no meaning. And even distinct events which may acquire a certain political or economic meaning, for example, when they are examined under a purely political or economic light they will fail to yield their entire meaning if not viewed under a superior light, which in the ultimate instance cannot be other than the unsoundable divine will, manifested to man in Revelation. You may say that the latter can hardly shed light on history because this is not its primary and principal end. History is then left undecipherable to man. Only little can be envisaged, and as if from a great distance, under half-light, using the glimmer of theological light with which God has willed to illumine man in his way toward eternity.

But it is evident that these slight glimpses into the mind of God which theology provides us shed a light of quality, and therefore with an explanatory force greater than what can be provided by the statistics or comparisons of any other human science. Hence, the Christian philosopher who wishes to penetrate into the meaning of the historical events cannot do without the theological light offered to him by oral and written Revelation and the Church's directives in the regular government of Christendom by means of the Holy Father and of the bishops placed by God to rule it. He should not work exclusively with this light but he should work with it, his work shall be specifically philosophical. But he should be aided by the facts provided by theology, which is the science of God.

It is unnecessary to forewarn that the conclusions to be arrived by this means are exposed to the fallibility of all human science. Its greater or lesser certainty or probability shall depend, as in any human discourse, on the degree of solidity of the premises on which the conclusions are supported.

The present study will proceed within such a method. It will be a specifically philosophical study on the course of historical events, intending to glean their meaning, and for that purpose will take advantage of all the clues that may be provided by the Word of God contained in Sacred Scripture and in Tradition, and which can be deduced from the ordinary government of the Holy Church as manifested in the directives of the Roman Pontiff and of the bishops subordinated to him.

The main objective of this disquisition is to be constituted by the proximate or remote term toward which is heading the course of the current historical events, which so greatly unsettle humankind. Where are we heading? What will be the outcome of the war waged by the forces into which humankind is divided? What is the likely fate of communism? What that of fascism? And Christ's kingdom, how will it be working in the world? Is it possible, in what conditions, and when, will the restoration of Christendom take place? Problems these that anguish the intelligence of men and which are the object of a thorough study by a Christian philosopher, Jacques Maritain, in his Integral Humanism. Even though no reference shall be made in the course of this exposition to the thinking of any philosopher, the conclusions at which it arrives are entirely new and unprecedented, as it will be easy to perceive by anyone who takes them into consideration.

The Biblical Peoples

Sacred scripture explains to us the origins of the peoples in Genesis when it refers to the story of Noah, saved from the deluge. Gen IX. :

They were then the sons of Noah who came out of the ark, Sem, Cham and Japheth: this same Cham is the father of Chanaan
Those three are the sons of Noah, and from these the entire human genre was propagated
And Noah, who was a farmer, began to till the land and planted a vine
And drinking of his wine, he became drunk, fell asleep, and laid naked in the midst of this tent Which being seen by Cham, father of Chanaan, that is, the shameful nakedness of his father, went out and told his brothers.
But Sem and Japheth, putting a cape over their shoulders and walking backwards, covered the nakedness of their father with their faces turned away .. and so did not see the disgrace of their father

When Noah woke up from his drunkenness later, having learned what his youngest son had done, said: 

Cursed be Chanaan, he shall become a slave of the slaves of his brothers, and added:Blessed be the Lord God of Sem, be Chanaan his slave.May God make Japheth great and dwell in the tents of Sem, and make Chanaan his slave.

This damnation of the sons of Cham explains sufficiently the suppression of the sons of Cham in history. Over the course of the centuries, they never exert any historical influence... they will be a people, but an inferior people, always in tow of other peoples.

And indeed, the African blacks, descendants of Cham, do not influence history. It is a cursed people. For the philosopher of history, they do not have to be taken into account, and sacred scripture explains why.

Only the descendants of Sem and of Japheth promise interest. Genesis relates that when they got engaged in building a tower and a city, the peak of which could reach the sky, the Lord descended to see the tower and the city being built by the sons of Adam. Gen:

Cast down, O Lord, and divide their tongues; for I have seen iniquity and contradiction in the city.
and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.

The Scripture, which with these plain words refers to the dispersion of the peoples, does not refer to them anymore but only indirectly. The people followed their separate ways and created various civilizations. The descendants of the two brothers kept distinctive traits. The Arians and the Semites perpetuate themselves in their generations with inextinguishable characteristics. The Semites spread over Asia Minor and over the north of Africa whereas the Japhethists were spread through the islands in their lands (Gen 10.5), that is, the coasts of the Mediterranean in Europe and Asia Minor, from where they slowly advanced towards the north in all of Europe and occupied a considerable portion of Asia. Horace, in his Odes (1,I. Odes III, V. 27) evokes the lineage from Japheth when he mentions the Audax Japeti genus.

These peoples, which came out of the hands of God, began deviating from their paths, forgetting his law, and gave themselves to idolatry, In this way, they constituted the gentile or pagan peoples.

The Pagan Peoples

God did not create the peoples in paganism. His Divine Mercy, even after the fall, comforted man with the means necessary to achieve their eternal salvation. The law of nature, with which men ruled themselves in that first age of the world, was not called that way in opposition to the supernatural law since it also comprised the supernatural precepts of faith, hope, and charity, but in opposition to the external or written law. Because instead of being imposed externally, it was known, whether by the simple instinct of nature in what refers to precepts of a natural order, or whether by simple divine inspiration with respect of the precepts of a supernatural order. In such a state, Saint Thomas tells us (Summa Theologiae III, q. 60, a J. ad. 3), men were not moved to adoring God because of any exterior law, but solely because of an interior instinct. And many were the just who made their life fit this law of nature, not only among the first patriarchs of humankind, but also after Abraham and Moses as, for instance, Job the Saint who, not being a Jew nor a proselyte, gave great and extraordinary proofs of sanctity, and possibly many are those who rule themselves by it nowadays and thus become saved. This can be thought particularly of the great holy men of Brahmanism in India, who in symbols and in very high theological-metaphysical principles, attain such an elevated knowledge of the things of God which could be thought today as being the exclusive patrimony of Christians. (See Johanns S.J. "Vers leChrist per la Vedanta").

Paganism is the infidelity of men to this law of nature. Saint Paul describes to us with definitive characters, the traits proper of all paganism. In his letter to the Romans, the apostle says, speaking of the pagans, I. 

because, having known a God, they did not glorify Him as a God, but instead, gotten arrogant, wandered in their discourses, and their nonsensical hearts became full of darkness; and while they boasted of being wise, ended up being foolish; and they changed into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things, the glory of the incorruptible God.

Let us deduce here the characters of paganism

First characteristic: the recognition of God.

Paganism is not atheistic. It recognizes God and trusts His Providence. And a one God, ruler of the world, distinct from the world itself. Saint Paul, in the quoted passage clearly insinuates this idea which has been scientifically confirmed by the modern researchers of religions. What is called henotheistic religions (adoration of one god without denying the existence of other deities) is nothing more than this. Henotheism, says philosopher Hartmann, has its foundation in the positive identity which is recognized in all deities of nature, an identity which permits honoring in the person of each god (mainly that which each of the deities admitted since the origins, the divinity in an absolute sense, the divine, God. And Tertullian recognized the henotheistic nature of the pagan cult when, speaking about the human soul, he said:

You confess the only God and Him alone you name when sometimes you speak to the gods you appear to confer to them a power they do not have. (De Testimonio animae, c. 2); 

and Saint Augustine when he writes: 

Even before believing in Christ, the pagans have been able to ignore entirely the name of him who is the God of the universe, because the prestige of the true divinity is such that it cannot remain entirely and plainly hidden from a reasonable creature, using his reason.

Second characteristic of paganism; idolatry.

Saint Thomas says (II,II, q 94, a, 1, ad. 4) that the name idolatry was given to "any cult given to creatures even when done without images". And since pagans did not have a clear idea of the transcendence of God, which is infinitely above all things created, as the necessary being above the contingent one, and at the same time of His divine immanence which is present in all beings and all activity of the creatures, as Being and as First Cause, (Saint Thomas III, q. 2 ans 8), they saw divinity in changeable things of creation, they fractioned it in these same corruptible things and in them they adored it.

Third characteristic of paganism: divinization of power.

Paganism, says Saint Paul, got to change the glory of the incorruptible God into the image and likeness of a corruptible man. It divinized everything and could not avoid assigning divine characteristics to Power, above all to political Power, which is the sum of conceivable powers on this earth. Paganism could not distinguish in the reason of all and of a part that fits all men. It is all because man, every man, even the most miserable and disgraceful, is ordered directly to God, his ultimate end. It is a part because to attain the plenitude of everything he has to submit himself as a part of different societies needed for his perfection. Man is all, he is a person, and in this sense, he cannot be fully subjected to any power on earth, on the contrary, the powers of the earth, and even the Church, have been made for man. Man is part and owes obedience to legitimate powers, the authority of which comes from God (Rom. XIII, 1-2). (see Julio Meinvielle, Concepción Católica de la Política.) Paganism necessarily had to make of Power, of the State, a God. It recognized the organic and hierarchical character of power, but so as to divinize it. Power would, for the same reason, inevitably turn out to be tyrannical, because it did not serve man but it served itself of man.

Fourth characteristic of paganism. National religion.

Paganism, not knowing either the transcendence of God, who is above all that has been created or the transcendence of man who, in an ultimate instance, is not ordered entirely to anything other than God, was incapable of perceiving the idea of a universal religion, one for all, the same way there is only one God, Creator, and End of men. Religion was particularized as the State and identified with it. The Caesar, monarch, consul, or tribune was likewise the one who regulated religious life when not being himself the object of cult.

Fifth characteristic of paganism: exaltation of own instincts and hatred of the foreign.

When God is ignored, man, made to the image and likeness of God. cannot be truly known. And so, paganism despised man. It despised man at the same time that it exalted him. This is because it exalted some and despised the rest. It exalted those of its own blood, nation or tribe, and it despised those of other blood, nations or tribes. It exalted him on glorifying his shameful instincts. Paul reproaches this of the pagans in his famous letter to the Romans.

Wherefore, God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness: to dishonor their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.
For this cause, God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women themselves have inverted the natural use into that use which is contrary nature.
And, in like manner, the men also, casting aside the natural use of women, have burned in their lusts, one towards another: men with men, working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error.
And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient. Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness: full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity: whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute: without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death: and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them.

The Jewish people

Such are the common characteristics applying to the pagan world in the various great civilizations they have created. Not only in the Greco-Roman but also in the very ancient Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations. All these are idolatrous peoples, which on losing the knowledge of the true God, corrupted also the principles of order and health on which the city of man should be edified.

Great and colossal undertakings were planned and executed, of which a pale idea is given to us by the archaeological remains, but they diminished man, depriving him of his prerogatives of human dignity which constitute his true grandeur. Man was dehumanized to be converted into a useful thing, into a tool. On man losing God, he also lost himself.

For this reason, God set apart a people for Himself, in which the primitive revelation which God had communicated to humankind's first parents should be kept intact. Two thousand years before Christ, God calls Abraham and tells him: 

Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father's house, and come into the land which I shall shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and magnify thy name, and thou shalt be blessed. I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee, and in thee shall all the kindred of the earth be blessed.

To this people, God gives a written law, which does not save of itself by intrinsic efficacy, but which is a sign of Him in whom all lineages of the world should be blessed. This people get thus sanctified and consecrated to God, not for being such people nor for descending from father Abraham, but by the Christ, the Son of God, blessed over the ages; the Promised; the Liberator; the Redemptor, who was to come out from its bosom.

This people, which God protects in a special way, has indeed brought to us the Redeemer, the Redeemer's mother, and the apostles, first trunk of Christ's Church. The Jewish people have been in Christ, the vehicle for the great blessings of humankind.

But just as paganism is an infidelity to the law of nature, in the same way, Judaism is an infidelity to the written law. The great sin of the Jews consists of, by having adhered to the sign, to the figure, they have lost the substance of salvation, which is Christ.  As written by Saint John (Gospel I,11) in an eternal word: He came unto his own: and his own received him not.

The first distinctive character of the Jewish people after Christ came to the world is its anti-Christianity.

They hate Christ as a traitor who came out of their race. They hate him because they consider He has disappointed them; when He should have brought them the greatness to dominate all their enemies, the rest of the peoples, He has instead done nothing other than tie them to the dominating yoke of those other peoples.

The second distinctive character of the Jewish people is their ambition to dominate the world.

What Christ did not do is to be accomplished by their race. The Jewish people have a conscience of their eternal destiny through the history of humankind, they want that the promises made to them, and which they have always understood in a carnal sense, attain fulfillment. They have inverted messianism that way; to that which in the mind of God has had a spiritual sense, they have assigned a material significance and have labored with a conscience ingrained in the deepest of their race over the ages, in the midst of the most diverse peoples, certain that someday will come when, from Jerusalem, the center of the world, they will dominate all nations with a hard stick.

Jews, then, have the mission of being the dissolvers of the Christian peoples, with a clear conscience that whatever they may do to corrupt those peoples, separating them from Christ and from all traditional ties of life, is a preparatory task for their future domination. (See Julio Meinvielle, El Judío)

The Christian Peoples

The world is ordered to Christ. To Christ was ordered the law of nature which ruled the just in the first age of the world, and to Christ was also ordered the written law of the Jewish people, which clearly showed him in figure. And the law of Christ was realized perfectly in the new law which Christ himself, Redeemer of humankind, promulgated.

Law of nature, written or ancient law, and new law, are not essentially different laws. (I, II, p 106, a. 1). They can be distinguished; as the imperfect from the perfect; as infancy from adulthood; as the sprout from the plant and from the flower; as the sunset from the dawn and from midday. For this reason, in the city of God, one at the bottom, there are three divisions that correspond to the three moments of its progress and form three different worlds, the world of the first just, the Jewish world, and the Christian world.

In all three, Christ is known, in the first age of the world, very obscurely, mainly by the divination of the instinct and the interior movements of grace; in the second, undoubtedly by greater grace, but additionally by the symbols, the figures, the rites, and the promises; in the third one by the reality oh His presence. What we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have contemplated and what our hands have touched of the Word of life, this is what we announce (I John, 1, 1) ( See Journet, Les Mondes, in La Vie Intellectuelle, March 1929)

In Christ, everything culminates. What Saint Paul teaches in his letter to the Colossans, I, and subsequent, has a universal value that will never be pondered enough. By Him all things were created in the heavens and in the earth; the visible and the invisible, whether they be thrones or denominations, whether principalities or powers, all things were created by Him and, in attention of Him, and thus, He has being before all things, and all subsist by Him. He is the head and the body of the Church, and the principle of resurrection, the first one to resurrect from among the dead so that He has the primacy; as it pleased the Father to place in Him the plenitude of all being, and to reconcile all things with Him by Him, re-establishing peace between heaven and earth by means of the blood He shed on the Cross.

All things converge toward Christ. And even the pagan peoples, which were unfaithful to the law of nature, as the Jewish people, who were so to the written law, have prepared the ways. Everything has been written in history so that His Kingdom, announced by the prophets, arise at the end of times over the summits of the hills and over mountain passes so that peoples run there and nations come in haste (Micheas IV, 2 and subsequent). Undoubtedly, it is not easy to make a fully documented historical verification of this when historiography has been maliciously perverted by a diabolical criticism; but history does not oppose it and clearly shows that this has been the way of Divine Providence. The Greeks have prepared the conceptual apparatus for the wisdom of the Church, so marvelously completed in the Summa Theologiae of the Angelic Doctor, and the Romans, their marvelous language as well as their colossal sense of the law and of organization, and the barbarians have contributed the live, virgin, mass for the evangelization and even for a Christian civil order, aside from other invaluable contributions, as the military ardor of the Germanic peoples which was employed in the conformation of the Holy Roman Empire.

The words of immortal Leo XIII in his encyclical De civitatum constitutione christiana contain a perennial truth: The immortal work of merciful God which is the Church, even though in itself and by its nature, looks to the eternal salvation of souls and to the happiness which is to be attained in heaven, yet even in the order of the perishable things it offers so great abundance, so many usefulnesses which it would not have been able to offer in such quantity and greatness if it had been instituted primarily and above all for the attaining of prosperity in the present life. Let us present the characteristics which should mark any civilization informed by the Christian principles; in other words, let us assign the characteristics of the Christian peoples.

First characteristic of Christianity. Adoration of the only God and of his envoy Jesus Christ.

Christianity has affirmed with the same energy the transcendence of the uncreated over all things created, and the divine immanence of God who is present in creatures by essence, potency, and presence. God, who is infinitely above man, does not step out of the way, but on the contrary, He strongly directs man to Him, even with a love reaching infinity, because, after man's prevarication, He has sent his Only-begotten son so that He would be the way the truth and the life. God has loved man so much that to raise him from the prostration in which he was sunk, He has not hesitated in taking his frail nature, suffer the punishments to which man had been made liable and rescue him for the eternal beatitude which is nothing less than the intuitive and fruitive possession of the Divine Essence. In Christianity, the Divine and the human are united, God and the world without, blending together. Idolatry is radically proscribed.

Second characteristic of Christianity: God lives in Christ and Christ lives in the Church.

The relations of man with God are not left to the discretion of the man who would get along with his God. Man cannot attain the union with God but through His envoy, Jesus Christ and, in turn, cannot communicate with Christ but through the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, who is Jesus Christ realized in the social order. The Church is a spiritual society instituted by God himself, which proposes man the concrete way for salvation and provides the means left by Christ for the auspicious transit through that road. The Church with its divine dogmas is Teacher of the Truth, the Church with his divine precepts exercises a real guiding action on consciences, the Church is king; the Church, with its divine sacraments and means of sanctification, is Priest who saves. All the order of the souls in their way to salvation is in the hands of the Holy Church, which in turn is founded firmly and unshakably on the Roman Pontiff with the episcopate united to him.

Third characteristic of Christianity: Its universality.

Just as all other religions have been localized at a point in time and space, Christianity, the same as God, from whom it has its origin, has maintained itself the same and with the same sanctifying and civilizing force in the most diverse human complexes.

Fourth characteristic of Christianity: Its position before the political power of the peoples.

Christianity has as its mission to lead men to eternal life. All that in some manner falls under this end is within the orbit of its attributions. But what cannot be included in such end lies, for that same reason, outside of its orbit. Political power forms then a world irreductible to the authority of the Church. Therefore, every human person belongs to two cities, a terrestrial city, which has as its end the temporal common good, and a heavenly city. the end of which is eternal life.

Within the same walls and in the same human multitude there are two peoples, and these two peoples give origin to two distinct lives, to two principalities, to a double juridical order. (Maritain, Primauté du Spirituel; Julio Meinvielle, Concepción Católica de la Política,) But distinguishing does not mean separating. They are two distinct things but united. United hierarchically in the primacy of the eternal over the temporal; of the Church over the political society; of God over man.

Fifth characteristic of Christianity: Union of all men and all peoples by a law of charity.

Christianity distinguishes and unites. It affirms the sacred rights of every human person, it affirms the rights of the family, of the worker organizations, of the governmental powers, of the Church itself, of Christ, and of God, and unites all of them, without abdicating, but on the contrary, by the affirmation of these rights with the bonds of charity. Man, who comes from God, who has been rescued by Christ, who is sanctified by the Church, who has a sole destiny; to wit, possession of eternal life, has to be united with his fellow men because they are united with God. If someone says: Yes, I love God, and at the same time he abhors his brother, he is a liar. Since he who does not love his brother, whom he sees, how can he love God, whom he does not see? (John I, Letter IV, 20)

An intermediary biblical people of great historical importance: The Mohammedans

A word also on another biblical people of great historical, though secondary, importance: the Mohammedans. To no one is hidden the biblical origin of the Mohammedans, descendants of Ishmael, son of Abraham by his slave Agar. If Isaac inherited the promises made by God to Abraham, that the Jews be a vehicle, and in Christ attained admirable fulfillment, the Mohammedans also received a blessing from God which is fulfilled through the ages. Gen XVII.

I have also made my request to Ishmael; lo and behold, I will give him my blessing and will give him a numerous descendancy; he will be the father of twelve commanders and I will make him chief of a great nation. 

Ishmael is neither Jew nor Christian nor pagan. He is not pagan because he comes from Abraham after he had left Ur to move to Chaldea; he is not Jew even though he comes from Abraham, he is excluded from the promises made to Abraham, and he is not Christian as it appears to be evident. Then, the people coming from him are neither one nor the other. Genesis foretells that his nation will be great and numerous, and insinuates that it will be an eminently bellicose nation, not only for having been called great but for having alluded to the twelve commandants.

And history witnesses that these words, which signify the intermediate character and the belligerent greatness that fit the Muslim people, have been fulfilled. Mohammedans have indeed been the intermediaries between the pagan culture, not only the Greco-Roman but also of the far East, and the Christian peoples, and who knows if they may not tomorrow, converted to the faith, be the ones who reduce the last gentile nations to Jesus Christ. The Mohammedans have been above all, under their condition of exterior enemies of Christendom, the ones who have maintained the heroic unity of the Christian peoples, contributing in that way to the splendor of their greatness.

Survival of the biblical peoples after Christ

If these four peoples are truly biblical; that is, if they appear in the Word of God contained in the Bible as directly expressed, it is evident that they should fulfill a theological mission in history. I say theological, meaning to signify that it is a mission willed by God with efficacious antecedent will, prior to history itself; that therefore governs history; whence these peoples are not those who will be dragged by the torrent of human contingencies to disappear if it fits so in the whirlwind of events, but on the contrary, the destiny which God has assigned to these peoples will drag the torrent of the contingent events until the admirable design of Divine Providence is fulfilled in history.

Be it not said that this endangers the human liberty to choose, as this liberty is not omnimodal as if in fact individuals or human groups would have to choose from among all hypotheses simply possible, but it is restricted to the hic et nunc possible only. The sphere of liberty is then conditioned by a number of factors which man cannot modify without it resulting in a deterioration of his psychological liberty. Can we, perchance, because we are free, evade the conditions of life, and live in a world — good or bad — which is not this of our modern life? And do we, perchance, because we cannot evade it, lose the psychological faculty to choose this or that at our own discretion?

On the other hand, history confirms the transcendental influence of these four biblical peoples. Everything is arranged in the course of human events to provide a background to the figure of Christ, who is the central event of humankind. I had made notice of this before, where I talked about the Jewish people and of the pagan people, which, in fidelity to the Divine Will, or in contradiction to His precepts, have not but prepared the paths to Jesus Christ, King of time and of eternity (Pius the XI, Mit brennender Sorge). After Christ, the same law governs the course of events. 

And in the last days, the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be prepared on the top of mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go, and say: Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths...(Isaiah II, 2) 

These words, which Theologians adduce to demonstrate the perpetual visibility of the Church of Christ, also demonstrate that this Church shall be the central focus of history. The Church has been placed in the midst of humankind, at the center of time and space, as a sign of contradiction, as a stumbling stone (Luke II, 34), as ruin and resurrection; no one, be it individuals or nations can remain indifferent before the Church, because they either hitch to her for their glory, or they do not for their ruin.

The luminous event that raises itself in the ages after the coming of Christ is the Church, with its head in Rome, in the midst of nations. Around her, Christendom is formed. Eight centuries of clashes of peoples against peoples, civilizations against civilizations, of pagans and Jews against Christians, has been the melting pot from which God's Spirit made the marvelous Christendom emerge. It will always be one of the culminating moments in history, that which Pope Leo III, at Christmas night of that year placed the imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne and made the people acclaim him as the Roman emperor. "There was in the restoration of a title preserved as glorious, something which would seduce the imagination of the people of the Eternal City, and the Papacy appeared to realize itself by coming to be, by a grandiose initiative, the visible fount of an unprecedented dignity in the political world." (Godefroy Kurth, Les origines de la Civilisation moderne, volume two, sept. edit., p. 309).

The Church, Christ visible on earth, appeared with the plenitude of His spiritual royalty, from where, by superabundance, she also strengthened and affirmed the temporal power of princes, and these, in turn, being conscious of their mission of God's servants and servants of their subjects, offered the firmness of their strength for the kingship of God's rights over their subjects. Who could sing of those magnificent ages of profoundly Christian life, which penetrated the sectors of all human activity, elevating the souls up to divine effusions of authentic mysticism, which illumined the intelligences with a never-dreamed of vision of the inenarrable order of beings, of which Saint Thomas' Summa Theologiae is nothing but a pale reflection, who transfigured the aesthetic capacity of all domains of the arts, as revealed by the music, the poetry, the painting, and the architecture of the great middle ages in the insuperable works, the greatest of the human genius of all ages and latitudes, which transformed the customs of the people even to make a prayer out of the laborious fulfillment of duties, family, social and political, and all that while maintaining firmly the attention to the Spirit of God, without at any moment enervating the dispositions of the spirit. And, how can we forget the magnificent medieval knights, theologians, philosophers, poets, and warriors at the same time, because the force of Divine grace elevated together all the infinite abilities of which men with the grace of God are capable? The Christian people have given proof of the possibilities of which the people subjected to the Grace of Christ are capable. But among the peoples conquered by Christ are also other biblical peoples. The Jewish people are there as blind and mute witnesses of the Christian truth, they hate such civilization and fight against it in the shadow of their ghettos, but their terrible snares and treason crash against the strength of the full Christian life, of peoples who know that the enemies of Christ are not to be feared when they live with Christ. (See Julio Meinvielle. El Judío)

The pagans are also there as an immense and formless mass that must be conquered to the light of Christ little by little. Lastly, the Muslims, as belligerent enemies of this civilization, serve to maintain the animus of the Christian peoples ever ready, so that they do not relax, so that they can clearly appreciate how distant are the dominions of Him who said: "Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart" from those of the barbarians and the destructive fierceness of a people who has not subjected itself to the law of grace.

Medieval civilization is a holy civilization. It is, without any kind of doubt, the highest level reached or that will ever be reached as a civilization by humankind. A theologian of undisputed authority, as is the celebrated Cardinal Billot (De Ecclesia Christi, epilogue, volume II) applies to her what can be read in Apocalypse on the Church of Thiatira, word that means splendor and magnificence of triumph. "It is, thus, the Church of Thiatira, the fourth age, initiated by Charlemagne with the conformation of the Holy Roman Empire, the duration of which should be measured with the number one thousand (from year 800 to the year 1800). And certainly, the institution of the Holy Roman Empire sealed the subordination of the temporal to the spiritual city and was as a crown for all the social organization of the Kingdom of the Lord, of which Isaiah prophesied: 

Arise, be enlightened, O Jerusalem: for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee... And the Gentiles shall walk in thy light, and kings in the brightness of thy rising. ...And the children of them that afflict thee, shall come bowing down to thee, and all that slandered thee shall worship the steps of thy feet...And thou shalt suck the milk of the Gentiles, and thou shalt be nursed with the breasts of kings: and thou shalt know that I am the Lord thy Savior, and thy Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob. (Chapter 60)

The other biblical peoples coexist together with the Christian people, but they feel dominated. The grace of Christ springs with such force in the heart of the peoples, that nothing can resist it or oppose it. Their efforts are in vain for, what can be done against the city when it is the Lord Himself who has custody of it? The forces of evil labor with determination, but their attempts are impotent. Saint Peter and Saint John teach us that the enemy of Christ has been working against Christ since then, and he does not triumph because he cannot. The Anti-Christ already brings about the iniquity.

(To be continued)