So when will the end come? Will it be caused by natural calamities or by man-made disasters or both together? Certainly, we human beings seem to be doing our best, all unwittingly, to hasten the approach of that end. Now not only the politicians, or the military, or the scientists, who are more responsible, but also the man in the street, who knows nothing of what is going on around him, feels ill at ease. All are hastening “the day of the Lord”.
And then, as Peter says in his second epistle, “the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth and the elements that are therein shall be burnt up”.
And what Peter says is echoed by Shakespeare in his last complete play, The Tempest, in the words of Prospero to the young couple, Ferdinand and Miranda. Then, he declares, in divinely inspired words, “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve and… leave not a wrack behind.” As for ourselves, he adds, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and this our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Moreover, to the words of Prospero may be added the other words of Macbeth as he, too, approaches his end. He, too, speaks of human life no less pessimistically, as “a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Is that all, we wonder? Hasn’t the great Shakespeare, with all his reliance on the Bible, anything more to tell us about the end, if only by way of interpreting the words he has read? Well, what does he know, for all his genius? What does anyone know? What does the Son of Man himself know? For what does Jesus say? “Of that day and hour no man knows, no, not the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but only the Father.”
Certainly, the signs of the times have been taking place, in a long-drawn-out succession of calamities, disasters, with woe following upon woe, and they are still taking place, as if to warn us in the words of John the Baptist and of Jesus himself, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”
On Consolation
There is a limit beyond which human beings can’t put up with commination. Surely the Jews had plenty of it from their prophets. Surely no anti-Semites have ever had more of a down on the Jews than their own prophets. No wonder they treated those prophets so badly! One even wonders how far the prophets were simply speaking what God told them to say or how far they were merely laying it on (as we say) “with a trowel”. One even imagines the Jews of that time exclaiming (in the American idiom), “Give us a break!”
Anyhow, sooner or later the break is given, as it were a break in the storm-clouds of divine vengeance, and the sun of divine mercy shines through. Then it comes down to warm the very cockles of Jewish hearts, with the words opening the aptly entitled “Book of Consolation” of the prophet Isaiah. What does he say, in the name of God? “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God.”
Such are the words that come down to us over two millennia, not only as they are to be read in the black and white pages of the Bible, but also as they are set to inspired music in the opening aria of Handel’s “Messiah”. Such are the words that bring comfort to people, and not only Jews, all over the world, especially at Christmas-time. Such are the words that show the divine consolation shining through his words of seeming commination. One even suspects that the preceding commination has merely been designed to set off the following consolation.
After all, in what precisely did “the day of the Lord”, as proclaimed in such dark terms by the prophets, consist? In what way did the world of the prophets and the people come to its promised end? Was it attended by wars and rumors of wars, by rack and ruin, by calamities of every kind?
No, it was an age of peace, when the emperor Augustus had established Roman rule over the lands of the Mediterranean, and for once the doors of the temple of Janus could be closed in the Roman Forum. Then it was that the Prince of Peace was born, as the prophet Micah had foretold, in Bethlehem of Judah, adding, “And he shall be peace.” And then the old man Simeon welcomed him to the temple, recognizing in him, in the tiny form of an infant, the consolation of Israel.
Then, too, we find Paul writing a second letter to the Corinthians, repeating this very word “Consolation” from God the Father, and from himself as representing the Father, no less than nine times (as noun and verb) in four consecutive verses. He is indeed, as I have said, “laying it on with a trowel”. The Greek word is paraclesis, from which comes the noun “paraclete”, which Jesus applies to the Holy Spirit in his long discourse to the disciples at the last supper.
All the same, we have to admit there is also a limit beyond which human beings can no longer put up even with consolation. There is a limit beyond which the very exhortation to “cheer up” depresses us and makes us shout, “Shut up!” There is a limit when even the prospect of commination affords us relief, as when Churchill in the dark days of World War II told us to expect nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”.
Such is the limit dramatized by Shakespeare in the dialogue between the poor queen of Richard II and his uncle the Duke of York, concerning the bad news of his impending defeat. “Uncle,” she pleads, “for God’s sake, speak comfortable words.” But he sadly replies, “Comfort’s in heaven, and we are on the earth, where nothing lives but crosses, cares, and grief.”
Such is the limit beyond which the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins felt he had more than trespassed, when he mournfully penned the words, “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, more pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.” And then, like Richard’s poor queen, he pleads, “Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?”
In yet another poem he adds, “I cast for comfort I can no more get by groping round my comfortless, than blind eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.” Here again he is recalling not only Richard II or his poor queen or uncle, but also the maddened Lear and the blinded Gloucester, especially when the latter has just had his eyes put out, causing him to exclaim, “All dark and comfortless!”
All this may well be interpreted as God’s punishment on sinful men. Lear is punished with madness for his foolish rejection of truth in banishing Cordelia and trusting to her false sisters, and Gloucester is punished with blindness for banishing his true son Edgar and trusting to his bastard son Edmund. This is what Edgar recognizes in his comment on his father’s blindness to the dying Edmund, “The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us. The dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes.”
That may not be such a popular saying nowadays, when we shrink from attributing the many natural and man-made disasters to the divine punishment on sinners. But we can’t help it! We are all sinners, and never more than today. So it is only to be expected that God should punish us for our sins. But such are the punishments he sends us that, as the prophets reassure us, he never smites without healing, never wounds without binding up the wound, never rejects us in his justice without embracing us in his mercy. Thus is his commination offset by his consolation.
On Goodness
Consolation is good, commination is bad. Creation is good, annihilation is bad. Light is good, darkness is bad. Being is good, non-being is bad. Then what about such opposites? Are they good or bad? And what about that reconciliation of opposites which is said (by Nicholas of Cusa) to be realized in God? Surely it is good! And surely all these opposing entities are likewise good! Surely everything is good, and nothing is bad! As the exiled duke in As You Like It concludes his opening speech in the exile of Arden (which is close to Eden), there is “good in everything”.
That is just what we read in the opening account of creation in the Book of Genesis. At each stage or “day” of creation God sees that it is “good”, and at the end of his work of creation he sees that it is all “very