Prophecy

In the Homeric poems the future is disclosed to men by several instruments and through several kinds of agent. The gods send omens in the flight of birds, in thunder, in portents observed on the field of battle, and in dreams; and there are men whose skill in reading such signs is itself represented as a divine bestowal. Calchas, called the best of the bird interpreters, is said to know what is, what will be, and what was before, and this knowledge is attributed to Apollo. The seer's office is not confined to the satisfying of curiosity about things to come. When Calchas declares before the assembled Greeks the cause of the plague, his utterance bears at once upon the conduct of the war and upon the honor of Agamemnon, so that the diviner appears from the first as a figure whose authority may stand in tension with the authority of kings.

Prophecy in Homer cannot be separated from fate. The course of events is represented as fixed, whether by the will of the gods or by an order of things which the gods themselves observe, and the seer's gift consists in making that order visible before it is enacted. Whether foreknowledge of this kind leaves anything for deliberation to accomplish is a question the poems raise without resolving. Thetis tells Achilles that two destinies bear him toward death, the one long and obscure, the other brief and glorious, and the telling appears to clarify his situation rather than to alter it. Nor does knowledge of the signs guarantee that they will be honored. Hector dismisses the augury of the birds and declares that one omen is best, to fight for one's country. The relation of foresight to freedom is treated more fully under the ideas of Fate and of Necessity and Contingency.

Foreknowledge is also ascribed in Homer to the dead. When Odysseus descends to the house of Hades, it is the shade of Tiresias who declares to him the manner of his return and the trials that remain, speaking with a plainness the oracles seldom permit themselves. That the departed should see what the living cannot suggests that the veil hiding the future belongs to the mortal condition rather than to the nature of things. The difficulty of interpreting signs, as distinguished from the difficulty of obtaining them, occupies much of the narrative, and it is a difficulty which later discussion of oracles inherits.

The Homeric poems furnish the terms in which the Western discussion of prophecy afterward proceeds: the seer as an intermediary between gods and men, the sign as something requiring interpretation and liable to misinterpretation, and the question whether the knowledge of what must come to pass alters the situation of the man who possesses it. Plato receives this picture and transforms it, treating the seer's condition as a species of divine madness and assigning the labor of interpretation to a separate art.

Plato treats prophecy as one of the forms of divine madness. In the Phaedrus he distinguishes four such forms according to their sources: the prophetic, from Apollo; the ritual, from Dionysus; the poetic, from the Muses; and the erotic, from Aphrodite and Eros. The prophetic is named as the oldest and most honored of these. Plato connects the word for the prophetic art with the word for madness, and the connection carries an argument as well as an etymology: the condition in which divine communication is received is one in which the ordinary exercise of reason has been suspended. Madness of this sort is not to be regarded as a defect of the soul. On this view the soul possesses a capacity for contact with what is above it, and that capacity operates when the discursive intelligence is not in command.

The same account appears in other dialogues with a further qualification. In the Timaeus it is said that no man attains prophetic truth while in his wits, and that the utterance of the inspired man must afterward be judged by another, since he who is possessed cannot weigh what he has said. Divination is thus divided between the receiving of the sign and the interpreting of it, and only the second is an art in the ordinary sense. In the Ion the poet and the rhapsode are described as speaking truly without knowledge, by possession rather than by skill. The Apology presents Socrates as guided by a divine sign which restrains him from certain actions without instructing him in reasons. Plato is not on that account uncritical of the practitioners of divination, and in the Republic the itinerant seers who profess to remit sins by sacrifices are numbered among the corrupters of belief.

The Platonic account leaves a question which the later tradition takes up in various ways. If the highest knowledge of things to come is granted to a soul whose reason has been set aside, then prophecy stands outside the account of knowledge given in the chapters on Knowledge and Opinion, and its credentials cannot be established by the methods proper to inquiry. Augustine retains the premise that the soul may be seized by a power beyond its own reason while denying that the god who seizes it is Apollo; Aristotle, on the other side, examines the reported instances of divination for causes of a natural kind.

Aristotle's short treatise on divination in sleep opens by declaring that the reported foreknowledge of dreams can neither be lightly dismissed nor confidently accepted, and the inquiry that follows keeps to that middle position. He proposes that a dream which appears to announce a future event may stand to that event in one of three relations. It may be a cause of it, as when a man who has dreamt of an action is disposed to perform it while awake. It may be a sign of it, as when slight movements within the body, imperceptible amid the distractions of waking life, are magnified in sleep and announce the onset of illness before it declares itself. Or it may be a coincidence, and Aristotle holds that most instances fall here, since men dream often and about many things, and some dreams must by chance resemble what afterward occurs.

The treatise does not deny that the interpretation of dreams is a skill of some kind. The most skilful interpreter, Aristotle says, is the man able to observe resemblances, for the images of sleep are distorted as reflections are distorted in moving water, and the art consists in recognizing the original through the distortion. What Aristotle resists is the inference from the occurrence of such knowledge to its divine origin. If God sent dreams, they would presumably be sent to the best and wisest of men, whereas the capacity for vivid and seemingly prophetic dreaming appears in persons of no distinction. The conclusion drawn is that dreams are not sent by God and are not designed for the foretelling of the future, though they may still be signs within the order of nature. The wider question of how images are formed and retained belongs to the chapter on Memory and Imagination, and the reading of signs to that on Sign and Symbol.

Aristotle's procedure, which is to look first for natural causes and to admit supernatural ones only where natural ones fail, supplies the tradition with a method as much as with a conclusion. Aquinas adopts the distinction while reserving a place for prophecy properly so called, holding that dreams of natural origin are one thing and the prophetic light another. Montaigne extends the skeptical side of the argument to the arts of prognostication generally, and later writers who explain prophetic experience by reference to temperament or bodily condition are working within the same account of causes.

Augustine distinguishes prophecy from divination and condemns the latter as a species of presumption. The prophets of Israel, from Moses through Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, are not men skilled in penetrating the secrets of heaven but instruments through which God Himself speaks; they interpret only in the sense that they make known to others what has been made known to them. Against this stand the arts by which men attempt to pry into what has not been disclosed, and Augustine's criticism falls with particular weight upon astrology, which he calls the lying divination and impious dotage of those who profess it. The objection goes beyond the frequency with which such predictions fail. It is that the claim to read the future in celestial or terrestrial signs assumes an access to providence which has not been granted.

In Books XVII and XVIII of the City of God the prophetic books are read as a commentary running alongside the history of the two cities, disclosing at each stage the meaning of what is taking place. On this reading the content of prophecy is seldom exhausted by prediction. The prophets are teachers, continuous with the patriarchs and with Moses, and their announcements of doom are accompanied by instruction in the law which the people have forsaken. Augustine finds a mark of their authenticity in their agreement with one another and with what preceded them, whereas among the teachers of the pagans he can find nothing but dissension, and no means by which the false teacher is distinguished from the true. The fulfillment of what the prophets foretold, and above all the messianic prophecies, is treated as a verification of Christian doctrine, since a succession of men over many centuries is held to have foretold one event without variation.

The framework Augustine establishes governs the discussion for a thousand years: prophecy is a gift conferred for the instruction of the faithful, its authenticity is tested by continuity with revelation already received, and its fulfillment counts as evidence for the faith. Two questions are left standing. Aquinas takes up the first, which concerns what happens in the prophet's mind when the light is given, and whether the vision may exceed the understanding of the man who receives it. The second, whether the messianic prophecies have in fact been fulfilled, remains the point at issue between the Jewish and the Christian readings of the same texts.

Aquinas treats prophecy as a light rather than as a habit. The prophetic light is a transient illumination by which God raises the intellect to know what lies beyond the reach of natural cognition, and because it is transient the prophet is not a prophet at all times, nor by any disposition of his own. What is prophesied need not concern the future. The content may be past or present or distant, and it is the supernatural manner of knowing, not the temporal direction of the thing known, that makes the knowledge prophetic. Within prophecy so defined Aquinas distinguishes grades. In the highest, the prophet receives both the representation and the light by which to judge it; in the lower, images are presented in dream or vision without the judgment that would disclose their meaning, so that the prophet may utter what he does not understand and stand in need of an interpreter.

The question whether prophets may err is answered by the same distinction. In what is directly revealed and judged by the prophetic light, error is excluded; in matters left to the prophet's own estimation, he remains as liable to mistake as other men. Aquinas applies the general doctrine to particular cases with some severity. He allows that astrologers may foretell in a general way, since the heavenly bodies act upon bodies, without conceding to them any genuinely prophetic power. And on the date of the end of the world and the resurrection he follows Augustine in holding that the time is hidden from men, neither calculable by natural reason nor revealed; those who have reckoned it have so far been shown false, and the same is to be expected of those who continue to reckon.

The treatment in the Summa becomes the standard exposition for later theology, and it settles a number of questions by drawing distinctions rather than by taking sides. One difficulty it leaves open concerns the identification of prophecy from without. If the prophet is infallible in what the light discloses and fallible in his own judgments, and if he may himself be uncertain which is which, then no rule is furnished by which a hearer may sort the one from the other. Hobbes takes up that difficulty and turns it toward the question of who shall judge prophetic claims, while the relation of divine foreknowledge to human freedom, which Aquinas treats alongside prophecy, is examined more fully under the ideas of Fate and of Necessity and Contingency.

The Divine Comedy presents itself as a vision granted by grace, in which the pilgrim is shown the order of divine justice and charged with reporting what he has seen to the living. The distinction between prophecy and divination, which Augustine and Aquinas had drawn in doctrinal terms, is enacted in the poem. In the twentieth canto of the Inferno the diviners and soothsayers walk with their heads turned backward upon their shoulders, weeping over their own loins, and the contrivance of the punishment states the offense: those who attempted to see too far ahead are permitted to see only behind. The souls named there are augurs, astrologers, and workers of magic drawn from antiquity and from Dante's own century alike, so that the condemnation falls upon a practice rather than upon a period.

Prophecy of the other kind appears in the seventeenth canto of the Paradiso, where Cacciaguida foretells the poet's exile from Florence and the bitterness of dependence upon others, and then lays upon him the commission to make his whole vision manifest without regard to whom it offends. On this account the true prophetic office is a burden imposed rather than a power sought, and its mark is the cost it exacts from the man who bears it. A further form of foreknowledge is described in the tenth canto of the Inferno, where Farinata explains that the damned see distant things as men see by a failing light, while the present is closed to them, and that when the door of the future is shut at the last judgment their knowledge will be extinguished altogether. Foresight granted to the dead is thus itself temporary, and belongs to their condition rather than to their merit.

Dante's assumption of the prophetic voice shapes the later European conception of the poet as seer, and the connection between poetic and prophetic inspiration, which Plato had proposed in another form, is treated more fully under the idea of Poetry. The distinction he enacts depends upon a standing authority competent to certify which claims are divine in origin and which are presumption. Where that authority is denied, or transferred to the civil sovereign as Hobbes proposes, the distinction between the true and the false prophet must be drawn on other grounds or abandoned.

In the essay on prognostications Montaigne surveys the arts by which men have attempted to learn what is to come, among them augury, astrology, the interpretation of dreams, and the consultation of oracles, and finds little in any of them. His argument rests less on the nature of the future than on the disposition of those who inquire into it. Men remember the predictions that were confirmed and forget the far greater number that were not; they read vague utterances generously and discover the meaning only once the event has supplied it. He observes that the practice is universal, that no people has been found so barbarous as to lack some form of prognostication, and he takes the universality as evidence of a common weakness rather than of a common gift. The desire to be certain about what cannot be known, he suggests, is stronger than the evidence that would satisfy it.

Montaigne does not deny that God may communicate with men, and as a Catholic he leaves the authority of Scripture and of the Church untouched by the argument. What he denies is that the ordinary arts of divination participate in any such communication, and he notes that the ancients themselves came to distrust their oracles, whose credit had declined long before the practice did. He is willing to entertain the case of Socrates and the sign that restrained him, treating it as an impulsion of the will arising without deliberation, and finds in it something more plausible than in the professions of the diviners. His own conclusion is characteristic of the Essays generally: to know the extent of one's ignorance, to refuse the false certainty that would fill it, and to hold in particular suspicion whatever prediction flatters one's hopes or confirms one's fears.

Montaigne's treatment belongs with the wider examination of human credulity carried on in the chapters on Opinion and on Custom and Convention, and it shifts the discussion of prophecy from the question of what the gods may disclose to the question of what men are inclined to believe. Hobbes carries the argument into politics, where the difficulty of distinguishing a prophet from a dreamer becomes a question of public order. Gibbon carries it into history, treating prophetic movements as phenomena to be explained by the temper of the age that received them.

Hobbes accepts that God spoke to the patriarchs and the prophets and denies that anything of the kind is to be expected now. The name of prophet, he observes, signifies in Scripture sometimes one who speaks from God to man or from man to God, and sometimes a foreteller of things to come, and the first of these senses is the broader. Understood in that sense the prophets of the Old Testament held an office within the commonwealth of the Jews. Throughout the history of the kings of Judah and Israel, Hobbes writes, there were prophets who controlled the kings for transgressing the religion and sometimes for errors of state. He also notes the manner in which the prophets were addressed, God having declared that He spoke to others in dreams and visions but to Moses as a man speaks to his friend, and he uses the distinction to rank the prophets below the lawgiver.

For the present the question is one of credentials. Hobbes proposes two marks by which a true prophet is known, and insists that they be taken together and not separately: the working of miracles, and the teaching of no religion other than that already established. Where miracles have ceased, the first mark is unavailable, and a man who reports that God has spoken to him in a dream reports only that he dreamed as much. Since no argument can oblige another to accept such a claim, and since any private man may advance one, the judgment of prophetic pretensions is assigned to the sovereign, on the ground that unexamined claims of revelation are an occasion of sedition and of the dissolution of the commonwealth.

The effect of Hobbes' position is to confine prophecy to the biblical past and to remove it as a source of authority in the present, a conclusion reached without denying that prophecy once occurred. Whether the sovereign is a competent judge of such matters, and what becomes of conscience when he is made so, are questions treated under the ideas of Religion and of Church and State. Hobbes' condemnation of oracles, omens, and necromancy as superstition goes further than the theologians had gone, and Gibbon's account of the prophetic enthusiasms of the early Church proceeds along the line his argument opens.

Gibbon does not argue against prophecy; he narrates the conditions under which prophetic claims were made and received. In the fifteenth chapter of the Decline and Fall he assigns to the growth of Christianity five secondary causes, among them the expectation of another life and the miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive Church. The expectation of the imminent return of Christ is examined as a fact about the early Christians rather than as a doctrine to be assessed, and the doctrine of the millennium is described as intimately connected with that expectation. What interests Gibbon is the behavior of the belief under disappointment. The delay of the fulfillment did not extinguish the conviction; the terms of the prophecy were understood afresh by each generation, and the date was moved rather than abandoned.

The same method is applied to the prophetic movements within the Church. Gibbon observes that the enthusiasms of Montanus and others were in due course disowned by the ecclesiastical authority which preserved its own claims to inspiration, and he leaves the reader to consider on what principle the one was distinguished from the other. His manner throughout is ironic rather than controversial, and the irony works by juxtaposition, setting the professions of the primitive Christians beside the ordinary human causes that would account for them. He is equally attentive to the temper of the early communities in matters remote from prediction, remarking on their aversion to images and on the severity of their discipline, so that the prophetic expectation appears as one feature of a disposition rather than as an isolated claim.

By treating prophecy as a historical phenomenon with assignable social and psychological causes, Gibbon alters the terms of the discussion without pronouncing upon the truth of any prophecy. The evidences which Augustine and Pascal had drawn from fulfillment are not refuted; they are set within a narrative in which belief and its transmission have causes of their own, and the defender of prophecy is left to show that his case requires more than these causes supply. The relation of such explanation to the writing of history is considered under the idea of History, and the secular predictions which later philosophers of history substitute for prophecy are considered under Progress.