Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, Vol. 11: Prolegomena (prefaces and canons)
The heresiarchs saw this, and envied it, and therefore, to claim credit for themselves and their heresy, coveted the gift of prophecy. But as the Magicians of Pharao, rivals of Moses’ miracles, convicted of falsehood by the true Prophets of the Church, gained nothing but the name and fame of false prophets, so these, cutting their own throats with their own sword, by the falsity and shame of their prophesying rather illustrated and strengthened the faith and glory of the Church. Thus Montanus the heresiarch, about the year of the Lord 182, boasted that he was a Prophet, nay the Paraclete sent by the Father: and he even imbued Prisca and Maximilla, two noble harlots, with the same fanatic spirit, and taught them to prophesy. He foretold among other things, under the Emperor Commodus (which he presaged from his character), that there would be wars, seditions and a monstrous persecution of Christians: but the event convicted him of falsehood: for under Commodus there was peace for the Empire, peace for the Church and Christians, and Commodus himself, as an avenger of Christian blood, raged against those who had afflicted Christians; because Marcia his concubine was most devoted to Christians, says Dio in Commodus. But what was the end of him and his? Montanus himself, driven by the same mad spirit, hanged himself with a halter: his prophetesses did the same. Eusebius is witness, bk. v of his History, ch. xv.
Curbicus, who called himself Manichaeus, as if a pourer-out and giver of manna, but in truth Manes, that is mad, falsely claimed to be the Paraclete and to know the future. He foretold and promised that by prayer he would cure the sick son of the king of the Persians: but when he presented him dead instead of living, he was flayed alive by the king. Cyril of Jerusalem is witness …
About the year of the Lord 700, a certain Hebrew sorcerer foretold and promised to Ezid, the Mohammedan king of the Arabs, thirty years of life and reign, if in his dominion he would command the images of Christ and of the Saints to be removed from the churches of Christians and burnt. He commanded it; but when the Christians did not obey, he sent Arabs and Hebrews into the churches, who zealously carried it out. And this was the first iconoclast, but a Saracen, whom Leo the Isaurian, a Christian Emperor, soon followed, who, likewise seduced by Jews, ordered the images to be removed from the churches and destroyed. Hence he received the surname Iconomachus. But what? was the Hebrew’s prophecy true? Not at all. For king Ezid died the following year, and his son and successor punished the Hebrew false prophet with a most shameful death, as is narrated in the Seventh Synod, and by Cedrenus, Zonaras and Nicetas in the Life of Leo the Isaurian.
Frederick II, Emperor, enemy and scourge of the Church, about the year of the Lord 1240, as a Prophet foretold and threatened to the Roman Church, and to Gregory IX himself, and after him Innocent IV, and other Pontiffs by whom he had been deposed, destruction, writing to him in this verse.
The Fates will, the stars teach, and the flight of birds,
That I, Frederick, shall be the hammer of the world.
The Pontiff wrote back to him in as many antistrophes:
The Fates will, Scripture teaches, sins declare,
That thy life shall be short, thy punishment eternal.
Which was the Prophet? Surely the Pontiff: for the Roman and orthodox Church stood, and stands, and will stand: but Frederick in the year of the Lord 1250 was strangled by his own son Manfred: so Cuspinian relates from Albericus, though an enemy of the Pontiffs, and among them Bozius, sign xx, and others.
In this age Martin Luther, the torch of Germany, a fifth, if the gods please, Prophet, a fifth Evangelist of the new Gospel, that is of the kakangelion, not of God but of the kakodemon, with Cerberean pride foretold the destruction of the Pope, and that he himself would overthrow the Papacy: for so he sang as a seer himself:
Living I was thy plague, dying I shall be thy death, O Pope.
But the false prophet died, and went down to hell: the Pope and Papacy live, and will live, the rock stands firm upon which Christ built the Church, and so the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Michael Stifel, a disciple of Luther, and, as his name suggests, his minister of the word, a fit lid for the pot, from his Algebra, I believe, affirmed to his parishioners from the pulpit confidently and constantly, in the year 1533, that on a certain day, which he named, would be the end of the world, and the consummation of the age. The poor Germans believed their Parson; some groaned, peasants would not work any more nor till the fields; others drank, and consumed their goods lavishly, as if they would have no more need of them; others received the Eucharist as if about to die; all awaited fearfully. The day came, and what then? the mountains are in labor, a ridiculous mouse will be born. The people hissed off the fanatic seer, and accused him before Luther, and urged him to punish him as an impostor, and remove him from the ministry. Luther, playing with Stifel, as augur with augur, dissembling the error, rebuked the people, and ordered them to receive their Minister, and obey him, and hear from him the word of God. Truly the poet says:
One sees many three-penny men, few prophets.
Here the old saying fits: “Many drive the oxen, but few are ploughmen.”
In the year of the Lord 1535, John of Leyden, a tailor, with fanatic audacity with his Anabaptists invaded and occupied the city of Munster in Westphalia: he proclaimed himself king, nay the Messiah of the new temple in Sion: like Christ he sent twelve Apostles and Prophets to the neighboring cities in every direction, to invite all to hear and worship this new Messiah, as a sun given by God, nay to summon them in the name of God, promising golden ages to those who received him, and threatening to those who rejected him all the wraths and curses of God. They went with enthusiastic fury, nay full of the demon, pouring out oracles, threats, curses. And that there might not lack another Judith slaying Holofernes, Hilla, a Frisian woman, laden with gold and gems, the city being besieged by the Bishop, its lord, went out, resolved to entice the Bishop to love her, and kill him with poison: but betrayed, she paid the penalty of her rashness and crime with her head. There came also a new Samson, John Matthiesen of Haarlem, who on the very feast of Easter said it was announced to him by the heavenly Father that, if he went out to the camp of the besieging Bishop, he alone would rout and slay all the enemies. All the Prophets approved: and he, armed with a battle-axe, went out, and was at once transfixed with a spear and fell. But what was the end of this prophecy and enthusiasm? The Bishop with an armed hand brought the city under his power, subdued the heretics, slew the new Prophets, and the king and Messiah of Leyden, alive, from a high tower, bound to a wicker hurdle, he hanged, and exposed him to the sun to be scorched, to flies and birds to be torn, and gave him to be devoured as prey. The history, known to the whole world, is tragically narrated by Surius and other chroniclers of the preceding century, as also by P. Serarius in the preface to Judith.
Calvin, on the testimony of Jerome Bolsec, his disciple, in the Life of Calvin, foretold and promised that for the confirmation of his heresy and sect he would raise a dead man from death. What does he do? hear the tricks. He induces a certain Bruleus, a man of small fortune, by great promises, to feign himself dead, and, publicly called back from death by Calvin, to pretend to rise from it. Said and done. Calvin calls him, and bids him, if the faith he preaches be true, in the name of God return from the dead to life.
But what? there was in Bruleus no voice, no sense, no life. O the efficacious voice and faith of Calvin, who from a living man made a dead one by a new miracle unheard of for ages! He, to be sure, is another Elias, another …
Who can deny that Nero is of the stock of great Aeneas? This one slew his mother, that one his father.
Such oracles, such miracles, become such Prophets: these indeed are they who teach the pure unadulterated word of God, who teach the first truths, these peddlers of trifles to whom the world entrusts its souls, whose sayings are irrefragable, whom the stage applauds. These impostors, who for life bring on their followers death, for heaven hell, for salvation gehenna: who dare these things, what will they not dare?
It is certain and clear therefore that prophecy is an indubitable mark and token of the true faith and religion, given by God, as false prophecy is the mark of heresy and of the synagogue of Satan, who is the father of lies. God expressly asserts the very same, Deuter. xviii, 21: “… how can I understand the word that the Lord hath not spoken? This shalt thou have for a sign: That which that prophet foretold in the name of the Lord, and it came not to pass: that thing the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath forged it by the pride of his mind.”
Wherefore it is easy to show that these four Prophets are mystically represented by the four Cherubim of Ezechiel, attendants of the first Truth and uncreated Wisdom (for literally I will teach in its place that others are understood). The lion fits Isaias, the ox Jeremias, the man Ezechiel, the eagle Daniel.