The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man

The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man by Alan Fimister


This is a difficult book. I'm not sure whether it is difficult because it is dealing with the texts of Christian prophetic literature, which are famously difficult, or because the thesis of the book is novel and surprising. The novelty of the thesis is not – according to author Alan Fimister – because the thesis is new but because it is so old that it has been forgotten.

Fimister argues that it proper to call the Catholic Church “Roman,” as in “the Roman Catholic church,” only so long as we understand that the “Roman” being referred to is the Roman Empire which is holding back or restraining the Anti-Christ.

See what I mean?

The clues are all there in the texts and Fimister's thesis is supported by various church fathers. It's really not his fault that no one pays attention to St. Paul's most obscure prophecy in Thessalonians 2, chapter 2:

“Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him, we beg you, brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you this? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming. The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 92). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

Got that? There is a lawless man who will be revealed and slain by the breath of Lord Jesus but this “mystery of lawlessness” is being restrained by “he” until “he is out of the way.

In a word, huh? Who is “he”? Why is “he” restraining the “mystery of lawlessness”? Does “he” know “he is doing this?

According to Fimister, the “he” has traditionally been considered to be the Roman Empire:

According to the majority of the Fathers, “what” and “he” who restrains the “lawless one” (unanimously identified by the Fathers as the Antichrist of whom John speaks in 1 John 2:18–22 and 4:3) is the Roman empire and the Roman emperor.220 St Thomas considers in his commentary on this epistle how it could be that the Antichrist has not come by his own time when it would seem that the Roman empire has perished. “The Roman Empire has not perished,” he explains, “but passed from the temporal to the spiritual order.” The revolt of which St Paul speaks will be against the faith and government of the Holy Roman Church.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 93). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

St. Thomas was writing in the thirteenth century, the last Western emperor of Rome left office in the fifth century. There was still a “Roman” emperor on the throne of Constantinople, but it still seems like a stretch to think that the Roman empire was doing much in the West, unless the “Roman empire” had been translated into the spiritual order of the Catholic Church, aka the “Holy Roman Church.”

According to Fimister, this interpretation is found in Tertullian (c 160-c 225):

In chapter thirty-two of his Apology, Tertullian explains that this teaching of St Paul secures the loyalty of the Christian to the empire—for all their refusal to express that loyalty in pagan rites: There is also another and a greater necessity for our offering prayer in behalf of the emperors, nay, for the complete stability of the empire, and for Roman interests in general. For we know that a mighty shock impending over the whole earth—in fact, the very end of all things threatening dreadful woes—is only retarded by the continued existence of the Roman empire. We have no desire, then, to be overtaken by these dire events; and in praying that their coming may be delayed, we are lending our aid to Rome's duration. More than this, though we decline to swear by the genii of the Cæsars, we swear by their safety, which is worth far more than all your genii.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (pp. 94-95). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

The same interpretation is found in Hyppolytus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Lactantius, and St. John Chrysostom. Fimister points out that this understanding was shared by the leading theologians of the West:

St Ambrose (c. 340—397) asserts:

The Lord will not return until the Roman rule fails and antichrist appears, who will kill the saints, giving back freedom to the Romans but under his own name.234

St Jerome (c. 340–420) in his Commentary on Daniel 7:8 confirms:

We should therefore concur with the traditional interpretation of all the commentators of the Christian Church, that at the end of the world, when the Roman Empire is to be destroyed, there shall be ten kings who will partition the Roman world amongst themselves. Then an insignificant eleventh king will arise, who will overcome three of the ten kings.235

Likewise, in his De Civitate Dei St Augustine (345–430) expounds St Paul in the same sense, although with a little more reservation:

For what does he mean by “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way: and then shall the wicked be revealed”? I frankly confess I do not know what he means. . . . However, it is not absurd to believe that these words of the apostle, “Only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way,” refer to the Roman empire, as if it were said, “Only he who now reigneth, let him reign until he be taken out of the way.” “And then shall the wicked be revealed”: no one doubts that this means Antichrist.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (pp. 99-100). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.
This seems surprising.

But is it? Shouldn't we expect the Roman Empire to play a role in Christian prophecy?

Fimister points out that Israel's interaction with Rome began during the so-called “intertestamental period.” Of course, it wasn't intertestamental at all to non-Protestants since that period left us Maccabees I. In Maccabees I, the Jews engage with Rome in an effort to find an ally against the Greeks. The Romans are depicted quite favorably as an altogether satisfactory ally for the people of God.

In the Christian era, the depiction of Rome is equivocal. On the one hand, Rome is “Babylon” and the beast with ten horns. Rome crucified Christ and destroyed the temple.

On the other hand, St. Paul tells Christians to support the empire. Josephus identified the destroyer of the temple with a prophecy of rulership. Rome was folded into Messianic expectations by Josephus:

No doubt the ability of the Judeans of the first century to make such precise calculations was limited, but as inter alia Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus bear witness, messianic speculation was frenetic and this last verse would seem to confirm that the people who would destroy the Temple and the city would be the Messiah's own people. What could be more natural then than Josephus's conclusion that Vespasian was the Messiah? Natural but wrong, and hardly compatible with the idea of the Messiah being “cut off” (Daniel 9:26). In fact, the implications are more startling still: that the people of the Prince who is to come, of the Messiah who was cut off in AD 30, who brought an end to victim and sacrifice and confirmed the covenant with the many, are the Romans.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 56). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

Over time, the assessment of the Roman Empire became more favorable, particularly after Constantine began using the resources of the Roman Empire to benefit the church. This was a reason why it was such a shock in the West when Rome was sacked, an event which lead St. Augustine to write the City of God, explaining that Rome was not City of God and that Christians should distinguish between the earthly city and the heavenly city. In the East, though, the Roman Empire which continued became the Kingdom of God.

In the West, though, Rome fell, and the anti-Christ did not come. The explanation for this anomaly turned on interpretations of Daniel and Revelation which described the beast as having ten horns. The horns were understood to be the successor barbarian kingdoms which continued the Roman empire. Eventually, the Roman Empire was “translated” to the Roman Church, i.e., the Catholic Church, and it was the Catholic Church that serves to restrain the coming of the anti-Christ.

In my experience, Rome and the Roman Empire are generally portrayed as villains. If they figure into prophecy, it is as the answer to the decoding of symbols. But it was not always so. Even Jesus's slighting “render unto Caesar” teaching was coupled with an outreach to the gentiles. This is an interpretation of the “turning over of the tables” narrative, I have not seen:

Of course, the real purpose of the Lord's cleansing of the Temple was precisely what He said it was: to remove from the part of the Temple reserved for the worship of the Gentiles profane activities which implied the exclusion of the nations from the worship of the one true God. It was certainly not to provide the casus belli for a revolt against the Romans. Rather it foreshadowed the sending down of the Spirit to convert those very Romans from their idolatry to the worship of the God of Israel. The idolatrous coins were brought into the outer court not by the Romans but by the Temple authorities who, by their rejection of the Messiah, were soon to bring upon themselves and into the precincts of the Temple far more violent and terrible trophies of the false gods of Latium than a few imperial denarii.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 86). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

Rome is the subject of typology from Psalms according to St. Cyril of Jerusalem:

Back in the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem read Psalm 2 in the same sense. But again you ask yet another testimony of the time. “The Lord said to Me, You are My Son; this day have I begotten You”: and a few words further on, “You shall rule them with a rod of iron.” I have said before that the kingdom of the Romans is clearly called a rod of iron;

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (pp. 106-107). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

St. John Henry Newman continued the tradition of reading Rome into prophetic literature in the nineteenth century:

Indeed, as St John Henry Newman would have it (commenting on 2 Thessalonians), it endured into his own day:

It is not clear that the Roman Empire is gone. Far from it: the Roman Empire in the view of prophecy, remains even to this day. Rome had a very different fate from the other three monsters mentioned by the Prophet, as will be seen by his description of it. “Behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns.” [Dan. vii. 7.] These ten horns, an Angel informed him, “are ten kings that shall rise out of this kingdom” of Rome. As, then, the ten horns belonged to the fourth beast, and were not separate from it, so the kingdoms, into which the Roman Empire was to be divided, are but the continuation and termination of that Empire itself,—which lasts on, and in some sense lives in the view of prophecy, however we decide the historical question. Consequently, we have not yet seen the end of the Roman Empire. “That which withholdeth” still exists, up to the manifestation of its ten horns; and till it is removed, Antichrist will not come. And from the midst of those horns he will arise, as the same Prophet informs us: “I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another little horn; . . . and behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things.”

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 108). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

Fimister discusses prophecy and history. He notes that in 800 AD, Pope Leo crowned Charlemagne as Roman emperor. The implication in this act was that the papacy had the authority to dispense the title of emperor as it chose. This act was coupled with a division of temporal and spiritual authority, with the spiritual authority being higher. The implication, therefore, was that the Church at all time reserved the spiritual dimensions of “Romanitas.” Fimister explains:

If, then, the universal imperium is essentially spiritual and the Roman state persists only as an exemplar polity, it is easy to imagine that the papal vision of ecclesiastical Romanitas is simply correct and exhausts the doctrine, and in a sense this is true. The centrality of this concept (of a universal spiritual power) to Western culture is illustrated by the enthusiasm in the second half of the twentieth century for human rights declarations and international and supranational institutions designed to guarantee peace and human dignity, even perhaps by the contrasting enthusiasm in the first half of the twentieth century for the absolute state that enters the heart and mind and demands the whole person. From the perspective of an authentic Catholic analysis of temporal power, such institutions are absurd: towers of Babel that seek by finite effort and power to traverse the infinite.382 As Pius XI asseverates:

There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 160). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

So, those who assert that Catholics are “Roman Catholics” or merely “Roman” are engaging in a proper attribution of titles insofar as they recognize that Rome played, and is still playing, a key role in prophecy.

Insofar as the Church that restrains the anti-Christ is Rome, Roman is Catholic; Catholic is Roman.

This is an interesting book. It is also surprising insofar as it is so out of touch with the spirit of the modern world. It may be the case that Fimister's points were better known to Catholics, at least, prior to Vatican II, but this kind of “triumphalism” is frowned on today.

Nonetheless, this is an interesting glimpse into a history that we no longer know. Fimister's approach also answers questions about biblical interpretation, such as the scourging of the moneychangers and the prophecies in Revelation and Daniel. This book is not an easy read because of the depth of its erudition and its counterintuitive - to modern minds – understanding of ecclesiastical history. However, it is worth reading because it provides food for thought.