1. Theology of History and Divine Providence
What is the theology of history? It is nothing more than a reflection on the way Divine Providence operates in history.
Divine Providence is God himself, considered in one of his infinite perfections: that which expresses his rule and, therefore, His sovereignty, over the entire created universe. The existence of Providence is a dogma of faith. Sacred Scripture says that “God, with his Providence, protects and governs all that he has created, because it extends from one end to the other with power, governing all things with goodness” (Wisdom 8:1). St. Thomas Aquinas defines it as “the ordering of things toward their end.” (1) This definition coincides with St. Augustine’s definition of order: “that by which all things that God has created are governed.” (2) The order impressed by God on the universe is nothing other than His Divine Providence, the way in which He governs creation. Providence is eminently ordered, which is why Divine Wisdom has arranged all things “with a certain weight, number, and measure” (Wisdom 11:21).
In this divine order, every person has a place determined by his or her vocation and participates in the providential and wise plan of the universe through it. In this sense, the theology of history is not an intellectual occupation of theologians but a vital need of the human soul. Each of us needs the theology of history to give deep meaning to our own lives, which are situated in time and therefore in history, and which have theological significance, like everything that exists, because God is the sole principle and ultimate end of all things, and everything is ordered to him and derives its meaning from him (Rom. 11:36).
Surrendering to Divine Providence, which expresses our love for the divine order of the universe, is the theology of lived history. Continuous attention to God’s plans for our lives, in order to correspond to his will, can be considered our individual theology of history: the theological meaning we have a duty to give to our existence by following our vocation.
It is not only our existence that is illuminated by the theology of history but also the existence of families, nations, the Church, and all humanity, from the beginning to the end of the created world. Providence encompasses everything, and the theology of history helps us understand it all. In this sense, the theology of history must be the subject of study for every Christian, especially those engaged in the apostolate, and, among them, in an eminent way, the counter-revolutionaries, because the Counter-Revolution, as taught by so many masters of Catholic thought, is nothing other than the theology of history in its highest expression.
Counter-revolutionary theology of history is the great key to understanding and interpreting contemporary historical events. Without it, those with a counter-revolutionary vocation will not only be unable to understand our times but also be unable to give meaning to their own existence, which needs to be nourished by the theology of history to receive light and guidance.
We cannot speak of how Divine Providence guides and gives meaning to our lives day by day unless we begin with our own lives as they actually unfold. Similarly, we cannot speak of how Providence guides history unless we begin with history itself, with the concrete events that have unfolded over time and have occasioned theological reflection among the great Doctors and Masters of our faith.
St. Augustine, the first great theologian in history, composed his masterpiece, The City of God, by meditating on the historical events of his time. The City of God is not an abstract work but a theological reflection on a dramatic era that bears striking similarities to the present.
2. An Exercise in the Theology of History: The Fifth Century AD.
Let us try an exercise in the theology of history. Let us imagine going back 1,600 years to the dawn of the fifth century AD.
The Roman Empire, the political and military superpower of the time, still stands, and its legions guard an immense territory stretching from the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea to North Africa, the Caspian Sea, and the borders of Persia and Arabia.
Christianity had emerged from the catacombs, gained freedom in 313 with Constantine’s Edict of Milan, and became the Empire’s official religion in 380 with Theodosius’ Edict of Thessalonica. However, paganism had not disappeared and had permeated the era’s mentality with its relativism and hedonism.
Pagan relativism is expressed in the concept of the Pantheon, according to which all religions are equal as different manifestations of a single deity. Pagan hedonism is the way of life of a society immersed in sensuality and violence. It suffices to recall that until the early 1400s, gladiatorial games were still celebrated, in which human life was sacrificed for entertainment. The people, even Christians, were intoxicated by the blood flowing in the Colosseum and other amphitheaters, as St. Augustine recalls in his Confessions, speaking of his friend Alipius’ passion for the circus. The latter later became a bishop and a saint.
Paganism was not the only enemy Christianity faced within the Roman Empire. The fourth century, which saw the end of persecution and the public affirmation of Christianity, was also the era when Arianism, the Church’s first great internal crisis, erupted. With a few extraordinary exceptions, such as the great St. Athanasius, that devastating crisis plunged almost all bishops into heresy or semi-heresy.
Few maintained the integrity of the Christian faith in this vast Empire, whose external borders were under pressure from a terrible enemy: the barbarian peoples. The barbarian migrations unfolded in several phases: a peaceful initial phase, in which individuals and organized groups entered the Empire’s territories in large numbers, attracted by the high standard of living and the charm of Roman culture; a second, violent phase, after armed barbarians who crossed the eastern borders defeated the Romans at Adrianople in 378.
Less than thirty years later, under pressure from the Huns, who came from Asia, the Vandals, followed by the Alans and the Swabians, crowded the banks of the Rhine, the great river destined to divide two states that did not yet exist, France and Germany, but which at that time marked the borders of the Roman Empire. It was December 406, a particularly cold year in which the Rhine was completely frozen. On December 31, the barbarians crossed this ice-covered river near Mainz, putting every city they encountered to the fire and sword. The first city to be devastated was Trier, about twenty leagues from the Rhine. A witness, Salvian, recounts that the members of the Trier Senate “were busy feasting when the barbarians entered the city, and could not bring themselves to interrupt the feast.” Such was the climate of moral decadence in which the West lived at that time.
The barbarians spread along the roads once traveled by the Roman legions. The Vandals crossed Gaul, reached Spain, and then Africa. Another people, the Visigoths, led by their king Alaric, invaded Italy and reached the gates of Rome. On August 24, 410, through the Porta Salaria, Alaric’s barbarians invaded the Eternal City, which had been inviolate for eight hundred years, and sacked it for three days.
Rome was the symbol of order and security in the civilized world. The Roman Empire encapsulated the history of civilization, much as Europe does today. A great doctor of the Church, St. Jerome, received the news of Rome’s fall in Bethlehem, where he had retired to study and pray. He was devastated, unable to think of anything else, and for many days he did nothing but weep. “The light of the whole world has gone out,” he wrote, “the head of the world has been cut off, and in the ruin of a single city, the whole Empire has perished.”
Rome was devastated twice in the fifth century, by Alaric and Genseric, and it was not invaded a third time thanks to the moral authority of Pope St. Leo the Great, who in 451 halted Attila’s hordes on the Mincio River in Lombardy. In 476, the Empire collapsed, and night fell over Europe before the dawn of the medieval era, which began with Charlemagne’s coronation on Christmas Eve in 800.
3. St. Augustine and The City of God.
In 410, Saint Augustine was the bishop of Hippo in Africa. In September, elderly and in poor health, he received the terrible news of the sack of Rome. His reflections on these dramatic events inspired The City of God, his masterpiece, which he devoted thirteen years to.
St. Augustine wondered why the city of Rome had fallen and, rejecting the pagans’ accusations against Christians, identified the cause as the Empire’s intellectual and moral corruption. On the ruins of the Roman Empire, he saw the Church founded by Christ, the City of God, rising in splendor, and, in opposition, an enemy city he called the City of the Devil. These two cities are destined to fight each other relentlessly throughout history, which is the battlefield where humanity exercises its freedom. For St. Augustine, all human activity boils down to love: “two loves have generated two cities: the earthly one, love of self to the point of contempt for God; the heavenly one, love of God to the point of contempt for self.” (3) The radical choice is between God, to whom humility intimately unites us, and the devil, to whom pride and self-love irrevocably bind us.
St. Augustine does not attribute world domination to the City of the Devil or to the future kingdom of the City of God. Between these two cities—the infernal and the heavenly—lies the city of men, that is, humanity living on earth and passing through its own period of trial. Humanity is the object of contention between the two enemy cities fighting to conquer history.
St. Augustine’s theology of history merely makes explicit the Gospel maxim that “no one can serve two masters” (Mt. 6:24; Lk. 16:13). The need to choose characterizes the lives of men and peoples. No compromise or modus vivendi between good and evil, or between the City of God and the City of the Devil, is possible. Christian life demands militancy.
The love of God can manifest itself in infinite ways. This love can impel men to spread the faith throughout the world, establishing the Church, its rites and institutions; it can impel them to abandon their families and possessions to devote themselves to a life of prayer and penance; to dedicate their lives to the poor and sick; to produce marvelous works such as cathedrals in the field of beauty, or theological and moral summas in the field of truth; finally, it can push men to take up arms and shed their blood to defend the conquests of the Gospel by raising the standard of the Cross against the infidels.
This was the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were an effort to realize the City of God on earth: a dream always present yet never fully realized.
Like the love of God, self-love can manifest in infinite ways within a moral climate dominated by disordered passions. Self-love can blind a person, distancing them from their true and only good. But it can also drive an entire society to rebel against God, triggering a process of disintegration that unfolds throughout history. The spirit of doubt, moral indifference, revolt against ecclesiastical and political authorities, the denial of the family, private property, the state, and religion itself constitute a process that the Church’s Magisterium has defined as Revolution since the nineteenth century, identifying its major phases in humanism, the Protestant Revolution, and then the French and Communist Revolutions.
The Middle Ages read and meditated on The City of God, but lived its fundamental teaching even before reading and meditating on it. The modern world, which arose at the end of the Middle Ages, rejected The City of God not because it failed to read St. Augustine’s work, but because it turned its back on his conception of history: it replaced the love of God with the love of self and Christian civilization with the Revolution.
4. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Theologian of 20th-Century History
St. Augustine meditated on the tragedy of his time, but neither foresaw nor perhaps imagined the Middle Ages or the centuries of departure from the faith that would follow. However, fifteen centuries after Augustine’s death, a great Catholic thinker surveyed, with an eagle’s eye, the panorama of his time and the history of preceding centuries. No one before him understood the destructive power of self-love and the regenerative power of the love of God as he did.
The contemporary era has also had its St. Augustine. That man was Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. His long life can be understood as a theology of history lived day by day over the course of a century, perhaps the most terrible in history.
St. Augustine meditated on the decline of the Roman Empire. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira meditated on the decline of Christian civilization.
We do not need to strain our imagination to grasp the dramatic reality of our time, in which Western civilization faces external and internal enemies and the Church in the 20th century is undermined by a self-destruction process worse than that of the Arians, as it is right before our eyes. However, we need the theology of history to understand the profound nature of this crisis.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, the theologian of 20th-century history, asks himself what the essence of the contemporary crisis is and gives the same answer as St. Augustine: it has its primary origin in disordered passions.
The Brazilian thinker understands the revolutionary process that has attacked Christian civilization as the development, in stages and through continuous metamorphoses, of the disordered tendencies of Western and Christian man and of the errors and movements these tendencies foster.
According to Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, the deepest cause of this process is an explosion of pride and sensuality, which has inspired a whole chain of ideological systems and a whole series of actions stemming from them.
Pride leads to hatred of all superiority and thus to the assertion that inequality is inherently evil at all levels, especially the metaphysical and religious: this is the egalitarian aspect of the Revolution. Sensuality rejects restraints and leads to revolt against all authority and all law, whether divine or human, ecclesiastical or civil: this is the liberal aspect of the Revolution. These two seemingly contradictory aspects are reconciled in the utopia of an anarchic paradise, where a highly evolved humanity, emancipated from all religion, could live without any authority in absolute freedom and equality.
In Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira describes with great acuity the dynamism of disordered passions and shows that only an opposing passion, equally total and equally dominant, can produce a victorious reaction to the Revolution. This passion is the love of God: a love that extends to all His work and, in turn, becomes love for the Church and for Christian civilization. “In other words, either the world converts and faithfully reproduces the Augustinian vision of the ‘City of God,’ in which every people pushes its love for God to the point of renouncing everything that harms other peoples; or, on the contrary, the world will be like that city of the devil in which everyone pushes their love for themselves to the point of forgetting God.” (4)
If the Revolution’s most powerful driving force is the dynamism of human passions, unleashed by a metaphysical hatred of God, Truth, and Goodness, there is a symmetrical counter-revolutionary dynamic that seeks to regulate those passions by subordinating them to one’s will and reason.
Such spiritual vigor cannot be conceived without taking into account the supernatural life, which elevates man above the miseries of fallen nature. For Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, this spiritual force is the deepest dynamism of the Counter-Revolution. “The struggle between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution,” he writes, “is religious in its essence.” (5) Like any religious problem, it cannot ignore the role of Grace, on which all authentic moral regeneration depends.
“Grace depends on God, but by a free act of His will, God has chosen to make the distribution of graces dependent on Our Lady. Mary is the Universal Mediatrix, the channel through which all graces pass. Therefore, her help is indispensable to prevent a Revolution or to overcome it through the Counter-Revolution. … Therefore, devotion to Our Lady is a sine qua non condition for the Revolution to be crushed and for the Counter-Revolution to win.” (6)
However, the problem of Our Lady’s contribution to the Counter-Revolution is not limited to grace. In fact, we must not forget the devil’s role in the outbreak and progress of the Revolution. “As is logical to think, an explosion of disordered passions as profound and as general as that which gave rise to the Revolution would not have occurred without a preternatural action.” (7) Therefore, this driving force of the Revolution also depends on Our Lady’s command and power.
God draws immense good from immense evil. The devil’s rebellion is the cause not only of the Incarnation of the Word but also of Mary’s divine motherhood and her privileged role in crushing the devil’s head and bringing God’s plans to their perfect fulfillment: this culminating point in history will be the Reign of Mary.
5. The Reign of Mary
When profound and true, the theology of history becomes prophecy by foreseeing and announcing the designs of Divine Providence.
According to Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, the seeds of Revolution have produced terrible evils throughout history, but the opposing principles have not yet produced all the good they are capable of producing.
The principles that inspired the Middle Ages did not reach their fullest development during that era. The fruitfulness of these principles is immense, and history remains open to further development. He writes:
“Admirers of the Middle Ages express themselves poorly when they claim that the world reached its peak of development during this period. There is much further progress to be made along the path on which medieval civilization was advancing. The Middle Ages’ grandiose and delicate enchantment derives not so much from what it achieved as from the sparkling truthfulness and profound harmony of the principles on which it was built. No one else possessed such profound knowledge of the natural order of things; no one else had such a keen sense of its inadequacy, even when developed to the fullness of its own order, and of the need for the supernatural; no one else shone in the sun of supernatural radiance with such clarity and candor.” (8)
History has yet to give God the full glory He deserves. Since man was created by God with a social nature, he is called not only to his own personal sanctification but also to the sanctification of society. The glory of God, the ultimate purpose of creation, cannot be merely individual and implicit but must be public and social: humanity must glorify God not only in its individual members but also in its collective life, because God created and redeemed humanity in its social nature. Therefore, peoples, communities, and states must also consecrate themselves to Christ by honoring Him in their customs, laws, authorities, and institutions. This is precisely what the social kingship of Christ consists of, a truth of faith proclaimed by Sacred Scripture: “Christ must reign” (1 Cor. 15:25); “all the kings of the earth shall worship Him, and all nations shall serve Him” (Ps. 71:10-11).
Time cannot end before it has consecrated its centuries to the Redeemer, and the world cannot end before it has consecrated its peoples to the Church. We must expect a new phase in history in which the Gospel promise will be fulfilled not only in principle but also in fact: the Kingdom of Christ, bringing together “one flock under one shepherd” (Jn. 10:16). This does not mean a new Church will arise, but rather that a new Christian civilization will emerge.
This historical era has been announced by many saints, including St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, as the Reign of Mary, given the privileged role Our Lady is expected to have in it. In 1917, at Fatima, the Blessed Virgin herself prophesied that, after a great chastisement, there will be an era of triumph that will not end history but open a new phase: “Finally, my Immaculate Heart will triumph; the Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, which will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.”
“The Reign of Mary,“ Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira wrote, “will be a historical era of faith and virtue inaugurated by a spectacular victory of Our Lady over the Revolution. In this era, the devil will be cast out, and Our Lady will reign over humanity through the institutions She will have chosen for this purpose. … The Reign of Mary will therefore be an era in which the union of souls with Our Lady will reach an intensity unprecedented in history, except, of course, in individual cases.” (9)
6. Potuit, decuit, fecit
However, the Reign of Mary is not based on prophecy but on reason enlightened by faith. There is a principle that theologians refer to as “fittingness.” Fittingness occurs when, given the existence of one thing, the existence of others that “fittingly” accompany it is affirmed. It is therefore the attribution to persons or things of a harmony and perfection consistent with their nature. The principle of fittingness does not give us dogmatic certainty but moral certainty; it does not tell us that a relationship is necessary but that it is highly probable.
With the famous expression: potuit, decuit, feci, Blessed John Duns Scotus posits this argument [of fittingness] to demonstrate the Immaculate Conception. (10)
By analogy, we can apply this principle to the Reign of Mary. Given the principle of the Kingship of Christ, that is, the right of Jesus Christ to reign over the world, it is fitting that He should exercise this right in fact. But since Jesus Christ willed to associate His Divine Mother with His redemptive work, it is fitting that She should be intimately associated with His Reign.
We do not have dogmatic certainty, but moral certainty, that Divine Providence wills the Reign of Mary. Potuit, decuit, fecit. Everything is possible for God: He loves and accomplishes what His Wisdom deems fitting.
The coming of the Reign of Mary is not a dogma of faith. If it were, and if we had dogmatic certainty, as with the Parousia, we would not need to exercise the virtue of hope to desire it, but only the virtue of faith to believe in it. The expectation of the Reign of Mary requires that hope be added to faith: this is confidence, the “spes roborata ex aliqua firma opinione” of which St. Thomas Aquinas speaks. (11) He addresses trust in the Quaestio dedicated to magnanimity, the virtue of the soul that tends toward greatness and is related to all other virtues. (12)
Blessed Duns Scotus did not have dogmatic certainty about the Immaculate Conception when he met the doctors of the Sorbonne, who denied this privilege of Our Lady five centuries before it was defined as dogma by Blessed Pius IX (1856). However, he had moral certainty about this Marian privilege and based his trust on that certainty. In the centuries that followed, before Pius IX defined it as dogma, many theologians, priests, and individual faithful, especially in some Spanish and Italian universities, took a vow to defend the privilege of the Immaculate Conception usque ad effusionem sanguinis [up to shedding their own blood]. Yet, the privilege had still not been defined as a dogma of faith and was openly denied by many distinguished Catholics, seeming to belong to the realm of the debatable. Yet these priests and lay people were ready to suffer martyrdom to defend the truth of the Immaculate Conception, being morally certain that this truth was part of the heritage of the Catholic faith. Their faith enlightened their reason and strengthened their will in this magnanimous choice.
Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira lived and worked throughout the 20th century in hope of the coming Reign of Mary. In my view, magnanimity was his primary virtue.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira did not see the Reign of Mary. However, he did see the abyss of evil represented by the Revolution in history. The certainty of this fact, as seen by his eyes and ours, founded his unshakable hope in an era that will arise from the ruins of the Revolution and reach the summit of good in proportion to the summit of evil the Revolution has attained.
7. Mary, the Future of the West
Potuit, decuit, fecit. By analogy, we can apply God’s modus operandi to humanity by the principle of fittingness. We cannot start from potuit, but from fecit: we must do what is fitting. However, since we are unable to do so with our own strength, we must rely on the one who can do all things (Phil. 4:13) and who will accomplish what is appropriate for His glory.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was not only a lucid and penetrating diagnostician of the Revolution but also the prophet of Christian civilization, announcing the possibility, and indeed the certainty, of its restoration.
In the conclusion of his last book, he describes the disastrous outcome of the long revolutionary process:
“This process has advanced relentlessly, from the waning and fall of the Middle Ages to the initial joyful triumphs of the Renaissance; to the religious revolution of Protestantism, which remotely began to foment and prepare the French Revolution and, even more remotely, the Russian Revolution of 1917. So invariably victorious has been its path despite uncountable obstacles that one might consider the power that moved this process invincible and its results definitive.
“These results seem definitive indeed if one overlooks the nature of this process. At first glance it seems eminently constructive, since it successively raised three edifices: the Protestant Pseudo-Reformation, the liberal-democratic republic, and the Soviet socialist republic.
“The true nature of this process, however, is essentially destructive. It is Destruction itself. It toppled the faltering Middle Ages, the vanishing Ancien Régime, and the apoplectic, frenetic, and turbulent bourgeois world. Under its pressure the former U.S.S.R. lies in ruins—sinister, mysterious, and rotten like a fruit long-since fallen from the branch.
“Hic et nunc, is it not true that the milestones of this process are but ruins? And what is the most recent ruin generating but a general confusion that constantly threatens imminent and contradictory catastrophes, which disintegrate before falling upon the world, thus begetting prospects of new catastrophes even more imminent and contradictory. These may vanish in turn, only to give way to new monsters. Or they may become frightful realities, like the migration of Slavic hordes from the East to the West, or Muslim hordes from the South to the North.
“Who knows? Will this actually happen? Will this be all? Will it be even worse than this?
Such a picture would discourage all men who lack Faith. Those with Faith, however, can already hear a voice coming from beyond this confused and grim horizon. The voice, capable of inspiring the most encouraging confidence, says: “Finally, my Immaculate Heart will triumph!” (13)
These words trace a profound theology of history. The human gaze resting today on the horizon of our time can only recoil in terror. There is no future for the West but death and decay. Yet another gaze rests on this horizon, illuminating it and transforming death into life, fear into hope, and hope into confident certainty. It is the merciful gaze of Mary, Mater Divinae Providentiae. Mary is the future of the West and our great horizon.
We must never lose confidence in the coming of the Reign of Mary. On the contrary, we must preserve that confidence until our last breath, even if everything seems to deny it. Our confidence rests on our hope, which cannot deceive us, for if it is pure, it is inspired in our hearts by God himself, the One in whom we place all our trust for its fulfillment.
(1) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 22, a. 5.
(2) St. Augustine, De Ordine, I, 10, 28.
(3) St. Augustine, The City of God, book XIV, chap. 28.
(4) Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, “Um remédio que agravará o mal,” in O Legionário, no. 491 (February 8, 1942).
(5) Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Marian Devotion and the Counter-Revolutionary Apostolate, in “Cristianità,” no. 8 (Nov.-Dec. 1974).
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, “The great experience of 10 years of struggle,” in O Legionário, no. 666 (May 13, 1945).
(9) Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Marian Devotion and the Counter-Revolutionary Apostolate, op. cit., p. 6.
(10) Blessed John Duns Scotus, Lectura in Librum Tertium Sententiarum, Distinction III, Question 1, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 158, 41.
(11) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-IIae, q. 129, art. 6, n. 3.
(12) vi, II-IIae, q. 129, art. 1, ans., art. 4.
(13) Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII. https://www.pliniocorreadeoliveira.info/UKLN_0101_conclusion.htm
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