REVELATION. – The term R. (Revelation), from the Latin *revelare*, literally “to uncover,” signifies the manifestation of a hidden reality or truth. In this sense it has also been used in biblical and theological language to designate God’s free disclosure of His inaccessible essence or of His designs unknown to men. The corresponding terms used in the Bible are ἀποκαλυψις (Mt. 11, 27), φανέσεως and its derivatives (Rom. 3, 21), with a slight difference in meaning between them.
Every religion, being a relationship between God and man, presupposes in man a knowledge of God and therefore presupposes a manifestation of God to man. But in the historically known religious forms outside of the Judeo-Christian religion, it is rather man who arrives at the knowledge of God, by one path or another, than God who freely manifests Himself to man as his God, Christ, and Savior. Islam, which seems to be an exception, is a religion derived from the Judeo-Christian religion. Parsimony is still too obscure in origin to constitute a certain exception (cf. G. Kittel, op. cit. in bibl., III, pp. 566-73).
The Bible and Christianity acknowledge a manifestation of God to humanity through nature, which has a relationship of dependence and likeness to its author, so that the human intellect can ascend from it to God and acquire certain knowledge of His existence and a certain (aliqualis) knowledge of His nature (Council of Trent, Denz-U, 1785, 1806). This first manifestation of God, clearly taught in Wis. 13, 1-9, presupposed in Rom. 1, 18-21; Acts 17, 22-28, is often called natural revelation or revelation of God through nature. It is, however, essentially different from revelation in the proper sense, because it is not an act of God manifesting Himself to man, but an act of man arriving at the knowledge of God.
In addition to this, the Bible and Christianity affirm the existence of a second, more direct and immediate manifestation of God, in which He has made Himself and His designs known through teaching immediately addressed to certain privileged men (prophets, Apostles), but intended for all humanity. This is properly called revelation or supernatural revelation. Alongside public revelation, of which alone we speak here, the common teaching of the Church also admits the existence of private revelations, i.e., those not intended for all humanity. It should be noted that revelations made to individuals but contained in Scripture, such as the vision of Zechariah (Lk. 1, 8-25) or of Peter (Acts 10, 9-16), belong to public revelation.
Rivarola, Agostino - Ritratto.
**I. EXISTENCE.** – The existence of this public supernatural revelation is a fundamental point of Catholic doctrine.
1. **Scripture.** – It is sufficient to cite some of the most characteristic testimonies of Scripture: in the Old Testament, the vocation and promises made to Abraham (Gen. 12, 1-3; 15, 1-21; 17, 1-22), the revelation of the burning bush and Sinai (Ex. 3, 1-17; 19, 1-5; 21, 1), the vocation and mission of the prophets (1 Kings 3, 1-21; Is. 1, 2; 2, 1; Jer. 1, 4-19). In the New Testament, the existence of a divine revelation is clearly taught by Jesus Christ Himself: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and him to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him” (Mt. 11, 27; cf. ibid. 13, 3; Jn. 15, 13). So evident was the novelty of the Master’s teaching regarding God to His disciples that John, although he well knew all the revelations contained in the Old Testament, wrote: “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known” (Jn. 1, 18). The same clear consciousness of a divine revelation, especially regarding the salvation of humanity, is found in St. Paul (cf. 1 Thess. 2, 13; 1 Cor. 2, 10-16; Gal. 1, 12-13; Eph. 3, 1-9). The author of the Letter to the Hebrews summarizes the common teaching: “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days He has spoken to us by a Son” (Heb. 1, 1).
From biblical teaching, a description of the nature of revelation can be derived: a) God is by nature “invisible” to men (Jn. 1, 18; 1 Cor. 2, 10-11; 1 Tim. 6, 16); they can know Him as He truly is in Himself only if He manifests, i.e., reveals Himself to them in a supernatural way (Mt. 11, 27; 1 Cor. 2, 11-14); b) supernatural revelation communicates to men a participation in the knowledge that God has of Himself (1 Cor. 2, 10-14; for the Son and the Holy Spirit, who reveal God, are God); c) this manifestation of God is not something to which God is bound, but a free initiative of love, an act of friendship on His part (Jn. 3, 16 with 1, 18; ibid. 15); d) participation in the knowledge that God has of Himself, and in general in the mysteries of God, cannot occur by natural intelligence alone, but presupposes an interior influence of God, the communication of a new principle of knowledge (1 Cor. 2, 16; the “νῷ” of Christ; cf. Mt. 16, 17; Eph. 1, 17-18; 3, 14-19).
2. **Tradition.** – Guided by the clear teaching of Scripture, Christian Tradition has constantly affirmed the existence of a supernatural revelation; it is sufficient to recall the importance attributed to divine revelations by the prophets of the Old Testament, and above all the clear affirmation of the divine value of every word of Jesus Christ. This existence has never met with opposition in the properly Christian world until the 17th century; for all the Christian communities that have separated from the Catholic Church from the 5th to the 17th century appeal to the supernatural revelation of Jesus Christ. The denial of a supernatural revelation, even by those who admit the existence of God, began in the 18th century with deism (q.v.) and continued in the various forms of rationalism that followed: Enlightenment (q.v.), liberal Protestantism (q.v.), modernism (q.v.).
3. **Doctrine of the Church.** – Faced with these denials, the Catholic Church has defined its doctrine, especially in the Vatican Council (sess. III, chaps. 2, 3, and 4), where it is affirmed: a) the existence of a twofold order of religious knowledge: knowledge that, like the existence of God, can be and often is the fruit of natural intelligence alone (cf. Denz-U, nn. 1785, 1806); alongside this, the holy Mother Church holds and teaches... that it has pleased the wisdom and goodness of God to reveal Himself and the eternal decrees of His will by a different (from nature) and supernatural way, according to the words of the Apostle” (Heb. 1, 1; Denz-U, nn. 1786, 1807); b) to this divine revelation is owed the fact that religious truths, which in themselves are accessible to human intelligence, even in the present state of fallen nature, can be known by all with certainty and without error. However, revelation is not necessary for this reason, but because in His infinite goodness God has destined man to a
Supernatural revelation is the communication by God to man of truths that surpass the complete understanding of man (cf. 1 Cor 2:9; Denz-U, no. 1786). The object of revelation is therefore not only religious truths naturally accessible to human intelligence, but also proper mysteries (Denz-U, nos. 1795-96, 1808, 1816); c) divine revelation, contained in divinely inspired Scripture and in traditions deriving from the Apostles, has been entrusted to the Church, which faithfully guards it and infallibly interprets it (Denz-U, nos. 1787-88, 1800); d) divine revelation is owed the full obedience of intellect and will, which is exercised in faith (Denz-U, nos. 1789, 1800-11); e) to render divine revelation knowable and the obedience of faith due to it reasonable, God grants internal aids of grace and has equipped revelation itself with external arguments, first among which are miracles and prophecies, which “are most certain signs and suited to all intelligences of divine revelation” (Denz-U, nos. 1789-90).
This doctrine represents a complete summary of the traditional teaching of the Church regarding revelation. For this reason, both points have been reiterated even recently, in the face of the resurgence of ancient errors, in the Anti-Modernist Oath (Denz-U, no. 2145) and in the recent encyclical *Humani generis* (12 Aug. 1950).
II. NATURE OF REVELATION — Theology has deepened the nature of supernatural revelation by utilizing analogies drawn from human experience.
1. **Active and Passive Revelation.** — Revelation is “a word of God to man,” and thus entails an act in God by which He communicates His thought, and implies in man a corresponding effect to this act, analogous to what occurs when one man wishes to communicate his thought to another. The act of God is called active revelation; the effect in man is called passive revelation or received revelation. Active revelation in God is nothing other than the eternal act of the intellect in which the truth to be communicated, the manner of communicating it, and the recipient of the truth are contained; it is the eternal act of the will by which God freely wills that, in the course of time, at the moment and in the person He has chosen, the revealed truth be presented in the manner He has willed and that a certain judgment be formed in man regarding the immediately divine origin of such truth. The realization in time of this act of the divine will constitutes passive revelation.
2. **Forms and Content of Passive Revelation.** — Historically, it is established that God has chosen different ways to communicate truths, such as the word addressed to Moses from the burning bush (Ex 3:1ff.), or those heard by the disciples at the Transfiguration (Mt 17:5), or through visions, such as that of Peter (Acts 10:19-23), or simply through the communication of ideas of which the recipient is conscious of receiving directly from God (thus, probably, most of the “revelations” received by St. Paul: cf. Gal 1:12; Eph 3:3). The essential element of passive revelation is the certain consciousness that the recipient acquires that the truth is communicated to him directly by God. Without this certain consciousness, there would be a truth communicated by God (infused knowledge), but there would not be revelation in the proper sense, since one would not possess a truth guaranteed by God.
The psychological origin of such consciousness can vary. It can arise from an immediate experience, as seems to be the case with the prophets of the Old Testament; it can arise from reflection illumined by a particular divine light (thus, probably, in the confession of Peter [Mt 16:16-17] and in the revelations of Paul); it can arise from reasoning: when the Apostles definitively understood and believed that Jesus was truly the Son of God, and was such from His birth, then all the life, deeds, and words of the Master took on a new value in their eyes: everything in Him became for them divine revelation. Traces of such reflections are evident in the Gospel of John (2:21-22, 23-25; 6:65; 7:39). Even in this last case, however, the formation of the certain judgment regarding the immediately divine origin of the received truth must not be considered as of purely natural origin. According to Thomistic doctrine, perfectly in accord in this with biblical teaching, the origin of the certain consciousness of revelation always lies in a supernatural illumination of the intellect (cf. R. Garrigou-Lagrange, *De Revelatione*, I, 3rd ed., Rome 1931, pp. 159-62).
3. **Revelation, Inspiration, Assistance.** — In light of this doctrine, the difference and relationship between revelation and other supernatural facts, such as prophetic or biblical inspiration and the assistance promised to the Church for the infallible preservation of revealed truth, are clearly understood; a) prophetic inspiration is a knowledge that the prophet acquires and expresses regarding facts or realities beyond his natural intelligence through a particular divine influence; of which, however, he may not be aware; so that the prophet does not always, or at least not necessarily, propose his word to others as the word of God, as a truth of divine origin. When he acquires a certain awareness of the divine origin of this knowledge, proper revelation is present; b) biblical inspiration is distinguished from revelation because the former does not in itself imply the communication of new truths to be preserved in the sacred books, but only a particular divine influence so that the truth known and expressed in the book, by whatever means it was known, truly corresponds to the thought that God wishes to communicate to men through the sacred book. Moreover, the inspired writer may not be aware of the divine influence guiding him in the composition of the book. Once, however, the sacred book is composed or recognized as such, every statement of the sacred writer, being inspired by God, thereby becomes a truth communicated by God to men and guaranteed by His authority, becoming revealed truth. For this reason, Scripture is the first “source of revelation”; c) divine revelation is distinguished from the divine assistance promised to the Church: because revelation is the first supernatural communication of truth, while the promised assistance is a gift of understanding and exact teaching of a truth already received. Revelation and infallible assistance stand to one another as creation and conservation in general.
4. **Catholic and Rationalistic Conceptions of Revelation.** — According to Catholic doctrine, revelation is an act of a transcendent and personal God, who, by virtue of His supreme dominion over all intelligent creatures, enters into their cognitive life outside of any purely natural psychological law. It is God who becomes the immediate teacher and witness of the truth He communicates; and man merely becomes conscious of this supernatural, objective divine intervention.
For rationalism, religious revelation is a phenomenon analogous to any other discovery of naturally knowable truths: it is a subjective intuition of particularly gifted men, who attribute to divinity the fruit of their experiences, which they find difficult to explain psychologically in a completely natural way. For modernism (q.v.), revelation is nothing other than the becoming conscious of religious experience or sentiment, and when it seeks to express itself through concepts, as with any other phenomenon of consciousness, it gives rise to religious doctrine, or objective revelation. Therefore, there is no place for any objective communication of truth on the part of God: everything originates from consciousness and subjective illusion.
III. **PHASES OF REVELATION** — In this immense work of teaching on the part of God, different phases must be distinguished: primitive revelation; Hebrew revelation; Christian revelation.
1. Primitive Revelation
It is impossible to know with absolute certainty the content of the truth communicated by God to the progenitors and the manner in which it was communicated. The narrative of the origins of humanity, the trial, the fall, and its consequences, contained in the first three chapters of Genesis (v.), certainly reproduces historical realities, but does not allow us to reconstruct in all its details the historical manner in which they occurred. Common theological teaching holds it certain that there existed a primitive revelation at the origins of humanity. This teaching is in conformity with the findings of the comparative history of religions (v.).2. Hebrew Revelation
The existence of a divine revelation to the Hebrew people is one of the fundamental teachings of Christianity; Jesus and the Apostles explicitly refer to it (Mt. 5, 18-21; Sg. 22, 31; Act. 1, 16; 28, 25; Rom. 1, 2; Hebr. 1, 1; 3, 7). Christian revelation itself is the fulfillment of Hebrew revelation, which prepared the way for it (cf. Mt. 5, 18). Here are some of its characteristics: a) progressive: it began with the vocation of Abraham (Gen. 12, 1; Sg. 3), but Scripture itself attests that God did not fully manifest Himself to Abraham (Ex. 6, 3). Historians of Hebrew religion point out the successive developments it underwent around three fundamental ideas: monotheism, messianism, and the conception of future life. This development was certainly due in part to a deepening of the religious reflection of the Jews, but largely, especially with regard to the first two ideas, it was due to a progressive illumination of divine revelation; b) the instruments of this revelation were certain chosen men (patriarchs, prophets, hagiographers), whom God freely selected. Hebrew revelation was not a continuous revelation, and in the Hebrew people there was no official organ that bore the divine revelation, as there is now in the Church in the magisterium. There was, however, a means of transmission: the sacred books. For this reason, in Hebrew religion one can observe notable differences in development in different periods, and sometimes even temporary obscurities, parallel currents not perfectly integrated with one another. Yet the divine action is all the more evident, guiding and utilizing all natural diversities, leading the Hebrew people to that degree of religious knowledge which made possible the insertion, without violent shocks, of Christian revelation; c) Hebrew revelation was indeed a preparatory revelation, not an end in itself; its function was to prepare for Christian revelation, in which it found its fulfillment (cf. Mt. 5, 18; Gal. 3, 24). For this reason, Hebrew revelation ceased its function with the advent of Christian revelation, or rather, all the content of truth it possessed was taken up into Christian revelation.3. Christian Revelation
The disciples of Christ perceived the sense of the novelty of Christian revelation compared to the Hebrew (cf. Io. 1, 18; Eph. 3, 1; Sg. 3; Hebr. 1, 2). Jesus Himself emphasized the novelty of His teaching, especially regarding the mystery of the Trinity (Io. 15, 15), the mystery of the Church (Mt. 13, 11), and the perfection of the Christian law (ibid. 5, 21; Sg. 3). The teaching of Jesus Christ did not consist solely in words: every one of His gestures, every interior sentiment made known outwardly, was an objective manifestation of the thought and love of God. The first and greatest revelation of God is the Person of the Incarnate Word Himself (cf. II Cor. 4, 4-6). In the light of the teaching of Jesus Christ and under the illumination of the Holy Spirit, which He promised (Io. 14, 26; 15, 26; 16, 12-15), the Apostles came to understand ever more fully the mystery of Christ and our solidarity with Him, the mystery of Redemption and our participation in the divine life through Jesus Christ, the mystery of Christ as the Church, and the divine teachings regarding the future life of the Church. All this patrimony of truth constitutes Christian revelation. It was concluded with the death of the last Apostle and was entrusted to the Church either in the form of written documents (the inspired books of the New Testament) or in the form of traditions faithfully preserved and transmitted by the episcopal body. After the death of the last Apostle, the Church has no new public revelations, but it comprehends, interprets, and explains with ever greater clarity and completeness the content of the revelation received from the Apostles. dogma (v.).IV. THE POSSIBILITY OF REVELATION
The difficulties against the possibility of revelation are derived from its alleged superfluity, its incompatibility with divine wisdom, its supposed anthropomorphism, the incommunicability of divine knowledge, or, in the case of mediate revelation, from the intervention of human instruments subject to error.The first difficulty is based on the self-sufficiency and autonomy of human intelligence. Man must suffice unto himself in the knowledge of truth, even religious truth: nothing can be accepted as true unless it is recognized as such by reason; man would contradict the most intimate exigency of his nature if he accepted a truth from without, even from God. The answer is: the immanentist supposition of the self-sufficiency of human intelligence easily collapses in the face of two facts. First, the historical observation of the enormous difficulty men have had in knowing fundamental moral and religious truths outside the influence of Hebrew-Christian revelation. It is sufficient to recall the difficulties, contradictions, and errors of philosophy, the puerilities and, at times, the gross deviations of religious conceptions. Secondly, one could deny the existence of truths inaccessible to human intelligence only by supposing that man, with his natural intelligence, can exhaust the reality and designs of God. But such a postulate clearly contradicts the infinity of the divine Being: if God is truly infinite, there must be something unattainable by the finite intelligence of man. On the other hand, it constitutes no diminution for man to receive from God some illumination regarding the mystery of His life and His action in the universe. Revelation cannot appear contradictory to the dignity of the universe, unless one supposes that man is himself the absolute.
The second difficulty may be formulated thus: for revelation to be intelligible and thus possible, it is not enough that God should have truths unknown to man; there must also be an intelligible reason for doing so. It is not apparent what use revelation of unknown truths could serve. The answer is: according to Catholic doctrine (v. above: *Concilium Vaticanum*), revelation has a twofold purpose: it supplies the deficiencies of natural intelligence in the knowledge of religious and moral truths, elevating the limited capacities of fallen intelligence through the higher light of divine teaching; and it introduces men to the knowledge of supernatural realities, which constitute the real world in which humanity now lives. Revelation is not an end in itself; it does not represent the definitive relationship between man and God; rather, it is a stage in another knowledge, the beatific vision, in which the present imperfect knowledge of supernatural realities communicated by divine revelation will become perfectly clear and self-evident. Revelation therefore has an essentially pedagogical function: its immediate purpose is to render possible the love of supernatural realities, that love which is called supernatural charity; for charity is the indispensable condition and preparation for the vision.
The third and fourth difficulties were particularly emphasized during the Modernist period in the form of a dilemma: either Revelation is conceived as the communication of a “word” or divine concept in the usual sense of the term, in which case one falls into anthropomorphism; or the infinite transcendence of divine knowledge is maintained, and then it is not understood how it can be communicated to man. The answer is this: the difficulty reproduces, in the particular sphere of Revelation, the general problem of the relationship between the infinite divine and the finite human. Theological thought had already formulated the principle solution with the doctrine of analogy (v.). Divine truth is communicated to men by means of concepts which, while not expressing it as it is in God, and therefore not expressing it adequately, are yet capable of truly reproducing, to a certain extent, its content. One might illustrate this answer by reference to the knowledge and teaching of Jesus Christ. According to common and certain theological doctrine, Jesus possessed during His earthly life the immediate vision of the Being and designs of God: He saw the Trinity in the Trinity, all reality having some relation to Him. He Himself attested this (Jn 16:14-15). Such knowledge was a single, simple, intuitive act, embracing all things. Jesus spoke to His disciples to communicate to them a participation in His own knowledge of God (ibid., 15:15), and He spoke a human language, made up of concepts and words accessible to finite human intelligence. In His intelligence there occurred the transition from the simplicity of divine knowledge to the imperfect but not deceptive multiplicity of human concepts. What happened in Him as a consequence of His being the Incarnate Word, God can miraculously repeat in other men whom He chooses to reveal.
The last difficulty concerns the rationality of a mediated Revelation: even if Revelation is possible and knowable by those who receive it immediately, when it is communicated to men it loses the guarantee of its divine origin. The men who received it, apart from Jesus Christ, were all fallible and limited, and inevitably, even without intending to, they could transmit, along with the truth of divine origin, their limited, personal, or even erroneous interpretation of the truth received. It is answered that it belongs to the essence of Revelation that he who receives it has a clear and certain knowledge of what he receives from God and distinguishes it from his own personal reflections, and the very experience of the recipients of Revelation assures us of this: it is sufficient to recall the manner in which Paul speaks of virginity and marriage (1 Cor 7:10-12). Moreover, it must be remembered that we are not here dealing with phenomena explicable by purely natural causes; if God willed that the truth revealed by Him should reach all men precisely as He revealed it, He certainly has the power to bring this about: and this is what guarantees the assistance of the Holy Spirit promised first to the Apostles and then to the Church.
V. Knowability. This reflection opens the way to resolving the final difficulties regarding the knowability of divine Revelation. The difficulty takes two forms: it is not seen how he who receives Revelation can acquire the certainty of not being the victim of an illusion. Moreover, it is not clear how others, who do not have the experience of immediate contact with God, can acquire the certainty that he is not the victim of an illusion.
It has already been said (v. supra, III, 2) that the certain consciousness of receiving a truth from God can have various psychological origins: this certainty cannot be formed, like any other certainty, except through an interior path. Often, however, it is noted that the recipient of Revelation doubts its divine origin and seeks to avoid the obligations that the word of God imposes; then God intervenes with extraordinary signs that remove all doubt, for example, in the vision of Zechariah (Lk 1:18-20), or in the conversion of Paul (Acts 9:1-19). But above all it must be remembered that in forming this judgment the human intellect is illumined by the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth: Scripture considers those who receive some Revelation from God and who speak in God’s name as “filled with the Holy Spirit,” that is, as supernaturally illumined by Him. For this reason they can have certainties that are naturally inexplicable to others (cf. 1 Cor 2:12-16). The question then arises how others, who do not have this immediate experience, can distinguish those truly illumined by the Holy Spirit from the illusory or deceitful, the true from the false prophets. Revelation itself suggests various criteria or signs, which constitute so many motives for recognizing true Revelation: the moral quality of the prophet, the content of his doctrine, the fruits of this doctrine, and finally—the decisive criterion—the works that he performs to guarantee, through divine intervention, the divine origin of what he asserts: prophecies and miracles (cf. Jn 15:22-24). When God speaks and wills that His Revelation should reach all men, He knows well how to accompany it with “signs” that guarantee its divine origin to every man disposed to accept it (cf. Mk 16:20).