Revisiting the Advent and Christmas joyful mysteries as image of all Divine history
Daniel 7 can help the Catholic Church combat the Protestants' faulty break up of the Ten commandments
The fourth beast is in Daniel 7, the worst and terrible pagan Rome.
It has 10 horns and a little horrible blasphemous Antichrist horn who uproots or tears up three horns and raises itself up with eyes and boasts and blasphemes.
This is a simple way to show the stupidity of how the Protestants divide up to 10 commandments.
I haven't checked yet but my assumption is that the commandments are divided up by the Orthodox just like we do since they do not embrace the iconoclastic heresy.
Anyway, in the Catholic Church, the first three commandments deal with the human relationship to God.
The latter seven deal with the human to human relationships.
The first commandment is you shall have no other gods before me. The text of scripture also goes on to condemn idolatry and says behold you shall not make any image of anything nor shall you worship it and blah blah blah blah.
The Protestants of course, who in general reject having beautiful and sacred images within their places of worship, accuse the Catholic and Orthodox Churches of blasphemously violating what they call the second commandment of idolatry and images. In other words, they are of the iconoclastic heresy.
As it stands the Catholic Church understands that the prohibition against having no other gods with God and to not make any image of anything blah blah blah, is rather referring to idolatry and is all one commandment. It is not an absolute prohibition because for example there were many images of living animal creatures Etc within the Jewish temple, there were cherubim golden cherubone carved on either side of a golden arc Etc
In the 700s the church saw that since Saints possess sanctifying grace, and since sanctifying Grace is a finite created participation in the Divine Life and Love itself, Saints are effectively divinized, even as St Peter testifies that we shall be like gods., participants in the divine nature.
For this reason, images of the Saints and angels, are images of sanctifying Grace that dwells within them which is created participation in God, and therefore to venerate these images that point indirectly to the persons the holy ones that they represent, is giving a form of veneration to their share of the Divine love in life and secondly It ultimately assists in the worship of God and is therefore acceptable to exist even within the very structure churches themselves.
Since Protestants reject this reality they take the first commandment and divide it into two, meaning that first you have no other gods but me, and then no images of anything at all.
Of course the Catholic Church understands that you fuse these things cuz they're the same damn thing.
Hence this is one commandment not two, and then the second one is of course you shall not blaspheme God or take his name in vain.
The third then deals with the Sabbath which is a disciplinary reality but the principle is that we are called to have conglomerate and common timing of public worship on a frequency basis which effectively comes from the allegorical tradition of the octave which is to say every seventh day.
These first three commandments summarize our relationship to God. The rest of these, are then human to human.
In this regard thou shalt not lust and thou shall not have greed are two different commandments at the end since obviously lust has to do with sex and greed has to do with stealing.
You can not fuse these because their nature is different and if you imply that they could be fused then you would also be implying that you could fuse thou shalt not commit adultery with thou shalt not steal, which is not only absurd theology but in which clearly both Protestant and Catholic agree are two different commandments.
As a consequence, the Protestant division is really stupid and is untenable when you look at it in terms of how we are to look at the reality of how to deal with sacred images. And this then leads to the fact that once the heresies exploded there would be no limit to how asinine and crazy ideas would arise from then on out.
And the Protestant conception of The commandments is the first four are against God and the latter six are against from human to human, and again like I said to make up for the difference they take thou shalt not lust and thou shalt not have greed and put them together which again is stupid and doesn't make sense.
Now in terms of idealism Daniel 7 is an aid to prove this or at least think of evidence.
In this regard Daniel 7 can have several meaning. And it's immediate since it can image the roman emperors, suggest casting aside the question of what three is, the emperors blasphemed the heavenly Father by declaring that they were in fact God Almighty. to be in the place of God.
Now even before we go on to one more idealistic way to look at this Antichrist principle, we can simply say that each of these horns is an assault on the Ten commandments. In fact in an orthodox book that looks at the apocalypse which I own, it goes through St Andrew of cesarea's commentaries on the apocalypse, and one of the scholars says that the 10 horns of the dragon and the beast from the sea can image The Ten commandments which they fight against.
In this regard, the the 10 horns of the fourth beast of Daniel 7 can image the seven Great commandments that great horrible and worldly Powers War against, and the fact that three or torn away and then it's place comes up blasphemy as if to rise above god, means that the three commandments that are dedicated to our relationship with god, which is to say the only ones and the first three ones, is that in fact that is what the spirit of antichrist and humanity does when it tries to exalt itself above God. It takes the first three great commandments with God and says we don't need these and we are above them and so they ripped them out and take their place divininizing themselves in the wrong way which is to say we are our own God's we determine what is right and wrong, and we will Forge our own Utopia without any Grace or need from God.
This one's greater evidence to the reality that the Catholic and Orthodox understanding of The commandments makes more sense and is even idealistically supported by a apocalyptic
scripture that we might not even see could help us!