This is God’s final threat, much graver and more vehement than the earlier ones. For first he had said, ‘My spirit shall not remain in man for ever,’ explaining nothing of the penalty with which he wished to strike man. Then he indicated the penalty, adding, ‘I will destroy man,’ but did not express how and when this would come to pass. But here he opens both: the time, saying, ‘The end of all flesh is come before me’; and the manner, adding, ‘I will destroy them with the earth’ — namely, by an almost immense flood of waters overwhelming the whole earth to the greatest depth and destroying all things that were in it. For a little below, saying this same thing more distinctly: ‘Behold,’ he says, ‘I will bring the waters of a flood upon the earth, to destroy all flesh wherein is the breath of life under heaven, and all things that are in the earth shall be consumed.’²

It is indeed a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, and, by the persistence and bitterness of one’s crimes, to compel, as it were, God — who long, most mercifully, deferred the punishment — at last to the supreme vengeance…³

Truly horrible is such a threat of God, deliberately and emphatically declaring that he will spare no longer, but will punish crimes with due penalties; for then there is no place for entreaty, no place for pity. For when sinners have filled up a certain measure, so that their iniquities are complete, as the Lord said of the Amorites, then there is no escape from the divine chastisement, nor does anything remain but condemnation. Whence to the Jews too, through Ezekiel, God said, ‘The end is come,’ etc., and adds, ‘I will not spare, nor have mercy’; and to Jeremiah he said, ‘Do not thou pray for this people, for I will not hear thee’; and again, ‘If Moses and Samuel stood before me, my soul is not toward this people.’ That ‘God said to Noah’ plainly signifies that God spoke with Noah; but by what kind of locution he used, is obscure and uncertain. For it may have been that God spoke these things by an interior and spiritual locution — that is, by an intellectual revelation, as he usually spoke with the Prophets — or by an apparition in sleep, or by some Angel speaking under the visible form of a human body.⁴

That ‘The end of all flesh is come before me’ is a Hebraism signifying this: ‘It is determined with me to destroy all flesh,’ or ‘to impose an end on the malice of men by destroying them with all that they possess and that is upon the earth.’ For what the Latin translator has as ‘end,’ the Septuagint translators rendered ‘time’; but Aquila and Symmachus translated similarly to our translator, the one telos, that is ‘end,’ the other peras, that is ‘term.’ But of all these translations the sense is the same. For that ‘The time of all flesh is come’ sounds thus: ‘The supreme time of punishing men’s crimes has arrived, and their vengeance will be deferred no further.’⁵

That phrase, then, ‘The end of all flesh is come before me,’ signifies either a general calamity of all men and the destruction of the whole earth, as in this place, or the greatest destruction of men and of the greatest part of the earth. For that the blessed martyr Euthicius used this same saying of the Lord, foretelling the immense calamity and innumerable disasters then threatening because of the coming and the savagery of the Lombards, the blessed Gregory narrates in the last chapter of the third book of the Dialogues. And it has seemed good to transcribe his words here. For when he had recalled a certain vision of Redemptus, bishop of the city of Ferentinum and most intimate with him, and had asked him to explain that vision more openly to him, he subjoins this: ‘He said that one day, while he was making his rounds of his parishes as usual, he came to the church of the blessed martyr Euthicius. And as the day was drawing toward evening, he wished a bed to be made for him beside the tomb of the martyr, and there, after his labor, he rested. When, at midnight, as he asserted, he could neither perfectly keep awake nor sleep, but, weighed down (as is usual) by sleep, his waking mind was also burdened with heaviness, the blessed martyr Euthicius stood before him, saying: “Redemptus, art thou awake?” He answered, “I am awake.” And he said: “The end of all flesh is come; the end of all flesh is come; the end of all flesh is come.” After which threefold…⁶

…utterance the vision of the martyr, which appeared to the eyes of his mind, vanished. Then the man of God arose and gave himself to the lament of prayer.⁷

And presently those terrible signs in the sky followed, so that spears and fiery battle-lines were seen from the region of the North. Presently the savage race of the Lombards, drawn from the sheath of their dwelling, raged against our neck, and the human race which on this land had sprung up, by reason of its excessive multitude, after the manner of a thick crop, was cut down and withered. For cities were depopulated, camps overthrown, churches burned, monasteries of men and of women destroyed; estates, desolate of men and bereft of every cultivator, the land lies in solitude; no owner inhabits it; beasts have occupied the places which before a multitude of men held. And what is being done in other parts of the world, I know not. For in this land in which we live, the world no longer announces its end, but shows it. So much the more urgently must we seek eternal things, by as much as we know that temporal things have fled from us. This world ought to have been despised by us even if it flattered, if it soothed the mind with prosperous things; but after it is pressed by so many scourges, wearied by so great adversity, and redoubles for us so many griefs daily, what else does it cry to us but that it not be loved? Thus Gregory.⁸

There follows: ‘The earth is filled with iniquity from before their face.’ This, about the extreme wickedness and malice of the men of that time, is here rather often repeated and inculcated, that the savagery of the crimes and the justice of the divine vengeance — punishing those crimes with so great a penalty — might be the more vehemently magnified. That ‘The earth is filled’ has emphasis — that is, the measure of sins has been carried to the utmost and filled up — so that the sense is, as it were, this: ‘Since these men set before themselves nothing but crimes, I too have set before myself nothing but their calamity, devastation, destruction.’ That ‘from before their face’ is a Hebraism and signifies the same as ‘by them,’ as the Septuagint translators rendered it; or, as the Chaldee paraphrase expressed it, ‘because of their evil works.’ Ambrose reads, ‘The earth is filled with their iniquities.’⁹

But concerning those words, ‘I will destroy them with the earth’ (or, as the Septuagint have it, ‘I will destroy them and the earth,’ or, as others render, ‘I will destroy them from the earth’), it is asked: how did God destroy the earth by the Flood? But it is easily answered that the earth was not destroyed as to its substance, but as to the adornment which is on its surface, arising from the beauty of plants and from the comeliness of buildings; or as to the diminution of its fertility — for, long drenched and overwhelmed by the salt waters of the Ocean, it was thereafter more barren, that is, bringing forth fruits neither so abundant nor so wholesome; or because (as the Hebrews hand down) the surface of the earth, to a depth of three palms, was wasted by the Flood, consumed, and turned into water — and in that outer part of the earth the germinating power and faculty of the earth especially thrived. But why did this punishment of God pertain only to the earth and not touch the water? Was it because the earth alone, up to that time, had been infected and contaminated by men’s crimes? For men had not yet entered the sea, the art of navigation had not yet been invented — from which, as many goods have arisen, so on account of men…¹⁰

…[from navigation], either insatiable avarice, or an insane lust of dominating, or beastly cruelty, innumerable evils overflowed. But in the other, general judgment and destruction of the world to come at the consummation of the age — which will be made not by water, as this one, but by fire — not only the earth but the water too will be purified, on account of the innumerable crimes of men perpetrated upon the waters up to that day.¹¹