The Mystery of Evil

Benedict XVI and the End of Days

Giorgio Agamben, Adam Kotsko

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503602748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

In 2013, Benedict XVI became only the second pope in the history of the Catholic Church to resign from office. In this brief but illuminating study, Giorgio Agamben argues that Benedict's gesture, far from being solely a matter of internal ecclesiastical politics, is exemplary in an age when the question of legitimacy has been virtually left aside in favor of a narrow focus on legality. This reflection on the recent history of the Church opens out into an analysis of one of the earliest documents of Christianity: the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which stages a dramatic confrontation between the "man of lawlessness" and the enigmatic katechon, the power that holds back the end of days. In Agamben's hands, this infamously obscure passage reveals the theological dynamics of history that continue to inform Western culture to this day.

II. Mysterium iniquitatis: History as Mystery

1.

The title mysterium iniquitatis unambiguously suggests that what will be in question here is a reading of the famous passage from the Second Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians on the end of days. I have written “unambiguously,” because what has happened in our time is that a genuinely eschatological notion—namely the mysterium iniquitatis—which, as such, made sense only in its context, has been torn from its proper place and transformed into a contradictory ontological notion, that is to say, into a sort of ontology of evil. What made sense only as philosophia ultima has thus taken the place of prima philosophia.

Let us reread the passage from the Pauline epistle in its entirety:

As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by inspiration or by word or by a letter that claims to be sent by me, as though the day of the Lord were imminent. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the apostasy comes and the man of lawlessness [ho anthropos tēs anomias] is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you? And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when the time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness [mystērion tēs anomias, which the Vulgate translates as mysterium iniquitatis] is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed. And then the lawless one [anomos, literally “the without-law”] will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will eliminate with the breath of his mouth, rendering him inoperative with the manifestation of his coming. The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan, who uses all power, signs, lying wonders, and every kind of wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. (2 Thessalonians 2:1–11)

When the Church was still interested in last things, this extraordinary passage stimulated the hermeneutical acumen of the Fathers in a special way, from Irenaeus to Jerome and from Hippolytus to Augustine. The interpreters’ attention was focused above all on the identification of the two characters whom Paul calls “what—or the one who—restrains” (to katechon, ho katechōn; in the Vulgate: quid detineat, qui tenet) and “the man of lawlessness” (ho anthropos tēs anomias, literally “the man of the absence of law”; in the Vulgate: homo peccati), or simply ho anomos (“the outlaw”; in the Vulgate: iniquus). The latter, beginning with Irenaeus (Against All Heresies, 7.1), although Paul seems not to be familiar with the term, has been almost constantly identified with the Antichrist of the First Epistle of John (2:18). The identification was then accepted by Hippolytus, by Origen, by Tertullian, and finally by Augustine, so that it became a commonplace, even if some modern scholars have called it into doubt. In all these authors the Antichrist is always conceived as a man of flesh and blood—a real historical character like Nero, or a more or less imaginary one such as, according to Hippolytus, a certain Lateinos or Teitanos, so named from the number of the Beast of the Apocalypse. As Peterson has fittingly observed, even if he is in the service of Satan, the Antichrist is a man and not a demon.

Who, then, is “the one who or that which restrains” and must be taken out of the way so that the Antichrist (more precisely, following Paul’s words, the “outlaw”) can come? I would like to yield the floor to Augustine, who commented on this passage in The City of God (XX, 19). After having written that the text in question doubtless refers to the coming of the Antichrist and that, on the other hand, the Apostle did not want to clearly express the identity of “the one who restrains,” because he was speaking to addressees who were already aware of it, he adds: “And thus we who have not their knowledge wish and are not able even with pains to understand what the apostle referred to, especially as his meaning is made still more obscure by what he adds. For what does he mean by ‘For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed’? I frankly confess I do not know what he means. I will nevertheless mention such conjectures as I have heard or read.”

At this point, Augustine gathers these “conjectures” into two groups:

Some [quidam] think that the Apostle Paul referred to the Roman empire, and that he was unwilling to use language more explicit [aperte scribere], lest he should incur the calumnious charge of wishing ill to the empire which it was hoped would be eternal; so that in saying, “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work,” he alluded to Nero, whose deeds already seemed to be as the deeds of Antichrist. And hence some suppose that he shall rise again and be Antichrist. Others, again, suppose that he is not even dead, but that he was concealed that he might be supposed to have been killed, and that he now lives in concealment in the vigor of that same age which he had reached when he was believed to have perished, and will live until he is revealed in his own time and restored to his kingdom. But I wonder that men can be so audacious in their conjectures. However, it is not absurd to believe that these words of the apostle, “only until the one who now restrains it is removed,” refer to the Roman empire, as if it were said, “until the one who now reigns is removed.”

As to the second group of testimonies, Augustine sums them up in this way:

But others think that [the Apostle’s] words . . . refer only to the wicked and the hypocrites who are in the Church, until they reach a number so great as to furnish Antichrist with a great people, and that this is the mystery of iniquity, because it seems hidden. . . . [And] they suppose that it is to this same mystery John alludes in his epistle. . . . As therefore there went out from the Church many heretics, whom John calls “many antichrists,” at that time prior to the end, and which John calls “the last time,” so in the end they shall go out who do not belong to Christ, but to that last Antichrist, and then he shall be revealed.

2.

Even if Augustine does not mention anyone by name, it is nonetheless possible to identify the authors to whom he is referring. The quidam of the first group are easily inscribed in the tracks of Jerome, who was occupied with the interpretation of the Pauline letter, among other things, in his letter to Algasia. It is this interpretation that Augustine cites when he says that the Apostle did not want to write openly in order not to be accused of desiring the collapse of the Empire that claimed to be eternal (Jerome had written: nec vult aperte dicere Romanum Imperium destruendum, quod ipsi qui imperant aeternum putant; Jerome, p. 18).

The second hypothesis, which identifies the katechon with the Church, comes from an author who exerted a particular influence on Augustine: Tyconius. He is an extraordinary character, without whom Augustine could not have written his masterpiece, The City of God, because it is from him that he drew both the idea of the two cities and that of the Church as permixta of good and evil. But Tyconius is important also because he realized fifteen centuries beforehand the Benjaminian program according to which doctrine can be legitimately pronounced only in the form of interpretation.

His Liber regularum (Book of Rules), which is considered the oldest treatise on sacred hermeneutics, in fact has the peculiarity that the rules that permit the interpretation of the Scriptures coincide with doctrine (which is, in this case, an ecclesiology).

The second rule, which bears the heading De Domini corpore bipartito (“On the bipartite body of the Lord”), here interests us in a special way. According to Tyconius, the body of Christ, namely the Church, is constitutively divided. In reference to the verse of Song of Songs that he reads in a translation that is worded fusca sum et decora, he distinguishes a dark Church, composed of the populus malus of the wicked that forms the body of Satan, and a decora, honest Church, composed of Christ’s faithful. In the present state, the two bodies of the Church are inseparably commingled, but according to the Apostle’s prediction, they will be divided at the end of days: “Now this goes on from the time of the Lord’s passion until the church, which keeps it in check, withdraws from the midst of this mystery of lawlessness [mysterium facinoris] so that godlessness may be unveiled in its own time” (Tyconius, p. 74/123).

Tyconius thus thinks an eschatological time that goes from Christ’s passion up to the “mystery of lawlessness,” when the separation of the bipartite body of the Church will be realized. This means that already at the end of the fourth century there were authors who had identified the Church itself as the katechon, the cause of the delay of the parousia.

3.

All these interpretations of the Pauline text refer in any case to historical characters or powers and concern events that will play out in the days that immediately precede the parousia. To understand the mystery of lawlessness means, therefore, to understand something that concerns the eschaton, that dramatic foreshortening of humanity’s history that takes place at the end of days. As Paul says clearly, in 1 Corinthians 10:11, in the last day no typological or figural interpretation will be possible any longer, because all figures and all t...