1

Until the End of the World – Carl Schmitt, Apocalypse and the Katechon

William Rauscher

CCC Papers 004

An Angel entraps the Mouth of Hell under lock and key. 1150 AD, author unknown.

2

The katechon originally appears as a figure in Paul’s Second Letter to the

Thessalonians, wherein Paul (or the writer standing in for Paul: the authenticity

of second Thessalonians remains dubious) describes it as the entity tasked

with restraining chaos until the proper arrival of the Last Judgment. In this

context, the katechon appears to solve the problem of earthly authority in

messianic time: in light of the Thessalonians’ premature apocalyptic

enthusiasm, Paul needs a way to justify obedience to the existing order. Paul

says, in effect, that yes, earthly authority will be invalidated when the world

ends, but don’t go around disobeying this authority just yet, because for now

the katechon is prohibiting this event from taking place:

Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come

unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed,

the one destined for destruction. He 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 his time comes. For the mystery of

3

lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now

restrains it is removed. [Second Thessalonians, 2:3-2:8]1

Paul makes two cryptic references here, to the “one who restrains,” the

katechon (Aufhalter in Luther’s translation), and to the “lawless one” who will

appear only after the restrainer has been removed. The restrainer and the

lawless one share a relationship of constant antagonism. The lawless one

cannot be defeated by the restrainer; instead the restrainer keeps him at bay,

repeatedly warding him off, until “his time comes,” at which point the restrainer

“is removed” so that the lawless one may be allowed to assume power fully

and thus usher in the Last Judgment. While the katechon vigilantly protects

earthly orders against chaos, his position is in essence temporary, with

termination and failure built into the job description.

The hedonistic behavior of the Thessalonians prior to Paul’s arrival2

signals the danger of allowing “lawlessness” to operate without the invocation

of a restraining force. After all, why should Christians continue to obey the

ruling order if the end of the world is imminent, and with it, the invalidation of

all earthly authority? This question strikes at a core concern for the Christian 1 All biblical citations from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Bernhard W. Anderson, Bruce Manning Metzger and Roland Edmund Murphy, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press: 1991). 2 See James D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 298-304.

4

subject: the need to negotiate between the demands of this world and those of

the next.

Paul must re-instill a sense of obedience in the messianic-minded

Thessalonians, and he attempts this not by brute force or rational persuasion,

but through the construction of a theological framework, which derives its

efficacy through belief. In this way Paul follows the model for authority as

originally developed by Plato. As Hannah Arendt notes, Plato first constructs a

theological-political premise, namely the scheme of punishment and reward in

the afterlife, as means of inducing obedience without recourse to force or

persuasion.3 The most significant difference in Paul’s model, however, is that

the katechon comes with a deadline. As such it is not intended to validate

authority directly, as in Plato, but rather to postpone authority’s de-validation.

Thus the katechon is a key element in Paul’s attempt to buttress the temporal,

finite nature of earthly authority theologically, a crucial stopgap that keeps the

end of the world in mind but out of sight.

It is not certain, however, that Paul’s invocation of the katechon as a

means of propping up earthly authority maintains a consistency with the rest of

his theology. The eschatology that supports the katechon in Second

Thessalonians seems to clash with that of the First, and the discrepancy is

3 See Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 108.

5

partly the cause of the long-standing scholarly dispute concerning the

authenticity of the Second. Compared with the Paul of the second letter, the

Paul of the first is much more concerned with the imminence of the Lord’s

arrival, saying, “you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will

come like a thief in the night. When they say, ‘There is peace and security,’

then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a

pregnant woman, and there will be no escape!” [1. Th. 5 2-4] Here the two

images of a thief and of labor pains allow Paul to figure the arrival of the

Messiah as an event of terrifying unpredictability. Within Thessalonians, then,

the Messiah acts as a kind of home intruder (a “thief in the night”), and the

katechon as a security guard. The katechon is said to restrain this event until

the “right time,” but prior to Second Thessalonians there is no right time for the

event of the Messiah, for Paul understands this time only as unpredictable,

incalculable, and unforeseeable. Only one thing is known about the arrival of

the Messiah: the proximity of its occurrence to the present. In First

Thessalonians it is considered “an imminent hope on the horizon, which

offered comfort for those in sorrow and motivation for right living for those in a

pagan world.”4 This imminence is reflected in a number of formulations

4 Phil Ware, “The Coming of the Lord: Eschatology and 1 Thessalonians,” Restoration Quarterly Vol. 22 no. 2 (1979), 120.

6

throughout Paul’s letters, mostly explicitly in his announcement in Corinthians

that “the time is short” [1 Cor. 7:29].

The particular conflict between the first and second letters concerning

eschatology is directly bound to a larger conflict within Paul’s letters

concerning the validity of earthly authority. The authority of the Messiah’s

arrival is founded upon both the vagueness and the urgency of its arrival,

which will most certainly be soon, but when exactly cannot be pinpointed. This

apocalyptic urgency seems to dissipate, however, in the figure of a restraining

force that holds off the End until the appointed time, and with it, a particular

justification for obeying Christian moral edicts. With the katechon Paul shifts

his moral agenda from promoting the duty of living a good life in preparation

for the End to theologically justifying the non-arrival of the Messiah and the

perpetuation of the world as it is. Along these lines, the question for Christians

that runs throughout Paul’s letters is, ‘with an awareness of the world’s end,

whom should we obey?’ Should we obey religious authority at the expense of

the political, or is political authority legitimated by the religious as long as the

Messiah continues to not arrive? This ambiguity produces a split within the

Christian subject, who is supposed to live within the world yet remain aware of

its end at the same time.

7

The uncertain status of earthly authority in Paul’s letters provides the

possibility for a wide variety of political interpretations, which read his thought

as providing the foundation for projects ranging from anarchy to imperialism. 5

An equally broad spectrum of interpretations attempts to reckon with the

identities of the katechon and the lawless one. In the Christian tradition the

lawless one is usually taken to indicate the Antichrist described in John, who

may assume power in the form of a false prophet or emperor. The katechon

has provoked more hermeneutic uncertainty: who or what is it that can

restrain, but not defeat, the forces of chaos?

Felix Grossheutschi’s exhaustive work follows the trajectory of katechon

interpretations from the figure’s inception in Paul to the numerous invocations

throughout Schmitt’s writings.6 The traditionally dominant interpretation,

beginning with Tertullian in the second century and perpetuated by Schmitt in

the twentieth, reads the katechon as the Roman Empire. The justification that

Tertullian needed for divine legitimacy of the Empire was fairly straightforward:

it sufficed enough to ask, if God did not give the Roman Empire dominion, then

who did? As Grossheutschi puts it, “Die Vorstellung, ein Mensch oder rein

Volk könnte in dieser Welt etwas erreichen, gross werden, ohne göttlichen 5 See subsequent chapter on authority and messianism. There is a seemingly conservative, but ultimately ambiguous anomaly: that of Romans 13, which, over and against the rest of Paul’s letters seems to offer theological capitulation to the Roman state. 6 Felix Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996).

8

Beistand, war dem antiken wie auch noch dem mittelalterlichen Denken fremd.

Von nichts kommt nichts, und ohne verleihende Macht keine verliehene

Macht. Also nochmals: Wer oder was hat Rom gross gemacht?”7 This

argument functions as a kind of precursor to the modern political platitude that

“might makes right”: here Tertullian’s argument is that “might was made right,”

that the Imperium is right because it sheer size indicates a divine influence.

According to Tertullian, the great obligation to pray for the emperor’s

prosperity comes from our realization that “the tremendous force which is

hanging over the whole world, and the very end of the world with its threat of

dreadful afflictions, is arrested for a time by the continuance of the Roman

Empire. This event we have no desire to experience, and in praying that it may

be deferred, we favor the continuance of Rome.”8 With his emphasis on the

“dreaded afflictions” that we “have no desire to experience,” Tertullian ramps

up a negative sense of anticipation for the end of days and thus places the

katechon in a positive light. As Grossheutschi points out, however, the

championing of the katechon is not historically universal: “Die Gleichsetzung

Roms mit dem Aufhaltenden findet sich bei Irenäus und Hippolyt, wobei

allerdings—zumindest bei Hippolyt—damit eine negative Wertung verbunden

7 Grossheutschi, Katechon, 45. 8 Ch. 32, Sec. 1 in Tertullian, Apologetic Works, trans. Joseph Daly and Edwin A. Quain (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 88.

9

wird; bei Aristides und Justin wird aus dem Katechon ein positiver Wert; Melito

macht aus dem antichristlichen Rom eine heilsgeschichtliche Grösse.

Schliesslich wird aus alledem das bergende Rom als wünschwertes

Katechon.”9 The figure of the katechon gains meaning depending on which

particular end of the world is being envisioned: the end that brings dreaded

afflictions, or the one which instantiates universal redemption.

A number of counter-interpretations locate the katechon outside the

precincts of imperial authority. The most radical of these is perhaps the one

put forth by the Frankish monk Walafried Strabo in the ninth century. Strabo

places the eschatological force of restraint within the faith practiced by the

individual subjects who together comprise the Christian community. As long as

the general faith is strong, evil has no possibility of establishing its dominion.

Only first when faith weakens, does the Antichrist arrive. While a key

contribution to anti-imperial readings of the katechon, Strabo’s interpretation

suffers from theological imprecision. If we follow the narrative thread that

undergirds Paul’s understanding of divine providence, then we must see the

arrival of the Antichrist as a necessary way-station on the path towards the

end of days. Within Strabo’s reading, then, a weakening of faith in the

community would ultimately set in motion the events leading to the Messiah’s

9 Grossheutschi, Katechon, 51.

10

return! We should not read this rather quizzical causality as being unique to

Strabo, however, as it is endemic to the problem of evil in monotheism.

The impossibility for monotheism to resolve the role of evil in the

universe would certainly appear, from the standpoint of reason, to provide

excellent grounds for discrediting its theology as a means of human

understanding on a rational basis. What better condemnation of monotheistic

theology could there be than its inability to explain the role of evil in a universe

ruled by a single, omnipotent and supposedly benevolent force? Against this

claim, a number of twentieth-century encounters with theology, such as those

by Taubes, Scholem and others, have attempted to show that it is precisely

the impossibilities of theology, its aporias, breakdowns and deadlocks which

contribute to its historical life. Taubes goes so far as to say that the hour of

theology strikes during historical instances in which religious symbols no

longer correspond to human experience.10 We might say along these lines that

the history of theology is a history of attempts to reckon with such

impossibilities, that the impossibilities of theology are at the same time the

conditions of its possibility, as they offer the possibility for theology to forever

reconstitute itself in the flux of historical experience.

10 Taubes, Vom Kult zur Kultur, 230.

11

Following Taubes, we can say that it is a mistake to hold theology

accountable on a rational basis for the same reason that one cannot judge art

in this way: the constitutive incompleteness of the icon, the sign, the symbol,

the image, contribute to the inexhaustibility of its meaning. The katechon is an

exemplary case of this sort of inexhaustible significance, with the alluring

mystery of Paul’s apocalyptic showdown between the restrainer and the

lawless one provoking a wide field of hypotheses. Schmitt, by all accounts the

prime instigator of discourse on the katechon in the twentieth-century, was by

no means immune to the katechon's provocative mystery: his work bears

numerous revisions, inversions and re-evaluations of the figure, both during

the time of his eager collaboration with National Socialism and in the aftermath

of the Second World War.

Before it obtains a paradigmatic status in Nomos der Erde the katechon

makes a series of brief appearances in several of Schmitt’s texts. While in

Nomos der Erde Schmitt will refer to the katechon as a Begriff, his earlier

encounters with the katechon are so diverse from one another as to foreclose

on the prospect of subsuming these encounters under a conceptual rubric.

Tracing these earlier encounters can contribute to a broader understanding of

the stakes of this figure in Schmitt’s work by marking certain theoretical

revisions and deviations, and these markings in turn can further our discussion

12

of the problem of authority in the discourse on the theological-political in

twentieth-century Germany.

Schmitt mentions the katechon some ten times in the course of his

Glossarium journals, written between 1947 and 1951. Of these ten, the entry

from December 19th, 1947 provides perhaps the most direct explication of

Schmitt’s interest in the Biblical figure: “Ich glaube an den Katechon; er ist für

mich die einzige Möglichkeit, als Christ Geschichte zu verstehen und sinnvoll

zu finden. Die paulinische Geheimlehre ist nicht mehr und ebenso viel geheim

wie jede christliche Existenz. Wer nicht selber in concreto etwas vom katechon

weiss, kann die Stelle nicht deuten.”11 This entry provides us with several

significant insights into the varying roles of the katechon in Schmitt’s thinking.

First, the katechon here is presented as a matter of belief. As Grossheutschi

puts it, “Als ‘Glaubenssatz’ ist der Aufhalter aber nicht nur eine theoretische

Angelegenheit, sondern ebenso eine Frage der Erfahrung, der ‘christlichen’

Existenz.”12 Second, it should not be lost on us that a mere two years after the

destruction of Nazi Germany, the movement’s chief legal architect now asserts

that only a figure of the apocalypse can offer up the right perspective on

history. By “right” what is meant of course is a Christian, specifically Roman

11 Carl Schmitt, Glossarium, Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), 63. 12 Grossheutschi, Katechon, 78.

13

Catholic perspective. In the postwar era, when German writing largely turned

its gaze away from the sight of its own catastrophic ruins, of buildings, lives,

ideals and history, Schmitt remained resolutely attuned towards destruction

under the presumption that the end of the world does not only mean the end of

history, it grants shape to history’s own unfolding. This attunement is roughly

congruent with the sense of dread that Gershom Scholem characterizes as

one of the two predominant religious attitudes towards the arrival of the

Messiah, the other being hope.13

Elsewhere in the Glossarium Schmitt indicates that the possibility of

reading history stems from locating the katechon within each particular era.

“Man muss für jede Epoche der letzten 1948 Jahre den Katechon nennen

können. Der Platz war niemals unbesetzt, sonst wären wir nicht mehr

vorhanden.”14 In this context, the katechon becomes pluralized, a role capable

of being adopted by various historical agents, and the very fact that there has

been history serves as proof that the role of the katechon has indeed been

taken on each time.

Schmitt’s statement invokes a kind of political-theoretical parlor game:

call it name that katechon. But how does one apply the figure of the katechon

13 See Gershom Scholem, “Zum Verständnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum,” in Judaica 3: Studien zur jüdischen Mystik. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). 14 Schmitt, Glossarium, 63.

14

as means for understanding historical change, as Schmitt wants to do? In

answering this question one cannot ignore the fact that a positive

understanding of the katechon in Schmitt’s work can only be found in texts

written after the conclusion of Second World War: “in den Schriften aus der

Zeit nach dem Krieg ist die Bezeichnung Katechon für Schmitt gleichsam eine

Art Ehrentitel.”15 Prior to the defeat of Nazi Germany, the only entities which

Schmitt calls katechons are the various enemies of National Socialism, those

empires whose power and influence act to restrain or retard the historical

destiny carried out by National Socialism. In the 1942 essay “Beschleuniger

wider Willen,” the katechonic effect of delaying world history is considered the

law of all “aging empires.”16 Great Britain’s political existence had been ruled

by this katechonic law governing aging empires since the late nineteenth

century, and in the twentieth century the United States was now subject to the

same logic, functioning first as “Aufhalter und Verzögerer,”17 only to then turn

into the paradox of the “accelerator despite itself.”18 In contrast, Schmitt

celebrates the Nazis’ imperial project as an “accelerator” or “grosser

Beweger.” In this context, the katechon appears as a negative concept, not

15 Grossheutschi, Katechon, 105. 16 Carl Schmitt, “Beschleuniger wider Willen ” in Staat, Grossraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916-1969 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995), 436. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.

15

restraining the end of the world, but the arrival of a new eon, specifically the

thousand-year Reich.

The valuation of the concept of the katechon depends entirely on how

Schmitt conceives the movement of history. Grossheutschi observes that,

viewed on the whole, Schmitt’s katechons can be divided into local and

universal types, each caught up in restraining a respective historical

process.19 Local katechons are negative, they are merely in the way of

history, and function within a determined, narrow historical space: these

include Masayrk, Pilsudsky, Kaiser Franz Joseph, Rudolf II, Byzanz, who

restrain through their action or, in the case of the Kaiser, by virtue of their

mere existence.

Grossheutschi further differentiates the universal into the historically

immanent and the historically transcendental. Universal immanent types of

the katechon include the British Empire, Savigny, as well as Hegel, who

restrain a general course of history. The only positive form of the katechon is

the kind which Grossheutschi identifies as the universal-transcendental—for

example, Donoso Cortes, the Roman church and the medieval Roman

Empire, who, according to Grossheutschi, restrain nothing less than the end

19 See Grossheutschi, Katechon, 103-107.

16

of the world, and thus signify the only form of the katechon which would for

Schmitt carry a historical-theological necessity.

The problem with this claim lies in a confusion concerning the ambiguity

of Schmitt’s use of the katechon, a confusion that Grossheutschi himself

notes when he states that Schmitt combines "auf eigenartige Weise zwei

Deutungen des Katechon miteinander: Zum einen der heilsgeschichtliche

Aufhalter des realen, physischen Endes der Welt—veranschaulicht an den

mittelalterlichen Kaisern—; zum anderen der Aufhalter als notwendige

Kategorie echten historischen Denkens. Der Übergang ist fleissend, und es

stellt sich die Frage, ob für Schmitt ‘grosse’ Geschichtsschreibung letztlich mit

Theologie zusammenfässt oder zumindest die Rolle einer ‘ancilla theologiae’

einnimmt, ode res ihm hier nur um eine formale Analogie zu tun ist."20 In

identifying Cortes, the Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire as the

only form of “positive” katechons, Grossheutschi falls victim to the ambiguity

he points out in Schmitt between the two forms of katechon. Properly

speaking, the only katechon that protects against the “real” end of the world is

the one which appears in Second Thessalonians. For Schmitt, the katechon of

the Holy Roman Empire is already a category of real historical thinking, and

whoever or whatever fulfills the role of the katechon during that time does so

20 Grossheutschi, Katechon, 91.

17

to protect one particular empire, not the world as such, a point to which we will

shortly return in greater detail.

The discussion of katechon in Nomos der Erde is most relevant to our

interest in authority in twentieth-century German political theology because it is

here, in Schmitt’s analysis of the Holy Roman Empire, that the figure becomes

bound up with his concern for "concrete orientation":

In der konkreten Ortung auf Rom, nicht in Normen und

allgemeinen Ideen, liegt die Kontinuität, die das mitteralterliche

Völkerrecht mit dem Römischen Reich verbindet. Diesem

christlichen Reich ist es wesentlich, dass es kein ewiges Reich

ist, sondern sein eigenes Ende und das Ende des

gegenwärtigen Aon im Auge behält und trotzdem einer

geschichtlichen Macht fähig ist. Der entscheidende

geschichtsmächtige Begriff seiner Kontinuität ist der des

Aufhalters, des Katechon. ‘Reich’ bedeutet hier die

geschichtliche Macht, die das Erscheinen des Antichrist und das

Ende des gegenwärtigen Aon aufzuhalten vermag, eine Kraft,

18

qui tenet, gemäss den Worten des Apostels Paulus im 2.

Thessalonicherbrief, Kapitel 2.21

It should be noted, first of all, that here the figure of the katechon has

become a concept [Begriff]. This is part of Schmitt’s political-theological

translation work, or to put it another way, Schmitt’s understanding of political

theology as translation, as the über-setzen of elements from the field of

theology to the field of politics. The identification of katechon as Reich allows

Schmitt to understand the empire as the power tasked with deferring the end

of the world. This concept of the Reich gives the law, the Volkerrecht, its

“concrete orientation,” providing it with a focus, a Weltanschauung that is as

grandly encompassing as it is fatally urgent, established not through “norms or

general ideas” but by being “concretely oriented” towards Rome. An

understanding of the katechon as that which orients reflects Schmitt’s

promotion of the term Nomos in its original Greek sense as meaning a “fixed

orientation in terms of space and land.”22 As such, the katechon belongs to

Schmitt’s general theoretical project of recuperating this privileged form of

orientation through the excavation of the occluded theological characters

21 Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1950), 29. 22 Schmitt, Nomos, 64.

19

behind political concepts. As Schmitt outlines in Politische Theologie, only a

politics conscious of its limits, origins and ultimate fate can properly secure

and defend itself, and such a consciousness can only be provided by

theological concepts such as the katechon.23

Schmitt turns to the katechon in a retrieval effort that initially nostalgizes

the lost world of the medieval respublica Christiana twice-over. First, Schmitt

privileges the unity of church authority and imperial power which allowed the

church to mandate and thus "concretely orient" imperial actions according to a

katechonic consciousness. This privileging reflects an elegiac note throughout

Nomos der Erde struck for the subsequent withdrawal of church authority into

the private sphere, thus depriving political power of its "proper" orientation.

The katechon isn’t only a stamp of legitimacy issued by church authority for

the sake of imperial power, however: crucially for Schmitt, it also acts as a

bridge-concept which effectively guarantees the very perpetuation of this

authority against the threats of eschatological paralysis and the efficacy of

mystic prophecy:

Ich glaube nicht, daß für einen ursprünglich christlichen Glauben

ein anderes Geschichtsbild als das des Katechon überhaupt

23 See in this context Karl Löwith’s introduction to his Meaning in History.

20

möglich ist. Der Glaube, daß ein Aufhalter das Ende der Welt

zurückhält, schlägt die einzige Brücke, die von der

eschatologischen Lähmung alles menschlichen Geschehens zu

einer so groß artigen Geschichtsmächtigkeit wie der des

christlichen Kaisertums der germanischen Könige führt. Die

Autorität von Kirchenvätern und Schriftstellern wie Tertullian,

Hieronymus und Lactantius Firmianus, und die christliche

Fortführung sibyllinischer Weissagungen vereinigen sich in der

Überzeugung, daß nur das Imperium Romanum und seine

christliche Fortsetzung den Bestand des Aon erklären und ihn

gegen die überwältigende Macht des Bösen erhalten. Das war

bei den germanischen Mönchen ein lichtvoller, christlicher

Glaube von stärkster, geschichtlicher Kraft, und wer die Sätze

Haimos von Halberstadt oder Adsos nicht von den truüben

Orakeln des Pseudomethodius oder der tiburtinischen Sibylle zu

unterscheiden vermag, wird das Kaisertum des christlichen

Mittelalters nur in fälschenden Verallgemeinerungen und

Parallelen mit nicht-christlichen Machtphänomenen, aber nicht in

seiner konkreten Geschichtlichkeit begreifen können.24

24 Schmitt, Nomos, 29-30.

21

Here Schmitt includes the church fathers among those representatives

of earthly authority who enjoy katechonic protection from eschatological

paralysis. In contrast, Paul’s letter, written before the establishment of the

church institution, concerns itself only with imperial authority. The dread

experienced by Tertullian and his ilk at the thought of the apocalypse,

combined with their distaste for prophecy and endorsement of the katechon,

can be attributed to their fear of losing of authority. In this light the

endorsement of the katechon takes on a distinctly self-serving veneer,

becoming a justification from those in charge as to why they should remain so.

Schmitt, however, does not aim to invalidate the anti-authoritative claim of

prophecy in the name of the Church, instead he uses the katechon as a

bridge, allowing institutional authority to persevere over time despite anti-

authoritative intrusions from hostile forces.

The value of the katechon’s eschatological view lies in the political

awareness of finitude that it produces. The production of this awareness

belongs to a profoundly existential strain in Schmitt’s thinking, which effectively

promotes a kind of political being-towards-death necessary for political identity

and survival. Only an awareness of death, in its unpredictability and finality,

can produce the urgency necessary for the perpetuation of political order.

22

Schmitt’s theories are peopled with death’s many faces: emergency, threat,

enemy and apocalypse, all which must be routinely, vigilantly confronted so

that the political order can remain concretely oriented. The shadow cast by

death discloses an order’s concrete contours, and gives shape to an order’s

equally concrete “Aufgaben und Missionen.”25

In the context of the katechon as a concept during the Holy Roman

Empire, the disclosive shadow of death is cast over the whole of history.

Throughout the course of Nomos der Erde, however, Schmitt invokes the

katechon less and less as a particular historical figure and more and more as

a generalized concept of theologically-supported political finitude. As a result

of this rhetorical shift in Schmitt's use of the figure, death’s shadow gets scaled

down. Paralleling the displacement from miracle to sovereign exception in

Politische Theologie, as the katechon comes to embody a general political

concept, it loses the universal applicability found in its original theological

context and gets retrofitted by Schmitt to each time accommodate a particular

political milieu. Paul’s katechon postpones the entire world from ending, while

Schmitt’s generalized katechon postpones the end for a particular empire.

Julia Hell elaborates on the historical stakes of this displacement when

she reads Schmitt’s katechon as a scopic “ruin-gazer” scenario, in which “the

25 Ibid., 31.

23

imperial sovereign—empire or emperor—who, with its or his eyes fixed on the

end of time, prepares for a political battle to delay that very end.” Contending

with Mehring’s claim that this scenario reflects a politicized theology of history

which conceives of the end as “historically meaningful,”26 Hell argues that we

understand Schmitt’s katechon as “a re-conceptualization of the trope of

imperial decline, a re-conceptualization that does not require the idea of a

meaningful ending—merely the understanding that empires do eventually

come to an end. . . . In sum, we are not dealing with a theological politics of

empire that has eschatology as its very substance, but a form of imperial

theology, that is, a politics of empire that feeds on the remnants of

eschatological history and their abandoned meanings.”27 The foodstuff upon

which Schmitt’s "politics of empire" feeds is thus the remnants of a certain

ruin-gazer scenario. In effect, Schmitt’s politics feeds on the ruins of ruins, on

an image of historical ruins itself eroded down to ruined form by the course of

time.28 Without pausing to consider whether an "imperial theology" is really the

26 See Reinhard Mehring, “Karl Löwith, Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes und das Ende der Geschichte,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 48.3 (1996): 234. 27 Julia Hell, “Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future,” The Germanic Review Vol 84, Number 4 (Fall 2009): 311. 28 In general, Schmitt tends to treat the remnants he finds among these ruins as plug-and-play tools, ready right out of the box to be inserted into political theory—anything else is most likely to be returned to the historical scrap heap of theology from when it came. We recall, for example, that while Schmitt famously asserts in Politische Theologie that “alle prägnanten Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre sind säkularisierte theologische Begriffe,” (Politische Theologie, 44), he contends only with the concept of sovereignty.

24

same as a "politics of empire," we will affirm that Hell is right to stress, over

and against Mehring, that Schmitt’s project does not require or affirm the full

resurrection of a theological view of history, but rather moves among its

hollowed-out structures looking for useful scraps. Mehring’s point of view lines

up with Grossheutschi’s hermeneutic slip mentioned earlier, in which he

assigns to Schmitt’s “positive” katechons the kind of theological view of history

which Hell dismisses as unsuited for Schmitt’s thought.

Before approaching the role of the katechon in Schmitt’s new nomos,

let us outline in greater detail the relation between authority and power in the

katechon’s medieval incarnation as Schmitt understands it. As previously

stated, Schmitt understands the concept as originally referring to a political

power whose legitimacy is granted by a religious authority: the pope

legitimates the emperor, who then sets out on the sort of “concrete tasks and

missions” designed to protect the empire, to stave off disorder, to effectively

restrain the Antichrist from appearing. The church acts as guarantor or

signator for the emperor’s actions, by signing off on the katechonic

significance of these actions and thus effectively controlling their

interpretations. One imagines that, sent off on his missions, the emperor bears

a sort of letter signed and sealed by the church, with a stamp reading “Official

Katechon.”

25

Schmitt’s concern for the development of a theological consciousness

in political practice is not only a matter of conceiving proper action, such as the

defense of a nation or the acquisition of territory, it is also a matter of

cultivating a consciousness for why these actions are taking place, a

consciousness which can orient these actions within a framework. For Schmitt,

the Holy Roman Empire maintained this consciousness through the

legitimation of imperial praxis as katechonic by the authority of the church.

This legitimation was possible, Schmitt argues, because of the profound unity

of medieval Christendom and its "supreme power."29

This unity was confirmed by the kings’ use of imperial names—

imperator and imperia—and their reception of mandates from the pope. These

mandates used church authority to imperial praxis as katechonic. Schmitt

underscores that the emperor’s office was “ein Auftrag, der aus einer völlig

anderen Sphäre stammt als die Würde des Königtums . . . ”30 The emperor

can “nach Vollendung eines Kreuzzuges seiner Kaiserkrone in aller Demut

und Bescheidenheit niederlegen, ohne sich etwas zu vergeben. Er tritt dann

29 This unity, Schmitt argues, encompasses the seats of emperor and pope as ‘antitheses’: “The medieval West and Central European unity of imperium and sacerdotium was never a centralized accumulation of power in the hands of one person. From the beginning, it rested on the distinction between potestas and auctoritas as two distinct lines of order of the same encompassing unity. Thus, the antitheses of emperor and pope were not absolute, but rather diversi ordines in which the order of the respublica Christiana resided.” See Schmitt, Nomos, 30. 30 Schmitt, Nomos, 31.

26

aus der erhöhten Reichsstellung in seine natürliche Stellung zurück und ist

dann nur noch König seines Landes.”31 The status of imperial power as a

temporary entity designed to address particular cases in which the political

order requires defense should recall the status of the sovereign dictator that

Schmitt outlined some thirty years previously. Schmitt thus clandestinely

swathes his own theories of the sovereign state of exception in historical

legitimacy. Katechon, then, is another name for the sovereign, and we can find

the modern sovereign of Politische Theologie already inscribed within the

tradition of the katechon.

Historically this tradition remains alive as long as auctoritas retains its

political efficacy: “Selbst als die kaiserliche potestas in der Wirklichkeit zu

einem machtlosen Namen geworden war, bestand die umfassende

Gesamtordnung des mittelalterlichen europäischen Völkerrechts weiter,

solange die auctoritas des Papstes ausreichte, Missionsaufträge und

Kreuzzugsmandate zu erteilen und neue Missionsgebiete zu verleihen. 32 The

Pope’s auctoritas suffices to preserve order because preservation is a matter

of existential orientation, which the sacerdotium can offer as long as it is

allowed to flourish in the public sphere.

31 Ibid., 32. 32 Ibid., 35.

27

Following his celebration of the political-theological unity perfected by

the Holy Roman Empire, Schmitt marks the various forces responsible for

subsequently undermining this unity and occulting the katechonic orientation:

“ein Zeichen der Auflösung des mittelalterlichen christlichen Reiches, daß sich

(seit dem 13. Jahrhundert) politische Einheiten bilden, die sich nicht nur

tatsächlich, sondern immer mehr auch rechtlich dem Imperium entziehen,

während sie die Auctoritas des Sacerdotium auf rein geistige Dinge

abzudrängen suchen.”33 Not only was the auctoritas slowly reined in over time,

thus depriving imperial power of its katechonic orientation, but repetitions of

pre-Christian influences also began to compete with the Christian church in

the realm of politics: “mittelalterliche Renovationen, Reproduktionen und

Repristinationen antik-heidnischer Begriffe”34 began to emerge which

represented the “deepest antithesis” to the political-theological unity of the

respublica Christiana. The revival of pre-Christian influence in the political

sphere produced a new form of Caesarism that for Schmitt lost any authentic

sense of orientation or history, obscuring the katechonic perspective, and with

it the crucial awareness that political power was ineluctably mortal: the

"Caesars" of the middle ages failed or refused to acknowledge their own

33 Ibid., 34. 34 Ibid., 32.

28

finitude as political agents, and so abandoned the essential framework for

effective political consciousness.

One does not have to look hard to observe that Schmitt has set up

these “renovations, reproductions, and revivals” of ancient heathen concepts

to collectively form a disparaged double to his own efforts at retrieving

elements of Christian theology. It is supposedly matter of nothing less than the

"deepest antithesis" between the idealized unity of auctoritas and potestas that

underwrites the katechon on the one hand and those heathen engagements

on the other. These engagements are already figured in the sort of paranoiac

language familiar to anyone versed in Schmitt’s writings on enmity. Within the

contested territory of the theological-political, Schmitt effectively plays the

katechon himself, protecting the unity of auctoritas and potestas against its

multiple enemies, who are bent on disseminating inferior simulacra of

Schmitt’s own invocation of ancient theology.

What, finally, separates Schmitt’s invocations of Christian theology from

these “renovations, reproductions and revivals”? Do they differ merely by

object, or by method as well? Since for Schmitt the Christian framework is

innately superior to its competitors because of its relation to concrete life, that

is, to finitude. Other theological frameworks provide only abstract notions of

eternity. Schmitt appropriates the Christian framework of history because it is

29

conscious of a beginning and an end, of a finitude divinely-ordained, and thus

purposeful.35 This appropriation marks a desire within right-wing twentieth-

century German thought, embodied by Schmitt, Heidegger and Jünger, to

mark finitude and then inscribe it within a heroic, destinal sense of purpose.36

Methodologically, Schmitt approaches Christian concepts from a

perspective which disregards the divinity of their authority. It is not because

these concepts are ordained or legislated by the Christian God, and thus one

does not incorporate them into political theory out of respect or fear of this

God’s authority. One approaches these theological elements rather by

acknowledging the superior efficacy of their structures: Schmitt privileges them

not because they are divinely right, but because they work. Schmitt assumes

the success of these structures because the conceptual antithesis, the

bureaucratic form of the Weimar-era government, has clearly failed.

Schmitt uses this theologically-guided "concrete orientation" to support

the construction of a new nomos, which occurs at the end of a historical

trajectory stretching from the Holy Roman Empire to the postwar twentieth-

century. When following this trajectory one can observe Schmitt grapple with

the progressive withdrawal of authority from the political sphere: from the

35 See Löwith’s introduction, Meaning in History. 36 See Susan Buck-Morss, “Sovereign Right and the Global Left,” Cultural Critique No. 69 (Spring 2008): 145-171.

30

idealized unity of authority and power in antiquity, through the pale attempts at

legitimacy in the form of the Versailles Treaty, towards the new nomos, which

he must devise a means to support. The question remains whether the means

of support that Schmitt offers can be schematized according to the analytics of

authority and power that Arendt establishes. Part of the force behind this

support lies undoubtedly in the occasionally mythic, occasionally prophetic

character of Schmitt’s discourse, in which he issues statements such as “I

speak of a new nomos of the earth.”37 Such vague declarations can be read

not only as resulting from their status as future-oriented predictions, but as

implicit efforts to re-capture the lost force of religious auctoritas in encrypted

form.

Schmitt’s effort to legitimate his new nomos in the absence of traditional

authority also repeats his typically ambiguous form of analysis which

simultaneously describes a situation as it purportedly is, but also how it should

be, once various forces of occultation have been removed.38 But unlike earlier

works such as Politische Theologie, in which such an analysis remained a

latent source of ambiguity, Nomos der Erde foregrounds this double quality as

37 See Schmitt, Nomos, 187-209. 38 “So handelt es sich für uns um den für jede geschichtliche Epoche wesentlichen, raum-einteilenden Grundvorgang, um das Struktur-bestimmende Zusammentreffen von Ordnung und Ortung im Zusammenleben der Völker auf dem inzwischen wissenschaftlich vermessenen Planeten.” Schmitt, Nomos, 49.

31

belonging to a nomos grasped in its originary meaning: “Trotz jener, schon in

der klassischen Zeit eintretende Veränderung der Denk- und Ausdrucksweise

ist stets erkennbar geblieben, dal das Wort Nomos ursprünglich keineswegs

eine blosse Setzung angibt, in de Sein und Sollen getrennt und die

Raumstruktur einer konkreten Ordnunj auß er Acht gelassen werden könnte.

Diese spätere Verwendung gehört vielmehr zum Sprachgebrauch einer

absinkenden Zeit, die sich nicht mehr mit ihrem Ursprung und Anfang zu

verbinden wußte . . .”39 In its restored unity of the is and the ought, which meet

one another in the existential affirmation of the founding act, the nomos to

come is always-already that which has been at work throughout history.

Above all, however, the new nomos contends with the modern

withdrawal of authority through its evental force. Its authority no longer stems

from its continuity with the past, or from its embodiment of a tradition. As

reactionary as Schmitt is, and as nostalgia-tinged as his analysis might

appear, he is only interested in promoting his conservatism from within the

bounds of historical possibility: with the binds of church authority having been

broken by its retreat into the private sphere, what remains is the possibility of

constituting authority in evental form, through the self-foundation of the nomos.

“Der Nomos im ursprünglichen Sinne aber ist grade die volle Unmittelbarkeit

39 Ibid., 38-39.

32

einer nicht durch Gesetze vermittelten Rechtskraft; er ist ein konstituierendes

geschichtliches Ereignis, ein Akt der Legitimität, der die Legalität des bloßen

Gesetzes überhaupt erst sinnvoll macht.”40 For Schmitt, legitimacy concerns

the institution and control of meaning, it makes the legality of the law

meaningful in the first place. In its evental self-foundation, the nomos grants

legitimacy, in other words, authority, to the law.

Schmitt’s conception of nomos as a foundational act betrays a

revolutionary tendency that would appear to be at odds with conservatism and

the katechonic conception of political order. A separate inquiry would be

needed to mark the contaminations of revolutionary rhetoric within Schmitt’s

avowed counter-revolutionary discourse, this would further mark certain

affinities between far-left and far-right political theories.41 Suffice to say here

that the thrust of decisionism behind the sovereign exception in Politische

Theologie becomes identified in Nomos der Erde with the foundation of

political order itself, substituting for the traditional form of authority founded on

the past.

40 Ibid., 42. 41 Jacob Taubes details this at-times subterranean affinity extensively in Die Politische Theologie des Paulus. See also Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) and Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000).

33

The trace of the theological is not limited here to nomos’ evental status,

it also concerns nomos’ ability to "concretely orient." To this effect Schmitt

offers that nomos can “als eine Mauer bezeichnet werden, weil auch die

Mauer auf sakralen Ortungen beruht.”42 Sacred for Schmitt always means

concrete. Walls are sacred because they demarcate territories and peoples.

“Concrete orientation” belongs to Schmitt’s repertoire of concepts, along

with Ausnahmezustand and katechon itself, which aim to reckon with the fate

of politics in an era of authority’s decline. “Orientation” in particular is a

vocabulary word that Schmitt shares with Arendt, as both express

philosophical interest in the modern need for a people to orient themselves in

history once certain traditional supports or bolsters have withdrawn. Both

Schmitt and Arendt take recourse to ancient Rome in their efforts to address

this modern need. The Roman Empire becomes for Schmitt the paradigm of

political order because of its "concrete orientation," in which everything in the

Imperium Romanum is oriented towards Rome itself. In much the same way,

Arendt privileges the Roman Empire as the exemplary locus of traditional

authority, in which, according to a kind of centripetal politics, all is derived from

Rome.

42 Schmitt, Nomos, 40.

34

Schmitt’s new nomos finds its model of impossible imitation in the

concept of the katechon in the Holy Roman Empire: the deployment of this

concept and its attendant "concrete orientation" acts a double-bind for the

nomos because the katechon represents an idealized model whose imitation

has been foreclosed upon by the course of history, in part due to the

withdrawal of religious authority from the public sphere. Schmitt will have to

find another way to guarantee or legitimate "concrete orientation." He attests

that he’s not interested in "conjuring acts," or in breathing "artificial new life"

into old concepts,43 thus rhetorically cordoning off his theoretical project from

certain precincts of spectrality and technology. Considering the extent to which

Schmitt compresses and regiments his rhetoric, it is difficult to imagine that the

contrast which these paganisms pose to Schmitt’s political Catholicism is

anything accidental. That is to say, the Catholicism of Schmitt’s politics

extends as well to the maintenance of a border between the dead and living,

specifically, between concepts that are dead and concepts that are still alive,

and Schmitt, in typical form, seeks to police this border by disavowing its

relation to conjurers of the dead and the Doctor Frankensteins of artificial life.

In his political theology, the dead, Schmitt emphatically claims, will not come

43 Ibid., 38: “Wenn ich demgegenüber das Wort Nomos wieder in seinem ursprünglicher Sinne verwende, so geschieht das nicht, um toten Mythen ein künstliches neue: Leben einzuhauchen oder leere Schatten zu beschwören.”

35

back to life: “no ghosts here!” he says, because a Catholic knows that only

God can breathe life into dead concepts.

Schmitt’s disavowal of the spectral and the technological in this case

indexes a central concern for twentieth-century discourse on the theological-

political: the status and stakes of secularization.44 It is no coincidence that

Schmitt is allergic to trafficking with conceptual ghosts. To deal with or produce

phantoms would go against Schmitt’s political theory which, as we have said,

is suffused with death, obsessed with identifying it, controlling it, naming it, in

the face of threats, finitude, and the enemy.

Schmitt's defense of his theoretical strategy against pagan enemies

refers us again to the broader problem of tradition which, as detailed in the

introduction, so consumes twentieth-century German political thought. This

breakdown is what causes authority to become a problem for theological-

political thought. Schmitt must rhetorically cordon off his nomos project from

rivals who illegitimately trespass into the past, because he accepts an

44 As Laurence Rickels notes, the secular era is marked by a proliferation of ghosts, of life unbounded from the demarcations enforced by religious authority. See Rickels, The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 22: “There emerged, then, in our modern secular era, in the new cleaned-up place of death’s representation, an uncontrollable blending of boundaries between life and death. Death was growing uncanny, unburiable, unframeable, unrepresentable, unmournable.”

36

irrevocable breakdown in tradition as such and seeks to access an auctoritas

that can survive without tradition’s continuity.45

Schmitt’s reading of the katechon offers an exemplary case for our

inquiry into the question of authority in twentieth-century German political

theology because it sets authority in relation to the problem of the end of the

world. We refer to the end of the world as a problem because it is not certain,

philosophically or theologically or any other way, what this end would be and

how we should orient ourselves towards it, if such an orientation were even

possible. Because it makes the end of the world a political concern, Schmitt’s

reading of the katechon as a figure of authority should be evaluated along a

concurrent political-theological thinking of messianism in twentieth-century

Germany.

By adopting the katechon as the central figure for a theologically-

motivated thinking of political order, Schmitt pulls off a significant sleight-of-

hand, condensing the two destructive-redemptive poles of the apocalypse into

one phenomenon: the messianic event. This condensation pumps up the

theological feeling of dread associated with the destructive wrath of the

Antichrist, expanding it into a more generalized fear of the Messiah’s return,

45 Arendt marks the essential dependency of authority on tradition in her essay, see Between Past and Future, 127.

37

and using this fear to legitimate the need to protect sovereign authority

accordingly.

This condensation ultimately allows Schmitt to read the messianic event

as a metaphor for the onset of political revolution. In this context Taubes reads

Schmitt’s apocalyptics as theological shorthand for his right-wing fear of

revolution, hence his designation of Schmitt as the “apocalypticist for the

counter-revolution.”46 Theology thus allows Schmitt to hypostasize political

revolution into an event equivalent to the end of the world: in this way

Schmitt’s politics function as the right-wing counterpart to left-wing

revolutionary politics infused with messianic or utopic sensibilities.

From Taubes’ perspective, not only Schmitt’s sovereign but institutional

authority as a whole fears Paul’s revolutionary declaration separating earthly

from divine authority: the Good News is bad news to those in charge, because

the salvation of humankind means the necessary termination of their authority.

For Taubes this holds just as true for rabbinical Judaism as it does for the

sovereign. In this context Elettra Stimilli writes: “In Taubes’ Augen ist jene

auch dem ‘Mysterium Judaicum’ wesentliche ‘katechontische Form der

Existenz’ also dem jüdischen Rabbinismus zuzuschreiben, durch den sie zu

46 See Jacob Taubes, “Carl Schmitt: ein Apokalyptiker der Gegenrevolution,” in Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fügung (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1987).

38

einer retardierenden und gerade in diesem Sinne politischen Macht geworden

ist, nicht unähnlich derjenigen, die Schmitt in der res publica Christiana

verwirklicht sieht.”47 Taubes sees the institution of Jewish religion as being

“essentially katechonic,” refusing the radicality of the messianic message: for

Taubes rabbinical Judaism insists without fail on building “immer neue Zäune

um die Thora,”48 in order to protect it against the threat of the messianic event.

Taubes offers a schematic reading of Schmitt’s investment in the

katechon in which he positions himself as Schmitt’s political-theological

counterpart: “Das Interesse von Schmitt war nur eines: dass die Partei, dass

das Chaos nicht nach oben kommt, dass der Staat bleibt. Um welchen Preis

auch immer. Das ist für Theologen und Philosophen schwer nachzuvollziehen;

für den Juristen aber gilt: solange auch nur eine juristiche Form gefunden

werden kann, mit welcher Spitzfindigkeit auch immer, ist es unbedingt zu tun,

denn sonst regiert das Chaos. Das ist das, was er später das Katechon nennt:

Der Aufhalter, der das Chaos, das von unten drängt, niederhält. Das ist nicht

meine Weltanschauung, das ist nicht meine Erfahrung. Ich kann mir vorstellen

als Apokalyptiker: soll sie zugrunde gehn. I have no spiritual investment in the

47 Jacob Taubes, Der Preis des Messianismus, ed. Ellettra Stimilli (Würzberg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 158. 48 Jacob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie (Berlin: A. Francke, 1947), 25.

39

world as it is.”49 Taubes here draws attention to the technicity of Schmitt’s

katechonic framework, that the proper juristic form must be found that can

keep a lid on apocalyptic pressure from below, regardless of its origin or moral

context.50 In contrast to the theologian or the philosopher, the jurist is willing to

spare no expense to locate this form. We might say that the jurist in a way the

most modern of the three, because his disposition towards concepts resonates

the most with scientific inquiry. While Taubes dismisses the katechon from his

own side, saying “das ist nicht meine Weltanschaaung, das ist nicht meine

Erfahrung,” it is clear that the katechon belongs to that range of concepts

which Taubes believes he must establish himself against as part of his

participation in Schmitt’s program of theoretical enmity. Throughout his

Auseinanderzetzung with Schmitt, Taubes is more than happy to sign on to a

philosophical polemics which effectively divides a spectrum of ideas into a

dualist cosmology, organizing it around a meridian of complementary

antagonism. To this effect Taubes’ essay on Schmitt builds a cosmo-

theoretical schema in which “Carl Schmitt denkt apokalyptisch, aber von oben

her, von den Gewalten; ich denke von unten her.”51 The katechon is in fact

part of Taubes’ Weltanschaaung, because it is the exact opposite of his

49 In English in the original. Taubes, Paulus, 139. 50 Ibid. 51 Taubes, Gegenstrebige Fügung, 22.

40

Weltanschaaung, belonging both to the territory of political sovereignty and to

the restraining forces within Judaic religion. The katechon in Taubes thus

stands for anti-messianic forces in general, and should be read as part of

Taubes’ critique of Scholem’s reading of messianism: it is not, as Scholem

claims, messianism which keeps Jews out of history, but the katechonic forces

of organized religion that bulwark against the messianic event by

institutionalizing the meaning of the Torah.52

Finally, it is necessary to address some contemporary critiques of

Schmitt’s identification of katechon with Reich. Grossheutschi provides

historical evidence of interpretations of the katechon that run counter to the

imperial interpretation first promoted by Tertullian. In his extended analysis of

the tricky position of Obrigkeit in Paul’s letters, Grossheutschi effectively

supports these counter-interpretations, arguing that the fundamental

indifference of the Christian believer towards earthly authority precludes the

possibility of reading katechon as Reich: “Eigentlich betrifft die Obrigkeit die

Christen nicht mehr, sie ist gleichgültig geworden für diejenigen, die frei

geworden sind von der Sünde....Solange die Christen gegenüber der Obrigkeit

eine pragmatische Haltung einnahmen, gleichweit entfernt von der

Vergöttlichung wie von der Dämonisierung, bestand kein Grund, das Katechon

52 See Taubes, “Der Messianismus und sein Preis” in Vom Kult zu Kultur.

41

auf Rom zu deuten. Erst als sie —gezwungen durch die Zeitumstände—ihre

neutrale Haltung aufgaben und zu werten begannen, wurde die

eschatologische ‘Aufladung’ Roms möglich.”53 Within Paul’s perspective,

Christians maintain an indifferent or pragmatic Haltung in relation to earthly

authority as long as the theological “shortness” of time, the nearness of the

present to the messianic event, retains a real historical efficacy. Only after the

messiah defaults on his arrival can the Roman Empire be inscribed within an

eschatological framework.54

Given the previously mentioned rhetorical shift between First and

Second Thessalonians concerning the status of earthly Obrigkeit, however, it

is quite difficult to describe ultimately what sort of relation this "gleichgültigkeit"

might be. The very space of hermeneutic openness that surrounds this

ambiguous term has in part contributed over time to theological-political

variants. We recall that for Schmitt an imperialized katechon is “die einzige

Möglichkeit, als Christ Geschichte zu verstehen und sinnvoll zu finden.” In light

of Grossheutschi’s reading, we can say that yes, the katechon does represent

the possibility of understanding history from a Christian perspective, but this

53 Grossheutschi, Katechon, 25. 54 See Taubes, Vom Kult zu Kultur, 230.

42

possibility only opens up in the wake of the Messiah’s non-arrival, in the failed

terminus of Pauline eschatology and the persistent continuation of history.

The most recent sustained critique of Schmitt’s interpretation of the

katechon comes from Giorgio Agamben, who reads Second Thessalonians

with a strong emphasis on katagerein, the “rendering inoperative” or de-

legitimizing of every power in messianic time. Addressing Schmitt’s imperial

reading, Agamben writes that “every theory of the State, including Hobbes’—

which thinks of it as a power destined to block or delay catastrophe—can be

taken as a secularization of this interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2. Yet the

fact remains that despite its obscurity, this Pauline passage does not harbor

any positive valuation of the katechon. To the contrary, it is what must be held

back in order that the 'mystery of anomia' be revealed fully.'”55 "Anomia,"

Agamben stresses, should not be translated as iniquity or sin, but should

mean only “absence of law.” Paul, in fact, presents himself to the Gentiles as

the one “outside the law.” Anomia is the condition of the law in messianic

time, its state of being "rendered inoperative."

For Agamben, the "unveiling" of the mystery of anomia, which occurs

when the katechon is "removed," is an act or event akin to the deconstruction

55 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: a commentary on the letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 110.

43

of authority— if we take notice here of another example of rhetorical slippage

between power, authority and force. “The katechon is therefore the force—the

Roman Empire as well as every constituted authority—that clashes with and

hides katargesis, the state of tendential lawlessness that characterizes the

messianic, and in this sense delays unveiling the mystery of lawlessness. The

unveiling of this mystery entails bringing to light the inoperativity of the law and

the substantial illegitimacy of each and every power in Messianic time. . . . It is

therefore possible to conceive of katechon and anomos not as two separate

figures, but as one single power before and after the final unveiling.” 56 The

katechon is an authority such as the Roman Empire, which stands in the way

of the unveiling of the illegitimacy of all earthly authority. In reading the

katechon as an authority flipped over in messianic time to reveal its essential

illegitimacy Agamben essentially ascribes a globalized deconstructive capacity

to the messianic event.

A small but crucial rhetorical shift here underscores, however, a

broader critical tension concerning authority in Agamben’s thought. Agamben

begins his closing argument against the imperialized katechon with the

statement that it is “possible to conceive” that in fact the katechon and anomos

are one and the same, and then finishes with the dramatic conclusion that as a

56 Ibid., 111.

44

result of this “possibility,” 2 Thessalonians 2 “may not be used to found a

‘Christian doctrine’ of power in any manner whatsoever.”57 What begins as a

conjecture or hypothesis in Agamben’s reading gathers steam until at the end

of the paragraph it becomes the ground for a categorical dismissal of the

imperial reading of the katechon. This shift from open conjecture to certainty

when critically dismantling an imperial ideology is indicative of Agamben’s

general systematic deconstruction of earthly authority which in turn subtly

installs Agamben himself in the authoritative position—if for Derrida what is

undeconstructible is called justice, for Agamben what is undeconstructible is

called Agamben.58

Readers of Agamben will no doubt observe the central role that Walter

Benjamin plays in the ontological contours specific here to Agamben’s reading

of Saint Paul. Agamben’s emphasis on a messianic inoperativity of the law is

culled from Benjamin’s political-theological writings, specifically from

Benjamin’s understanding of splinters of messianic time that create

discontinuous, crystalline Stillstands within the course of history.59

Furthermore, the view to a profound congruence between Benjamin and Paul

57 Ibid. 58 Derrida reads similar cases of Agamben’s rhetorical slides in The Beast and the Sovereign, see 324-332. 59 See “Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption,” and “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy.

45

that guides a great deal of The Time That Remains is, as Agamben attests

from the outset, indebted to Taubes’ lectures on Paul. Agamben’s text

functions as something like a philosophical supplement to Taubes’ comments

on messianism as well as his identification of Schmitt as an "apocalyptician of

the counter-revolution." In the context of the theological-political problem of

authority, Taubes and Agamben both proclaim themselves as something like

starting players for Team Benjamin, critically engaging the figure of the

katechon in Schmitt from a Messianic perspective in order to offer a

deconstructive reading of the Pauline regard for earthly authority. Thus our

reading of the katechon in Schmitt and his interlocutors can now function as a

pivotal point upon which we can turn to discuss in greater detail the role of

authority in twentieth-century writings on the political valences of the

messianic.

46