It is evident that the present enquiry returns to the heart of the problem of the katechon. In its light the latter appears as the difficulty of a particular praxis that must at once hold to the demands of servitium with regard to necessaria, to building a barrier against anomie, to recognizing fully the primacy of the spiritual. Consequently the katechon must take the form of a complex, organized power but not that which belongs to empire nor that which belongs to the Church. Furthermore, if the katechon also has a mediating role, it will recognize the claims of political power just as much as the testimony of those who have received ‘the love of truth’. But to what extent is this possible? It is clear the power the katechon wields is not mere fiction, it is equally clear that it proves infinitely weaker than the power of the Adversary, and while its function is essentially and ineluctably linked to the testimony [of the believers], its practical use is in doubt: must it not ultimately be taken out of the way? All medietas is destined to collapse in the apocalyptic hour. Can the ecclesia militans1 the church militant, be eternal? And if, as it seems, the katechon occupies the position of the middle in this time (nel secolo) playing a role of temperance and moderation, then it must also have special affinity for those who expectantly wait in spe (hope) for the novissima (the Last Hour) and for that reason it will want to be taken out of the way.
Why a withholding power? The ambivalence it generates seems insuperable. In its struggle to contain the Antikeimenos (that is, the community of the Antichrist) it appears to stand clearly on the side of the righteous but up to what point? Its role could just as well be seen as an attempt to sustain the energy of the Adversary, knowing well that the pleroma of the latter will coincide with its own destruction. Would this catechontic activity consist then in extending as far as possible the moment in which the Iniquitous is allowed to manifest himself as energos (in all his energy)? Will catechontic opposition eventually turn into an assisting of the will to endure (assuming that this is indeed the will of the Antikeimenos – rather than to rush to its own end)? Catechontic praxis then would be a prime exemplum of heterogenesis of ends. It will amount to an admission that all opposition within the domain of the Prince of this world is destined to turn into a contributing factor to his will to power. Only faith in Jesus who is the Christ, faith upon which the firm hope in His coming is founded, delivers us from evil (libera nos a malo), whereas any withholding power opposing the advance of anomie will not only become an integral part of the latter’s history but it will also drive its force to greater violence, like a river that has burst its banks.
The katechon cannot fail to participate in the most intimate fashion with the principle it strives to withhold and delay, if not bring to a halt. It is impossible not to retain what you seek to contain. Every catechontic power must constitute itself within the dimension, even the cosmic dimension, of the principle of anomie that is destined to triumph. Evidently, the former could not be derived from the latter since both powers are expressions of a plan that transcends them, a plan that makes history into the ultimate test whose purpose is to arrive at a clear-cut separation between those who believe in the true and those who believe in the false. However, even while the katechon opposes the Adversary it cannot fail to preserve the latter’s energy and postpone his eruption – we have seen this in its most ‘diabolical’ form in the ‘retention’ of the numbers of the Antichrist in the Church.
Conversely, one could also argue: it is by reason of His mercy that the katechon works as if the day of the Lord could be deferred or even never happen. It is not only political and civil authorities (exousiai) in their role as true defensor pacis, defenders of peace, but also spiritual authorities who, though aware, even if naively, of the appalling sufferings necessarily preceding the parousia, could end up acting in such a way as not to see them. Who could bear the violent upheaval when the blood of the righteous will be shed, children killed in the latrines and the cemeteries of the saints desecrated (Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel, IV, 51)? The katechon, fully aware of the inevitability of the End and in possession of that faith which grounds the hope for it, may find the advance of destruction and ruin, of anomie and apoleia intolerable and out of love for mankind (philanthropia) rise against the Adversary. It is on this basis that the Church will recognize the ‘good’ function of imperial power. And it is according to this scheme that the Son of Perdition turns into the barbarian and the universalism of imperial law is providentially wedded to the evangelizing mission; thus empire and the Church jointly hold the form of the Age in vigilant expectation while quelling the pride of impatience. Is this not the model of all ‘holy alliance’ between political power and the Papacy?
This irenistic and conciliatory philosophy of history has been endlessly repeated in various ways; however, it holds only if the aporias we encountered so far are not taken into account. In fact, if authentic catechontic power is only conceivable as an internal dimension of empire, it will inevitably come into competition with spiritual authority. Were the empire to be conceived as the enemy of the Adversary, no exegesis of the apocalyptic tradition from Daniel right up to the Apocalypse of John would carry any weight. If we confused anomie, which is the spirit of the Iniquitous, with anarchy or reduced it to barbarism, we would be misunderstanding its structure and missing its importance. The Adversary does not attack from the ‘outside’ like a foreign invader! He emerges from the Age that bears the name of the Son – indeed, even from within the bosom of His Church. Even more, he emerges from that imperial power which providentially prepares the world for the universalism of the gospel of the new Covenant. If opposition to him is to be effective, the katechon must seem able to oppose itself to all the powers of the Age, or at least, to those intrinsic aspects of them through which they participate or are forced to participate in the power of the Antichrist.
The ‘history’ of the Antichrist is made up of edicts, laws and kings; he wages wars for dominion not rapine. They who lament Babylon, the kings of the earth, the merchants (‘emporoi’), the great merchants, in the end, ‘shall see the smoke of her burning’, for no one buys gold and silver, fine linen and purple, ivory, brass and iron anymore. It is the wrath of God (ira Dei) that destroys ‘all magnificence and splendour’ (Rev 18:9:19) not the tents and carts of the barbaric hordes! Moreover, the Adversary is well aware that the empire must also be a consummate spiritual power. Far from revealing an anarchic drive, the realm of the Adversary combines sword and altar and for this reason he must rise like God and found his own cult and following. The Adversary is not an anarchist but an apostate and apostasy, the ordering of apostasy, is on the whole a civil, political and religious fact. It is undoubtedly anomos but only with respect to the law of Christ, that is, the foolishness of the preaching of the Cross (1 Corinthians 1:18). Could imperial power fail to contain within itself this anomie without being forced to express it violently? And how then could it be a katechon in this regard? Only in the sense that it contains anomie within itself, in the sense the latter constitutes its secret. If expressed in its fullness the conflict with the ekklesia would be unavoidable – and its outcome prescribed. For the kingdom of the Antikeimenos to last, it is necessary that the power of imperial order – which cannot fail to be also spiritual order – ‘guard’ his spirit, veil or re-veil without ever completely unveiling it. In this way, Adversary and empire could interweave their destinies without confusing them. But could Church and empire be able to do this – and precisely by means of mediation reach a catechontic compromise?
The charisma of the Church consists entirely in the proclamation of the Kingdom – or even in its actual proximity, its being-here-and-now and in every instant for those who believe – and hence in preaching now the radical conversio of the human. What could this mission have to do with that of the katechon? The katechon acts only in the face of or perhaps, as we have seen, within the power of the Antichrist. Will the Church confront this problem only negatively – on account of the antichrists it harbours within it? Is it in order to offer a line of defence to their number and act as a barrier against them that it too has to take on a catechontic dimension? But then this is true for every worldly power: for the empire too must contain and arrest the forces that undermine the full realization of its own nature, a nature that bolsters the will to grow, to secure and expand its dominions (and for that reason appoints itself a spiritual auctoritas).
The catechontic figure appears increasingly as an ensemble of actors (personae) who, putting on different costumes, perform in different scenes, now appearing decisively political, now religious, now as imperial officers, now as church servants (diakonoi) and ministers (leitourgoi). All the while, the ambivalence of its power grows more radical: keeping the empire from confusing itself with the Adversary and preventing his rapid rise; confining within the Church the numbers of the antichrists, who are not ‘of us’ and keeping the latter from waging a decisive battle against the empire or from reaching a verdict regarding its character. In addition, the katechon, as said above, can pursue an autonomous character (although far less meaningful than before) by representing itself as the bureaucratic-administrative State or ‘police’. The Church can always be tempted to lend support (avvalorare) to its ‘weak’ image – an imperial idea, a ‘grand politics’ is likely to assume the colour of aion and for that reason compete not only with the form of ecclesiastical rule (hierocracy) but also with ecclesiastical rank and honour (tîmê).2 But a katechon that is not properly active (energos) through its membership in and familiarity with the two principal politico-spiritual domains is a pure fiction, a will to powerlessness. Therefore the Church, to the degree it views catechontic energy as indispensable, will seek to compromise with ‘strong governments’, while being aware, with the political realism that distinguishes its entire tradition, that nowhere on earth will there ever be empires which will peacefully obey those who believe their charismatic authority to be the expression of the End of the Age.
The more settled and powerful the epoch of the Political appears to be, the more prized its nomos, the sharper will be its contradiction with the Age. The katechon remains agnostic regarding this eschatological discord – or else seeks to lessen its impact. In this respect it is active within the two realms or, as they are often called, the two cities (duo civitates). In the first realm, whose relations with the Antikeimenon are abyssal, it is a question of putting reasons ‘calculated’ to securing its own continuing survival over the libido dominandi which is its characteristic feature. In the second, it will have to place the universalistic demands of its own mission (which render it ‘homogenous’ with the imperial vocation) over the eschatological preaching for which no worldly power is ‘justified’ in confronting the Enemy, unless it can openly confess that its hope is founded on faith, ‘whosoever acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also’ (1 John 2: 23), something which would ultimately amount to a recognition of the primacy of spiritual auctoritas.
The figure of the katechon is delineated as a place of progressive splittings that take place not only between empire and Church but also within the imperial sphere itself, between those who restrain the impetus of the Adversary and those who restrain the monotheistic ‘anti-trinitarian’, theological-political instances of the Church,3 and also within the Church itself, between those who refrain from a compromise with Rome and those who contain the definitive ‘emergence’ of the antichrists. An equivocal figure, an in-secura maxime, an utmost in-security and thereby characteristic of the Age, of the nunc-et-nondum, now-and-not yet. A figure composed of simulatores, of dissemblers who simulate the will to power but actually aim to contain its expression, who pretend to confront decisively the Antikeimenos but who in reality must join him, who simulate solidarity with the forbearance of the Church but whose resistance is really a sign of the compromise they pursue on the one hand with the earthly powers and on the other with the Adversary himself. Larvatus prodeo, I come forward masked.4 Dissembling is not deceiving, it is pretending (in all the senses of this word) to possess power that in reality you do not have. Only when the katechon wants to raise itself up to the level of autonomous energy does its activity turn into pure deception. If the katechon is to have any autonomous significance, it will have to assert not only the end of the two great contending forces (or the meaninglessness of their confrontation) but also that there is neither epoch nor Age and that time does not manifest an eschatological character but is merely interminable, indifferent duration over which logically the Prince of this world wields absolute power. Were the katechon to reveal a nomos of its own in order to silence the other powers, its figure would turn into a perfect imitation (simia) of the Adversary. If the dominion becomes that of the katechon, the advent of anomie would be inevitable qua apostasy and dissolution of the order secured by the empire.
All these possibilities symbolized in the figure of the katechon need to be carefully weighed together. Each exists for the other by virtue of their conflicts and reciprocal compromises. To abide in the end-time it is necessary that the dominions be reciprocally limited – each of which would wish to be universal – and that each in some way comes to recognize the claims of the other. The katechon is the space of such mediations, including the immanent tendency of every power, shared by the katechon, to reduce every other to itself. A tendency that perhaps becomes more emphatic at the twilight of the Christian Age. All powers are in their turn contained in the Hour of the assertion of the Antichrist, hence their boundaries touch the essence of the latter as they draw near and risk themselves in his destiny. The temptation (cupiditas) to make itself an Idol pertains to the empire while theocratic temptation pertains to the Church, aware that only recollection of the End can hold the form of the Age (this is the path offered by the Accuser5 to Jesus and so the Church could never openly admit it). The emptying out of the eschatological and messianic meanings of time and the forgetting that no power can prevail against the Son of Perdition are all elements immanent to the nature of the katechon. Is it possible to think this from a different perspective without stumbling over ground already traversed?
Thus far the katechon has been mainly understood in the form of mediation, even when it seemed to be at work in the Church confining and ‘guarding’ the antichrists. But the other side of its acting as if the Last Judgement could be delayed might consist in pleading that more time be granted so that the infantes, the new born,6 may become gregoroi, watchful that more time be granted to the heirs incapable of receiving the Logos that they might turn to Him. Where the force of deception is at work (‘energeitai’) this faciaes, this feature of the katechon is employed in the desperate hope of prolonging the End-time – not in order to allow the overwhelming advance of the Adversary, nor to let the empire expand nor to let ecclesiastical order claim spiritual monopoly, but in order to make the ‘stubborn’ receptive until they are open to the love of truth. This pleading prayer is a delaying force, like Abraham’s prayer upon the imminent destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the ‘seed of the Christians’ as Aristides and Justin the Apologist would say. Woe then to those who persecute Christians! Rome must understand that to silence this cult, should it ever be possible, would mean precipitating the dissolution of its own empire.7 Theodore the Interpreter and Theodoret of Cyrus view the katechon along the lines of an intrinsically evangelizing Christian preaching, for if the gospel of the Word has to reach all peoples it will have to survive all persecution. It is only when its purpose is accomplished that the full apocalypse of the Antichrist will come to pass.8
On this view, the Church itself appears as essentially catechontic, working on confining anomie, unceasingly calling for conversion in preparation for the ‘death of time’ that will come like ‘a thief in the night’. The Church knows that the full realization of its work coincides with the revelation of the Son of Perdition, ‘according to the force of Satan’, but it also bears witness to the breath issuing from the mouth of the Lord that shall destroy the kingdom in a ‘great moment’ and when those who were able to resist deception shall be saved. Therefore, in spite of everything, it is necessary tirelessly to invoke metanoia, repentance, to labour in the vineyard of the Lord. Apostasy is not the very last but the last of the historical moments, the conclusion of the Age and the terrible, the anguished spasm of dying time. The possibilities of time burdened with suffering, discord and misery flow into apostasy, like a river flows into the ocean, but there too they are undone. And hereafter and forever there is what the Gospel says: the im-possible of eternal salvation, of which the Kingdom now is the living image, for those who, like the thief on the cross, believe now.
The Church has always maintained this apocalyptic idea throughout the history of its confrontation with the earthly powers. It is not possible to order or hold ‘in form’ the natura vulnerata of human existence unless political sovereignty orients itself towards this idea. Explicitly or implicitly earthly powers must regard themselves as functions of the general conversio through whose grace the Church strives. If they contradict it, or even just assume an agnostic position with regard to it, they will cease to count against anomie, and also lose their political effectiveness. In principle, and by virtue of a general law that for the Church is divine, worldly sovereignty will be that more effective the more it can appear ‘contained’ within a spiritual dimension and the more it knows how to show itself as ministering to those ends manifest in it. To the degree the Church restrains vulnerable human nature from falling prey to deception it is katechon; equally, it is katechon with regard to political sovereignty when it forces the latter to recognize it represents ends that transcend sovereignty; and finally, it is, as we have seen katechon in its own right because it knows that in its state of peregrina9 et militans it cannot but partake of the energies of the Adversary. For all these reasons the Church is the katechon of the end-time, praying it might last until its own work is concluded – the conversion whose testimony had been entrusted to it.
The neat separation between worldly and spiritual power, the conception of theology itself as immanent critique and, furthermore, the demolition of every possible political theology (Barth) seem, accordingly, completely unrealistic, ‘disembodied’.10 However, equally unrealistic is their peaceful coexistence. If the Church as community ‘in prayer’ has a catechontic function then its own symbol must be politically representable, not simply in the forms or ‘figures’ of a cult but in its relation/conflict with worldly sovereignty. The ‘compromise’ with sovereignty necessary to hold the form of the Age will inhere in this very symbol. The Church can radically (radicitus) ‘justify’ only those forms of power capable of exercising authentic catechontic force over the anomie always at work that no human energy could overcome by itself, and which is destined to become manifest in the general apostasy. Any self-referential exercise of power, any containment or arrest of the dissolution of the political that does not lead back to the idea of conversio, any attempt to prolong the end-time not ultimately conceived to permit such conversion cannot appear other than an ‘accomplice’ of the libido dominandi of the Adversary. It will also turn out to be politically ineffective since a spiritually uprooted worldly empire can only accompany the advance of the Adversary.
If there is a katechon which can hope that its own hope is not unfounded then this will be the Church. It is the faith which dwells, to the degree that it does, in the Church that confines the Enemy (as Hildegard of Bingen believed) and the empire’s own duration depends on it. Rome might be ‘reformed’ and not ‘completely destroyed’ (totaliter destructa) only thanks to the Christians’ plea for divine mercy; it is for this that the ‘eternal city’ will be spared the fate of Sodom (Augustine, Sermon 397). However, it is just as clear that Peter did not die for the salvation of her temples, her idolatrous effigies and theatres (Augustine, Sermon 296), and it is certainly not for the ‘beauty’ of the world that God listens to the prayers of those who call upon Him for more time. The full meaning of the eschatological Age that the sign of Christ inaugurates can be none other than universal peace, the peace He grants only to those who have faith in Him. The eschaton of Romans 9:11, that is resurrection, life’s triumph over death, signals primarily the end of stasis11 between Church and Synagogue,12 where casting off (apobole) the latter permits ‘the reconciliation of the world’ and the conversion of the Gentiles by the preaching of their apostle. Only such prayer ‘justifies’ and renders catechontic power effective, even if it is impossible to regard it in exclusively religious-spiritual terms. The universal preaching of the gospel is already historically implicated in the universalism of the empire. The Church cannot be ecclesia ‘incarnate’ other than in the city where contradiction persists, where the Iniquitous is at work (‘energeitai’), where all the worldly powers with intrinsically catechontic characteristics at once conflict and converge with him, where the stasis persists between the holy root that bears the fruit of Israel13 – that can never be repudiated – and its branches: terrible sign of the not-yet (nondum) whose denial would commit the ultimate sin of impatience. In other words, if the Church claims to be superior in ‘holding the Age in form’ then it must implicitly admit that it cannot lack catechontic power and therefore be as ‘rich’ in duplicity and contradiction as all the other worldly and spiritual powers. The Church militant cannot but feed on the energies waging war within the the City of Man, just as ‘Christianity nourishes itself on non Christianity, “feeds” on the wild unchristian shoots of the growth of non Christianity’.14
But if, as I believe, it is impossible to unearth any interpretation of the katechon as the essential dimension of the ekklesia from the exegeses of the Church Fathers then it is just as hard for Christian eschatology to admit such a reading for reasons very difficult to surmount. The catechontic force of the Church springs solely from its profession of faith and stands exclusively in the service of preaching the gospel. It is a paradoxical katechon because it longs for more time while completely relying on the Lord’s design. What sign could bear witness to the fact that the will of the Church is not a will to resist, let alone to dominate in relation to other powers, but stands solely at the service of the Word? Is it perhaps by virtue of this delay that the number is increasing of those who seize the kairos15 that changes their mind and their lives? Does history perhaps show some ‘progress’ in holiness? In the very moment the Church affirms something of the kind it would betray the entire meaning of the apocalypse, becoming the first to make a ‘progressivist’ idol out of history. Thus far the katechon has appeared as the force of an ‘as if’, but there is no way in which the Church can act in accordance with such a ‘method’. It cannot even conceive the idea that the End could somehow be arrested – rather, it must show it to be present at every instant. The Church cannot feign eternal duration. The place, whatever it may be, where the Eternal is represented is not itself eternal – nor must the Eternal be conflated with a time of resisting, of enduring. An essentially spiritual catechontic force lives in the following contradiction: the more it prays to be granted the time needed for conversion, the more it declares time to be insignificant for the act of faith that alone can save; the more it hopes to be granted time enough to ‘deserve’ salvation, the more it confirms salvation and eternity to be in toto different from any idea of merit and endurance. The Church ‘contains’ only by showing the ‘uncontainability’ of Spirit. It is the power of the katechon that either folds back on itself or implodes.
In any case, the Church as an historical community existing in hoc saeculo, in this world but not of it, must relate to the political katechon that, reinforced by secular means, forms an epoch with respect to the overabundance of anomie. Thus the Church must also reflect in itself the structure of worldly organization, the very structure that through its will to power can always be ‘seduced’ into forgetting the eschatological-apocalyptic dimension. The politeuma en ouranois of Philippians 3:20 is a real people, a multitude who live in the world. The futurus does not nullify the meaning of civis, while the limits of civitatis, the ‘product’ of the civis, touch the realms of both apoleia and soteria. Whoever it may be that must or ought to announce the Last Judgement, in the very moment of imploring it to be deferred, is the ultimate katechon. The latter shares a common destiny with the Last Judgement. All these figures appear in a non-chronological succession that unfolds according to a hierarchy of principles. The first figure to be swept away will be that which belongs to those who are simply terrified of the eschaton and who desperately protect their own survival. Then it will be the turn of the different political forms that the idea of empire embraces within itself, an empire which is not abstractly conceived but constituted ex nationibus: it will be the time of apostasy when all the peoples fall away from the empire, from all authentic Roman power. And finally, the Antikeimenos will overturn the form of the ekklesia itself: it will be apostasy from the faith in the Church as the real representative of Christ. The Glossa ordinaria,16 a compendium of the exegetic tradition to which great Medieval authors including Anselm refer (in omnes sanctissimi Pauli apostoli epistolas enarrationes), interprets 2 Thessalonians along these dramatic lines.17 First apostasy, secessio, discessio from the imperial ‘grand form’ of Rome, the translatio of empire into kingdoms; second, apostasy from other imperial forms that tried to imitate her, piecing together a multiplicity of kings (reges); then the dissolution of monarchic auctoritas in the struggle for hegemony among the various individual States; and last but fatally: the secession of the majority of people from the Church and papal authority which presages the radical apostasy incarnated in the Antichrist. The unity of the empire and the unity of faith in the Church will have to be eliminated in one fell swoop for the apocalypse of the Iniquitous to come to pass. A whole tradition from Ambrosiaster to Bruno of Certosa speculated on the novissima along these lines. When the political and spiritual forms become comuni then the time is ripe for the great disaster. In the kingdom of the Antichrist iniquity will be commonplace and the remains of Israel will confess from out of the depths of their desert their willingness to salute the pneuma of the Lord.
For this exegetical tradition the catechontic powers simul stant, simul cadunt, stand and fall together.18 Their entanglement forms that dimension of the Age that stands versus-contra the affirmation of the Antichrist. He will come to pass neither before the dissolution of the empire nor before the pleading prayer of the Church falls forever silent or lies forever unheard. Only the Antikeimenos appears without any catechontic significance yet even he is not a stranger to the fate of the withholding powers, and not only because he too expects them to be swept away. In fact, the way these powers present themselves depends on their actual proximity to the Iniquitous. It is quite possible to believe that one can resist him, can contain him by yielding to his compelling force, or by wearing him down during the time of waiting, or by imitating him thereby assuming his likeness. And thus empire can show itself as an idol, in the form of the Idol that does not admit of any other cult but its own to the point of conflating itself with the nomos of apostasy. And thus the Church, despairing of the meaning of awaiting, and despairing of a humanity awaiting in anguish conceives of its own ‘empire’ without end, turning its own word – that it can efficiently contain and restrain – into the Word. In this way, Church and empire by virtue of an always open possibility immanent to them secede from their own missions. The most momentous sign of the advancing apostasy will not be the abandonment of Church and empire by the multitudes but their secession from their own missions, from the function and the faith which they ought to have embodied.
1 As one of the divisions of the Christian Church, the Church Militant refers to the Christians who live on earth and fight against sin and evil. The two other major divisions are the Church Triumphant (ecclesia triumphans) and the Church Penitent (ecclesia penitens) (tr. note).
2 On political and clerical power, see the relevant passages in Max Weber’s Economy and Society.
3 The obvious reference is to the famous essay by E. Peterson, Monotheism as a Political Problem (1935; 2011), where it is stated that compromise with political authority, understood in the most radical sense as empire, is not available to a trinitarian theology. The present work aims to show that the relation is more complex. It aims to show the exact way a trinitarian theology can develop all those forms of catechontic power in their necessary dialectical entanglement for the constitution of imperial form.
4 The phrase belongs to René Descartes (tr. note).
5 One of the disguises of Satan in the Book of Revelation (12:7–12), also the Book of Job 1:2.
6 1 Peter 2:2, ‘Like newborn infants, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation’ (tr. note).
7 For a ‘guide’ to the relations between the Roman Empire and Christianity from a socio-political standpoint, see P. Siniscalco (1996).
8 The interpretation of the katechon as the gospel of the Word of God is an idea that precedes Calvin’s exegesis, contra Schmitt’s view in ‘Three Possibilities for a Christian World View’ (2009).
9 ecclesia peregrina, pilgrim church, is a term from Augustine’s Civitas Dei and it denotes the earthly historical pilgrimage of the celestial civitas (tr. note).
10 G. Lettieri’s (2002) work on Augustine’s political philosophy and philosophy of history moves along these lines.
11 stasis, an ambivalent term, it means immobility, repose, rest, arrest, but also unrest, strife, insurrection, revolt, civil war. See also Mark 15:7 (tr. note).
12 This forms the eschatological background to E. Peterson’s (one of Schmitt’s opponents) Die Kirche aus Juden und Heiden (1933), on the problem of the relationship between monotheism and political sovereignty. The contradiction consists in the fact that the church professes to be universal, catholic, while ‘containing’ in itself only a part. It must represent itself as the people while not being able to ‘contain’ other than a people, in the hope that it will not disperse before the full realization of the promise. Once more the catechontic dimension of the Church comes to the fore.
13 References here and below are from Romans 11:16 ff. (tr. note).
14 Vasily Rozanov (1977, 65).
15 kairos usually contrasts with chronos. While chronos refers to chronologically/sequentially arranged time, kairos has a more indeterminate sense. It refers to a time span within which something happens and lasts or is completed (tr. note).
16 glossa ordinaria (ordinary gloss) is a collection of interpretations, commentaries and exegeses from the time of the Church Fathers, and thereafter, printed on the margins of the Vulgate Bible (tr. note).
17 For the importance of the glossa ordinaria for interpreting the katechon, see R. Lambertini (2009).
18 This seems to be also Tocqueville’s point of view. The new conserving party will not be sufficient to resist the levelling force of homo democraticus. The political mores could not by themselves contain the ‘wicked’ idea of the complete independence of individuals. Compromise with the Church is unavoidable – such will overcome the great political evil which for him is the clash between civil power and religious authority. The political theology of the katechon, as one can see, underlies all his discourse. For more on this, see the beautiful critical biography by U. Coldagelli, Vita di Tocqueville (Rome, 2005).