This is the second of two articles by the Austrian theologian Wolfgang Palaver in response to the argument by Peter Thiel and others that Christians need the protection of a political restraining force – a ‘Katechon’ – to ward off the anti-Christian world government – or ‘Antichrist’ – that Thiel fears.
In his first article – On the Dangers of a Return to Constantinianism – Palaver argued that the philosopher René Girard (d.2015) saw huge dangers in the idea of a new union of church and state – and also saw sincere Christian faith and practice as a sufficient restrainer of evil. Here Palaver explores the origins of the concept of the Katechon, identifying it not with Christianity but with the archaic – and pre-Christian – sacred religious system (based on victimisation) that Christianity rendered obsolescent.
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Wolfgang Palaver
Wolfgang Palaver
I am worried as I look at how our world is increasingly turning towards a world of large spaces ruled by empires (USA, China, Russia), as if following the roadmap provided by the infamous German law scholar Carl Schmitt. Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and others are right now pushing the US in this direction. Russian and Chinese strategists are eagerly reading Schmitt along similar lines, too. I am especially worried by those Christians who are supporting this turn towards an imperial order by following Schmitt’s political theology. Schmitt saw the plurality of large spaces as a katechontic antidote against a universal world order that he identified with the Antichrist. He posited the Christian empire as “the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon” (Schmitt 2006, p. 60) 1. Schmitt’s interpretation of the katechon stems, however, from the old sacred. It tries to slow down the influence of the biblical revelation and deprives us from developing an open society that need not result in a centralized world state but a unity of nations that relativize their sovereignty and overcome nationalism and imperial longings.
Such a world became the aim of humanity after the two catastrophic world wars of the 20th century. In October 1965, Pope Paul VI gave an important address to the United Nations in which he not only called the nations to overcome war and let peace “guide the destiny of the nations of all mankind,” he also asked the nations to follow the humility of God to create a fraternal world: “It is impossible for someone to be a brother if he is not humble. For it is pride, as inevitable as it may seem, that provokes the tensions and struggles over prestige, over domination, over colonialism, over selfishness. It is pride that shatters brotherhood” (Paul VI, 1965). Pope Francis emphasizes too, a universal fraternity aimed at a polyhedric world order that enables “the convergence of peoples who, within the universal order, maintain their own individuality” (Francis 2013, #236). The Pope’s model is not a homogenized globalism but a polyhedron. Aiming in this direction no longer relies on katechontic means rooted in the weakened sacred but is nourished by the holy.The Katechon – the ‘Restrainer’ – and Carl Schmitt
This is my promised follow-up essay in the Bulletin after addressing the dangers of Constantinianism last August. This time I will focus on the mysterious figure of the katechon that is mentioned in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, as a restrainer against the reign of the man of the lawless one: “And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed” (2 Thess. 2:6-7 NRS). The katechon is the restrainer of the lawless one whom the tradition often identified with the Antichrist. He or it prevents the outbreak of total chaos that, according to certain apocalyptic traditions, will precede the second coming of Christ. During the reign of the katechon, lawlessness will not break out, and this will also postpone the return of Jesus. The restrainer was first identified with the Roman Empire and later with other forces of order that were able to contain violence. Today the concept of the katechon is discussed all over the world as a concept of political philosophy or of political theology. In the Western world it became widely known through the work of Carl Schmitt, who from 1936 onwards referred to it frequently. I came across the katechon during my work on Schmitt that I started during my time at Stanford University in 1991/1992 (Palaver 1992) 2. When Raymund Schwager and I organized the first European COV&R conference in Wiesbaden (Germany) in 1994, it was he who convinced me to present a paper on the katechon because he thought this was an unknown topic that should be addressed and will be remembered afterwards. I followed his advice, and it turned out that he was right. The published version of my lecture is still read and discussed (Palaver 1995) 3. The topic was later also taken up by René Girard and people following him. Most prominently also Peter Thiel refers to the katechon frequently.
In the following I will use mimetic theory to explain the concept, address the dangers of a Schmittian understanding of it, and show how it might remain a useful concept if it is understood properly. I take Girard’s distinction between the sacred that stems from the scapegoat mechanism and the holy that is given by the nonviolent God as a starting point (Palaver 2020) 4. From this perspective, the katechon belongs to the world of the sacred. The katechon is a concept of order that contains violence in both senses of the word “contain.” Like the scapegoat mechanism, it uses a certain amount of violence to suppress the total outbreak of a violence of all against all. We have some evidence for these roots of the katechon in the violent sacred. Many myths refer to a power or a person like a katechon that keeps chaos, often described as a dragon or a monster, in check. In Egypt, the god Horus, for example, was called a binder of the dragon (katéchon drákonta).
2 Thessalonians and St Paul?
If the katechon belongs to the world of the old sacred, however, how can it become a key concept in the New Testament that results from the overcoming of the old world of the sacred? My preferred explanation is to read the Second Letter to the Thessalonians as a later reaction to the early Christians who were enthusiastically expecting the immediate return of Jesus Christ and stopped to care for their ordinary life. It is a reaction from an already Constantinian perspective that tries to adjust Christianity to the much more mundane needs of a world that is content with a sacrificial version of Christianity, to refer to a Girardian concept. The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil claimed that already the Book of Revelation is addressing this “corruption of Christianity” in her interpretation of the image about “the beast that had been wounded by the sword and yet lived” (Rev. 13:14 NRS): “The mortal blow that the Beast received, was it not the crucifixion of Christ? And when the Beast revived, was it not through the adoption of Christianity as the official religion? Perhaps the author of the Apocalypse simply foresaw that event. Christians must have hoped for it and thought about it long before Constantine” (Weil 1970, pp. 304–305) 5 . Weil might be wrong about her interpretation of this verse, but she is certainly right about a slow deviation from the message of the Gospels that led toward sacrificial Christianity. Jacob Taubes, a Jewish philosopher of religion who was in dialogue with Carl Schmitt, explicitly saw the katechon as a Constantinian concept: “The Kat-echon, the restrainer that Schmitt contemplates, is already an early sign of how the Christian experience of the End of the World was domesticated and came to an arrangement with the world and its powers” (Taubes 2013, p. 13) 6. There are indeed scholars who clearly claim a late date for the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. According to Maarten J. J. Menken, for instance, the letter “was written some time between the year 80 and the early second century CE” (Menken 1994, p. 65) 7. There are, however, also scholars who insist on an early date of the letter. Klaus Berger and Christiane Nord date it between 50 and 56, quite close to Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. Such an early date, however, does not mean that it was written by Paul and that it shares his theology. These two authors see it as a “completely independent document” representing a “Jewish-Christian apocalypticism, which places great emphasis on the future revelation of Jesus Christ in glory. The death and resurrection of Jesus play no role, nor does the doctrine of justification. All of this suggests more archaic conditions rather than a late imitation of Paul, which would already be strongly re-apocalypticized” (Berger and Nord, pp. 48–49) 8. We can conclude that it is either a letter written decades after Paul with a strong Constantinian leaning, or it stems from the time of Paul, but comes from a tradition closer to the sacred of early religions. Both possibilities show that it is not part of Saint Paul’s theological writings but only tries to look like them.
This becomes even more obvious as soon as we turn toward Paul’s own writings. Paul is not unaware that societies need forces of order, as we can see in his Letter to the Romans, in which he claims that all authority stems from God and that the governing authorities justly wear the sword as a servant of God (Rom. 13:4). This endorsement of an institution of order, however, is not in expectation of a long or ongoing functioning of it but is related to Paul’s expectation of an immediate return of Jesus, as he also expressed it in his First Letter to the Thessalonians. He remarked regarding time: “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers” (Rom. 13:11 NRS). Jacob Taubes underlined Paul’s view of time that results in a short-term view of institutions of order (Taubes 2004, p. 53) 9. Paul’s warning in the First Letter to the Thessalonians that whoever promises “peace and security” (1 Thess. 5:3 NRS) will soon be confronted with destruction is also not compatible with the concept of the katechon that promises exactly that type of security. Girard’s reading of this passage underlines the fact that the old sacred lost all its strength after Jesus exposed its roots (Girard 2010, pp. 117–118) 10 .
Schmitt and Dostoevsky’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’
As soon as we understand that the Second Letter to the Thessalonians is not compatible with Paul’s writing and the core of the Gospels, it becomes clear that it is much closer to the sacred than to the holy. This also explains the katechon’s deep ambivalence because by suppressing lawlessness it also postpones the second coming of Jesus. Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is a perfect example of a katechon who asks Jesus to never return because he disturbs the established order.
Schmitt’s interpretation of the katechon lacks all its ambivalence. It is a Constantinian sacralization of this figure that even leads back to the pre-axial mixture of politics and religion. He put all his faith into the restrainer as he noted in his private notebook: “I believe in the katéchon; he is the only possibility for me to understand history and find its meaning as a Christian” (Schmitt 2015, p. 47) 11. It is also no surprise that Schmitt identified with the Grand Inquisitor because he helped to “de-anarchize Christianity” and make “the effect of Christ innocuous in the social and political arena” (Schmitt 2015, 184) 12. By turning the katechon into a proper and undoubtedly Christian concept, Schmitt loses any distinction between the sacred and the holy. It results in an understanding of Christianity that no longer can distinguish between religion and politics or church and state. Jacob Taubes realized this lack in Schmitt’s political theology when he told him in a letter against the accusation of Spinoza as the destroyer of the unity of religion and politics that it was rather Paul whom Schmitt should blame: “It was not the ‘first liberal Jew’ who discovered this point of rupture, but the Apostle Paul […] He had distinguished inside from outside even for ‘the political.’ Without such a distinction we are at the mercy of throne and powers that, in a ‘monistic’ cosmos, have no sense of a hereafter. One can argue over the boundary between the spiritual and the worldly, and this boundary will constantly be redrawn (an everlasting task of political theology), but if this distinction is neglected, then we breathe our last (Occidental) breath” (Taubes 2013, pp. 29-30) 13.
Taubes is right about the danger he mentioned in this letter to Schmitt. We see that clearly today in Russia, where quite a few Russian thinkers who support Putin are following Schmitt’s interpretation of the katechon (Lewis 2021, pp. 193–214) 14. The Russian Orthodox Church too, supports Putin’s war against Ukraine by a quite similar understanding of the katechon. In March 2024, the World Russian People’s Council, under the chairmanship of Patriarch Kirill, released an edict titled “The Present and Future of the Russian World” that declared the Russian war against Ukraine a “holy war” and referred to Russia as a “katechon” to protect the “world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.” As in Schmitt’s understanding, all ambivalence of this figure is missing. It again does not recognize the important distinction between church and state.
Is Peter Thiel’s understanding of the katechon also missing its ambivalence and its sacred roots? Thiel recognizes the ambivalence when he frequently mentions how easily the katechon may turn into the Antichrist. A world in fear of its own self-destruction might long for a katechontic protector that could no longer be distinguished from the world state with which Thiel identifies the Antichrist. In his Paris lecture of 2023, he stated that also the katechon is not enough. More recently Thiel expressed the demand “Don’t immanentize the katechon” by expressing a parallel to Eric Voegelin’s warning that the eschaton must not be immanentized. Voegelin’s insight stems from the many hellish attempts to create heaven on earth. Voegelin, however, is referring to the transcendent realm of the holy that is always divinely given and should not be turned into a human effort. To immanentize eschaton would be an instrumentalization and even weaponization of the holy. To claim that the katechon (rather than the eschaton) should not be immanentized is something completely different and confuses again the distinction between the sacred and the holy.
Saintliness Is a Political Stance
The katechon is nothing divine or holy but results from the human creation of the sacred. It lacks true transcendence and is only an immanent force of order cloaked in false transcendence as long as the sacred is not completely spent. It needs to be desacralized so that its immanent nature becomes obvious. It is the task of the Church to desacralize the katechon by living as a communion of saints. Despite his attempt to prevent the absolutization of the katechon, Thiel is still too much focused on the katechon. It is his Constantinian temptation that is already visible in his essay “The Straussian Moment” when he longed, regarding the crisis of the world after 9/11, for a Christian political leader: “What then must be done, by the Christian statesman or stateswoman aspiring to be a wise steward for our time?” (Thiel 2007, p. 214) 15. Thiel’s Paris lecture of 2023, too, discusses the katechon in view of Pierre Manent’s political criticism of Girard’s mimetic theory and tends more toward Manent then toward Girard’s stress on saintliness. We should not view Girard’s call for saintliness as a completely apolitical and individualistic approach but understand it as a political stance embodied by the church, as I learned it from Stanley Hauerwas, who claims that “Christianity is mostly a matter of politics—politics as defined by the gospel” (Hauerwas/Willimon 1989, p. 30) 16.
Understanding the political task of the church with Hauerwas helps to recognize in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics a profound example of what it means to desacralize the katechon and how important it is to distinguish between the task of the church and the task of states or other political institutions of order (Bonhoeffer 2005, pp. 131-133) 17. According to Bonhoeffer, the restrainer is responsible for order and must set limits to evil. The katechon, however, is “not God” and “not without guilt, but God uses it to protect the world from disintegration.” The church has a different task by embodying “the miracle of a new awakening of faith” and by bearing “witness to Jesus Christ as living lord.” This difference between the church and the forces of order does not, however, prevent an alliance between them in the face of imminent chaos. By preaching the risen Jesus Christ, the Church “forces the custodians of power in particular to listen and change their ways” without, however, rejecting them arrogantly by claiming a moral superiority. Bonhoeffer’s interpretation differs significantly from Schmitt and is close to the holy.
For Girard Holiness Holds Back the Worst
Girard was aware of Schmitt’s reading of the katechon and was also not thinking that we can do without a katechon. He distinguished the katechon as a Christian concept from the original scapegoat mechanism from which it has broken free, but admits at the same time that it “still retains a little of the old order, without which nothing would stand in the way of absolute violence” (Girard 2014, 98) 18. This comes close to Schmitt. Girard, however, moved later closer towards Bonhoeffer, closer to the holy. In his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning he addresses the topic of the katechon again and highlights its ambivalence by stating that it “contains” the apocalypse “in the twofold sense of the word as noted by J.-P. Dupuy: to have within itself and to hold within certain limits” (Girard 1999, p. 186) 19. This goes beyond Schmitt. In the original French edition of this book, he remarks that the delay of the apocalypse is not so much caused by the political forces of order but by people who follow the path of God’s kingdom. The delay “is due again, and perhaps above all, to the behavior of individuals who strive to renounce violence and discourage the spirit of retaliation” (Girard 1999, p. 287) 20. This sentence touches with Bonhoeffer’s view of the church’s task to “prevent the final fall into the abyss” (Bonhoeffer 2005, p. 131) 21. It is strange why Girard’s endorsement of nonviolence is omitted in the English translation because he takes up the same thought in his later book on Clausewitz, in which he distanced himself from Schmitt’s attempt to prevent the escalation to extremes with legal means. For this reason, he again emphasizes how essential Christian love is to delay the apocalypse: “Without this love, the world would have exploded long ago. We should not say that there are no legitimate, healthy political actions. However, politics is in itself powerless to control the rise of negative undifferentiation. It is more than ever up to each one of us to hold back the worst; this is what being in an eschatological time means” (Girard 2010, p. 131) 22. We must connect these words with Girard’s reflections on the relationship between the church and the empire. Like Schmitt, he understood that “the empire tended to hold back the rise of violence” (Girard 2010, p. 198) 23. Contrary to Schmitt, however, he recognized the “collapse of the idea of empire” and knew that its attempt to create peace through domination (pax romana, pax sovietica, pax americana) is a “falsehood” that has been “exhausted.” Pope John Paul II’s act of repentance in the year 2000 was, according to Girard, a triumph of the church over itself that gained worldwide significance: “Before our eyes, it succeeded in expelling all imperial ideas, at the very point when its temporal power disappeared” (Girard 2010, p. 201) 24.
The futility of empires has been forgotten in recent years. To revitalize this concept politically today is dangerous and may result in a catastrophe. We should instead strengthen attempts to create a world in which sisters and brothers live together in a framework of a universal polyhedron.
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Wolfgang Palaver is an emeritus professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is the author of ‘René Girard’s Mimetic Theory‘ (Michigan State University Press, 2013), a lucid standard introduction to the insights of this Catholic anthropologist and philosopher, who died in 2015.
This important article was first published in February 2025, in the Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, centred on the ideas of René Girard. It appears here with the kind permission of Wolfgang Palaver, whom we thank for this privilege.
NOTES
- Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press, Ltd., 2006.
- Palaver, Wolfgang. A Girardian Reading of Schmitt’s Political Theology. Telos, no. 93 (1992): 43-68.
- Palaver, Wolfgang , Hobbes and the Katéchon: The Secularization of Sacrificial Christianity. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture2 (1995): 57-74.
- Palaver, Wolfgang. Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness: Reflecting on Violence and Religion with René Girard. Elements in Religion and Violence. Edited by James R. Lewis and Margo Kitts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- Weil, Simone. First and Last Notebooks. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
- Taubes, Jacob. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections. Translated by Keith Tribe. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
- Menken, Maarten J. J. 2 Thessalonians. London: Routledge, 1994.
- Berger, Klaus, and Christiane Nord, eds. Das Neue Testament und früchristliche Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2001.
- Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul. Translated by Dana Hollander. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004.
- Girard, René. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2010.
- Schmitt, Karl. Glossarium. Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1947 bis 1958. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015.
- Schmitt, Karl. Glossarium. Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1947 bis 1958. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015.
- Taubes, Jacob. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections. Translated by Keith Tribe. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
- Lewis, David G. Russia’s New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
- Thiel, Peter. The Straussian Moment. In Politics & Apocalypse, edited by Robert Hamerton-Kelly, 189-218. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2007.
- Hauerwas, Stanley, and William H. Willimon. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989.
- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. Translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West and Douglas W. Stott. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.
- Girard, René. The One by Whom Scandal Comes. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014.
- Girard, René. Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1999.
- Girard, René. Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1999.
- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. Translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West and Douglas W. Stott. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.
- Girard, René. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2010.
- Girard, René. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2010.
- Girard, René. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2010.
For me it is inevitable that any forgetting of the clear instruction by Jesus not to ‘Lord it’ over others (e.g. Matthew 20:25) will be a forestalling of the kingdom. Is it too simplistic to understand ‘the Antichrist’ in that way – as the tendency of some Christians to want it both ways – to be both Christian AND ‘in charge’?
To understand the Antichrist as both to be Christian and “in charge” is one of more possibilities to explain this temptation.