State and anomie. Considerations on the antichrist
Giorgio Agamben,
Quodlibet, October 19, 2022The term “antichrist” (
antichristos) appears in the
New Testament only in the first and second letters of
John. The context is certainly
eschatological (
paidia, eschate hora estin, vulg. filioli, novissima hora est, “little children, it is the last hour”), and the term significantly also appears in the plural: “as you have heard that antichrist comes, even now there are become many antichrists”. No less crucial is that the apostle defines the last hour as the “now (
nyn)” in which he himself finds himself: “antichrist comes (
erchetai, simple present)”. Soon afterwards it is stated more clearly, if there was any need, that the antichrist “is now in the world (
nyn en to kosmoi estin)”. It is good not to forget this eschatological context of the antichrist, if it is true — as
Peterson, and
Barth before him, never tire of remembering — that the last moment of human history is inseparable from Christianity (“a Christianity” — writes Barth — “which is not absolutely and totally eschatology has absolutely and totally nothing to do with Christ”). The antichrist is for John the one who in the last hour “denies that Jesus is the Christ” (that is, the Messiah) and antichrists are therefore the “many” who, like him, “went out from us, but were not of us”, which suggests, not without ambiguity, that the antichrist comes out of the bosom of the
ekklesia, but he doesn’t really belong to it. As such, he is repeatedly called “deceiver” (
planos, literally “the one who misleads”, vulg.
seductor).
However, the exegesis of fathers and theologians on the antichrist did not concentrate for centuries on the letters of John, but on the second
Pauline epistle to the Thessalonians. Even though the term does not appear in it, the enigmatic character that the letter presents as “the man of anomie” (
ho anthropos tes anomias) and the “son of perdition” (
ho uios tes apoleias) has already been identified by
Hippolytus,
Irenaeus and
Tertullian and then by
Augustine with the antichrist. Indeed,
Paul says of him, whom he also calls as “lawless” (
anomos), that he “opposes and exalts himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sits in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God”. The antichrist is a mundane power (a tradition identified him with a revived
Nero) which tries to imitate and counterfeit the kingdom of Christ in the time of the end.
In the letter to the Thessalonians, however, the lawless man is placed in close relationship with another enigmatic figure, the
katechon, that which holds back (also in third-person form: “the one who holds back”). That which holds back is “the parousia of our Lord Jesus Christ and our reunion with him”: the context of the letter is, therefore, as eschatological as in the letter of John (a little earlier, the apostle evokes “the just judgment of God... at the revelation of the Lord Jesus with the angels of his power”). Already in the time of Augustine, this power which holds back the final advent of Christ was identified with the Roman Empire (which, in Augustine’s words, was never explicitly named by Paul “lest he should incur the calumnious charge of wishing ill to the empire which it was hoped would be eternal”) or with the Roman church itself, as John’s letter seemed to suggest, mentioning the antichrists who “shall come out of us”. In any case, whether it is the Roman Empire or the church, the power which holds back is that of an institution founded on a stable law or consitution (anticipating our notion of “state”, Tertullian says:
status romanus, which in his day meant “the steadiness of the Roman Empire”).
It is crucial to understand the relationship between the power which holds back and “the man of lawlessness”. It has sometimes been interpreted as a conflict bewtween two powers, in which the lawless one or the antichrist “takes out of the way” the power which holds back. The expression
ek mesou genetai (“until he that now holds back is taken out of the way”) does not in any way imply that it is the man of anomie who does it: as the translation of the Vulgate (
donec de medio fiat) suggests, it is the very power which holds back (be it the empire or the church) to take itself out of the way. The immediately following text is, in this sense, perfectly clear: “and then the lawless one will be revealed”. The relationship between the institutional power of the
katechon and the man of lawlessness is the succession between two mundane powers, one of which takes itself out of the way and is replaced — or passes through — into the other. This is, in Paul’s words, “the mystery of anomie that is already at work” and which eventually finds its unveiling, almost as if, as the term “mystery” seems to suggest, the “lawsless one” exhibited finally in full light the truth of the preceding power.
If this is true, then the letter contains a doctrine on the fate of any insitutional power which must not be overlooked. According to this doctrine, in the end, firmly founded institutional power necessarily gives way to a condition of anomie, in which the constitutionally founded sovereign is replaced by a “lawless” sovereign, who arbitrarily exercises his government. Hence the letter contains a message that concerns us closely, because it is just such a “mystery of anomie” that we are living through. State power founded on laws and the so-called democratic constitutions has been transforming — through an unstoppable process which began long ago, but that only now comes to its ultimate crisis — into an anomic condition, in which the law is replaced by executive power decrees and measures, and the state of emergency becomes the normal form of government. It remains — it is good not to forget — that the letter states that once the “lawless one” shall reveal himself through his own power, “the Lord shall slay him by the breath of his mouth and bring to nought by the manifestation of his coming”. This means that what remains for us to think about in the apparently dead-end condition we are going through is the form of a human community that escapes both the “power which holds back” with its apparent institutional stability and the emergency anomie into which it fatally converts itself.
