The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days

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This is a brief, interesting theological text. The author, Giorgio Agamben, examines the 2009 resignation of Pope Benedict XVI from the perspective of an obscure text found in 2 Thessalonians 2:1 - 11. In that text, the apostle Paul asserts that the parousia - the return of Christ - is being delayed by a mysterious figure who is restraining the end of days. This mysterious figure was historically identified with either the Roman empire or the Church.

Agamben points out that Pope Benedict had published an article approving the position of a Donatist heretic named Tyconius that the church, like the person of Jesus, is “bipartite.” In the Church's case, the bipartite division is, pace Augustine, between the good and devout followers of Christ and the dark and damned sinners. At the end of time, the two bodies will be disclosed, but the end of time is being restrained, according to Tyconius, Augustine and Pope Benedict, in Agamben's reading, by the Church.

The book makes for interesting reading relative to the above, I was not certain what Agamben's point was at it related to the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. I think that the point may be that Pope Benedict's resignation was motivated by the corruption of the church, and that his resignation was meant to highlight that fact. This might be true, but based on the evidence, this seems like a stretch, which Agamben seems to acknowledge.

Agamben's more immediate theological points, on the other hand, are valuable. I particularly liked his point that the “mystery of evil” is more readily understood in the context of eschatology. Agamben points out that “the term mystērion indicates a praxis, an action or a drama in the theatrical sense of the term as well, that is, a set of gestures, acts, and words through which a divine action or passion is efficaciously actualized in the world and time for the salvation of those who participate in it.” Agamben writes:

“The wisdom of God is therefore expressed in the form of a mystery, which is nothing other than the historical drama of the passion, namely an event that really happened, which the uninitiated do not understand and the faithful grasp for their salvation. In the time of the end, mystery and history correspond without remainder.”

And:

“The history of the end (which does not coincide with the end of history) is therefore presented in Paul as a mystery, that is to say, as a sacred drama in which the salvation and damnation of human beings is at stake, a drama that can be seen and understood (as happens for the initiated) or seen and not understood (this is the case of the damned).”

And:

“What does the mysterium iniquitatis of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians add to this conception of mystery? Here the eschatological drama is, so to speak, staged, in the form of a conflict or a dialectic among three characters: the katechōn (the “one who restrains”), the anomos (the “outlaw”), and the messiah (God and Satan are also named, but remain in the background).”

And:

“10. These are actors and vicissitudes of the eschatological “mystery” that the epistle's author has evoked with his obscura verba, which, once restored to their dramatic context, are no longer so obscure. And yet the Church, which has put aside the eschatological perspective that is consubstantial with it, seems to have lost all awareness of this context. The mysterium iniquitatis has been extrapolated from its eschatological context, in which alone it could find a coherent sense, and transformed into an atemporal structure, which aims to give a theological jurisdiction to evil and, at the same time, to slow and “hold back” the end of days.
After the two World Wars, scandal in the face of horror has driven philosophers and theologians, based on Christ's kenotic moment, to root the mysterium in God, in a sort of monstrous—forgive me for the term—“kakokenodicy,” a justification of evil through kenosis, totally forgetting its eschatological meaning. Thus in 2002 the Gregorian University published, under the title Mysterium iniquitatis, the acts of a conference in which the text of Paul's Second Epistle to the Thessalonians was never cited. This is not surprising, since one of the participants candidly affirmed that “the mystery of evil is a reality of our everyday experience, which we do not manage to explain or dominate.” Unfortunately, even the authors who reproach the Church for its abandonment of eschatology end up transforming the drama of the end of days into an ontotheological structure. Here we are clearly dealing with a Gnostic gesture (or at least, as has been suggested, a semi-Marcionite one; Milana, p. 149) that opposes not two divinities but two attributes of the same divinity in a sort of “originary ambiguity,” which, especially among the philosophers, is inspired by a mixture between the late Schelling and Dostoevsky. In any case, these theologians and philosophers, perhaps without realizing it, end up, to take up the words of the Apostle, causing evil “to take [its] seat in the Temple of God, declaring [it] to be God.”

There is a lot here to ponder.