The Pope and the Antichrist

I recently lectured in Rome on the topic of the Antichrist. The Antichrist interests me for several reasons, mostly because nobody else is talking about it—which, for most of Christian history, would have seemed a clear sign of his impending arrival (2 Pet. 3:3–4). I expected that the Church would ignore my talks. I am not Catholic, I was not speaking publicly, and the topic seemed to me to lie far, far outside the Overton Window.

My expectation went unfulfilled. The gaggle of paparazzi outside the (notionally secret) lecture venue suggested that my talks might not be as private as I had hoped. After the first of them, my staff informed me that the Italian press was taking considerable interest. One priest who had not attended the talk wondered publicly whether I should be burned at the stake for heresy (albeit a political “heresy against the liberal consensus”).

I say this not as an exercise in self-aggrand­izement or self-pity, but because it made me feel greater sympathy for Pope Benedict XVI. Allow me to explain. I did not come to Rome to try to be more Catholic than the pope, but I did hope, even as a Protestant, to be more Catholic than the average Catholic. To clear this bar, as I explained in my lectures, one need simply listen to Pope Benedict not only when he spoke ex cathedra­, but when he spoke sotto voce. One will hear him whisper, and then shout: The world is ending.

Benedict believed he was living in the end times. This claim shocks us, because Benedict chose not to speak openly on this topic until the final years of his life, at which point he had resigned the papacy, his allies had been purged from Vatican leadership, and almost nobody was listening. We will never know why he waited. He may have feared jeopardizing his authority, which rested on his academic brilliance, and nothing sounds less academically respectable than doomsday preaching. More generously, Benedict may have believed that his apocalyptic predictions would be self-fulfilling prophecies, deranging his flock and driving them away from the Church.

Ironically, an honest discussion of our apocalyptic moment would have resonated most powerfully with young people. They understand and fear the existential dangers of climate change, artificial intelligence, demographic collapse, and nuclear weapons. Benedict could have taught the young the particularities of the biblical apocalypse, including the totalitarian peace and safety that precede it. Such a discussion would have revealed reasons for hope, as we seek the bravery to “be not troubled” (Matt. 24:6). One cannot imagine a more qualified person than Benedict to lead such a conversation. Now we must make do without him.

It is not my place to tell the Church what time it is. Benedict already did that, as this essay, which I wrote with my friend Sam Wolfe, attempts to show. My humble hope is that others might succeed where Benedict failed, in answering the question: Facing the hour of darkness, how can we recover faith in the future?

Eschatology enraptured the young Joseph Ratzinger. Sometimes autobiography disguises itself as biography; this is a rule to remember when reading Ratzinger’s 1957 The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (his Habilitationsschrift, which qualified him for a professorial appointment in the German university system). He wrote that “Bonaventure’s theology of history presents a struggle to arrive at a proper understanding of eschatology. . . . [T]he theology of history does not represent an isolated area of Bonaventure’s thought. On the contrary, it is related to the basic philosophical and theological decisions which provided the basis for his participation in the bitter controversies of the 1260’s and 1270’s.” Ratzinger excavated these “controversies” because he thought that “it would not be difficult to work out applications to the present,” even seven centuries later. “Precisely at the present moment,” he added, “­theology has every reason for remaining in ­contact with its own history.” He chose not to identify those applications and those reasons, because “the task of the historian is to present his findings and nothing but his findings. . . . At times this limitation has disturbed me.”

Whatever its limitations, Ratzinger’s exposition of Bonaventure established his genius. It translates Bonaventure’s medieval density for the modern mind. As he proceeds, Ratzinger seems to be on the point of adjudicating questions the Church has ­neglected for centuries, questions reaching to Christianity’s mysterious core. At this core lies the problem to which Ratzinger devoted the final ­section of his treatise: How and when will the world end?

The apocalyptic prophecies of the twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore fractured the Church. Joachim declared history a mirror of the trinitarian God, and that the Antichrist—the final world tyrant—would soon inaugurate the third age. (His followers narrowed the year down to 1260.) He predicted that this Antichrist would become pope. In rebutting the Joachimites, Bonaventure resisted their certainty about the day and hour of the Antichrist’s arrival. But Bonaventure also resisted the opposite temptation: the epistemic humility of his Aristotelian rival Thomas Aquinas, for whom “no period, either long or short, can be determined, in which is to be expected the end of the world,” and in whose teaching, per Ratzinger, “the eschatological consciousness fades into the background.” 

Bonaventure went further in denouncing Averroist Aristotelianism, a significant source for the recovery of Aristotle in the West, which taught the eternity of the world, the necessity of fate, and the unity of the intellect. Bonaventure labeled these three doctrines the “666” of Revelation 13:18, and Ratzinger observes that it is the first of these doctrines, the notion that time continues forever and history is never brought to an end, that ­Bonaventure regarded “as the primordial heresy and the very essence of the apocalyptic monster.”

In this great debate Ratzinger sided with Bonaventure: Ignorance of the precise day and hour of the Lord’s return is no excuse for incuriosity. But concerning the implications for the twentieth century and beyond, Ratzinger remained silent. He explains why in a footnote that quotes his dissertation adviser, Gottlieb Söhngen: “In the case of Bonaventure, we see how difficult it is to succeed in placing the proper limits on [apocalyptic] images. Apocalyptic images are like a torrent of water that overflows the banks and is difficult to keep in bounds. And regardless of all efforts to mollify the imagery, the apocalyptic tone predominates. Even a Mozart cannot make a trumpet forget to sound like a trumpet!”

In other words, beware spreading rumors of the apocalypse. If Ratzinger were ever to leap from academic eschatology to earthly politics and its role in the world’s end, he would do so cautiously—so cautiously that even in broaching the topic he quoted his adviser, who was himself discussing another theologian.

Philosophy can appear hopelessly remote from political and scientific knowledge. Ratzinger thought otherwise. He understood philosophy and theology as complementary means of understanding God and the whole, including politics and science. With this understanding, in 1969 Ratzinger named on the radio several “crises” besieging the Church. The positivist erosion of “the question about the existence of God” catalyzed the “crisis of the present,” “the crisis of our concept of reality,” the “general crisis in thought,” and “the crisis of Modernism.” These crises of mind and soul would soon, he predicted, decimate the Church:

From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. . . . The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate.

Would a return to the contemplative, politically abstemious early Church mean a return to millenarian expectations, or even their fulfillment? Both Joachim and Bonaventure thought so and prophesied the Church’s retreat into contemplation in her final days. Just as he had done in his Habilitationsschrift, however, Ratzinger left it to others to judge how seriously he took this possibility. His 1977 book, Eschatology, begins by noting another “crisis” (the “emerging crisis of European civilization”) and affirms longstanding orthodox eschatology, including the eventual arrival of a final Antichrist heralded by identifiable signs. But Eschatology touches upon earthly affairs little more than did The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure. It chastises the optimism of liberation theology but otherwise refrains from political commentary.

A Manhattan crowd eleven years later witnessed a less reserved Ratzinger. Brought to New York by First Things founding editor Richard John ­Neuhaus to deliver the 1988 Erasmus Lecture, he began his speech, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis,” by blowing the trumpet: “In Vladimir ­Solovyov’s History of the Antichrist, the eschatological enemy of the Redeemer recommended himself to believers . . . by the fact that he had earned his doctorate in theology at Tübingen and had written an exegetical work which was recognized as pioneering in the field.” Ratzinger then pivoted to a critique of the exegetes Martin ­Dibelius and ­Rudolf Bultmann. If Ratzinger hoped the ­audience would connect the crisis of biblical interpretation to a world-historical, apocalyptic crisis on the horizon, and thereby understand Dibelius and Bultmann as agents of the Antichrist, they would have to do this difficult work themselves. ­R­atzinger dropped one more breadcrumb: In Dibelius’s and Bultmann’s reductively historical picture of Jesus, “all apocalyptic, sacramental, mystical elements have to be pruned away.”

When Benedict became pope, the audience for his winks and hints expanded from cardinals and bookish theologians to the entire world. Benedict brought the Antichrist into newspaper headlines when he asked Cardinal Giacomo Biffi to deliver the 2007 Lenten meditations to Vatican leadership. Biffi had a habit of mentioning the Antichrist during his tenure as archbishop of Bologna, and he obliged with a private talk on Solovyov’s account of the Antichrist. Benedict’s praise tantalizes: “You [Biffi] have given us a very acute and precise diagnosis of our situation today, and you have especially shown us how, behind so many phenomena of our time that appear to be very far from religion and from Christ, there is a question, an expectation, a desire.”

Later that year, Benedict again ventriloquized some thoughts on the Antichrist in his encyclical Spe Salvi (“Saved by Hope”). This time, he quoted some uncharacteristically apocalyptic words of Immanuel Kant: “If Christianity should one day cease to be worthy of love . . . then the prevailing mode in human thought would be rejection and opposition to it; and the Antichrist . . . would begin his—albeit short—regime.” In the same encyclical, Benedict wrote, “Faith in Christ has never looked merely backwards or merely upwards, but always also forwards to the hour of justice that the Lord repeatedly proclaimed. This looking ahead has given Christianity its importance for the present moment” (emphasis added).

These apocalyptic paroxysms make Benedict sound like a fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist. Though they are infrequent, it is odd that they lie forgotten among his sixty-six books and many speeches. But not everyone ignored them. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben understood Benedict like few others, and he saw Benedict’s resignation as a prediction of the end and the fulfillment of Benedict’s longstanding fascination with the theologian Tyconius. ­Agamben’s 2017 book, The Mystery of Evil, notes the young Ratzinger’s admiration for Tyconius’s theory of a “bipartite Church” containing both Christ and Antichrist (“fusca sum et decora” [Song of Sol. 1:5]), a Church that will split in two at the end of days. Asked by his biographer Peter Seewald in 2018 whether Agamben was right, that Benedict’s resignation amounted to “a wake-up call for eschatological awareness,” the pope emeritus did not deny it.

In our gerontocracy, eighty is the new eighteen, the age at which one can finally behave as an ­irresponsible adult and say what one thinks. And in his senescence, Benedict began to speak with the clarity he had hitherto withheld from all but his closest readers. He told Seewald in the same 2018 interview: “Modern society is formulating an anti-Christian creed and opposing it is punished with social excommunication. It is only natural to fear this spiritual power of Antichrist and it really needs help from the prayers of a whole diocese and the world church to resist it.” Three years earlier, out of the blue, the Slovak politician Vladimír Palko had received a letter from Benedict praising his book Die Löwen Kommen (“The Lions Are Coming”). The letter included these words: “We see how the power of the Antichrist is expanding, and we can only pray that the Lord will give us strong shepherds who will defend his church in this hour of need from the power of evil.”

Everybody who thinks about the Antichrist for long enough identifies a specific candidate. Benedict resisted the down-­market temptation to name his suspect. But he left us clues. One possibility, of course, is the liberalizing pope who succeeded him. According to Joachim, the Antichrist would assume the papacy following a virtuous pope. Several Joachimites believed Pope Celestine V, who like Benedict abdicated at age eighty-five, to be this good pope, making his successor, Boniface VIII, the Antichrist. Benedict knew all of this when in 2009 he laid his papal pallium atop Celestine’s tomb, a week after lecturing on Tyconius’s theory of the bipartite Church. Did Benedict believe Pope Francis to be the Antichrist?

Tempting as this theory is, Benedict suspected somebody else. Solovyov’s Antichrist is a Nietzschean liberal theologian who, as Benedict had mentioned in his Erasmus Lecture, seduces his followers in part thanks to his honorary degree in theology from the University of Tübingen. This last detail amused Benedict—he pointed it out again in his 2007 book, Jesus of Nazareth—perhaps because he himself had taught at Tübingen from 1966 to 1969. But if we stop here, we will miss Benedict’s subtler intention.

Hans Küng was a charismatic priest and colleague of Ratzinger’s at Tübingen (where Küng taught from 1960 to 1996). Küng served at age thirty-­four as one of the youngest periti (experts) at the Second Vatican Council, which adopted many of his recommendations. “Never again would a theologian have such influence,” Vaticanologist Peter Hebblethwaite observed. Küng later advocated euthanasia, denied papal infallibility, received a warm welcome from John F. Kennedy at the White House, mentored Tony Blair through his conversion to Catholicism, and was banned from teaching Catholic theology by Pope John Paul II. He influenced the Church more than the average pope.

Küng’s pan-religious “World Ethos” set the agenda for the 1993 meeting of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. Robert Spaemann, a Catholic philosopher who had lectured on ­Solovyov’s Antichrist story and was a close friend of Benedict’s, excoriated the concept of a Weltethos in 1996 (“Weltethos als Projekt”). “Hovering above all,” wrote Spaemann, “was the name of a Tübingen theology professor.”

Like the Antichrist, whose slogan is “peace and safety” (1 Thess. 5:3), Küng’s Weltethos aimed at world peace: “No peace among the nations without peace among the religions. No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.” An obsession with peace similarly distinguishes Solovyov’s Antichrist from Christ: “Christ brought the sword,” the Antichrist says. “I shall bring peace.” He chides Christ for “divid[ing] humanity by the notion of good and evil” and “threaten[ing] the earth with the Day of Judgment.” As Spaemann observes, in a similar fashion “Küng’s soft version of Christianity” discourages all thought of the end times. “Certainly Jesus,” writes Spaemann, “when he spoke of the Last Judgment . . . did not expect a liberated smile from his listeners.” And Küng goes further, dropping not just the apocalypse but Christ’s warning that “except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved”—that is to say, Küng asks us to forget the Antichrist and the Great Tribulation. This world is all we have, and it’s up to us to save it: No survival without Weltethos.

Solovyov’s Antichrist proselytizes by means of a best-selling book, The Open Way to Universal Peace and Prosperity. This work “embraced everything and solved every problem. It united a noble respect for ancient traditions and symbols with a broad and daring radicalism in socio-political questions. It joined a boundless freedom of thought with the most profound appreciation for everything mystical. Absolute individualism stood side by side with an ardent zeal for the common good, and the highest idealism in guiding principles combined smoothly with a perfect definiteness in practical solutions for the necessities of life.” Spaemann describes Küng’s Weltethos in uncannily similar language: “He has thought through every objection in advance. His path is the ‘reasonable middle path’: ‘between libertinism and legalism,’ ‘between greed for possessions and contempt for possessions,’ ‘between hedonism and asceticism,’ ‘between sensual pleasure and hostility to the senses’ . . . ‘between worldliness and world-denial,’ ‘between rationalism and irrationalism,’” and so on. 

As for Ratzinger, he considered these arguments so persuasive that in a 2004 debate with Jürgen Habermas, instead of rebutting Küng himself, he simply directed readers to Spaemann’s essay.

Benedict’s quiet war against Küng, which began in the 1960s at Tübingen, marks the most recent front in a battle that has raged since at least the 1260s. Upon this battlefield once stood Solovyov and Nietzsche, and Bonaventure and Aquinas before them, debating questions that concerned the fate of the world. Nothing would have surprised Ratzinger and Spaemann less than to learn that the Antichrist had appeared as a fellow academic like Küng.

Today, all three men are dead, and the idea that the Antichrist might be scribbling away in a university somewhere feels antiquated and silly. Nobody writes or thinks with the subtlety and power of these three men, and if anybody did, nobody would notice. Benedict’s mistake in assuming that ideas would always matter may have been a grandmaster mistake—but it was a mistake, nonetheless. In his less reserved final years, perhaps Benedict realized that the world had moved on from the academic debates on which his authority and greatness rested, that only a Silent Generation thinker like Agamben even came close to understanding him, that academia had long ago ceased to produce allies like Spaemann and enemies like Küng, and that our world had lost interest in its past and faith in its future.

We can excuse Benedict the academic for believing that his world would last forever, but for Benedict the Christian, it was a great error. ­Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers who followed them wrote between the lines about the permanent questions. They wrote not only for their brilliant contemporaries, but for people who love to think in all times and places. They affirmed the eternity of the world and did not doubt that the future would bring new students with the intelligence and time to indulge in the very long, never easy, but always pleasant work of interpretation proper to a philosopher. But the Christian knows that nothing lasts forever, for this world has a beginning and an end. The apocalypse, the revelation of all secrets and the end of all interpretations, arrives eventually. There is a time and a place for esotericism, whose antonym is revelation. But not in matters concerning the fate of the world—and our souls. For when the time is short and the hour late, who can hope for ­salvation in philosophical reticence?