11/30/2018 Saint Paul, the Apocalypse, and the mystery of evil. (Part 2)
Conor Sweeney
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/11/30/saint-paul-the-apocalypse-and-the-mystery-of-evil/ https://www.catholicworldreport.com/author/sweeney-conor/ Satan—the personification of evil, antichrist, whom Scripture calls “a liar, and the father of lies”
John 8:44
Satan relentlessly pursues the best so that the worst might be that much more effective a lie.
And the “spiritual forces of evil” (Eph 6:13), it also sets the fate of the world itself on its final trajectory.
“Apocalypse,” both in the sense of unveiling and ultimate catastrophe, thus perfectly expresses the new dramatic trajectory that the Incarnation has set us on.
Salvation and redemption are the beginning of the end.
The truth of Christ is simultaneously the activation of the greatest evil, one that will cause the catastrophic end of the age: and it will happen—is always happening—from and at the very heart of the Church, God’s dwelling place (if this sounds, well, apocalyptic, consult the Catechism’s treatment of the theme.
cf. especially CCC 675
Catholics should believe in this stuff too
It’s in this context that we must not shrink from the extent to which evil can and will operate in the innermost recesses of God’s temple, the Church. Evil’s power extends, not just to corruption of individual hearts and minds, but in some sense to the institutional dimension of the Church itself.
This accords, I think, with what St. Paul is trying to say in.
2 Thessalonians
(Although how far it’s to be taken is the difficult point; both anti-Catholic bigotry and Catholic “progressivism” see an ideological wedge here).
It was the contention of enigmatic Croatian-Austrian intellectual Ivan Illich, a radical critic of modern institutions, that serious awareness that the best can become the worst, that the Church itself as an entire institution could easily adopt modes more typical of the “whore of Babylon.”
Rev 17:1–18
Was very early on in the history of Christianity effectively sublimated.
For Illich, explains David Cayley, this has come with a price:
“By abandoning this goad to self-criticism and self-awareness, on which it should have centered its faith, the Church disowned its own shadow.”
Thereby rendering itself “less and less capable of discerning in the image of antichrist its own tendency to substitute power for faith….”
“Get behind me, Satan.”
But one need look no further for vivid corroboration of this “shadow side” than chapter 16 of Matthew’s Gospel.
In verse 18 we have Christ’s words to Peter that have inspired the dogmas of the indefectibility and infallibility of the Church:
“You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
And yet, just 4 verses later we see Christ turn savagely on Peter, telling him “Get behind me, Satan.
You are an obstacle [literally, skandalon] to me.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
(v. 23).
My point is not, I wish to make clear, to deny the indefectibility and infallibility of the Church.
Nor should we become fixated on the largely unanswerable question of the extent to which this pope or that pope is literally a figure of the “lawless one” or not.
The important point, rather is to be attentive to the more general character of Paul’s cryptic insistence that a “hell” of a lot of deception, manipulation, and corruption (evil!) will operate in some way even inside the assurance of indefectibility and infallibility.
It’s at this level that we must attend to Christ’s description of Peter—the first pope—as a stumbling block, and yes, even as “Satan.”
Here we face an “enigma,” a “hard saying” (and Christ has a few of these) not amenable to easy answers or control by merely juridical and rationalist categories.
According to both Christ and St. Paul, then, there must be real acknowledgment that no pope, simply by virtue of being pope, is thereby immune from becoming an instrument of evil.
And it’s also to affirm that somehow the office of the pope will be used by Satan as the instrument of evil par excellence.
Every pope must therefore face this test and trial.
It’s not surprising that we should prefer to accent the reassuring message of verse 18:
What institution wants to be up-front about an evil inside itself corrupting and perverting its operations and destroying its credibility?
But indefectibility and infallibility in principle mean little, particularly for the “little ones.”
cf. Matt 18:6
If the gatekeepers of the Church in any historical here and now are in the grip of heresy, apostasy, and false witness, especially at the level of praxis—it’s small, no, delusional consolation to appeal to theoretical doctrinal coherence and integrity while at the level of practices everything else is in pieces.
My point, said with great caution, is that downplaying the mysterium iniquitatis capable of being actively propagated even by the Church’s highest office may well represent a crucial historical blind spot as regards treatment of Christ’s promise to Peter.
Modernity, the illegitimate progeny
There’s one more piece of the puzzle, particularly important for our own historical epoch: the way in which the mysterium iniquitatis at the heart of the Church comes to be mirrored in the world.
Extending his reflection on the mysterium iniquitatis, Illich advanced the radical thesis that the modes and institutions of modernity were not post-Christian as much as they were perversely Christian—
Parodic perversions of faith bled of the vital sap of the New Testament, perhaps the beginning of the definitive (apocalyptic) “betrayal of Christian faith.”
In other words, think of modernity as the illegitimate progeny of the Church’s own worst mode of itself, an extension of ecclesial perversion into the heart of the world.
It’s a weird idea: the worst things in the world come from the Church.
We’d prefer it to be the other way round.
This might be a bitter pill to swallow: for we’d be crazy not to regard some developments of modernity as salutary, i.e. universal rights, modern medicine, technology, democracy, etc.
All undeniably of Christian inspiration and which have in remarkable ways raised standards of living, stamping out immense suffering.
And yet, note how each of these “salutary” gifts of modernity can be employed, with moralizing imperatives that brook little dissent, for evils capable of destroying the person, communities, cultures, if not the world itself: e.g. a “right” to abortion—
Embryo experimentation and sex reassignment surgery—the atomic bomb—the “dictatorship of relativism.”
Here’s the point: but is not this profound ambiguity precisely what we should expect from antichrist?
Weave evil with good so it becomes well-nigh impossible to distinguish and extricate the two. T
rap souls and bodies in what John Paul II called “structures of sin,” where material cooperation with evil becomes almost impossible to avoid, where simple social and cultural acts become freighted with a nihilism that works like a cancer on those who perform them.
Illich was struck by the fact that “apocalyptic modernity’s” greatest stroke is to consummate a trend that had already been long gestating in the worst tendencies of institutional Christianity:
To overcome the gratuity, radically, freedom, intimacy, and foolishness of Christian love with stifling procedural, bureaucratic, corporate, and professional modes;
And as a final flourish, we might add, to then convince the Church to ape these modes of its own perversion and thus unwittingly cooperate in its own destruction (surely, this is evil’s greatest stroke).
The transformation can be subtle enough not to notice.
But then, one day, you wake up and the deepest New Testament modes of existential, Gospel faith—including the mysterium iniquitatis—
Appear as incomprehensible, fundamentalist nonsense, an embarrassment to “respectable” ecclesial discourse in Catholic institutions.
All of this is why Illich concluded ominously that “I believe this to be, paradoxically, the most obviously Christian era which might be quite close to the end of the world.”
Watch and pray
Thus ends a rather bleak, and by no means complete, reflection; but one, I think, with great explanatory power.
Note that none of it precludes the truth that “where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.”
Rom 5:20
Christ has already triumphed over the lawless one.
But this victory cannot to be an excuse for lethargy and blindness to the very real evil that this victory has unleashed.
If the mysterium iniquitatis should not be the occasion for cheap attacks on the Church as divine institution per se, neither should we deny the profound ambiguity that Christ’s second words to Peter represent.
The mysterium iniquitatis must be permitted as a goad forcing recognition that the central mode evil takes on is the corruption of the best for the worst, as the Gospel itself warns.
What always remains for us is to pray:
“Watch and pray that you will not fall into temptation.”
Matt 26:41
And know that Christ always abides with us in this fight against evil:
One more thing, friends: Pray for us.
Pray that the Master’s Word will simply take off and race through the country to a groundswell of response, just as it did among you.
And pray that we’ll be rescued from these scoundrels who are trying to do us in.
I’m finding that not all ‘believers’ are believers.
But the Master never lets us down.
He’ll stick by you and protect you from evil one.
2 Thess 3: 1–3
(End Part 2)