11/30/2018 Saint Paul, the Apocalypse, and the mystery of evil. (Part 1)
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)
Relentlessly pursues the best so that the worst might be that much more effective a lie.
One of the most enigmatic tropes in the New Testament can be found in St. Paul’s comments to the Thessalonians (2 Thess 2)
About the “mysterium iniquitatis”: the mystery of “lawlessness” or “evil” he tells us is “already at work.”
https://aleteia.org/2018/09/02/what-do-we-mean-when-we-say-evil-is-a-mystery-and-why-is-there-something-hopeful-about-it/ This is a pervasive and apocalyptic evil able to inhabit and control human hearts, worldly powers, and worst of all, the earthly reality of Christ’s own mystical body, the Church.
Apocalypse and antichrist
At this point in these trying days for the Church, I’m inclined to think that we must reflect more urgently on this provoking Pauline perspective.
This is, of course, by no means an easy or safe task. Disturbing, delusional, or fanatical possibilities await at every turn.
The mysterium iniquitatis is therefore perhaps one of the more embarrassing New Testament themes, certainly for what passes as “civilized” (read: bourgeois) Catholic discourse today, which eagerly grasps at every opportunity to “spiritualize” away as much of it as possible.
One can quite confidently expect accusing cries of “fundamentalist!” to ring in the ears of those who today take up this theme with any degree of seriousness.
And yet this teaching, along with the perspectives of apocalypse and antichrist that are part and parcel of it, is by no means peripheral to the New Testament as a whole:
St. Peter and St. John pull no punches either. Properly understood, the mysterium iniquitatis furnishes an essential dramatic and eschatological dimension to Christian anthropology that we, heirs and citizens of the “flattest,” most dramatically and eschatologically arid eras of history (i.e. secular modernity), are won’t to forget.
Here’s how St. Paul presents the teaching to the Thessalonians. He speaks, cryptically, about a “lawless one” (or, as one freer translation puts it, a “real dog of Satan”) (v. 3) who will “seat himself in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (v. 4).
This, he assures his listeners, has not yet come to pass; but “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work” (v. 7).
In more reassuring (but no less apocalyptic) vein he goes on to speak of the ultimate triumph over the lawless one, whom Jesus “will kill with the breath of his mouth and render powerless by the manifestation of his coming” (v. 8).
What’s most disturbing about this passage, of course, is how we’re told to look for an evil that will incubate in the heart of God’s own dwelling place—his “temple”—and even, as Paul tells the Ephesians, in the “heavenly places.” (Eph 6:12).
In other words, the worst evil is not outside the gates; it’s not even at the gates. Rather, the worst evil is always already inside the gates, at the very heart of the existential reality of faith, in us, in the Church.
Here we encounter the paradox that no person and certainly not the institutional machinery of the Church (“Surely not I, Lord?” (Matt 26:22)
Usually want to really confront.
But what is confronted brutally and honestly by St. Paul is this unthinkable possibility: that the worst evils might be most at home and, indeed, find the most scope for their manifestation and legitimation in that which is most sacred.
Yet this should not be surprising if we consider what evil is in its essence.
If evil is a “privation of the good,” this means that it cannot work on its own; it requires a host.
In order to manifest itself evil must take a good thing and corrupt and desecrate it from within, transforming by parasitisation the icon into the idol.
“Vice mimics virtue,” says St. Cyril of Jerusalem. Here’s the scary part: the more perfect the good, the more scope for evil to mimic and subvert.
Thus, in order to effect the most perfect corruption and desecration of everything good and pure, Satan—the personification of evil, antichrist, whom Scripture calls “a liar, and the father of lies”
(John 8:44)—relentlessly pursues the best so that the worst might be that much more effective a lie. It’s nicely expressed in the ancient Latin idiom: corruptio optima quae est pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst.
The assault on “the temple”
The genuinely disturbing implication of St. Paul’s teaching is therefore that we should expect—and not deceive ourselves—to find the most horrible possibilities in our own hearts, our own hands, and our own community.
St. Paul’s reference to the temple, God’s dwelling place, is crucial in this regard. In a broad sense, “temple” represents those sacred and holy places where God’s presence is manifest (e.g. the Jerusalem temple).
The holiest of these is Christ himself, the Son, the “temple” par excellence (cf. John 1:14), who pours himself out for his bride (cf. Eph 5).
The Church, who in turn becomes the Sacrament of Salvation for all mankind, generating the children of God, sanctifying and purifying them for perfect union with the Father.
We ourselves, bearers of the divine image, adopted into the eternal mystery as sons in the Son and bride of Christ, are in the entirety of our bodily selves sacramental temples of the Holy Spirit. (cf. 1 Cor 3:16-17; 1 Cor 6:19).
This means, then, that what evil will attack and corrupt most virulently is precisely the mystery of baptismal adoption, eucharistic presence, Holy Orders, and sacramental marriage—the central ecclesial, sacramental, and liturgical modes of God’s “temple,” the highest realities of truth, worship, and love.
It explains a lot, I think.
This is the deep paradox of the Incarnation: even as the gift of the Son offers the possibility for the best, it also adds to the scope of the worst.
It makes a more perfect, more demonic rejection of Christ possible. This is why David Bentley Hart argues—so effectively—that nihilism could only become possible after Christ; you could not have Nietzsche, with his frighteningly polished embrace of anti-value, without the Incarnation.
But St. Paul recognizes that the Incarnation does not just sharpen the existing conflict between good and evil, but in fact starts its final countdown.
This is what the apocalyptic mode of antichrist is all about. And if this plays out in the summons to each adopted child of God to fight antichrist in the dramatic arc of their own lives, to “put on the armor of God” against the “devil’s schemes” (Eph 6:11) 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….”
(End Part 1)