O Mistério do Mal. Bento XVI e o Fim dos Tempos

by Giorgio Agamben, Patricia Peterle (Translator), Silvana de Gaspari (translator)

Neste breve volume, ao interpretar a renúncia do papa Bento XVI, em chave, a um só tempo, teológica e política, escatológica e histórica, Giorgio Agamben aborda a questão da crise da sociedade e das instituições contemporâneas ressaltando como ponto crucial a confusão entre legalidade e legitimidade.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Religion, Theory

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 22, 2013

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[Peter Bradley]

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/review/R2IJTYE...

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.

[Shulamith Farhi]

Agamben's main topic in these lectures is the question of evil, which he argues makes more sense in the context of eschatology and should therefore be stripped of Gnostic ontotheological residues it has accumulated. Readers familiar with Agamben's work won't be surprised by this left-Heideggerean gesture; what is surprising is his analysis of the Pauline katechon. According to the hegemonic interpretation, associated with Carl Schmitt, this term is usually understood to refer to the role of Empire in restraining the coming of the man of lawlessness (ho anthropos tēs anomias). Agamben uncovers a second approach to this term, originating with the Donatist heretic Tyconius, where the katechon refers to the divided body of the Church. Tyconius interprets Song of Songs 1:5 ("I am dark and beautiful") as referring to two aspects of the Church: corrupt and blessed; the former is then interpreted as the lawlessness in need of restraint by the latter. On this basis, Agamben weaves an account where the katechon is the "slowing element" combined with the decisive element of the eschaton, acting as an "arrest and, at the same time, a dilation of history." On this account, the Church performs two functions: the slowing down of lawlessness and the decisive acceleration that brings about the coming of the end times. The significance of these lectures is that they provide a careful philological grounding for attempts in contemporary theory (Virno, Noys) after Schmitt to theorize the katechon as carrying a leftist significance. If Agamben is correct, and on this point at least I think he is, the katechon is not the inherently right-wing institution tasked with preserving law and order that Schmitt makes it out to be; on Agamben's interpretation, the katechon represents what Ernst Bloch would call the not-yet-conscious.

[Elena Molina]

Illegitimacy? Review of Giorgio Agamben’s The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days. By Gerardo Muñoz.
Read more: https://infrapolitica.com/2017/05/04/...

Giorgio Agamben’s Il mistero del male, now translated in English as The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days (Stanford U Press, 2017), is an intense repudiation of the mundane legitimacy of every institution, costume, and political structure hitherto existing on earth. For Agamben, the decline towards illegitimacy has not been a matter of a few years or decades, but part of a larger inherited drama. The core of the book reads Benedict XVI’s “great refusal” as an ‘exemplary act’ [sic] against the Church, bringing to awareness a vital “loss of substantial legitimacy” (Agamben 3). Overstating the dual structure characteristic to Western governmentality – potestas and autorictas, or economy and mystery, legality and legitimacy – Agamben asserts that Ratzinger’s gesture cuts through the very thicket of the ekklesia arcanum, reversing the mystery of faith in time to the point of abandoning the very vicarship of Christ (Agamben 5). Of course, this comes as no surprise to those that have engaged with his prior The Kingdom and the Glory (2011), where Agamben interprets the Trinity as a stasiological foundation of an oikonomia that plays out (vicariously) as a praxis without Being [1].

In many ways, this essay is supplemental to the larger turn already undertaken in The Kingdom, only that this time, Agamben brings to focus a seminal institution of the Western political tradition. Here Agamben seems to be pressing more heavily on the state of global affairs in which the Church is a metonymy: “…if this gesture interests us, this certainly is not solely insofar as it refers to a problem internal to the Church, but much more because it allows us to focus on a genuinely political theme, that of justice, which like legitimacy cannot be the eliminated from the praxis of our society” (Agamben 16-17). This is consistent with overall structure of The Kingdom, by which the structure of the oikonomia is understood vis-à-vis the true ‘providential machine’ of human administration. So every administrative structure is illegitimate, since for Agamben, it governs through de-substantial vicarious being. It is a true ‘kakokenodicy’ (referring to the emptying) that can only justify effective evil (Agamben 36). To the extent that Agamben’s overarching project seeks to establish a responsive unity to the problem of discessio or internal division, it is not difficult to grasp how Benedict XVI’s return to Tyconius’ obscure thesis of the Church composite of good and evil is highly relevant, as we shall see.

We are far from Augustine’s City of God, where the split was produced between two cities, allowing for what Erik Peterson understood, against Schmitt, as the impossibility of any political theology. Tyconius is, in a sort of way, the persistence of an Anti-Augustinian gnosis. Agamben’s effort, let’s be clear, tries to make Augustine a son of Tyconius, which makes it even more mysterious; since whereas Augustine separated Church and Empire, Tyconius separates evil and good in the temporal katechontic nature of the Church (Agamben 10-11). Agamben cites Illich’s testimony to claim that the Church is always already mysterium iniquitatis as corruption optima pessima (the worst possible corruption of the best). But once again, Agamben seems to be forcing positions, since whereas for Illich the Church, consistent with Augustine, allowed for ius refomandi (reform), Agamben posits discessio as the arche of the corporeal Church, in this way reintroducing the myth of political theology to stage the mysterical drama of History.

In a strange sense, the mystery is not that mysterious. It becomes messianic eschatology on reserve. According to Agamben’s narrative, the Church as a dual nature of opposites, possesses an internal stasis between a temporal restrainer (katechon), the evil that runs counter to against law’s integrity (anomos), and the eschatological dimension of the End. This last character points to the Pauline’ messianicity, which allows Agamben to link Benjamin and Tyconius’ in a common salvific structure. As he writes: “The mysterium iniquitatis…is a historical drama, which is underway in every instant, so to speak, and in which the destiny of humanity, the salvation or fall of human beings, is always at stake.” (Agamben 14). Benedict XVI is a counter-katechon, as he is able to reveal, in his exodus, the eschatological structure that leaves behind the vicarious economy. According to Agamben, Benedict XVI’s message was “nothing but the capacity to keep oneself connected to one’s own end” (Agamben 16).

On the reverse, this entails subscribing a messianic turning of life from within the Church in order to posit a metapolitical form without remainder. The renunciation of the katechon implies that we are left with an economy (oikonomia) devoid of legitimacy. The central problem here is that history itself has become mystery of the economy, instead of an economy of mystery, which is the Pauline arche. What compensates for this illegitimacy becomes messianic politics that “does not remain a mere idea, entirely inert and impotent in the face of law and economy, but succeeds in finding political expression in a force capable of counter-balancing the progressing leaving out onto a single technico-economic plane of the two coordinated but radically heterogeneous principles [legitimacy and legality] that constitutes the most preciouses patrimony of European culture” (Agamben 18).

But if the machine of governance of the West is dual, playing legitimacy and legality in a skirmish co-dependency, why does Agamben conflate the renewal of legitimacy to the coming of a new politics? The reason seems to be that once you accept the condition that what exhausts government is an economical structure of the Christian katechon, you can then accept as exodus a metapolitics of salvation. What is interesting is that this politics, seemingly against Schmitt, actually re-enacts the same movement for an exact, albeit reverse, political trade-off. Agamben does not follow Peterson here. Let us recall that Peterson’s argument was never that the Church is an oikonomia, but that Schmitt’s totalizing and unifying political theology applied not to the Church, but only to Empire. This principial politics, as we know, has always led to catastrophic dominance, from Rome to Christian Monarchy to Nazi Germany. Counter to Schmitt, Agamben wants to produce not an imperial katechon, but “a time of the end, [where] mystery and history correspond without remainder” (Agamben 30).

The problem becomes that in order to set the stage for such “drama”, Agamben needs to avoid at all costs the Augustinian/Petersonian split of the Church in its facticity (as it actually happened). This explains why, in the second essay, history is understood as mysterical. In this context, it is noteworthy that Peterson is fully absent, even though he famously authored the essay “The Church”. There he writes in an important passage:

“The worship the Church celebrates is public worship and not a celebration of the mysterious; it is an obligatory public work, a leitourgia, and not an initiation dependent on voluntary judgment. The public-legal character of Christian worship reflects the fact that the church stands much closer to political entities like kingdom and polis, rather than voluntary associations and unions” [2].

I highlight Peterson’s reference to the “the mysterious”, because this is an explicit polemical stance against Casel, the Benedictine monk that informs Agamben’s mysterical adventure in history. But this has important implications, only two of which I will register here. First, accepting Casel’s mysterical Church leads us to conclude that internal worldly illegitimacy requires that we embrace a messianic politics ‘again’ (Agamben 38). In fact, politics is ultimate salvation in Tyconius, Casal, and Benjamin.

Secondly, mysterical historicity demands voluntary filiation. Agamben lays this out in plain sight: “it is in this drama, always underway, that all are called to play their part without reservation and ambiguity” (Agamben 39). Messianism forces agonic politics, displacing administrative vicarship with a conceptual theodicy. But profane life does not need to coincide with or abdicate a metapolitics of salvation. Now, if this is so, perhaps the accusation raised against governmental structure as illegitimate is in itself not legitimate. What if instead of being on the side of the metapolitics of the eschatological mystery, legitimacy is nothing other than the internal rational enactment of the separation of the profane that is always taking place in the world?





Notes

[1] Agamben writes in The Kingdom and the Glory (2011): “And, more generally, the intra-Trinitarian relation between the Father and the Son can be considered to be the theological paradigm of every potestas vicaria, in which every act of the vicar is considered to be a manifestation of the will of the one who is represented by him. And yet, as we have seen, the an-archic character of the Son, who is not founded ontologically in the Father, is essential to the Trinitarian economy. That is, the Trinitarian economy is the expression of an anarchic power and being that circulates among the three persons according to an essentially vicarious paradigm… The mystery of being and of the deity coincides entirely with its “economical” mystery. There is no substance of power, but only an “economy,” only a “government.” 138-39 pp.
[2] Erik Peterson. “The Church”. Theological Tractates (Stanford U Press, 2011). 38 pp.

[OSCAR]

Obra concisa, se esperaba más contenido de ella, o al menos, que tratará más el tema sobre las razones por las cuales Joseph Ratzinger dejó la tiara papal hace unos años.

La renuncia sólo le permite al autor poner en contexto el tema de la visión eclesiológica del anterior Papa, que a su juicio está basada en la obra de un escurridizo teólogo preagustino, cuya interpretación particular sobre katechon, el Anticristo (el antinomos) y el drama o misterio de Dios habría inspirado al Papa a abdicar de su cargo.

Lo fundamental de este opúsculo es la idea, para Agamben relevante, de que el katechon no sería un cuerpo como el Estado encargado de demorar el fin de los tiempos, sino un actor más en el drama divino, que se actualiza en la Historia, en el presente, que no sería sino la lucha que cada uno de nosotros tiene que hacer en contra del mal. El opúsculo es un llamamiento a evitar más la ambigüedad, a la definición política, a la toma de partido, algo repugnante para el liberalismo.

Solamente no estoy de acuerdo en la idea de que al reducir al katechon a un actor más de un drama divino, se haya acabado o quede infundada la teología política schmittiana. Conviene apreciar los enfoques de otros pensadores como Ramiro de Maeztu. Sin embargo, Agamben, al cuestionar otra vez la visión de las dos ciudades y reinterpretar nuevamente a San Agustín, ha vuelto a replantearnos el papel de la teología política hoy en día.

[Kyle]

Agamben is definitely onto something deeply profound when suggesting that Benedict XVI took the view of the 4th century Tyconius, that it is the Church that is the katechon that Paul speaks of in II Thessalonians, and that, until the second coming, there is within the Mystical Body the Church and the anti-Church that will be intertwined alongside one another. The young Ratzinger wrote with great intrigue on Tyconius' thesis, and as pope mentioned these ideas explicitly in a general audience just shortly before his resignation.

There are many theories about the nature of Benedict XVI's resignation. A papal resignation is itself a unique and rare moment in the history of the Church, but Benedict's resignation is especially unique amongst them - he alone took the title "Pope Emeritus", continued to wear the white robes of the papal office for the many years he lived after the resignation, and even spoke of himself, in Seewald's biography, retaining a "spiritual dimension" to the papacy after his resignation. Some, typically identified whether pejoratively or proudly as "Bedevecantists", take the view that Benedict was forced out, and his resignation is canonically invalid, making him still the true pope. Where that leaves the legitimacy of the Francis papacy after Benedict's death these same Bedevecantists seem to be divided on.

Agamben suggests that Benedict XVI's resignation is a gesture of profound implications about the nature of the Church, namely in reference to her "bipartite body" (as Tyconius proposes) - that the Church is both spiritual and temporal, Church and anti-Church. This renunciation of the papal office, while claiming to still retain a "spiritual dimension" of it afterwards, does give further thought to this sense that Benedict's resignation is linked to this idea of the Church as bipartite. Was his resignation a severing of the true Church from the anti-Church? If we follow Paul's letter, this is something that can only occur at the time of the second coming. Was his resignation then, more specifically, the renunciation of the Church's role as katechon? So that the lawlessness and illegitimacy of both our present empire and the anti-Church could be fully revealed. In this case, is his resignation a preparation for the severing of the true Church from the anti-Church, a preparation for the second coming of Christ at the end of time? Or was Benedict simply trying to reveal and remind us of this distinction, that the true Church is aimed towards spiritual affairs, that its domain on earth is within "messianic time" - here and now, and not only with the coming of the eschaton.

Agamben seems to leave this all an open-ended question. One would have to do much "reading between the lines" to credit a definitive conclusion to him. As I've found with some of his other shorter works, Agamben explores a lot of very interesting ideas here but he ultimately leaves the reader wanting more, as he does not provide any explicit conclusion that ties all of these ideas together. Still, there is no denying there is something intensely apocalyptic about our own times, and this book offers many bread crumbs that need to be followed further by perceptive minds of our age, to uncover the true role of the Church and of ourselves in the midst of messianic time, in the midst of this apocalyptic moment.

[Alexander]

I don't know how necessary this book was. Alot of it covers very similar - if not identical - ground to that already threaded by The Church and the Kingdom and The Time That Remains, with the additional twists here of 1) situating the abdication of Benedict XVI among the themes broached in those two titles, and 2) spending more time on the role and place of 'evil' in the salvific discourse of Christianity. With respect to the first point, Benedict's abdication is only barely discussed, and serves more as a launching point for discussion than a subject in its own right; With respect to the second point, the thesis advanced - in a manner far too thinly substantiated for my liking - is that unless 'the mystery of evil' is placed in its proper eschatological context, Christian doctrine threatens to tip over into an 'ontology of evil' with disastrous results for the possibility of political action.

If that last sentence seemed to move too quickly, from eschatology to evil to political action, my only defence is that it's not too far removed from the pace of the book itself, which squeezes in these legitimately interesting topics into a space much too small for them. Part of the issue - and I suppose this is by design - is that this book also serves to partly color-in some empty spaces left by certain unarticulated but alluded-to reflections in The Kingdom and the Glory on the relation between oikonomia ('economy') and mystery, as well as some bits in the State of Exception on law and legitimacy, in order to better link both these books to the messianic themes more explicitly dealt with in the texts I mentioned in the paragraph before. So yeah, it all serves a purpose in the very specific context of the Agambenian oeuvre, but outside of that, it's a pretty scatter-shot little book. Not awful, not great, just OK.

[Gerardo]

I due testi qui raccolti sono brevi, ma illuminanti sulla condizione politica contemporanea. Partendo da un singolo evento, il "gran rifiuto" di Benedetto XVI, Agamben illumina la nostra epoca.

Anch'egli riprende la nota lettera ai Tessalonicesi di Paolo, in cui si parla del "potere che frena" la venuta dell'Anticristo, il quale deve essere messo da parte affinché possa avvenire il Giudizio Universale e la fine dei tempi. Per secoli, è stata difficile l'interpretazione di tale passo, ma molto spesso si è convenuto sul fatto che la Chiesa - altre volte l'Impero - rappresentasse questo potere frenante capace di mantenere l'ordine, contro il potere dell'anomia rappresentato dall'Anticristo. Tale potere ordinatore, però, è diviso in due parti: quella del Bene e quella del Male. Infatti, ogni potere racchiude in sé queste due forze, rendendo difficile e delicata il suo esercizio. Benedetto XVI, col suo rifiuto, ha voluto sancire la divisione tra queste due realtà: il suo rifiuto, quindi, è stato un rifiuto contro la parte malvagia e corrotto del potere, volendo così preservare l'esistenza di quella benevola e corretta.

Inoltre, l'avvento dell'Apocalisse, secondo Agamben, non indica la "fine del tempo", bensì "il tempo della fine": è un racconto, un elemento storico che contempla una prassi. Infatti, il termine mistero, che indica tale processo, in realtà non indica qualcosa di nascosto e oscuro, bensì una prassi che si esercita come un dramma nel mondo. Dio agisce e agendo si mostra sulla Terra. Tale azione, produce due strutture storiche: l'oikonomia, cioè la strategia d'azione della divinità nel mondo, e l'escatologia, cioè la fine e il fine della storia. Se non si ha più una visione escatologica, l'oikonomia diviena una tirannica struttura di ordinamento, fine a se stessa, non più capace di donare un senso. Oggi, con l'avvento dell'economia come fine ultimo di ogni decisione politica, si assiste a questa perdita di senso e di visione storica.

[Felix]

A quick but fascinating read, placing the resignation of the papacy by Benedict XVI in the context of Ratzinger's own lifelong dialogue with Augustinian thought, and taking the opportunity to speculate on an ongoing crisis in the Church which fits neatly into the broader scope of Agamben's work on institutional power - the distinction between institutional legality and legitimacy is a timely addition to his critical toolkit, and, when placed alongside prior concepts such as the state of exception and the camp, provides a useful framework through which to understand the trends in Western liberal democracy that gathered momentum following 9/11 and that we now see extremised in Australian and American detention centres.

Notwithstanding a reasonable degree of prior exposure via discussions by other authors, this is the first work of Agamben's that I've read directly, though despite its brevity and clarity I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as an introduction to his work - without the broader context of the Homo Sacer series it will likely come across as little more than a contemporary curiosity, narrow in scope and surface-level in analysis. That said, anyone with an interest in scriptural hermeneutics, eschatology and the nature of Antichrist will likely find some delight in these pages.

[heyyonicki]

Déception. Déjà, je crois que je n'aurais sans doute pas du focaliser sur le sous-titre du livre mais plutôt sur son titre, puisque je m'y suis engouffré en attendant une réflexion sur abdication du pape, alors que c'est une partie plutôt minoritaire dans cet essais. Il est composé de deux parties et d'un appendice, la première partie est consacrée à Benoit XVI, et la deuxième retranscris une conférence sur le thème de l'aspect politique du retour du Christ pour la fin des temps. On nous précise dans l'appendice que les allusions au "grand refus" du pape ont été gommé dans la deuxième partie pour ne pas se risquer à être redondant. Je pense sincèrement que c'est une erreur car le niveau de language et d'analyse de l'auteur (qui est plutôt soutenu et universitaire) ne m'a pas permis de faire des liens, ce qui m'a un peu frustré. Le nombre de terme technique et latin est asse exaspérant. Finalement, ce n'est pas une lecture très agréable puisqu'elle n'a pas spécialement satisfait ma curiosité face à cet événement. Je ne conseille pas particulièrement cette lecture mais plutôt un article qui m'a plutôt aidé à la compréhension et qui en fait une bonne synthèse : https://livre-religion.blogs.la-croix...

[Afiq Ahmad Fauzi]

Again quite a difficult text for someone who's not versed in Church history. Agamben here provides a reading of the stepping down of Pope Benedict XVI and its relation to the katechon (a Biblical concept I didn't know of until I read this book)

[Garuda Guru]

Análise muitíssimo interessante para quem pensa a igreja como problema ao desenvolvimento do cristianismo.

[Katherine]

Me demoro mucho leyendo a Agamben y siempre encuentro algo genial y muy bien pensado.

[Aaron Schuschu]

Apparently…. Benedict quit because…. To let loose the Antichrist? Pay attention.

[Sergiu S. Dobre]

Have read the book in Romanian. Excellently translated by Anamaria Gebaila! It triggered my interest in the works of Ticonius!
Highly recommended!

[Cassidy]

3.5 fully don’t think I understood all of it and also it was nawt what I thought it would be about but nonetheless v interesting

[Michael Greer]

How is the reader introduced to the topic the author wishes to present for the reader? He states explicitly: "I will seek to understand Pope Benedict XVI's decision by situating it in the theological and ecclesiastical context proper to it." The decision of which he speaks is also called "the great refusal." This refusal is a turning away from the present condition of the Roman Catholic Church. And the refusal is a mark of courage, as he states. But the uniqueness of this event is something worth a deeper discussion, going well beyond news accounts.

Pope Benedict's refusal is the refusal to see the church as a temporal power alone. By compromising itself with the world it has become an economic institution which acts and reacts to events in time. But the church was founded for a very different purpose; to call attention to the call of the eternal in every human life. Unlike animals who don't worry about their eternal condition, humans of necessity must at least be concerned about their eternal vocation. And each person has precisely one, unique vocation. The church is currently subject to the perversions of its own dark side since it is a body consisting of both those making progress in holiness and those resolutely facing damnation.

[Stephane Martineau]

Réflexion difficile

Un thème intéressant mais dont le fil de perd dans la présentation qu'en fait l'auteur. Plusieurs redites qui peuvent devenir agaçantes.

[Mihaelavasiliu]

3,5 ⭐