Autonomies

If we refer to the doctrine set out in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, we can then say, as we have already done in this section, that the katechon—the power that restrains and delays the end, which the Church Fathers identified with institutions (the Roman Empire and the Church itself)—is today in crisis everywhere, and we are witnessing, therefore, the advent of the anomos, a lawless power that brings ruin and proclaims itself to be God (which is why the Church Fathers identified it with the Antichrist).

This is evident in the United States, where institutions no longer seem to function and all power lies in the hands of a man who speaks and acts without any regard for the law (the same can be said of Israel) and masquerades as God. It is worth reflecting on this epochal situation, which involves the whole of the West. Given that institutions (the State and its historical structures) have lost all credibility, it is futile to base upon them the power that holds back the eschatological event. And this is all the more true insofar as anomos, the lawless one, is not an external principle, but rather the form that the institution itself assumes as it decays. Trump and Netanyahu do not come from outside: it is the State itself—the power that ought to hold back and delay the end—that becomes the agent which accelerates and precipitates it in its most ruinous forms.

Quodlibet, 27 July, 2026

The term “Antichrist” (antichristos) appears in the New Testament only in the First and Second Epistles of John. The context is certainly eschatological (paidia, eschate hora estin, vulg. filioli, novissima hora est, “little children, it is the last hour”), and the term also significantly appears in the plural: “just as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, and now many have become antichrists”. No less decisive is the fact that the apostle defines the last hour as the “now (nyn)” in which it is he who finds himself: “the Antichrist is coming (erchetai, present indicative)’. Shortly afterwards, it is specified—as if it were necessary—that the Antichrist “is now in the world (nyn en to kosmoi estin)”. It is worth bearing in mind this eschatological context of the Antichrist, if it is true—as Eric Peterson, and Karl Barth before him, never tire of reminding us—that the final moment of human history is inseparable from Christianity (“a Christianity,” writes Barth, “that is not wholly, entirely and without residue eschatological, has nothing at all to do with Christ, wholly and without residue”). For John, the Antichrist is the one who, in the final hour, “denies that Jesus is the Christ” (that is, the Messiah), and the antichrists are therefore the “many” who, like him, “went out from us, but were not of us”, which suggests, not without ambiguity, that the Antichrist emerges from the bosom of the ekklesia, but does not truly belong to it. As such, he is repeatedly referred to as the “deceiver” (planos, literally “the one who leads astray”, commonly translated as “seducer”).

For it is necessary to learn … at the same time the falsehood and truth of the whole of being.

Plato, Seventh Letter

By leading him astray, errancy dominates man through and through. But, as leading astray, errancy at the same time contributes to a possibility that man is capable of drawing up from his ek-sistence — the possibility that, by experiencing errancy itself and by not mistaking the mystery of Da-sein, he not let himself be led astray.

Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, 1943

At the limit, life . . . is what is capable of error. . . . With man, life reaches a living being who is never altogether in his place, a living being who is fated “to err” and “to be mistaken”.

Michel Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, January-March, 1985.

The sophist credo, expressed in Protagoras’ statement, “Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not”, reduces what is to what is knowable or cognisable, with the only limits on the latter being other cognitions. In other words, we are confined to a world of beliefs, opinions, or what the ancient Greek philosophers called doxa, and thereby separated from truth.

Truth, by contrast, concerns the being of what is, the experience that something is, that there is something rather than nothing, which is ultimately mysterious, that is, not reducible to what is “known”.

If the truth makes possible what is knowable, it is not itself what is knowable. It is that which makes possible “knowledge” of particular beings, but the latter may always be the object of differing opinions.

The truth keeps the latter at bay, as not the final word about what is or is not. It pulls us away from the hubris of unquestionable and unlimited knowledge; it holds in check the illusions of a sovereign knower capable of sovereign action in the world; it renders possible other potential ways of being in the world.