Josef Pieper: "The Antichrist is a phenomenon of the political sphere"

“JUST AS the martyr, historically speaking, is a figure of the political order, so, too, the Antichrist is a phenomenon of the political sphere. The Antichrist is not something resembling a “heretic”, who is of importance only to ecclesiastical history and to whom the rest of the world need pay no attention whatever. Potentia saecularis, worldly power—this, says Thomas, is the specific instrument of the Antichrist; he is a worldly potentate. Tyrants, in their persecutions of the Church, Thomas states further, are prototypes (quasi figura) of the Antichrist. The latter, then, is not conceived as a phenomenon on the brink of the historical field; rather is the Antichrist, insofar as history is primarily political history, an eminently historical figure.

“This also implies that the End will not be chaos in the sense that the opposition and conflict between numbers of historical powers will cause progressive dissolution of historical ties and structures and, finally, putrefaction. On the contrary, the End will be characterized by one single governmental structure equipped with prodigious power, which, however, fails to establish any genuine order. At the end of history there will be a pseudo-order maintained in being by the exercise of power....

“The establishment of a World State, which is today well within the bounds of historical possibility, may quite possibly come to be looked upon as a legitimate goal of political endeavor. What this doctrine [the traditional doctrine of the Antichrist] does state is that once this step has been taken, mankind itself will find itself in a condition in which the Dominion of the Antichrist has become more acutely possible than ever before: a world organization might become the most deadly and impregnable of tyrannies, the final establishment of the reign of anti-Christ.”

~Josef Pieper: The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History. (Ignatius Press)

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