Thiel, the Pope and the Antichrist

“I recently gave a lecture in Rome on the subject of the Antichrist,” writes Peter Thiel in the latest issue of First Things. “I am interested in the Antichrist for various reasons, chiefly because no one else talks about him — which, for most of Christian history, would have seemed a clear sign of his imminent arrival. I expected the Church to ignore my remarks. I am not Catholic, I had never spoken in public before, and the subject seemed to me to lie well outside the Overton window. My expectations were dashed. The crowd of paparazzi outside the venue of the (supposedly secret) conference suggested that my remarks were not as private as I had hoped. A priest who had not attended the conference publicly wondered whether I should be burnt at the stake for heresy (albeit a ‘political heresy against the liberal consensus’). I say this not for self-congratulation or self-pity, but because it made me feel greater sympathy for Pope Benedict XVI. Let me explain. I did not come to Rome to try to be more Catholic than the Pope, but I hoped, even as a Protestant, to be more Catholic than the average Catholic. To cross that threshold, as I explained in my lectures, one need only listen to Pope Benedict not only when he spoke ex cathedra, but also when he spoke in a low voice. You can hear him whispering, and then shouting: the world is coming to an end. Benedict believed he was living at the end of time. This statement takes us by surprise, because Benedict chose not to speak openly about it until the final years of his life, when he had already renounced the papacy, his allies had been purged from the Vatican leadership, and almost no one was listening to him any more. We shall never know why he waited. Perhaps he feared compromising his authority, which was based on his brilliant academic acumen, and nothing sounds less respectable from an academic point of view than preaching about Judgement Day.

More generously, Benedict might have thought that his apocalyptic predictions would become self-fulfilling prophecies, unsettling his flock and driving them away from the Church. Ironically, an honest discussion of our apocalyptic moment would have resonated most strongly with young people in particular. Benedict could have taught young people about the specifics of the biblical apocalypse, including the totalitarian peace and security that precede it. Such a discussion would have revealed grounds for hope, as we seek the courage ‘not to be alarmed’ (Mt 24:6). One cannot imagine anyone more qualified than Benedict to lead such a conversation. Now we must do without him (…) In 1969, Ratzinger listed on the radio several ‘crises’ besieging the Church. The positivist erosion of ‘the question of God’s existence’ catalysed ‘the crisis of the present’, ‘the crisis of our concept of reality’, ‘the general crisis of thought’ and ‘the crisis of Modernism’. These crises of the mind and the soul would soon, he predicted, decimate the Church: ‘From today’s crisis will emerge the Church of tomorrow — a Church that will have lost much. It will become small and will have to start more or less from scratch’.

In 1988, a crowd in Manhattan witnessed a less reserved Ratzinger. Brought to New York by the founder of First Things, Richard John Neuhaus, to deliver the 1988 Erasmus Lecture, he began his address, ‘Biblical Interpretation in Crisis’, by sounding the alarm: ‘In Vladimir Solov’ëv’s *The History of the Antichrist*, the eschatological enemy of the Redeemer endeared himself to believers by having obtained a doctorate in theology at Tübingen and having written an exegetical work recognised as pioneering in the field’ (…) When Benedict became Pope, the audience for his allusions and hints expanded from cardinals and bookish theologians to the whole world. Benedict brought the Antichrist into the headlines when he asked Cardinal Giacomo Biffi to deliver the 2007 Lenten meditations to the Vatican leadership. Biffi was in the habit of mentioning the Antichrist during his episcopate in Bologna, and agreed to give a private talk on Solov’ëv’s account. Later that same year, Benedict once again voiced some thoughts on the Antichrist in his encyclical "Spe Salvi". On this occasion, he quoted some unusually apocalyptic words by Immanuel Kant: ‘If one day Christianity were to cease to be worthy of love, then the prevailing mood in human thought would be one of rejection and opposition to it; and the Antichrist would begin his — however brief — reign’. These apocalyptic outbursts make Benedict seem like a Baptist preacher of fire and brimstone. Although rare, it is strange that they lie forgotten amongst his sixty-six books and numerous speeches (…) In our gerontocracy, eighty is the new eighteen, the age at which one can finally behave like an irresponsible adult and speak one’s mind. And in his old age, Benedict began to speak with the clarity he had hitherto reserved only for his closest readers. He told Peter Seewald in the 2018 interview: ‘Modern society is formulating an anti-Christian creed, and those who oppose it are punished with social exclusion. It is natural to fear this spiritual power of the Antichrist, and he truly needs the help of the prayers of an entire diocese and the universal Church to resist it.’ Three years earlier, out of the blue, the Slovak politician Vladimír Palko had received a letter from Benedict praising his book Die Löwen Kommen (‘The Lions Are Coming’). The letter included these words: ‘We see how the power of the Antichrist is spreading, and we can only pray that the Lord will give us strong shepherds to defend his Church in this hour of need against the power of evil.’ Anyone who reflects long enough on the Antichrist will identify a specific candidate. Benedict resisted the petty temptation to name his suspect. But he left us clues. One possibility, of course, is the liberalising pope who succeeded him. According to Joachim, the Antichrist would assume the papacy after a virtuous pope. Several Joachimites believed that Pope Celestine V, who, like Benedict, abdicated at the age of eighty-five, was this good pope, making his successor, Boniface VIII, the Antichrist. Benedict knew all this when, in 2009, he laid his papal pallium on Celestine’s tomb, a week after delivering a lecture on Ticonio’s theory of the two-part Church. Did Benedict believe that Pope Francis was the Antichrist? However tempting this theory may be, Benedict suspected someone else. Solov’ëv’s Antichrist is a Nietzschean liberal theologian who, as Benedict had mentioned in his Erasmus Lecture, seduces his followers not least thanks to his honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Tübingen. This last detail amused Benedict — he highlighted it again in his 2007 book "Jesus of Nazareth" — perhaps because he himself had taught at Tübingen from 1966 to 1969. But if we stop there, we miss Benedict’s more subtle point. Hans Küng was a charismatic priest and a colleague of Ratzinger’s at Tübingen (where Küng taught from 1960 to 1996). At the age of thirty-four, Küng served as one of the youngest experts at the Second Vatican Council, which adopted many of his recommendations. Küng subsequently advocated euthanasia, denied papal infallibility, received a warm welcome from John F. Kennedy at the White House, and was barred from teaching Catholic theology by John Paul II. He influenced the Church more than the average pope.

Küng’s pan-religious ‘World Ethos’ set the agenda for the 1993 meeting of the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Robert Spaemann, a Catholic philosopher who had lectured on Soloviev’s history of the Antichrist and was a friend of Benedict’s, lambasted the concept of Weltethos in 1996. ‘Hovering over everything,’ wrote Spaemann, ‘was the name of a professor of theology at Tübingen’. Like the Antichrist, whose slogan is ‘peace and security’ (1 Thessalonians 5:3), Küng’s Weltethos aimed at world peace: ‘No peace between nations without peace between religions. No peace between religions without dialogue between religions’. An obsession with peace similarly distinguishes Solov’ëv’s Antichrist from Christ: ‘Christ brought the sword’, says the Antichrist. ‘I shall bring peace’. As for Ratzinger, he considered these arguments so persuasive that in his 2004 debate with Jürgen Habermas, rather than refuting Küng, he merely referred readers to Spaemann’s essay. Benedict’s silent war against Küng, which began in the 1960s in Tübingen, marks the front line of a battle that has been raging since at least the 1260s. On this battlefield stood Soloviev and Nietzsche, and before them Bonaventure and Thomas, debating issues concerning the fate of the world. Nothing would have surprised Ratzinger and Spaemann less than the fact that the Antichrist should have appeared in the guise of an academic colleague such as Küng. Today, all three men are dead, and the idea that the Antichrist might be scribbling away somewhere in a university seems antiquated and foolish. No one writes or thinks with the subtlety and power of these three men, and if anyone did, no one would notice. Benedict’s mistake in assuming that ideas would always matter may have been a grand master’s mistake — but it was a mistake nonetheless. We may excuse Benedict the academic for believing that his world would last forever, but for Benedict the Christian it was a grave error. Plato, Aristotle and the philosophers who followed them wrote between the lines about enduring questions. They wrote not only for their brilliant contemporaries, but for people who love to think in every age and place. They affirmed the eternity of the world and had no doubt that the future would bring new students with the intelligence and time to devote themselves to the very long, never easy, yet always rewarding work of interpretation that is the philosopher’s own. But the Christian knows that nothing lasts forever, because this world has a beginning and an end. The apocalypse will come sooner or later. When time is short and the hour is late, who can hope for salvation in philosophical reticence?” (Translation by Giulio Meotti)