The End Of Time by Josef Pieper

Author:Josef Pieper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Philosophy, Catholicism, Christianity
ISBN: 9780898707267
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER III

[1]

Contemporary man and the notion of the Antichrist

In the tradition of Western historical thought, the end-situation within history is invariably entitled Dominion of the Antichrist. It is therefore necessary to explain as precisely as possible what is meant by this expression.

The name “Antichrist” may at first ring strangely on the modern ear. The meaning of this name in terms of historical reality is, however, very familiar to the contemporary man—to the contemporary man, which does not mean every man who is alive today on earth; it means whoever has observed and shared the experience of the most recently past events of human history (the totalitarian regime, “total war” and its concomitants) with awakened senses and from within. That familiarity, which it will be easy to demonstrate, is something new. In the spiritual history of “modern times”, the notion of the Antichrist has met with the same fate as the whole notion of a catastrophic end-situation within history. It was looked upon as something belonging simply to the “Dark Ages”.1 Twenty years after Iselin’s History of Mankind, synchronously with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the Swiss Corrodi published a Critical History of Millenarianism (1781-1783), in the Preface to which he says, “The history of mystical rapture is useful, because it preserves us from relapses”, in addition to which it affords “rich material for merriment”.2 Has not the ingenuousness of this attitude of enlightened superiority assumed, in the interim, a touching character? This is equally true of the theology of this period, even of that which is in other respects ecclesiastically orthodox; in contrast to the “exaggerations” of the medieval notion of the Antichrist, it laid great stress on adopting an emphatically enlightened attitude, which led it to adduce highly “modern” arguments. Thus the important ecclesiastical historian Dollinger, for instance, points to the “geographical expansion of our field of vision”, in order to prove how difficult it is to imagine a persecution of the Church extending over the whole earth.3 “A world power which closes all churches in all parts of the earth and on every island simultaneously”4 is for Dollinger “something positively unthinkable”.5 In the meantime, this “unthinkable” idea has become completely familiar to us; few things enjoy such good prospects of successful operation as this technologically registerable simultaneity all over the planet, including the “islands”. Above all, there is no trace today of the amused superiority which the century of the Enlightenment felt with regard to medieval notions of the barbarity of the Antichrist regime, which was simply dismissed as primitive fantasy. Contemporary man cannot escape the feeling that, in some uncanny way, it “all fits in” when, for example, he learns that according to the medieval tradition the Antichrist brings with him a cremation furnace6—a notion which the enlightened narrator found as primitive as it was amusing.

[2]

Correct understanding of the Antichrist presupposes theology in toto

What, then, in detail, does the notion “Dominion of the Antichrist” imply?

It has already been mentioned that the more a philosophic inquiry relates to history, the more the inquirer needs to return to theology.

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