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    The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days
    The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days
    The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days
    Ebook73 pages59 minutes

    The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days

    By Giorgio Agamben and Adam Kotsko

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    In 2013, Benedict XVI became only the second pope in the history of the Catholic Church to resign from office. In this brief but illuminating study, Giorgio Agamben argues that Benedict's gesture, far from being solely a matter of internal ecclesiastical politics, is exemplary in an age when the question of legitimacy has been virtually left aside in favor of a narrow focus on legality. This reflection on the recent history of the Church opens out into an analysis of one of the earliest documents of Christianity: the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which stages a dramatic confrontation between the "man of lawlessness" and the enigmatic katechon, the power that holds back the end of days. In Agamben's hands, this infamously obscure passage reveals the theological dynamics of history that continue to inform Western culture to this day.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStanford University Press
    Release dateMay 23, 2017
    ISBN9781503602748
    The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days

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      Book preview

      The Mystery of Evil - Giorgio Agamben

      Stanford University Press

      Stanford, California

      English translation © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

      The Mystery of Evil was originally published in Italian in 2013 under the title Il mistero del male: Benedetto XVI e la fine dei tempi © 2013 by Giorgio Agamben. Originally published by Gius. Laterza & Figli, S.p.A. Roma-Bari. This book was negotiated through Agnese Incisa Agenzia Letteraria, Torino.

      Translator’s Note © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Agamben, Giorgio, 1942– author.

      Title: The mystery of evil : Benedict XVI and the end of days / Giorgio Agamben ; [translated by] Adam Kotsko.

      Other titles: Mistero del male. English | Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)

      Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Series: Meridian: crossing aesthetics | Originally published in Italian in 2013 under the title Il mistero del male. Benedetto XVI e la fine dei tempi. | Includes bibliographical references.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2016049164 (print) | LCCN 2016050729 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503600935 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503602731 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503602748 (ebook) | Subjects: LCSH: Benedict XVI, Pope, 1927–—Abdication, 2013. | Political theology. | Good and evil. | Eschatology.

      Classification: LCC BX1378.6 .A3313 2017 (print) | LCC BX1378.6 (ebook) | DDC 282.092—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049164

      THE MYSTERY OF EVIL

      Benedict XVI and the End of Days

      Giorgio Agamben

      Translated by Adam Kotsko

      STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

      STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

      MERIDIAN

      Crossing Aesthetics

      Werner Hamacher

      Editor

      Contents

      Translator’s Note

      Prefatory Note

      I. The Mystery of the Church

      II. Mysterium iniquitatis: History as Mystery

      Appendix

      Declaration of Celestine V

      Declaration of Benedict XVI

      Tyconius, Liber regularum

      II. The Lord’s Bipartite Body

      VII. The Devil and His Body (Excerpt)

      Augustine, City of God, Book XX, Chapter 19

      Bibliography

      Translator’s Note

      For this text, I have broken with a long-established tradition in Agamben translations by declining to mark the distinction between two pairs of terms: diritto/legge and potere/potenza (conventionally translated as juridical order/law and power/potential, respectively). In neither of these texts is Agamben exploring the conceptual problems that motivated the technical usage of these pairs, and hence translating them in the conventional way struck me as unidiomatic and distracting. Nevertheless, Agamben’s usage of the respective pairs is systematic within this text and can be tracked fairly easily based on the sense. Diritto appears exclusively in The Mystery of the Church and always refers to law in general (for instance, diritto naturale e diritto positivo is translated as natural law and positive law rather than natural juridical order and positive juridical order), and every use of law in the context of the exposition of the biblical text corresponds to legge; potere refers to political power in an abstract sense (e.g., constitutional powers or state powers), while potenza refers to concrete political powers in the sense of visible institutions (the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, etc.). The only exception to the latter rule comes in Agamben’s rendering of 2 Thessalonians 2:9, where Satan is said to use all power (ogni potenza).

      For Greek terms, I have supplied macrons, which do not appear in Agamben’s Italian text. The lack of macrons sometimes creates ambiguity as to whether we are dealing with the katechōn (the personal form: the one who restrains) or the katechon (the impersonal form: what restrains), and I have opted to add or omit the macron depending on what seemed to me to be the more likely sense in any given case. Finally, I regret that there was no possible translation for the subtitle of the second essay that did not introduce a rhyme that does not exist in the Italian.

      I would like to thank Carlo Salzani for checking my translation against the Italian text and to extend my continued gratitude to Emily-Jane Cohen and the entire staff of Stanford University Press.

      Prefatory Note

      "Mysterium iniquitatis represents the unpublished text of a lecture delivered at Freiberg, Switzerland, on November 13, 2012, on the occasion of an awarding of an honorary doctorate in theology. The arguments treated on that occasion are so tightly interconnected with the following attempt at an interpretation of Benedict XVI’s abdication (The Mystery of the Church") that I did not believe it necessary to conceal the proximity by mitigating assonances and repetitions. Both texts in fact think one single problem: that of the political meaning of the messianic theme of the end of days, today as much as twenty centuries ago.

      I. The Mystery of the Church

      1.

      In these

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