The Katechon Has Become the Antichrist

On Thiel’s essay “Nihilism is not Enough”

Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division - Luke 12:51

Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima - Leonard Cohen, The Future

Peter Thiel, in an essay titled Nihilism Is Not Enough, returns to the problem he raised in The Straussian Moment. Thiel's essay reads like a re-creation narrative; he writes it in six instead of seven sections. Mirroring the essay’s conclusion that we are in a false Sabbath of history, time has stopped, but judgment has not yet fallen.

Although only one chapter is about the Katechon, the entire essay is centered around the question of restraint. Thiel is in search of a delayer. The katechon, “that which withholds”, could be a force or figure that holds back the revelation of the “man of lawlessness,” the Antichrist. Historically, this has been interpreted variously: as the Roman Empire, the Church, Christian monarchies, or a noble man. Schmitt brought the concept down from heaven and secularized it. Treating the katechon as a political structure that maintains enough order to delay the descent into chaos, preserving history from eschatological unfolding. But such a compromise always comes at a cost.

Thiel’s essay reveals itself within a tension, its aim is restraint and redemption. He quotes Malachi 3:2 in the final line: “But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth?” For he knows that the Judge approaches, with eyes of fire (Rev. 1:14), a sword proceeding from His mouth (Rev. 19:15), and a robe already dipped in blood (Rev. 19:13). Thiel hopes for a delay, not because he believes that our world is desirable, but because he sees judgment coming and fears we are not ready. He attempts to delay not from cowardice, but in hope, hope that repentance might still be possible. The world slumbers in its decadence, but the wise discern the hour and read the signs in imitation of Christ (Revelation 3:2-3).

Christ appears 5 times in the essay, as in the five wounds of the Passion. Violence appears 30 times."Peace and safety" and the "katechontic" each appear four times, which is the central message of the essay, the katechon is not restraining the Antichrist, it has become the Antichrist. Both the Enlightenment and the Antichrist promise safety and order, but offer no salvation. The katechon, mentioned directly 3 times and 4 times with its adjectival form, completes a symbolic 7, the number of the Antichrist illusion of completion. The katechon is offering us a false rest, man’s refusal to act. Hamlet and Machiavelli each mentioned 7 times. There are 39 footnotes, as in St. Paul’s "forty lashes minus one" in 2 Corinthians 11:24, “Our zombie era has been stretched as far as it will go”, the World has received its lashes, one more lash before it explodes, but unlike St. Paul, it has not turned toward faith, or sacrifice.

What appears to be resilience, Thiel argues, is in fact the prolongation of decay. The post-Cold War world has not overcome the threat of destruction; it has simply buried it under layers of institutional illusions. This is not peace but stasis. It is a simulation of order that suppresses not only violence but also vitality. Thiel reinterprets Schmitt's katechon through the lens of Girard. For Girard, all cultures are founded on scapegoating violence, hidden beneath layers of sacred myth. Christianity revealed this mechanism, dismantling it, and thereby undermining the very foundation of the political. “The Gospel revelation of foundational violence,” Thiel writes, “will, over time, lead to the gradual desacralization, deconstruction, destruction, and death of all cultures”. The katechon, once a restraining figure, in modernity it has become the twilight of the world heading towards the apocalypse.

Here, Thiel’s analysis of nihilism approaches Strauss, but not fully. In Natural Right and History, Strauss writes of modern political philosophy's turn from the ancients to a new, lowered horizon: “the low but solid ground” of self-preservation and material comfort. This lowering, Strauss warns, may create a system that is no longer open to revelation, where man forgets the question of the good altogether. The essay offers the same observation with a theological twist: in trading apocalypse for stability, modernity has sacrificed salvation itself.

Thiel’s reading of Bacon’s New Atlantis is pivotal. In Bacon, we find Salomon’s House, a technocratic priesthood that claims to pursue the “knowledge of Causes,” but also holds the power to create illusions and manipulate appearances. “Delusions and deceits of the sight,” the text says. Bacon’s project is a prototype of the modern machinery: a society that sustains its own legitimacy through simulation. Our world is one ruled by administrative fiat, procedural justice, risk aversion, and the abolition of all mystery.

The implication becomes clear: the katechon now restrains not evil, but good. It prevents not the apocalypse, but revelation. It results not in order, but numbness. It is not holding back the Antichrist, it is the Antichrist. The Antichrist is no longer an emperor or tyrant, no longer a figure in red robes proclaiming false divinity. He is a system. He’s the low but solid ground. A hyper-rational, peace-promising approach that numbs the soul and flattens all desire for transcendence. This was the promise of the Enlightenment: “peace and safety” by suppressing the sacred. “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them.”.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is the mirror of late modern man: paralyzed by knowledge, disenchanted with the world, and incapable of decisive action. Hamlet delays catastrophe, but cannot prevent it. This is the new Straussian Moment, that there are no longer any moments. Hamlet, like the late modern West, has lost touch with the political and theological. Hamlet wasn’t purely wicked, but he was too numb to act. He cannot act, he cannot create, and he cannot believe. Hamlet's tragic flaw is not rage, but the numbness that comes with the lack of faith. The world today is a Hamlet-world, ruled by an exhausted reason, unwilling to return to revelation, but also unable to leap forward into anything else. Like Hamlet, we delay the inevitable choice. But the delay is not virtuous. It is suffocating. And when the final act arrives, as it must, we will discover that the katechon was not our protector, but our jailer.

But we still haven’t resolved the main problem in the text, and here is where it becomes extremely more difficult. Thiel says: “Like Hamlet, we would like to put off the inevitable choice for as long as possible” and that “One problem remains for the Girardian.”. Girard like Hamlet, he saw what was revealed and though the choice of action is clear, he never acted. Thiel initially agrees with Pierre Manent’s critique in the third section: “Girard’s political atheism, his anti-political and apocalyptic thinking,” but then subtly gives the illusion of walking it back, writing: “Manent would later recognize this critique as too sweeping. Girard’s political atheism was not absolute”. Yet here, too, he only conceals what he earlier wrote. He says, “He [Girard] was a keen observer of current events,” and also in the final section: “Hamlet's refusal to act seems to be a form of political atheism” which paints the picture of Girard as Hamlet, an astute, brooding analyst of a corrupted court, seeing everything, doing nothing. Just as Hamlet saw that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Girard saw that something was deeply rotten in the heart of the Enlightenment.

At the end of the introduction of Battling to the End we can see the tension in Girard’s thinking, Girard writes:

In our discussions, we constantly point out that relationship resides at the heart of reciprocity and that reconciliation reveals the negative meaning that war gives to relationship. These are the “signs of the times” that the future can be deciphered from the present: the prophet, like the strategist, has a responsibility to know how to read clues to the future. However, violence is a terrible adversary, especially since it always wins. Desiring war, which Clausewitz says is the typical attitude of the defender, against those who desire peace, in other words, desiring lies and domination, can thus become a spiritual attitude. Does not Christ himself invite us to be more cunning than the serpent? We are thus more at war than ever, at a time when war itself no longer exists. We have to fight a violence that can no longer be controlled or mastered. Yet what if triumph were not the most important thing? What if the battle were worth more than the victory? The primacy of victory is the triumph of the weak. The primacy of battle, by contrast, is the prelude to the only conversion that matters. This is the heroic attitude that we have sought to redefine. It alone can link violence and reconciliation, or, more precisely, make tangible both the possibility of the end of the world and reconciliation among all members of humanity. We cannot escape this ambivalence. More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.

But where danger threatens
That which saves from it also grows

All the options exhausted in the essay are secular; No politically religious answers are given. Theological and philosophical writings are portrayed as insufficient. The one remaining hope, Thiel suggests, is in preaching, in calling the world to repentance before the last lash. In this, Thiel marks a significant departure from The Straussian Moment, where he called us to become wise christian statesmen. Here he calls us to become saints and be willing to become martyrs.

Thiel says that if there’s hope for Girard, and thus the world, it is “merely the desperate hope of Jonah in Nineveh”. In the book of Jonah, Jonah says: “I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness”. The story of Jonah was a story filled with frustrations. One might still wonder here, if philosophy is not possible, and neither is politics, why is Thiel still writing esoterically or even philosophically? Both are aimed at the few, thus, we can’t consider this essay an act of general preaching, for he would’ve written more plainly and spoken more loudly. Jonah is the model of anti-political political action, a “politico-theological“ action. He does not persuade by reason. He speaks as if he were delivering a revelation, and that is exactly what the modern world lacks. Jonah represents the return of the sacred speech. A singular, non-strategic, disruptive intervention that awakens conscience, not by ideas, but by confronting the city with its own inevitable death.

Jonah is the anti-Hamlet, the man who acts even though he doesn’t believe it will work. Jonah was a reluctant prophet, skeptical of his own people, suspicious that any speech can do good, and yet, still acting. Jonah represents a different kind of restraint and action. Not purely political but “politico-theological“. It was prophetic, and apocalyptic. He delays the end, not through management, but through confrontation. Jonah’s passion, which even though it was in anger, it was what provokes God’s final teaching: “And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?” (4:11). Jonah is the antidote to the deadening comfort Thiel describes. He is not “safe.” He is not “stable.” He is alive. And only the alive can be saved.

Christ destroyed Caesar not through founding a new empire, but by revealing, fatally, the hidden violence that had sustained the old. Christ did not conquer the Roman empire with arms, but by a disruption so complete that the ancient theater of sacrifice could no longer hold. Hamlet needed a more convincing revenge play to act at all; he needed the sincerity of staged passion to reignite the decayed passions. Girardian knowledge might offer more potential for action than it initially seems, and perhaps Machiavelli was the first Girardian (Discourses, Book I, Chapter LVI) but Girard was too paralyzed with the full knowledge and its current stage in history to act like Machiavelli did. If tragedy can still command the human heart and nihilism is not enough, perhaps it is not a final war of conquest that remains, but another theater against the low but solid ground: a cunning, sorrowful defiance staged under full Giradian knowledge. Our world needs a last spectacle. A last performance that confronts the audience, and leaves the choice of repentance, or destruction.

I would like now to make a more explicit suggestion. Girard doesn't say all cultures are impossible; he asserts the possibility of the Biblical tradition in resolving our problems. Such resolution extends to the polis by definition. I would like to suggest the English possibility of the city. Unlike Rome, the scapegoating of Charles I did not become the mythic foundation of a new sacred order. His death was not glorified; rather, it was treated as a civic tragedy, followed by the institutionalization of legal protections for the scapegoat. The innocent scapegoat and the false myths of violence were revealed to the English polis through centuries of the same type of experience. Girard does not say that all imitation is bad; Christianity transforms this mechanism by offering a new model: Christ, the innocent victim. There was no society in history that better imitated Christ than the English one, which is why it has resulted in the highest polis, as Christianity was best revealed in the English way of life. This revelation was completed in the United States, although corrupted by two sins, the modern part of the American regime and the original separation from the Catholic Church. But this has shown us the possibility of a city without a scapegoat, the American Founding. Reason was assisted by the Christian revelation. This possibility is by definition of the universality of reason and Christianity is universal to reach through centuries of historical experience to other cities. Maybe a new British (American) Empire Katechon is enough but there's no way back there without a spectacle to open that possibility back.

Thiel ends with the terrifying image of our world from Girard:“[w]e pretend not to see the disintegration of our cultural life, the desperate futility of the puppet shows that occupy the empty stage during this strange intermission of the human spirit. A silence has descended upon the earth, as if an angel were about to open the seventh and last seal of an apocalypse” Our moment feels like that moment from the book of Revelation. The silence before the storm. But it’s also from the Book of Jonah. Jonah sits alone. Silent. Watching the city. Waiting to see if it will get destroyed or repent.