2.1The commentaries and the identifications
Over the centuries the letter's silence about the holder has produced a long list of candidates. The standard modern commentaries set out the identifications proposed for what withholds and who withholds: the Roman empire or emperor, the preaching of the gospel, God or God's plan, an angel, a hostile power. Each of them weighs these proposals, and each stresses that the first readers knew what later readers do not (Best 1972; Bruce 1982; Wanamaker 1990; Malherbe 2000; Fee 2009). That shared emphasis is important for what follows, because it is also Augustine's starting point. The commentators and the bishop agree that the knowledge existed and was not written down.
Against the weighing stands a series of single, confident identifications, each built on a different body of evidence. Cullmann reads the holding back as the preaching of the gospel to the nations, which must happen before the end, and the one who holds as the apostle himself (Cullmann 1936). Aus reads the restraining factors against Isaiah 66 as God's plan and God's power (Aus 1977). Nicholl argues that the restrainer is the archangel Michael, read against Daniel 12:1 (Nicholl 2000). Two further studies place the passage in a wider setting without fixing a single holder: Strobel within Jewish and early Christian reflection on the delay of the end, which turned on Habakkuk 2:3 (Strobel 1961), and Metzger within ancient apocalyptic thought (Metzger 2005).
The authorship of the letter is disputed. Trilling argues that it was written later in Paul's name, on grounds of style, form and theology (Trilling 1972); Malherbe and Fee argue that it is Paul's own. This article, like the tradition it reads, says "Paul" and "the apostle" for the writer, and says once here that the attribution is contested. Augustine's chapter takes the apostle as the writer without question, and nothing in what follows depends on the dispute.
Laid side by side, the two kinds of scholarship differ in what they do with the gap. The commentaries survey and weigh; their common point is that the gap is a gap in our knowledge, not in the first readers'. The single identifications each close the gap with a reading drawn from a particular scriptural neighbour. Neither kind, as their positions are summarised here, treats the refusal to close the gap as a position of its own with a structure that can be described. That is the space Augustine's chapter occupies.
2.2Schmitt's katechon and its readers
Schmitt's use of the katechon belongs to a book about land and law. The Nomos of the Earth is a history of international law as a history of spatial orders: every order begins with an appropriation of land; the public law among European states from the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth bracketed war between sovereign states, each treating the other as a just enemy, and rested on free land and sea beyond Europe. In Schmitt's account of the Christian empire of the Middle Ages, the empire's continuity rests on the idea of the katechon, the empire as the historical power able to restrain the coming of the Antichrist and the end of the present age (Schmitt 1950). In that account the restraining power is an empire, the same answer as the Roman identification that some early readers gave; the connection between the two is drawn here by this article. Carl Schmitt served the Nazi regime from 1933, and critics read his theory of the exception in that light. The katechon reading of The Nomos of the Earth is a separate matter from that sentence, and this article does not give one as the cause of the other.
Two readings of Schmitt's katechon stand at the centre of the debate this article joins. Grossheutschi traces how and why Schmitt uses the concept across his works, with its background in the letter, the church fathers and the readings that found Rome in it (Grossheutschi 1996). Hell reads Schmitt's katechon as an imperial theology, bound up with the Third Reich's imitation of Rome, and gives the concept an imperial genealogy (Hell 2009). The first is a history of a concept within one author's work and its sources; the second is a critique that ties the concept to an imperial project and a regime. They differ in what they take the concept to be for. They share a subject: the line of readers who found Rome in the passage and drew a theory of order from it.
Around them stand other readers of Schmitt. Meier reads him as at bottom a political theologian whose faith in revelation shapes his concept of the political (Meier 1994). Taubes, in lectures given in 1987, reads Paul as a political thinker set against the empire, calls Schmitt an apocalyptic of the counter-revolution whose concern was that chaos be held down and the state remain, and sets against him an apocalyptic thinking that has no stake in the world as it is (Taubes 1993). Cacciari treats the restraining power as ambiguous: in holding back the lawless one it also holds back the end and the coming the faithful await, and it can contain lawlessness only by taking some of it into itself (Cacciari 2013). Agamben reads what withholds as constituted power, the empire and the church among it, which holds back and hides the lawlessness that the messianic will reveal, and treats theories of the state as a power that delays catastrophe, Schmitt's among them, as secularised readings of the passage (Agamben 2000).
These readers disagree about whether the katechon is a figure to defend, to fear or to dismantle. What none of them is described as doing, on the summaries this article may rely on, is to build on the reader who would not say who the katechon is. The question here is whether that sentence, read in its chapter, amounts to a model that could sit beside the imperial line as its counterpart.
2.3Where an organisation keeps its reasons
A second debate concerns ordinary organisations and the way their rules outlive the people who made them. It has several voices, and two of them set the terms for this article.
Walsh and Ungson define organisational memory as information from an organisation's history that can be brought to bear on present decisions. It is retained in several bins at once: in individuals, in the culture, in transformations (procedures), in structures (roles), in ecology (the workplace itself), and in external archives. It can be used well, and it can be misused (Walsh and Ungson 1991). On this view, a forgotten reason is a question of retrieval. The reason may have lived only in one bin, a person's memory, while the procedure lived on in another.
Levitt and March describe organisations as learning by encoding inferences from their history into routines that guide conduct. Routines survive the turnover of the people who made them. Learning can trap an organisation in a competence it is already good at, and it can draw lessons from too few cases, which they call superstitious learning (Levitt and March 1988). On this view, as this article reads it rather than as Levitt and March state it, a forgotten reason need not be a failure of the routine: the routine outlasts the people who made it, and their reasons may not outlast them with it.
Other work fills in the picture. Nelson and Winter treat routines as the organisation's memory, kept by being exercised, and as a truce among members whose interests differ (Nelson and Winter 1982). Pierson argues that the reasons an institution was made need not be the reasons it lasts (Pierson 2004). Streeck and Thelen describe drift, in which an institution is left formally unchanged while its circumstances change, so that its effects change (Streeck and Thelen 2005). Bozeman separates rules that are dysfunctional from the start from those that become so as circumstances change, and adds that whether a rule is red tape depends on whose purposes are counted (Bozeman 2000). Merton describes officials who come to treat rules as ends in themselves and keep to them after they have stopped serving their purpose (Merton 1940). Kaufman describes red tape as mostly the residue of protections that people demanded, so that cutting it means deciding whose protection to drop (Kaufman 1977).
2.4The debates side by side
Rarely do the two debates meet, yet they ask a common question in different vocabularies.
| Commentary and political theology | Organisation studies | |
|---|---|---|
| What is lost | The identity of the holder, known to the first readers | The reason for a rule, known to its makers |
| Those who close the gap | Single identifications: the empire, the gospel, God's plan, Michael | Accounts of retrieval: the reason is in some bin, if it can be found |
| Those who leave it open | Commentaries that weigh and stress the first readers' knowledge | Accounts of routine: the rule works without its reason, for better and worse |
| The risk named | A theory of order built on one identification (Hell's critique of the imperial line) | Goal displacement, competency traps, superstitious learning |
What the table does not contain is a worked-out model of the third position, a reader who neither closes the gap nor merely notes it, but organises a judgment around it. The claim of this article is that Augustine's chapter supplies that model in a form precise enough to be compared with a modern record. Whether the comparison helps, and where it misleads, is the business of Sections 6 and 7.