The historical claim of this section is that Augustine's admission of ignorance in The City of God XX.19 is not a refusal to engage but a conclusion drawn from a stated premise: the first readers had knowledge that the letter deliberately did not write down, and later readers cannot recover it by effort. The section adds to the commentary debate of Section 2.1 by showing that the point the modern commentaries share, that the first readers knew, was already Augustine's, and that he drew a further consequence from it which the commentaries, on the summaries available here, do not draw: a limit on what any identification can claim.
4.1Why the passage could not be passed over
Augustine introduces the chapter as something he cannot leave out, in a book already threatening to grow too long:
I see that I must omit many of the statements of the gospels and epistles about this last judgment, that this volume may not become unduly long; but I can on no account omit what the Apostle Paul says, in writing to the Thessalonians, “We beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,”
The Latin then gives the whole passage from 2 Thessalonians 2:1 to 2:12 in the words of Augustine's Bible. The point to notice is the order of his commitments. Before saying anything about the restrainer, Augustine fixes what he takes to be certain:
No one can doubt that he wrote this of Antichrist and of the day of judgment, which he here calls the day of the Lord, nor that he declared that this day should not come unless he first came who is called the apostate —apostate, to wit, from the Lord God.
Its opening words, "No one can doubt", are the first of a series of markers of confidence that run through the chapter. It establishes a floor. Whatever the restrainer is, the subject of the passage is the coming of Antichrist and the day of judgment, and the order of events, apostate first, day of the Lord after, is not in question.
A second marker follows at once, this time of uncertainty about something else:
But it is uncertain in what temple he shall sit, whether in that ruin of the temple which was built by Solomon, or in the Church; for the apostle would not call the temple of any idol or demon the temple of God.
Augustine reports that some read Antichrist here not as one prince but as his whole body of followers, and that they would rather translate the Greek as "for" or "as the temple of God". He gives the reading without endorsing it. Already, before the restrainer appears, the chapter has three registers: what no one can doubt, what is uncertain, and what some think. This is the vocabulary within which the confession will be made, and it matters that the confession is not the chapter's first expression of doubt. It is one grade on a scale the chapter has already set out.
4.2The gloss on "withholdeth"
Everything turns on Augustine's reading of the sixth verse. Dods renders it as follows:
Then as for the words, “And now ye know what withholdeth,” i.e., ye know what hindrance or cause of delay there is, “that he might be revealed in his own time;” they show that he was unwilling to make an explicit statement, because he said that they knew.
More compact, and in one respect sharper, is the Latin:
Quod autem ait: Et nunc quid detineat scitis, id est, quid sit in mora, quae causa sit dilationis eius, ut reueletur in suo tempore, scitis: quoniam scire illos dixit, aperte hoc dicere noluit.
Two things happen in this sentence. The first is a gloss on the verb. Augustine explains detineat, the Latin of his Bible for the Greek participle, by two phrases: quid sit in mora, what is in delay, and quae causa sit dilationis eius, what is the cause of his delay (the English of both phrases is this article's). The holding is read as delay. That reading is older than the modern placing of the passage within reflection on the delay of the end, which Strobel traces to Habakkuk 2:3 (Strobel 1961), and it is compatible with it; Augustine does not cite Habakkuk here, and this article does not claim he had that verse in mind.
The second is an inference about the writer's silence. The Greek of the verse reads:
καὶ νῦν τὸ κατέχον οἴδατε, εἰς τὸ ἀποκαλυφθῆναι αὐτὸν ἐν τῷ ἑαυτοῦ καιρῷ·
The verb οἴδατε, you know, is in the perfect of knowledge, and the neuter participle τὸ κατέχον names the thing that holds without describing it. Augustine's inference is that the apostle chose not to speak openly, aperte hoc dicere noluit, because he had told them that they knew. The silence is not a sign that there was nothing to say. It is a sign that the saying had been done elsewhere, in person, and that the writer saw no need, or had reason not, to put it in a letter. The fifth verse, which the Latin renders as a reminder of what the apostle had said while he was with them, supports this: the knowledge was oral and local.
4.3Those Who Do Not Know What the First Readers Knew
From that premise Augustine draws the conclusion that shapes the rest of the chapter:
And thus we who have not their knowledge wish and are not able even with pains to understand what the apostle referred to, especially as his meaning is made still more obscure by what he adds.
In the Latin:
Et ideo nos, qui nescimus quod illi sciebant, peruenire cum labore ad id, quod sensit apostolus, cupimus nec ualemus; praesertim quia et illa, quae addidit, hunc sensum faciunt obscuriorem.
Dods's "we who have not their knowledge" smooths a stronger contrast. The Latin sets nos, qui nescimus, we who do not know, against quod illi sciebant, what they knew: the same verb in the negative and the positive, with the readers of Augustine's day on one side and the first readers on the other. The obstacle is not a lack of effort, cum labore, with labour, and not a lack of desire, cupimus, we wish. It is the absence of a piece of knowledge that was held by particular people at a particular time and not passed on. Augustine's ignorance is located. It has a cause, and the cause is in the history of the text, not in the reader's capacity.
Augustine next quotes the seventh and eighth verses as his Bible gives them, and asks what they mean:
For what does he mean by “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way: and then shall the wicked be revealed?” I frankly confess I do not know what he means. I will nevertheless mention such conjectures as I have heard or read.
The Latin of the confession and the sentence that follows it:
Ego prorsus quid dixerit me fateor ignorare. Suspiciones tamen hominum, quas uel audire uel legere potui, non tacebo.
Prorsus, which Dods gives as "frankly", means outright or altogether; the confession is that Augustine does not know at all what the apostle said, not that he knows in part (the gloss is this article's). The next sentence is as important as the confession. Suspiciones hominum, the suspicions or conjectures of men, quas uel audire uel legere potui, which I have been able either to hear or to read, non tacebo, I will not keep silent about (again this article's English). Augustine does not stop at not knowing. He commits himself to reporting what others have said, and the word he chooses for their views, suspiciones, sets their status before he reports them. They are conjectures. That word governs everything that follows in the chapter until the point where he returns to certainty.
4.4What the confession is
Put together, the passages of this section show four moves in a fixed order. First, a floor of certainty about the subject and the order of events. Second, an account of why the specific point, the identity of the restrainer, is lost: the first readers knew, the writer did not write it down, and later readers cannot recover it by labour. Third, an outright confession that the meaning is unknown. Fourth, a commitment to report the conjectures of others, labelled as conjectures before they are heard.
The modern commentaries, as summarised in Section 2.1, share the second move: they stress that the first readers knew what later readers do not. Augustine adds the third and the fourth. He draws from the lost knowledge the conclusion that no later identification can claim to be the meaning, and he frames the identifications he reports as suspiciones. This is the contribution of the section to the commentary debate. The commentaries weigh the identifications; Augustine weighs them too, as the next section shows, but he first denies any of them the status of knowledge. The weighing is done inside a frame in which the answer is acknowledged to be unavailable.