This section makes a second historical claim: Augustine does not treat the conjectures he reports as equal. He ranks them with distinct words of assent and dissent, he records a political reason that one of them gives for the apostle's silence, and he closes the survey by returning to the floor of what is certain. The section adds to the Schmitt debate of Section 2.2 by showing that the Roman identification, which Schmitt carried into his theory of order, enters Augustine's chapter as one conjecture among three, graded as "not absurd", inside a frame that denies it the status of knowledge.
Carl Schmitt served the Nazi regime from 1933, and critics read his theory of the exception in that light.
5.1Rome, and the reason for silence
First among the conjectures is the one that later became the main line:
Some think that the Apostle Paul referred to the Roman empire, and that he was unwilling to use language more explicit, lest he should incur the calumnious charge of wishing ill to the empire which it was hoped would be eternal; so that in saying, “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work,” he alluded to Nero, whose deeds already seemed to be as the deeds of Antichrist.
This sentence offers a second explanation for the apostle's silence, beside the one Augustine gave in his own voice. In Section 4 the silence was epistemic: the readers already knew, so there was no need to write it. Here, in the voice of those who identify the restrainer with Rome, the silence is prudential: to write that the empire would one day be taken out of the way would expose the writer to a charge of wishing it ill. The Latin makes the stakes plain:
Quidam putant hoc de imperio dictum fuisse Romano, et propterea Paulum apostolum non id aperte scribere uoluisse, ne calumniam uidelicet incurreret, quod Romano imperio male optauerit, cum speraretur aeternum;
The clause cum speraretur aeternum, since it was hoped to be eternal (this article's English), carries a small irony that Augustine leaves unspoken. On the Roman reading, the empire is the restrainer, and the restrainer is by definition the thing that will be taken out of the way. To identify the empire as the katechon is therefore to predict its end, which is exactly the prediction its subjects did not want to hear. The identification that later became a theology of imperial continuity is reported here, in its earliest form available to Augustine, as a reason for caution: naming the restrainer was dangerous because it implied the restrainer's removal.
This is the first point at which the chapter speaks to the Schmitt debate. In The Nomos of the Earth, as summarised in Section 2.2, the empire's continuity rests on its being the power able to restrain the Antichrist (Schmitt 1950). The emphasis falls on the holding. In the conjecture Augustine reports, the emphasis falls equally on the removal: until he be taken out of the way. Cacciari's reading, that the restraining power holds back the end and with it the coming the faithful await (Cacciari 2013), and this study's extension of it, that a holding delays every coming, good or bad, are not Augustine's; they are marked here as later readings. What Augustine's report shows is narrower: the Roman identification was, from the start, an identification of something whose end the passage foretells.
5.2Nero, and the limit of conjecture
With the Roman conjecture comes a second, about the one to come rather than the one who holds:
And hence some suppose that he shall rise again and be Antichrist. Others, again, suppose that he is not even dead, but that he was concealed that he might be supposed to have been killed, and that he now lives in concealment in the vigor of that same age which he had reached when he was believed to have perished, and will live until he is revealed in his own time and restored to his kingdom.
Augustine's response is the strongest word of dissent in the chapter:
But I wonder that men can be so audacious in their conjectures.
In the Latin:
Sed multum mihi mira est haec opinantium tanta praesumptio.
The noun is praesumptio, presumption: the taking of something for granted before it is known (the gloss is this article's). The legend that Nero would return, which Dods's note traces to Suetonius, is not refuted by Augustine; it is judged. It goes further than the evidence can carry, and it goes further in a particular direction: it fills in a detail of the future, a named person, an age, a hiding place, a restoration, that the letter does not give. The audacity Augustine objects to is the step from an unnamed figure to a named one with a biography.
This conjecture concerns the one who will be revealed, not the one who holds. Its place in the chapter is still instructive for the question of the restrainer, because it shows the cost Augustine sees in identification carried too far. An identification that begins with a plausible reading of the political world (Rome as the power that holds) generates, in the hands of some readers, a story about who will come when the holding ends. The story is vivid, specific and unfounded. Augustine stops it with a single sentence.
5.3A Reading Graded "not absurd"
Having judged the Nero legend, Augustine returns to the Roman identification and grades it differently:
However, it is not absurd to believe that these words of the apostle, “Only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way,” refer to the Roman empire, as if it were said, “Only he who now reigneth, let him reign until he be taken out of the way.”
The Latin keeps the grade exact: non absurde de ipso Romano imperio creditur dictum, it is believed not absurdly to have been said of the Roman empire itself. The verb is impersonal and passive, creditur, it is believed; Augustine does not say that he believes it. The adverb is a double negative, not absurd, which is a weak form of assent. The paraphrase he offers, reigneth for holdeth, shows how the reading works: it substitutes one verb for another and the sentence still makes sense. It is a reading that fits. It is not one he adopts.
A third marker of certainty follows, which applies not to the restrainer but to the one revealed:
“And then shall the wicked be revealed:” no one doubts that this means Antichrist.
The contrast within two sentences is the anatomy of the chapter in miniature. On the identity of the wicked one, no one doubts. On the identity of the one who holds, the Roman reading is not absurd. The two grades are placed side by side, and the reader can see the difference.
5.4The church, and the verb Augustine's Bible supplied
A third conjecture moves the whole passage inside the church:
But others think that the words, “Ye know what withholdeth,” and “The mystery of iniquity worketh,” refer only to the wicked and the hypocrites who are in the Church, until they reach a number so great as to furnish Antichrist with a great people, and that this is the mystery of iniquity, because it seems hidden; also that the apostle is exhorting the faithful tenaciously to hold the faith they hold when he says, “Only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way,” that is, until the mystery of iniquity which now is hidden departs from the Church.
This reading depends on a feature of Augustine's Latin Bible that the Greek does not share. The Latin quotation of the seventh verse runs:
Tantum qui modo tenet teneat, donec de medio fiat; et tunc reuelabitur iniquus
Teneat is a subjunctive with the force of a command: let him hold. The Greek reads:
τὸ γὰρ μυστήριον ἤδη ἐνεργεῖται τῆς ἀνομίας· μόνον ὁ κατέχων ἄρτι ἕως ἐκ μέσου γένηται·
There is no second verb after ὁ κατέχων ἄρτι, the one who now holds. The clause runs straight from the participle to the temporal phrase, until he comes out of the midst. Readers of the Greek have to supply something; the King James translators supply a future (King James Version 1611), and Augustine's Bible supplies a command. The third conjecture Augustine reports is built on the command. If the verse says let him hold, it can be read as an exhortation to the faithful to hold fast. The Latin of Augustine's report makes the connection visible in its own wording: hortari autem apostolum fideles, ut in fide quam tenent tenaciter perseuerent, that the apostle exhorts the faithful to persevere tenaciously in the faith they hold (this article's English). Tenent, tenaciter, teneat: the reading is generated by the repeated verb.
This is a striking case of an identification produced by a translation. The third conjecture is not wrong because of it; Augustine does not judge it at all, and reports it with the support its proponents found in the first letter of John on the many antichrists who "went out from us". But it shows something that bears directly on the question of this article. Some of the confidence an identification carries may come not from the thing identified but from the form in which the text reached the reader. A restraint read through a translation can acquire a holder that the original did not specify.
5.5The return to the floor
Augustine closes the survey with a sentence that collects the conjectures and sets them aside:
Thus various, then, are the conjectural explanations of the obscure words of the apostle. That which there is no doubt he said is this, that Christ will not come to judge quick and dead unless Antichrist, His adversary, first come to seduce those who are dead in soul; although their seduction is a result of God’s secret judgment already passed.
The Latin begins with a phrase that has the rhythm of a shrug and the function of a verdict: Alius ergo sic, alius autem sic apostoli obscura uerba coniectat, one thus, another thus, conjectures the obscure words of the apostle. The word coniectat confirms the status given to the views at the start, when they were called suspiciones. Then, with quod tamen eum dixisse non dubium est, what nevertheless it is not doubtful that he said, the chapter returns to the floor it laid at the beginning. The order of events is certain. The identity of the restrainer is not.
One further move, late in the chapter, completes the structure. Discussing why the works of Antichrist are called "signs and lying wonders", Augustine reports two possible explanations and then declines to choose:
Why they are called signs and lying wonders, we shall then be more likely to know when the time itself arrives.
Shorter still is the Latin: Propter quid horum ergo dicta sint prodigia et signa mendacii, tunc potius apparebit, which of these is the reason will rather appear then (this article's English). Augustine names a condition under which an open question will be settled: the arrival of the events themselves. He does not try to settle it now. He does not abandon it either. He sets a point at which it can be revisited.
5.6What the survey adds
The chapter, taken whole, offers a structure with five parts. A floor of certainty, stated before and after the doubtful matter. A located ignorance, with a reason: the knowledge was held by the first readers and not written down. A survey of conjectures, labelled as conjectures before they are given. A grading of those conjectures with distinct words: audacious presumption for the Nero legend, not absurd for the Roman reading, no grade at all for the reading built on the church. And a deferral of one question to a named future condition.
This is what the article proposes as a non-identifying model of a restraint. It is non-identifying because it refuses to say who holds. It is not empty, because it says a great deal about the holding: what it holds back, in what order the events it delays must come, which readings of it are tolerable and which go too far, and when a further question will be answered.
The Schmitt debate, as Section 2.2 set it out, is a debate about the line that begins in the conjecture Augustine graded as not absurd and ends in a theory of order. Grossheutschi follows the background of Schmitt's katechon in the letter, the fathers and the readings that found Rome in it (Grossheutschi 1996); Augustine is one of those fathers, and the reading here shows that, in his chapter at least, the Roman reading sits inside a frame that denies it the status of knowledge. Hell reads Schmitt's katechon as an imperial theology with an imperial genealogy (Hell 2009); Augustine's chapter shows that the genealogy has a branch that declined to become imperial. The contribution is not a correction of either reading. It is a counterpart: a model of what it looks like to take the restraint seriously while declining to name its holder.