The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

A terrifying world without an exterior 207
tuting the ‘ultimate authority’ and the ‘absolute foundation’ of Schmitt’s
thought: ‘There can be no doubt of the fundamental precedence of the theological
for Schmitt’ (Meier 1998: 16). If Schmitt is an anti-immanent thinker, as
Meier correctly observes, it is because of his ultimate belief in divine Revelation.
All metaphysics of immanence – like Hegel’s, for whom the other never
enters from the outside into the immanence of development – would entail the
denial of God’s sovereignty, that is, the transcendent commandment of God
coming from the absolute outside. In the same manner, the denial of the figure of
the enemy, says Meier, assumes that one must forget the fundamental theological
dogma of the sinfulness of the world and of man (ibid.: 78). Evil and enmity
enter the world along with original sin – and the belief that a human being could
independently destroy all evil and create a paradise-like world by means of his
natural reason and his own judgement is nothing but anti-Christian hubris.
Enmity is the state of things in the world as ordained by God in the beginning: ‘I
will put enmity . . . between your seed and her seed’ (Genesis 3:15). 2 To deny
this ordinance would mean that one sets oneself against Him and on the side of
the Antichrist.
According to Meier, however, of primary importance for Schmitt is the
Second Letter to the Thessalonians, which Schmitt frequently quotes. In his
view, Schmitt’s entire spiritual existence can be understood in the light of this
letter, which also explains his hostility towards the unification of the world. In
the light of the letter, human history can be seen as consisting of the eschatological
struggle against the anomos, ‘the man of lawlessness’ (2 Thessalonians 2:3).
In Meier’s view, in order to understand this struggle, three suppositions concerning
history have to be taken into consideration: Resurrection, historical interim,
and the Day of Judgement. Because the Day of Judgement, that is, the final
triumph of anomos and the second parousia of Christ, is not yet at hand,
mankind lives in the era of the interim, and more precisely in the era of a battle
between so-called katechon and anomos (Meier 1998: 161). Katechon is also a
figure of 2 Thessalonians (2:6–7), and its function is to restrain (katheon) the
‘lawless one’ before the second coming of Christ. At that time, anomos will
appear in its final form, and the Lord will extinguish it by the manifestation of
his coming. Until that happens, however, anomos, whose coming is the ‘activity
of Satan’ (2 Thessalonians 2:9), performs deceitful wonders that lead people
from the truth. Nevertheless, all this is part of God’s great plan: ‘God sends
upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false’ (2 Thessalonians
2:11). The purpose of the plan is to try people’s belief and to separate the
wheat from the chaff in order to judge the latter.
For Schmitt, argues Meier, the greatest swindle of anomos and thereby also
the greatest test of God is that history would have already ended and the world
united. From now on, all battles against anomos – and therefore all battles –
would be useless and superfluous. This cannot be true, however, because the
second coming of Christ would also mean the end of the world, but the end of
the world is not yet at hand. Katechon must exist and it becomes ‘conceivable in
him who does not stand for the unity of the world’ (Schmitt 1988: 165). In