The Friend and the Enemy: Carl Schmitt, Katechon, and the Theological Foundations of the Political

Abstract

This paper explores Carl Schmitt’s concepts of the friend and the enemy through the lens of Katechon. Contemporary scholarship often treats Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction as an occasional decision driven by political contingency. This paper refutes such a purely political reading and instead argues Schmitt’s political enemies have a deeper theological origin—Gnosticism. The Gnostics, emerging from a mistaken rejection of theodicy, developed a cosmological dualism and apocalypticism that, in the 20th century, manifested politically in the forms of liberal universalism and social pluralism. To illuminate the theological depth of Schmitt’s thought, this paper investigates a recurring yet underexplored concept—Katechon, the restrainer who holds back the end times. By linking Katechon to Schmitt’s political projects—the nomos of the earth and the decisionist state—this paper reveals the theological foundation underlying his understanding of the political: enmity is not contingent but theologically predestined by human fallenness and God’s redemptive plan. However, Schmitt’s project of political theology ends in paradox: Katechon, meant to restrain chaos, turns into its opposite owing to its intrinsic logical flaw.

1. Introduction

The concepts of the friend and the enemy lie at the heart of Carl Schmitt’s political theory. In The Concept of the Political, he famously defines the political as the distinction between friend and enemy (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 26). Controversially, he points out that the “friend and enemy concepts” must be understood in an “existential sense” (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 27). However, what Schmitt means by the enemy’s “existential” status remains paradoxical. Karl Löwith argues that Schmitt swings between “a substantial and an occasional understanding of enmity and friendship” (Löwith 1995, p. 151). The substantial understanding means that the enemy merely has a different form of existence than us: the enemy is “the other, the stranger…existentially something different and alien” (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 27). In this sense, one group is defined as the enemy simply due to their form of existence, such as the characteristics related to religion, morality, economy and aesthetics. But Schmitt acknowledges that there is no eternal friend or enemy (Löwith 1995, p. 148). In contrast, the occasional or opportunist understanding means that one group can become an enemy when they constitute an existential threat to us: “the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence” (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 27). Yet this interpretation detaches the concept of the enemy from theology and metaphysics, which contradicts Schmitt’s position as a political theologian. As early as The Concept of the Political, Schmitt had already hinted that the question of the enemy is “an anthropological profession of faith (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 58)”, though the full theological framework would only be developed and revealed in his later works.

The mainstream contemporary scholarship understands Schmitt as an opportunist. For example, John McCormick argues that romantics and Schmitt who criticize them share a common characteristic of political opportunism (McCormick 1997, p. 82). Wolin recognizes Schmitt’s theory as an “opportunistic expression of political will” (Wolin 1990, p. 393) and Habermas warns its danger (Habermas 1989, p. 137). However, these interpretations treat Schmitt’s political theology and his theory of enmity as two separate systems, thereby obscuring the logical basis for distinguishing friend from enemy. Eventually, they failed to reveal Schmitt’s fundamental ground underpinning the concept of the enemy.

Some scholars highlight the connection between Schmitt’s political theory and theology. For instance, Leo Strauss finds that Schmitt’s political theory represents an unnamed spirit against the “spirit of technicity” and the mass faith of radical secularism (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 121). Heinrich Meier argues that Schmitt’s political theory is based on the “community of faith” and friend–enemy distinction means the fundamental opposition between orthodox and heretical faiths (Meier 2011, p. 61). However, their interpretations remain vague regarding the specific forms of spirituality and faith underpinning the friend–enemy distinction.

John Milbank offers three dimensions of Schmitt’s enemy that could cover the above two positions: First, the enemy simply means evil and friend or “the exception” is “our equitable and grace-given resistance to evil”; second, the enemy is the alien to the nation and the friend is “the arbitrary confirmation of formal sovereignty” in the name of peace while without any reference to normativity; third, the enemy is the civilizational opponents such as the Muslim world, where the friend is the Christian world (Milbank 2022, p. 127). The second dimension corresponds to the opportunist understanding of the enemy and the third is more substantial. Milbank argues that the first theological dimension is continually suppressed by Schmitt (Milbank 2022, p. 127). It implies that the theological dimension requires further interpretation.

To further reveal the theological foundations of Schmitt’s concepts of the friend and the enemy, this article focuses on the recurring yet underexplored notion of Katechon as the interpretive key. As he writes, “I believe in Katechon; for me, it is the only possibility to understand history and to have meaning as a Christian” (Schmitt 2015, p. 47). This theological concept has been gradually attended by Western scholars to understand Schmitt’s theory. In international relations, Popov Dmitry argues that Katechon is the theological and political basis of international justice (Popov 2023, pp. 13–25). In the study of populism and democracy, Luke Collison and Hjalmar Falk argue that Katechon is the intermediate authority to free politics from radical mass power and rigid state bureaucracy (Collison 2023, p. 166; Falk 2022, pp. 151–65). Wolfgang Palaver argues that Schmitt’s understanding of Katechon is not Christian but paganist: it is a scapegoating mechanism to channel internal conflicts to interstate wars and to produce the sacred enemy to protect human beings from their own violence (Palaver 2007, pp. 74, 81). In Russia, Katechon has been popularized in the public with conservative mindset, as two intellectual clubs bearing the name “Katechon” and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church started to refer to Russia as the Katechon who withholds Antichrist (Uchaev 2023, p. 27). However, the connection between Katechon and the enemy has not been fully revealed. Katechon is a biblical concept related to eschatology, referring to the restraining force that “defers the end and suppresses the evil one” (Schmitt [1950] 2009, p. 169). It is closely associated with Schmitt’s political projects, including his ideal conception of the state and his theory of international law, because his opponents—either explicitly or implicitly—also link politics to eschatological visions. Both sides refer their theories to eschatological political theology. To grasp the full scope of Schmitt’s political theory, his concept of Katechon must be closely read. It is not a theological reading of Katechon but an interpretation of Schmitt’s theo-political logic related to Katechon and the enemy.

This article seeks to interpret Schmitt’s concepts of friend and enemy through the lens of Katechon, thereby rejecting opportunistic readings of his concept of the political and proposing a new understanding: The presence of the enemy and the persistence of political conflict are theologically inscribed into history, as consequences of original sin and as part of God’s providential design for redemption. The analysis proceeds in three parts: First, it will examine Schmitt’s concept of Katechon and its association with the friend–enemy distinction in the context of international politics. Second, it will explore the manifestations of Katechon and its enemies within domestic political structures. Third, it will address the problem of theodicy as the theological foundation of Katechontic political theology and the basis of its Gnostic opponents, and point out its ultimate flaw and failure.

2. Katechon in International Politics: Concrete vs. Universal

Schmitt’s concept of Katechon is explained in The Nomos of The Earth:

“the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon; it was a power that withholds (qui tenet)”.

(Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 60)

In this passage, Schmitt sets the Katechon in opposition to the Antichrist within an eschatological framework. His concept is taken from Paul’s The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. In the Biblical text, Antichrist is described as a deceptive power while Katechon withholds him:

“Let no one deceive you in any way. For unless the apostasy comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one doomed to perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god and object of worship, so as to seat himself in the temple of God, claiming that he is a god—do you not recall that while I was still with you I told you these things? And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. But the one who restrains is to do so only for the present, until he is removed from the scene. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will kill with the breath of his mouth and render powerless by the manifestation of his coming”.

(2 Thessalonians 2: 3–8)

In this verse, “the lawless one” is seen as Antichrist who attempts to imitate and oppose God, while “one who restrains” is called Katechon, who restrains the Antichrist until the Second Coming of Christ. Particular attention should be paid to the eschatological context, as it is regard to “the coming of our Lord” (2 Thessalonians 2:1) and “the end of the world” (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 60). It implies that Katechon and Antichrist are a part of eschatological narrative, which is key to understanding Schmitt.

Eschatology assumes a confrontational relationship between Katechon and Antichrist. At the end time, all men shall be judged by God. The just are promised redemption, while the unjust face condemnation. This brings complex emotions to Christians. On the one hand, they hope for redemption as the just in the final judgment. On the other hand, they fear the judgment as they have not fully repented their sin and obey God. For them, the judgment means destruction. For this reason, Katechon serves the role of delaying the final judgment, making more people have the chance to repent and follow Jesus. At the same time, before the end of world history, Katechon also withholds the power of Antichrist. Since Christ has not yet return, Antichrist has to pretend to be God to misguide people from the right path. That is why Antichrist is described as deceptive in the scripture. Antichrist attempts to establish durable rule by convincing people to believe in the coming peace and security, so they no longer need to distinguish Christ from his enemies.

Schmitt, as a political theologian, notices the significance of Katechon and the danger of Antichrist in the realm of international politics in the 20th century. Antichrist promises an illusional and dangerous universal community. In the early 20th century, liberalism did the same, by proposing universal peace as the end of history but ultimately resulted in failure and “spatial chaos” (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 258). Although Schmitt never directly mentions that liberal universalism is Antichrist, we can identify their resemblance as they both promise perpetual peace at the end of history through deception in Schmitt’s eyes. In Meier’s understanding of Schmitt’s concern, the end time is associated with Antichrist’s deceptive envision of peace and security (Meier 2011, p. 25). In contrast with the liberal-antichristic universalism, Katechon embodies a concrete order, aiming to maintain the specific religious and political order in reality. Schmitt’s famous book, The Nomos of The Earth, offers a theoretical specification.

As the title hints, the book is about order and space. Schmitt defines law, or in Greek word Nomos, as the appropriation of space:

“Nomos is the measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated; it is also the form of political, social, and religious order determined by this process. Here, measure, order, and form constitute a spatially concrete unity”.

(Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 70)

The nomos of the earth means the distribution of global space. In contrast with the spatial homogeneity of liberal universalism, it is an international order consisting of concrete spatial units. What makes this legal theory distinctive is that it incorporates both violent acts of appropriation and law as a means of securing order into the very concept of law. “Not every invasion or temporary occupation is a land-appropriation that founds an order” but law aims to establish “a land-based order and orientation” (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 80). It means that the order of earth is shaped by war and thus it can only ask for peace in spatial boundary, realizing limited, temporary and specific peace and security. This kind of international law is different than the liberal universal law, which is based on Nous.1 Because land is passed down through generations of cultivation and labor, the legal order constructed under this theory is inherently embedded in specific customs and historical contexts. Schmitt considered any lawmaking detached from concrete territorial grounding to be a nihilistic construction of law.

For Schmitt, the nomos of the earth exists throughout the history of international politics. Its implantation determines the relative order and chaos of the world. Katechon can be seen as the guardian of it, while Antichrist is the powers who neglect or oppose the unity of law and space. Historically, the nomos of the earth was reflected in European public law (jus publicum Europeaum) from 16th century to the end of 19th century, because it made “a real progress, namely a limiting and bracketing of European wars” (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 160).

In particular, European public law brought two transformations. Firstly, its form of interstate war replaced the bloody and formless religious civil wars in 16th-17th century. Schmitt argues that the rationalization and neutralization of inter-state warfare facilitated the formation of the basic structure of international law (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 140). In the religious wars, both sides claimed that they are the real representative of God’s will. In order to monopolize the sacred, war becomes destructive. In a so-called just war, each side, convinced of the righteousness of its cause, disregards the enemy’s rights by appealing to the justice of its own ends, thereby obscuring the legitimacy of its means. The result is that each side seeks to degrade the enemy into a criminal, aiming not only for their physical annihilation but also for the denigration of their existential meaning and value (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 123). In contrast, inter-state war presupposes mutual recognition of the parties as sovereign equals under law, thereby transforming war from a mortal struggle into a ‘duel’ between legitimate adversaries (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 141). The enemy, in this sense, is no longer conceived as a criminal to be destroyed, but as an opponent whose claim to existence and values is acknowledged, even as both sides engage in conflict without threatening the integrity of the overarching European order. At this point, the justness of the causes for going to war becomes irrelevant; what matters is the procedural justice of the ‘duel’ itself.

Secondly, war came to be understood as a juridical relationship between sovereign equals. As the concept of ‘war’ was increasingly restricted to conflicts between states, supranational entities, such as the Roman Catholic Church, have lost superior and universal authority over the states. This signaled a moral and legal equality among sovereign states (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 148). It not only entailed adherence to ceremonial and normative standards in the conduct of war, but also anchored international stability in a balance of power, whereby sovereign equality itself became a mechanism for securing peace.

However, after World War I, international order is transformed into the Geneva–Versailles system. International politics is regulated by The League of Nations led by the US. The problem is: in the eyes of Schmitt, the US resembles the deceptive image of Antichrist. He writes that the “long shadow” of Antichrist is from the West: The US as a growing super power, was struggling between isolation from Europe and “a global universalist-humanitarian intervention” (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 227). The Geneva-based League of Nations positioned itself as the embodiment of a universalist order. According to this self-conception, all nations were expected to recognize the conventions issued by the League as having constitutional status, and the League itself was to possess the institutional capacity to ensure effective collective action among states. However, the dominant powers behind this universalist ideal never truly abandoned their actual positions—they remained regional hegemons within a multipolar world order. In practice, the United States advanced the Monroe Doctrine, asserting an isolationist policy under its leadership in the Western Hemisphere and denying external interference in American affairs. Meanwhile, the old European order was also fragmented, as Britain and France, based on their differing conceptions of sea power and land power, each came to dominate their own distinct Großräume.2 Consequently, the League of Nations not only proved incapable of sustaining the previously limited form of peace, but also masqueraded as a ‘world state’ to legitimize its deceptive practices. Under the banner of constructing a stable and enduring global order, it engaged in wars marked by discriminatory logic and selective application of norms.

The 1919 Paris Peace and Wilsonism signified the dissolution of the spatial order of the earth and the emergence of “an empty normativism of allegedly recognized rules” (Schmitt [1950] 2006, pp. 227–28). What was originally known as international law in fact referred to the legal framework governing relations among European states. It regulated a substantive community composed of European royal houses, states, and peoples—a sphere in which the participating states generally shared a degree of homogeneity and were regarded as members of a common European civilizational family. The emergence of the new international law, however, involved the recognition and inclusion of entities that previously lacked independent sovereignty, as well as sovereign states entirely external to European civilization. This expansion dissolved the original coherence between law and space. Colonies and metropoles, Old Europe and the New World, did not belong to a shared existential space. As a result, norms initially designed to mediate disputes between, for example, Sweden and the Netherlands, could not be directly applied to conflicts involving Japan or American states. Consequently, an ever-growing number of reservations and exceptions had to be introduced to address normative breakdowns. Yet as more states invoked these reservations, the new international law became increasingly hollow and ineffectual.

There are two consequences of the Geneva–Versailles system. On the one hand, while the universalist League of Nations spoke rhetorically of abolishing war, it proved incapable of restraining the great powers operating under reservation clauses. On the other hand, the League lacked any real authority above those powers; in reality, it functioned under the dominance of the Allies. Schmitt emphasized that the so-called world state, which claimed to put an end to all wars, in fact concentrated immense economic and technological power in the hands of an interest group (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 57). For example, at the Paris Peace Conference, the United States emphasized the illegality of wars of aggression, designating them as unjust wars. As a result, the traditional European public law concept of the ‘just enemy’ was entirely displaced, with the enemy redefined as a criminal subject to moral condemnation. Against such criminals, waging a war of annihilation in the name of humanity came to be regarded as ‘just’. But as Schmitt argues, the party that first crosses a border is not necessarily the true aggressor—such an act may merely reflect a momentary initiative in response to perceived military threats near the frontier (Schmitt [1950] 2006, p. 274). By contrast, other interventions carried out under the banner of humanitarianism, precisely because they are not legally classified as ‘war,’ evade the legal constraints imposed on aggressors. Cloaked in the rhetoric of justice, such interventions often conceal imperial ambitions. The result of the moral justification of war is that every war comes to be seen as a necessary act of justice on the path to human peace. In the name of a future where humanity would no longer require armies or killing, the ‘final war’ is waged with unprecedented brutality, driven by the moral denigration of the enemy.

The Katechon-Antichrist confrontation is a theological-metaphysical structure. Throughout world history, it manifests in the scheme of ‘universalism vs. concrete order’: The Antichrist seeks to dissolve the connection between law and space, promising a false vision of universal peace across the globe. In contrast, Katechon upholds the interdependence of law and the spatial order represented by the earth. Recognizing that permanent peace cannot be achieved by eliminating all enemies and all war, Katechon chooses instead to resist the enemy, to measure and counterbalance its power, and to establish a boundary (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 36)—a concrete and limited space within which peace becomes possible.

The metaphysical structure serves as Schmitt’s criterion for distinguishing between friend and enemy. Writing The Nomos of the Earth in the 1940s, Schmitt perceived a global order increasingly dominated by the asymmetrical power of the Antichrist. Following the collapse of European public law, the universalism championed by the United States claimed to offer perpetual peace but, in Schmitt’s view, ushered in a new era of war and violence. His conception of the enemy thus diverges sharply from the opportunistic definitions commonly accepted by mainstream scholars. For Schmitt, the enemy is a substantial form of existence, not determined by religion, morality, or ethnicity, but rather by adherence to a universalist ideological project. Within this framework, American liberalism is identified as the paradigmatic enemy.

3. Katechon in Domestic Politics: Decisionism vs. Pluralism

The theological–metaphysical roles of Katechon and the Antichrist manifest not only in international relations but also in domestic politics. The threats to one state’s form of existence may also arise internally, such as civil war. When the state disintegrates, individuals revert to the state of nature, no longer enjoying the protection guaranteed by political authority. The persistent and concrete possibility of bodily annihilation compels a renewed confrontation with the problem of existence. The friend–enemy distinction cannot be confined to external threats alone; individuals must also identify internal forces that could deprive them of the state’s protection. For Schmitt, it is precisely the pluralists who undermine the state from within, dissolving its unity and thereby exposing individuals to existential insecurity.

As a Catholic, Schmitt’s concern with internal security is rooted in the historical experience of the religious civil wars of the 16th-17th centuries. He notices that it is not only a political problem but also a theological issue inherently rooted in Christianity:

“To render the influence of Christianity harmless at the social and political levels; to eliminate the anarchism within Christianity, while nonetheless retaining its justificatory function in the background—and, above all, never to abandon it entirely”.

(Schmitt 2015, p. 184)

It implies that the “anarchism within Christianity” poses an inherent threat to the existence of the state, as it denies the authority of the state and attempt to build a stateless, autonomous and free society. It echoes the deceptive role of the Antichrist, who promises peace and security while ultimately casting the society into fire. For Schmitt, the secularized version of Christian anarchism is the political pluralists in early 20th century.3

To show how pluralism emerged and eventually took over, Schmitt traces a historical narrative of state formation. In the early 19thcentury, theories of the state were commonly framed around a basic formula: a binary opposition between state and society (Schmitt [1931] 2014b, p. 166). It was commonly held that the military and bureaucratic apparatus under monarchy belonged exclusively to the domain of the state, whereas the diverse forms of non-state organization, emerging through voluntary association, were classified as society. For instance, one typically conceived of the monarch and the subjects, the royal household and the parliament, or the government and the representative bodies of the people as concrete manifestations of the state–society binary. The binary structure of the political unity possessed two key characteristics. First, the state was positioned above society: although various organizations within the social sphere stood in opposition to the state, the latter was generally strong enough to integrate and subsume them (Schmitt [1931] 2014b, p. 166). Second, the state adopted a non-interventionist stance toward domains typically regarded as belonging to society—such as religion and the economy—thereby respecting their autonomy. In this model, the state appeared as a kind of “night-watchman,” overseeing society without encroaching upon its inner workings. When state authority was predominant, the political entity was understood as an administrative state governed by executive power; conversely, when society played a more prominent role, it was seen as a legislative state dominated by parliamentary institutions (Schmitt [1931] 2014b, p. 166). Regardless of how the balance of power tilted, the political order of that era was consistently characterized by a dualistic structure in which the state and society remained distinct and mutually differentiated.

However, as legislative power expanded, this dualistic balance unraveled, and pluralism began to hollow out the state from within. Pluralism means the transformation of the state into the self-organization of society made by interest groups and political parties. Economic associations, cultural institutions, and religious groups—originally situated within the autonomous sphere of society—were gradually integrated into political parties that aggregated similar interest-based demands. These interest groups, through the mechanism of parliamentary politics, came to wield political power that had traditionally belonged to the state alone. This form of social pluralism as the beginning of the state’s dissolution. This is because, for Schmitt, the jus belli—the right to decide on war and survival—and the authority to maintain public order were powers that properly belonged to the state alone. These prerogatives constituted the very foundation of “the political” as a distinct domain, irreducible to economic, moral, or cultural categories. The correspondence between “state–political” and “society–non-political” was fundamentally disrupted. Society came to possess functions and powers that had previously belonged exclusively to the state. In such a configuration, the state could no longer maintain a neutral stance among competing social forces or interest groups; it was increasingly captured by political parties manipulated by particular societal interests (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 39). When these groups came into conflict, the state no longer possessed either the capacity or the legitimacy to arbitrate social divisions, for its decisions merely reflected the interests of one group over another. In response to this transformation, Schmitt pointedly asked: “In the pluralist state, if one subtracts all the other content—religious, economic, cultural, and so on—what, then, remains of the state? (Schmitt [1930] 2014d, p. 159)”

Schmitt located the deeper historical origins of pluralism in Hobbes, whom he saw as having unintentionally paved the way for its rise. At the time Hobbes was writing Leviathan, the English Civil War was marked by profound conflicts between spiritual and temporal authorities. Competing factions invoked the Book of Revelation to legitimize their claims. Both Cromwell and the Royalists he suppressed appealed to millenarian hopes, each portraying their rule as the fulfillment of divine prophecy and demonizing the other as its negation (McQueen 2017, p. 118). Against this backdrop, Hobbes sought to shield the law of the state from the interference of competing truths and religious doctrines by making the state the sole interpreter of revealed truth. However, the state originally possessed only secular power, not the authority to determine what the public ought to believe as revealed truth. To overcome this limitation, Hobbes deliberately blurred the distinction between power and authority, transforming the highest power into the highest authority. As a result, the sovereign came to exercise spiritual powers—deciding what counts as justice, miracles, and faith (Schmitt [1938] 1996a, p. 53). However, Schmitt astutely observes that Hobbes avoids the crucial issue when discussing miracles and faith. While the sovereign may compel subjects to conform publicly to the official religion of the state, this demand pertains only to “public reason.” On the level of “private reason,” individuals are still permitted to retain their own inner judgments (Schmitt [1938] 1996a, p. 56). Thus, obedience is external and performative, not necessarily indicative of genuine belief. Building on this, Schmitt observes that Spinoza reduces the public faith of an entire people to mere “external cult,” while elevating private freedom of thought to the status of true “piety” and inner devotion to God (Schmitt [1938] 1996a, p. 57). This move is not merely a terminological substitution of Hobbesian categories; rather, it establishes freedom of thought and speech as normative principles, relegating the maintenance of public peace to a conditional and secondary concern. As a result, in the wake of the nineteenth century, the concept of the state as a monopolist of transcendence and authority was supplanted by the liberal constitutional state governed by the rule of law, becoming a “externally all powerful, internally powerless” mechanical shell (Schmitt [1938] 1996a, p. 61).

It becomes evident that Schmitt confronts a fundamental dilemma. If the state is to retain a sacred character in the public sphere, the religious civil wars of seventeenth-century England stand as a stark warning against such entanglement. Yet if questions of ultimate truth are entirely relegated to the private sphere, the distinct political domain of the state begins to erode.

Schmitt’s solution is to elevate the state above society as a transcendent and mystical authority—one that reveals truth but prohibits public discourse about it. It suggests that the state retains a sacred character, but is deliberately distanced from the people in order to prevent them from appropriating or laying claim to it. In other words, it is about decision, not discussion. To remedy the internal deficiency of Leviathan, Schmitt proposes an all-embracing version of decisionism, viewing the state as an ultimate decision-maker not only standing above the society but also penetrates into the minds of citizens. Schmitt observes that the traditional state was once described as “the god on earth,” “the kingdom of objective reason and morality,” and “the supreme and final judge over all disputes. (Schmitt [1930] 2014d, p. 152)” Its superiority over society was not grounded merely in its monopoly of military force, but in its authoritative claim to interpret revealed truth. In other words, the state along not only makes political decisions but also determine their meanings. It controls not only citizen’s external action but also their internal thought. This conception of state is anti-liberal and inclined to totalitarianism.4

This conception of the state is grounded in a theological-metaphysical foundation, assuming the role of Katechon—the force that restrains antichristic, anarchic pluralism and holds back the descent into chaos. Just as Schmitt’s concept of Katechon functions in international law to draw the line between peace and war, in the realm of domestic politics it likewise creates a space that delineates the boundary between state and society. He recognizes that it is impossible to eliminate human restless drives to approach God and take over the state, so the only solution is to periodically check them by making decisive interventions. Katechon keeps this boundary without fully separating them, whereas antichristic pluralism seeks to abolish this boundary by subsuming the state into society.

For Schmitt, pluralism constitutes a substantial enemy—one that must be identified and eliminated, or at the very least, repelled beyond the borders of Germany. In fact, domestic pluralism is closely aligned with universalism in international relations, as both seek to emancipate society from the state and to integrate it into a global civil society. Pluralism, in this sense, represents the domestic manifestation of Anglo-American liberalism. In sum, liberalism envisions a borderless world composed of autonomous individuals and transnational social groups, whereas Katechon represents a world composed of distinct sovereign states which incorporate and control their societies and individuals.

4. From Politics to Theodicy: Gnosticism vs. Katechon

Universalists and pluralists are identified by Schmitt as enemies in the realm of political reality. Yet by associating them with the symbol of the Antichrist, he gestures toward a deeper, still only partially disclosed theological horizon underlying his political analysis. This is to say, Schmitt has theological explanations of Antichrist and Katechon, which, respectively, correspond to two opposing systems of political theology: Gnosticism and Katechon. Political theology is a mode of thinking:

“Any reflection about human experience has a way of traveling up the chain of causes, first to the cosmos, then to God. If we conceive of God as the shaper of our cosmos, which displays his purposes, then the legitimate exercise of political authority might very well depend on understanding those purposes. God’s intentions need no justification, since he is the last court of appeal”.

(Lilla 2008, p. 22)

Political theology emerges when we accept that the conceptual link from man to cosmos to God can serve as a source of authoritative guidance for political life. A political theologian, then, is one who constructs arguments within the framework of “God-man-cosmos.” Yet different understandings of how these three domains are connected have led to competing visions of political theology.

In his later work, Political Theology II, Schmitt explicitly acknowledges the theological connection between his political adversaries and the tradition of Gnostic dualism (Schmitt [1970] 2014c, p. 125). Gnosticism was a heterodox branch of early Christianity, existing outside the bounds of orthodoxy. Gnostics held that the cosmos in which we dwell is nothing more than a prison—a fallen world ruled by a lower, malevolent spiritual being known as the demiurge; in contrast, the true God—whom we conventionally call “God”—neither created nor governs this universe, but exists as its absolute antithesis, standing in opposition to the darkness that defines worldly existence (Jonas 1958, pp. 251–52). Most importantly, “the gnostic God is not merely extra-mundane and supra-mundane, but in his ultimate meaning contra-mundane” (Jonas 1958, p. 251). This reflects an extreme form of dualism at the heart of the Gnostic worldview: a radical opposition between God and the world, which is further reduced to dichotomies such as spirit versus matter, soul versus body, and good versus evil. In Schmitt’s words, “the two gods are in a state of open war, or at least in a relationship of unbridgeable alienation similar to a kind of dangerous Cold War” (Schmitt [1970] 2014c, p. 124). Motivated by the desire to return to the divine realm of light, the Gnostics focused primarily on human salvation and cosmic redemption.

To achieve salvation, Gnostic thought generally offers two divergent yet structurally similar paths: asceticism and libertinism. Both approaches are grounded in a shared conviction—that the world is a decaying and defiled prison. The ascetics, seeking to avoid contamination by the material world, embark on a path of “spiritual escape.” While not always overtly hostile to the world, they remain detached observers, withdrawing from worldly affairs to contemplating higher truths. This path of spiritual liberation requires a high degree of intellectual and moral discipline, and thus tends to be limited to individuals or small elite communities (Lin 2019, p. 225). The libertine strand within Gnosticism, by contrast, seeks to draw the divine light into this darkened world—a world sustained only by law or violence (Jonas 1958, p. 271). Believing that the existing order is fundamentally corrupt, these Gnostics pursue revolutionary means to overturn it, aspiring to transform the prison of the world into a new heaven and new earth. Inspired by the apocalyptic visions in the Book of Revelation, they interpret its eschatological imagery as a blueprint for radical transformation. This orientation has come to be associated with what may be called “an eschatological politics” (Lilla 2008, p. 28).

Schmitt regards Apocalyptic Gnosticism as absurd and degenerated. He argues that “history does not consist in calls to historical deeds. Rather, it is like a passage through lack, hunger, and invigorating impotence” (Schmitt [1950] 2009, p. 169). He means that Gnostics’ answer to the call of apocalypse is a mere illusion, as world history has no meaning.5 The end-time is not within secular history but beyond it. In other words, it is not determined by men but by God alone. The Gnostic history is nothing but “an exchangeable costume to conceal the bluntness of activist attempts to give meaning to the meaningless” (Schmitt [1950] 2009, p. 170). They attempt to create meaning for history by themselves.

Gnostic psychology is rooted in a longing for existential certainty—one that must ultimately be self-generated. The emergence of modern society marks the arrival of a secular age, in which the Church no longer serves as the necessary intermediary between man and God, nor as a sanctuary for the soul. As a result, the relationship between the individual and the divine is sustained only through personal faith—a faith that, at its core, is “the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Yet this faith remains a fragile bond. Modern individuals are left to endure the burdens that follow the collapse of transcendent meaning: boredom, loneliness, despair, and helplessness. In response, they desperately seek new gods—sources of certainty that might restore a sense of orientation to life. It is in this context that the Gnostic impulse reemerges, attempting to make the self its own locus of salvation through, in Schmitt’s words, “binging the self to God” (Schmitt [1917] 1996b, p. 49). At the heart of their doctrine lies the belief that if man can become God, then salvation—once the prerogative of the divine—can be carried out by man himself through self-redemption. In this way, human beings may reclaim a sense of certainty within the immanence of secular history. The universalist vision of “peace and security” and the pluralist state appear to constitute a kind of false earthly paradise—one that offers the certainty modern man so desperately seeks.

Yet for thinkers like Carl Schmitt, this so-called “paradise” is little more than a façade. It imitates the material abundance and environmental comfort of the true paradise, but evades the deeper, spiritual inquiry into the foundations of certainty. Those who dwell within it continue to experience existential anxiety and inner torment. In response, they make false promises and employ their powers to sustain a collective self-deception—casting themselves as the authors of history. Freedom is elevated to the status of the highest value, functioning as a screen behind which the true face of nihilism is concealed.

Although Schmitt criticized the Gnostic worldview, he nevertheless acknowledged that its dualistic framework posed a profound challenge of theodicy to orthodox Christianity—namely, how to reconcile the existence of evil with belief in an all-powerful, all-good God (Schmitt [1970] 2014c, p. 124). Since Gnostics are unable to reconcile them, they attempt to resolves the tension by distinguishing between the god of creation and the God of redemption (the true God), attributing all evil to a subordinate demiurge. They regard evil as the fundamental cause of human suffering and therefore attempt to eradicate it through human agency. In doing so, they invert the traditional ontological hierarchy of “God–cosmos–man,” replacing it with the anthropocentric order of “man–cosmos–God.” For them, God did not become man,6 but man will become God.

Schmitt regarded the Gnostic rejection of theodicy as a heretical doctrine and reaffirmed Christian theodicy. He refuses dualism: “Although God is alone, He is also omnipresent in the world” (Schmitt [1917] 1996b, p. 49)—this is one of the most fundamental affirmations of Christian orthodoxy. He also places the doctrine of the Incarnation at the very center of understanding Christianity (Schmitt [1950] 2009, pp. 169–70). This affirms that God is not, as in the Gnostic view, a distant and indifferent deity, nor, as in Judaism, a God who binds humanity through the law, but rather Jesus Christ, the God who willingly suffers for the sake of humanity. Through the doctrine of the Trinity, the God of creation and the God of redemption are not absolutely identical, but they are nonetheless of one essence (Schmitt [1970] 2014c, p. 124). If there is only one God that creates and redeems the world, evil cannot be his intention or the fundamental cause of suffering. Rather, evil is a consequence resulted from sinned human nature. Original sin, in this view, is not to be understood as individual moral guilt, but as a historical punishment and inherited condition—a natural sin that defines the fallen state of humanity.7 As Schmitt points it out poetically, “Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Thus begins the history of humankind. This is what the father of all things looks like” (Schmitt [1947] 2017, p. 71). By this logic, it is impossible for men to eliminate evil by their own hands. Evil and suffering on earth is rather a divine punishment. The enemy exists because we are all the posterities of Cain. In other words, enmity is a natural condition of man inherited from history and imposed by God.

Thus, the Gnostic logic—that the suffering of the righteous necessarily implies the malevolence of the creator god—is invalidated. The evil enemy cannot be eradicated by men, for evil constitutes an enduring condition of human existence. God must return to the center of world. As long as the origin of evil is theologically and metaphysically acknowledged, the question shifts to how the effects of sin can be contained and its harm minimized. That is why Schmitt writes: “theologians tend to define the enemy as something that must be destroyed. But I am a jurist, not a theologian” (Schmitt [1947] 2017, p. 71). Thus, Schmitt took the crucial step of transferring the theodical question from the purely theological domain to the political realm. Political theology, for Schmitt, means to reach the theological root of enmity and recognize its insolvability in the human realm and thus draw a clear boundary between the political and the theological.

At this point, the task left for human beings is to deal with the enemy through law, embodied in the nomos of the earth and the Leviathan—that is, in the sovereign state. The former establishes spatial boundaries to contain the enemy outside the political order, while the latter monopolizes the interpretation of revealed truth and offers protection to its subjects. When these two are unified—when the interpreter of transcendental revelation also acts as the guarantor of worldly order—both apocalyptic religious wars and world revolutions that claim to bring “perpetual peace” are held in check. In other words, Katechon provides a realist response to the challenge of theodicy by mediating the tension between revelation and order.

Katechon is not a rejection but an affirmative expression of theodicy. As embodied in the state system, Katechon does not eradicate evil but merely contains it. Its very existence serves as a reminder that evil is inseparable from divine punishment. It serves as a reminder that, like Job, one must submit to God’s will—for true redemption comes from God alone, but the appointed time has not yet arrived. Palaver argues that Schmitt’s Katechon is more a paganist concept that “uses anarchy or violence to prevent the total outbreak of anarchy or violence” and theologically “not only postpones the reign of the Antichrist but it also holds back the second coming of Christ” (Palaver 2007, p. 85). He might be right that Schmitt is not a good Christian who is interested in human self-protection rather than redemption. However, we can also speculate that Schmitt recognizes that the end-time has not yet come so the paganist self-protection mechanism is still needed. Even Katechon is a paganist thing, its existence is also a reminder of the not-yet time.

Through the foregoing discussion, it becomes evident that Schmitt seeks to offer a theological justification for Katechon—a form of theodicy that contains evil within history while affirming divine justice. In this view, Katechon is not simply negative as a restrainer but also generative. It affirms the divine justice at the end-time by treating enmity and evil as divine retribution for the past. As Schmitt writes, Katechon is a “bridge” between “eschatological faith and historical consciousness”, between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man (Schmitt [1950] 2009, p. 169). The two-kingdom worldview acknowledge the sinfulness of man but give them hope for redemption. As Schmitt argues, “whoever recognizes how deep is the sin of man is compelled by the incarnation of God to believe that man and the world are ‘by nature good.’” (Schmitt [1917] 1996b, p. 56). Massimo Cacciari likewise agrees that Katechon prevents the two kingdoms from falling into absolute opposition; although it is not itself a politics of redemption, it remains open to the promise of redemption rather than excluding it (Cacciari 2018, p. xxv). By contrast, a world without Katechon is one that must confront directly the mortal struggle between God and the Devil, between good and evil. If the world is destroyed before redemption is fulfilled, then God’s salvific plan is subverted. This is precisely the trick of Antichrist. As Dmitry Popov argues, Katechon simultaneously implies a dual function of restraint and transgression: it is both the force that holds back destruction and the gateway to a long-awaited, just world order—a new horizon often associated with the coming of the millennium (Popov 2023, pp. 13–25).

It is now clear that Schmitt understands the friend–enemy distinction not merely as an occasional political decision, but as a serious theological dispute. As Schmitt remarks in his early work The Concept of the Political, the inquiry into enmity is “an anthropological profession of faith” (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 58), suggesting that the enemy is an inherent theological question. In his later works, he invokes theodicy to refute Gnostic heresies, which find their political expression in universalism and pluralism. The friend–enemy distinction constitutes a battle of faith throughout Schmitt’s life. This spiritual battle also affirms the reality of human sinfulness: that human beings, by their very nature, are inclined to turn away from God and to become enemies of one another.

Conversely, the persistent existence of the enemy testifies to the fact that humanity is incapable of liberating itself from sin without divine intervention. It is precisely human freedom that gives rise to rebellion against the will of God, giving rise to original sin. This suggests that humanity is fundamentally self-insufficient—human beings alone cannot determine the form of their own existence. In political life, the self-insufficiency of humanity manifests in the figure of man as “a dangerous and dynamic being” (Schmitt [1932] 2008, p. 61), whose actions reveal the ever-present potential for conflict and disruption. This is because they must acknowledge an enemy in order to be acknowledged themselves: “Whom in the world can I acknowledge as my enemy? Clearly only him who can call me into question. By recognizing him as enemy I acknowledge that he can call me into question…‘The enemy is our own question as form’.” (Schmitt [1947] 2017, p. 71). The enemy functions as both the negation and the affirmation of the self. Because the enemy poses an existential threat, one must engage in struggle to affirm one’s own existence. In other words, to know who I am, I must know who I am not.8 The enemy thus becomes a reciprocal relationship of what Schmitt calls the “mutual acknowledgement of acknowledgement” (Schmitt [1947] 2017, p. 70). Most importantly, the mutual recognition between the self and the enemy ultimately leads to the recognition of sin and of God. Enmity entered the world through the fall of Adam and the violence of Cain, and it will endure until the final judgment. As Schmitt puts it poetically, “Woe to him who has no enemy, for I will be his enemy on Judgment Day” (Schmitt [1947] 2017, p. 71). For the Gnostics, who deny the theological origin of enmity and the fallen nature of humanity, Schmitt delivers a prophetic warning: God will ultimately reveal the truth of faith. After all, while the friend–enemy distinction may appear to be a human decision in a specific time and locus, it is already theologically and metaphysically inscribed into humanity by God.

5. Conclusions

Schmitt’s position is the that friend–enemy distinction is grounded in a profound theodical foundation. His political enemies—universalists and pluralists—emerged from a mistaken rejection of theodicy. Unable to reconcile the existence of evil with an omnipotent and benevolent God, they turned to Gnostic dualism and sought to eliminate evil and all enemies by their own means, in pursuit of the immediate realization of salvation. Their heresies posed a fundamental threat to both the earthly order and God’s plan of redemption. Schmitt reaffirmed theodicy by showing that evil and the existence of the enemy are the consequences of human fallenness and divine punishment. Katechon, as a restraining and yet productive force, is theologically justified: it represses the uproar of human egoism while simultaneously reminding us of the possibility of redemption from God. Schmitt thus establishes the theodicial foundation of the friend–enemy distinction: it is not merely an occasional product of political contingency, but is theologically predestined by the fall of man and the anticipated redemption of God.

To clarify Löwith’s confusion, the enemy represents a substantive form of existence—one that represents, in theological terms, Antichrist or Gnostics, and that in practical political terms manifests as liberalism. In international relations, Antichrist manifests as a universalist ideology—one that promises perpetual peace but in practice has led to endless and inhumane conflicts. Schmitt identified the United States as the deceptive enemy. To restrain Antichrist, Schmitt proposes Katechon, incarnated in the nomos of the earth—not to eliminate conflict, but to contain it within a concrete spatial and legal order. The competition between the two international orders is the reflection of the cosmic conflict between Antichrist and Katechon. In domestic politics, Antichrist manifests as social pluralism, which seeks to hollow out the state through the proliferation of interest groups and political parties, ultimately leading to civil war. To contain domestic chaos, Schmitt then theorized Katechon as the decisionist state—one that separates society from the state, yet simultaneously intervenes in it as a divine force. Schmitt raised this concern in the context of the Weimar constitutional crisis, but it ultimately served the rise of the Nazi regime, in which the state, conversely, came to subsume society.

Our position is that Schmitt’s Katechon is fundamentally flawed: in order to restrain the destructive power of Antichrist, it must itself become a great power. In international relations, Germany was transformed into an interventionist empire when the Nazi sought to dominate the global order during the Second World War. In domestic politics, Germany became a totalitarian state when the Nazis did not safeguard society, but instead devoured it. The state sealed off transcendence and elevated itself as a god on earth. In Voegelin’s terms, the Schmittian state may be understood as an immanent political religion (Gontier 2013, p. 36), one that ‘finds the divine in subcontents of the world’ (Voegelin [1938] 2000, p. 33).9 Like the transcendent God, this Schmittian political religion demands absolute obedience. Within such a regime, the state must usurp ‘the redemptive power that belongs to God,’ while individuals are compelled to ‘find meaning and salvation’ through their integration into the state (Porter 2002, pp. 160–62). According to Voegelin’s typology, this constitutes a variant of Gnosticism: the state itself becomes a terrestrial god, offering political redemption through both the extermination of the Jews and the martyrdom of its citizens on the battlefield. In this way, the Schmittian Katechon, ostensibly intended to shield individuals from messianic violence, ultimately assumes the role of a political Messiah that demands ever greater violence.10 All of Katechon’s efforts ultimately produced the very outcome it sought to prevent. As Cacciari comments,

“The katechon works for its own end and for death in the most ‘perfect’ sense of the expression; every element that it ‘convinces’ to serve, brings it nearer to its end; every ‘victory’ defeats it, every form it manages to produce, dissolves it. Its containing- postponing-forming is a drama that cannot lead to any catharsis—a drama cursed by all its protagonists”.

(Cacciari 2018, p. xxv)

The flaw lies not merely in Schmitt’s contingent and erroneous identification of Nazi Germany as Katechon, but in the theo-political logic of Katechon itself. If all human beings are fallen and inclined to deviate from God’s plan, how could Katechon be exempt from such corruption? If society is constituted by flawed individuals, how can the sovereign—also a human being—make the right decision and correctly identify the true enemy? Even when a state assumes the role of Katechon in repressing the Antichrist, nothing safeguards it from transforming into a messianic empire that seeks to eliminate all internal and external enemies. In this sense, Katechon may not only delay the Second Coming of Christ but may itself become indistinguishable from the Antichrist. Schmitt’s logic is self-defeating: if human fallenness cannot ground a justification for political millenarianism, neither can it justify the notion of a political Katechon. After all, every form of political power remains subject to sin.