@Maria delos Angeles./@Naomi Arai
Quote: "The Great Deceiver will provoke the apostasy of many before Christ’s definitive victory. Which is to say: “underhandedly, he will please everyone, he won’t accept offices or positions, he will not show favoritism to people, he will be amiable to everyone, calm in all things, he will refuse gifts, will appear affable to his fellow man, and thus, everyone will praise him exclaiming: “Behold a just man!” This excerpt, from St. Ephraem’s Latin, has a disquieting prospect: the Antichrist in the deceitful guise of “a man of dialogue”; a peaceful, restrained, honest “humanist”?
The Antichrist will arise from a society similar to the modern West, where: “men are poor devils who know everything and believe in nothing”; a society where “the most important and newest things are secularized: beauty has become good taste, the Church is a pacifistic organization and in the place of the distinction between good and evil, what is useful and harmful.” In such a culture, the underhanded, “dialoguing” Antichrist will have you believe that salvation depends on social certainties and development. Most of all, the Antichrist will not be a materialist at all, neither an enemy of religion: rather “he will provide for all needs, including those spiritual.” He will satisfy man’s yearning for transcendence by talking about spirituality, by proposing a “religion of humanity” where everyone is in agreement with everything and where any divergence is banished, and, above all, any dogma is seen as a radical evil practically unnoticed, appearing decidedly improbable. Yet, is it not perhaps the case to reflect on it today when what’s threatening us, in the religious sphere, is certainly no longer intolerance, but if anything, its opposite: the “tolerance” that is transformed into indifference, by refusing to consider the various faiths as something more than one unique way (differentiated only by historical and geographical factors) of venerating the same, identical God? Where the “enemy”is no longer old, honest materialism, but perhaps, an insidious “humanitarian” spiritualism? End Quote.
[From the book Pensare la storia,(Thinking History) San Paolo, Milan 1992, p. 517-519]
Primary Source: (condensed) Vittori Messori/Carl Schmitt. 2016.