by Marco Dotti

If history had a meaning, the Incarnation would be superfluous.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I do not believe that a faith originally Christian in character can sustain
any image of history other than that of the Katéchon.
Carl Schmitt

Joseph de Maistre, the great reactionary, taught that it takes uncommon skill to hit a moving target. As in the hunt: standing still is not enough. Peter Thiel–entrepreneur, techno-philosopher, a figure whose voice carries considerable weight within the current U.S. administration–moves with evident fluency through a chaotic world: a world that has grown unaccustomed to sustained thought, habituated instead to oscillating between gossip and yesterday’s certainties, if not the day before’s. But Thiel is also a formidable hunter. And he hits his mark, whether one welcomes it or not. The Antichrist, for instance.

As of this writing, Thiel is in Rome for the third cycle of his lectures on the Antichrist and the Apocalypse. A closed-door seminar, like all those that preceded it: the four lectures delivered at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in the fall of 2025, organized by the Christian technocrat association Acts 17 Collective–tickets at two hundred dollars, sold out at once, with an absolute prohibition on recording–then reprised at Oxford, Harvard, the University of Austin, and Paris. Each time the same format, modeled on the four sermons on the Antichrist that John Henry Newman delivered in the 1830s, before his conversion to Catholicism. Each time a density of argument virtually unprecedented for a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Or perhaps precisely becauseThiel is a thoroughly anomalous entrepreneur, and the discourse he is constructing is the fruit of an intellectual architecture of rare ambition–well beyond the caprice of a wealthy eccentric amusing himself by generating talk about a private obsession. The founder of Palantir–the company whose very name is a programmatic manifesto, the Tolkienian palantír, the seeing-stone that perceives what is distant and concealed–seeks to persuade the Western elites that the category of the Antichrist remains the most adequate conceptual instrument for understanding the dynamics of power in the twenty-first century. And he does so from a precise starting point.

The Benevolent Superman: The Solovʹëv Model

At the center of Thiel’s argument lies a text that virtually no one in the world of technology and finance has ever read, and that nearly everyone working in theology and Russian philosophy knows well: the Short Tale of the Antichrist by Vladimir Solovʹëv, published in 1900, the year of its author’s death. Solovʹëv–mystic, philosopher, poet, the greatest Russian religious thinker of the nineteenth century–wrote his tale as the epilogue to the Three Dialogues on War, Progress, and the End of Universal History, a work that explicitly sets out to refute Tolstoyism: the idea that evil can be overcome through non-resistance alone, through individual moral perfection, without conflict and without tragedy. For Solovʹëv, this represents the most perilous of illusions. The illusion takes the form of an orthopraxis–but it is also the conviction that good can triumph without passing through struggle, a conviction that already constitutes, in itself, a form of anti-Christian seduction. Here is the point that captivates Thiel and becomes the first pillar of his construction. Solovʹëv’s Antichrist possesses everything except the appearance of evil: he is an extraordinary man of thirty-three–Christ’s age–endowed with genius, beauty, and magnetic charisma; he has authored a theological work universally admired; he harbors a genuine concern for the welfare of humanity and even for the environment. Many consider him a superman. And in a certain sense, he is. But his fundamental defect–decisive and fatal–resides in the depths of his soul. He prefers himself to God. He believes in God, but he believes more in himself. He regards himself as Christ’s successor, His perfection, the one who will bring to completion what Christ only began. He is, in the words Thiel adopts as his hermeneutic key, hyper-Christian: ultra-Christian, more Christian than Christ–and precisely for this reason, radically anti-Christian. In Solovʹëv’s narrative, this Antichrist becomes the president of a united Europe, then, through a mechanism Solovʹëv himself never entirely clarifies, comes to govern the world. He offers universal peace, prosperity, enlightened social reforms, dialogue. The churches, one by one, yield to the seduction. Catholicism obtains the restitution of its institutional authority; Protestantism sees the primacy of biblical scholarship recognized; Orthodoxy receives the custodianship of its liturgical and archaeological treasures. Only a small group–Pope Peter II, the starets John, Professor Pauli–refuses to submit, recognizing that behind the emperor’s gifts lies not Christ but His simulacrum.

Thiel identifies in Solovʹëv what he calls a “plot hole”–but a revealing one. How does this Antichrist succeed in seizing world power? Does he deliver hypnotic speeches and people simply fall into the trap? A barely plausible demonium ex machina. It is here that Thiel grafts a central element of his thesis. In 1900 Solovʹëv could not have envisioned atomic weapons, engineered pandemics, or artificial intelligence beyond human control. He lacked the capacity to imagine a world in which the fear of annihilation was not only concrete but so technologically grounded as to render acceptable–indeed desirable–the surrender of every freedom in a post-Faustian pact with a centralized power that promises and guarantees security. What was absent from Solovʹëv’s mechanics, Thiel argues, the twentieth century supplied: the Antichrist does not seize power despite the fear of Armageddon but because of it. His slogan, borrowed from Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians (5:3), is “peace and security.” Peace and security are unimpeachable values, Thiel observes–but one must consider how those words resound in a world where the stakes are absolute, where the alternative to peace and security is total annihilation. In such a world, whoever speaks incessantly of Armageddon–of existential risk, of the necessity of regulating whatever might stand in the way of averting an ostensibly imminent catastrophe–is already clearing the path for the Antichrist. Or perhaps is already the Antichrist.

In Thiel’s reading, Solovʹëv’s tale becomes a distorting yet extraordinarily acute mirror of the present: a world in which supranational regulatory agencies, NGOs, international organizations, and movements to render artificial intelligence “safe” may be preparing–with the best of intentions, and precisely for this reason all the more effectively–the ground for a global anti-Christian power without precedent and without appeal. Yet this is only the beginning of Thiel’s argument. Solovʹëv is the point of departure: the literary model that renders the unthinkable thinkable. What follows–Newman, Benson, Girard, Schmitt, the katéchon–is the articulation of a formidable conceptual assemblage with which the founder of Palantir undertakes to re-read the entire contemporary political order.

Newman, or the Duty to Watch

If Solovʹëv furnishes Thiel with the content–the literary portrait of the Antichrist as benevolent superman–John Henry Newman furnishes him with the form. Thiel’s lectures, through to his symbolic investiture in Rome, are explicitly modeled on the four sermons Newman devoted to the Antichrist in 1838: The Times of Antichrist, The Religion of Antichrist, The City of Antichrist, The Persecution of Antichrist. Published in the Tracts for the Times, the manifesto of the Oxford Movement, which sought to restore to the Church of England the doctrinal density of ancient Catholicism–those sermons constitute one of the most remarkable and least-visited texts in nineteenth-century Anglican theology. Newman judged them sufficiently important to republish decades later, by then a Catholic cardinal, in the collection Discussions and Arguments. Thiel’s choice of Newman as structural model is far from incidental. In the intellectual genealogy of the Antichrist lectures, Newman holds a precise position: he is the figure who transforms the eschatological question from near-abstract speculation into a concrete moral duty. The starting point of the sermons is an assertion Thiel takes up directly: it is the task of believers to keep perpetual watch for the coming of the Lord, to seek His signs in all that transpires around them, and above all to bear in mind the great and terrible sign of which Paul writes to the Thessalonians–the appearance of the Antichrist. As the first coming of Christ was preceded by a precursor, the Baptist, so the second will be preceded by its counter-precursor: the very image of Satan, the fearsome Antichrist.

What renders Newman decisive for Thiel is the way the cardinal resolves an objection that traverses the entire history of Christian eschatology: if the Antichrist must come immediately before the return of Christ, and if two millennia have elapsed without this taking place, then perhaps the prophecy was mistaken–or perhaps the Antichrist has already come and gone unrecognized. Newman responds with a layered, typological conception of historical time. Every age produces its own prefigurations of the Antichrist, its own partial anticipations of the end, just as every age before Christ had produced its own prefigurations of the Messiah. History proceeds as a widening circle; the same patterns recur, but each time with greater intensity, a more precise approximation to the final event. Nero was a type of the Antichrist. Napoleon was a type of the Antichrist. Hitler, Stalin… But the definitive Antichrist–the one who immediately precedes the return of Christ–remains yet to come. Thiel adopts this typological logic and projects it onto the present. If every epoch produces its own anti-Christian precursors, then the task of the Christian–and, by extension, of anyone who wishes to read the signs and understand his own time–consists in recognizing them. The difficulty–and it is here that Thiel parts company with the majority of contemporary commentators–is that the precursors of the Antichrist nearly always appear under the guise of the good. Newman had underscored this in his second sermon, devoted to the religion of the Antichrist: the anti-Christian figure will reject Christ, yes, but will do so by passing himself off as Christ. He will be mistaken for the Messiah. He will impersonate the Savior. And precisely for this reason his seduction will prove irresistible for all who seek salvation without the weight of the Cross–security without sacrifice, peace without struggle, progress without risk. Orthopraxis without incarnation.

Newman’s third sermon, The City of Antichrist, offers Thiel a further element. Newman examines the role of the Roman Empire in anti-Christian prophecy. Paul, in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, speaks of a force that “restrains” the advent of the lawless one, and patristic tradition nearly unanimously identifies this force with Rome. Roman imperial power, in other words, performs the function of the katéchon: that which holds back evil, that which prevents chaos from flooding in. But here is the paradox that Newman–in what Thiel terms an “augmented” reading–grasps with precision: Rome is, at different moments, both the persecutor and the protector of Christians. The same empire that martyred them under Nero elevated them to a state religion under Constantine. The force that restrains evil can itself transform into that which unleashes it. The katéchon is always one step from the Antichrist. Thiel translates this insight into contemporary geopolitical terms with a directness that has few parallels in public discourse. The United States, he argues, are simultaneously the natural candidate for the role of katéchon–the power that, through its technological and military primacy, holds back the emergence of a totalitarian world government–and the natural candidate for the role of Antichrist: the power that, through its own surveillance networks, intelligence apparatuses, and global technology platforms, could become the nucleus of that very world government. America is, in the words that have leaked from his lectures, the “ground zero” of both possibilities. And the question pervading Thiel’s entire discourse–a question at once theological, political, and profoundly personal, given that Palantir is precisely the technocratic instrument that could serve the katéchon no less than the Antichrist–is which of the two trajectories will prevail.

Newman’s fourth and final sermon, on the persecution of the Antichrist, closes the circle with a warning Thiel takes up and amplifies. The ultimate persecution will surpass all others in history, and will be interrupted only by the return of Christ. But its true purpose–here Newman speaks as a pastor, and Thiel follows in a tone that those present at the leaked recordings describe as unusually solemn–is conversion: to detach from the world, to remain alert against seduction, to accept the cost of resistance. The T-shirts distributed at the Oxford lectures bore the inscription: Don’t immanentize the katéchon. An insider’s witticism and a grave admonition at once: the wordplay on Eric Voegelin’s celebrated formula (Don’t immanentize the eschaton–that is, renounce the attempt to build paradise on earth) introduces a further conceptual layer. If to immanentize the eschaton means presuming to construct the Kingdom of God by political means, then to immanentize the katéchon means presuming to identify with certainty, within history, the force that restrains evil–and to make of it a program of governance. The risk, Thiel cautions, is that the defender may transform into the very thing against which it claims to defend. That the katéchon may become the Antichrist. That Palantir itself, as it were, may change sign.

The theological stakes of this formulation deserve close attention. In the Pauline tradition, and in the patristic commentaries that follow it, the katéchon is never a self-appointed office: it is a function discerned retrospectively, through faith, within the inscrutable economy of Providence. What Thiel proposes–and what the formula Don’t immanentize the katéchon simultaneously warns against and enacts–is something categorically different: the deliberate identification of a political agent with the restraining force, and the construction of a technologically mediated apparatus to fulfill that role. The katéchon thereby ceases to be an eschatological mystery and becomes a geopolitical program. The distinction is not trivial. If the katéchon is a mystery–if its identity remains hidden even from those who may, unwittingly, be exercising its function–then any claim to wield it knowingly is already a form of the very presumption that, in Christian eschatology, characterizes the Antichrist: the pretension to occupy God’s seat in history. Thiel is not unaware of this circularity; he returns to it repeatedly, and his warning against immanentization is genuine. Yet the entire practical architecture of his career–Palantir’s surveillance apparatus, Anduril’s defense technologies, the strategic funding of political campaigns–constitutes precisely the immanentization his formula prohibits. The katéchon, in Thiel’s hands, oscillates between a theological category that resists operationalization and a techno-political instrument that demands it. It is in this unresolved oscillation–not in any doctrinal error easily named–that the deepest tension of his thought resides.

From Newman, then, Thiel derives three things: a structure (the four sermons), a method (historical typology, whereby every epoch produces its own anti-Christian precursors), and a moral imperative–the duty to watch, to seek the signs, to refuse the intellectual somnolence that relegates the Apocalypse to a fossil of superstition. At this juncture, however, the question becomes inescapable: watch for what, exactly? And by what means? Thiel’s answer comes from two further thinkers summoned to his genealogy–René Girard and Carl Schmitt. It is through their lens that Thiel transforms Newmanian theology into a political theology of the present.

The Theological Workshop: Girard, Schmitt, and the Genesis of a Thought

Rome, today. To understand Thiel’s Roman lectures, one must return twenty years, to a California summer that contained in embryo everything that was to follow. In July 2004–one month before his pioneering investment in Facebook, three years before the founding of Palantir–the thirty-six-year-old Thiel financed out of his own pocket a week-long symposium at Stanford, assembling Robert Hamerton-Kelly, dean emeritus of Stanford Memorial Chapel, half a dozen professors of philosophy, theology, and political theory, and his former teacher, the anthropologist René Girard. In a gesture unusual for an entrepreneur, Thiel contributed a substantive essay: The Straussian Moment, subsequently published in the collective volume Politics and Apocalypse (2007) and now available in Italian, edited by Andrea Venanzoni for Liberilibri (Il momento straussiano, 2025). That text–extraordinarily dense, crystalline in its argumentative strategy, deliberately “Straussian” in what it says and what it withholds–is the keystone of the entire intellectual edifice, which today approaches a nearly finished form.

The starting thesis is that the attacks of September 11 called into question the entire political and military framework of the modern age: deterrent armies, rational nation-states, public deliberation, international diplomacy. The Enlightenment, Thiel argues, constructed its order upon a fundamental repression: it buried the question of human violence beneath the myth of the social contract, pretending that in the moment of universal crisis (“the war of all against all”) human beings convened and negotiated a reasonable pact. For Thiel, this is the “founding myth–that is, the central lie–of the Enlightenment.” And September 11 shattered that lie. At this point the essay summons three thinkers, each embodying a distinct response to the crisis: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, René Girard.

Schmitt is the first. His response to violence is the most radical and the most perilous: politics is the arena in which human beings are compelled to distinguish between friend and enemy. The friend-enemy distinction is irreducible, pre-political, foundational. The Enlightenment sought to abolish it; political Islam restored it to view. The Schmittian response to September 11 would have been: recognize Islam as the providential enemy of the West and respond in kind. Thiel rejects this–at least explicitly–on the grounds that it “would mean making a clean sweep of everything that fundamentally distinguishes the modern West from Islam.” But he rejects it only to recuperate it, in transfigured form, through the concept of the katéchon. Schmitt, in his Nomos of the Earth, had theorized the katéchon as a concrete political force–the Christian Empire, the power that holds back chaos–and had identified it successively with European sovereign states and then, in an adherence to Nazism that remains the indelible stain on his thought, with the Hitlerian Reich. Thiel takes up the Schmittian schema, condemns its historical outcome, but preserves its structure: there must exist a force that restrains the Antichrist, and that force is invariably ambiguous, always one step from becoming anti-Christian itself. The United States, in his reading, occupy precisely this liminal position.

Strauss is the second. His response is reticence. The most dangerous truths about human nature–foundational violence, the irrationality of desire, the impossibility of perpetual peace–must be communicated only esoterically: to initiates, to philosophers, to those capable of sustaining their weight without succumbing to madness or destruction. The Straussian art of writing consists in saying one thing to the public (exotericism) and another to the few who know how to read between the lines (esotericism). Thiel adopts this double register as method–the lectures on the Antichrist are, in their very format (closed doors, no recordings, a select audience), an exercise in esoteric communication–but acknowledges its limits. The “Straussian moment” is a moment, precisely, destined to exhaust itself. The day will come when every secret is unveiled, every injustice laid bare, and those who perpetrated them called to account. It is at this juncture that Thiel parts ways with Strauss and draws close to Girard.

Girard is the third, and the most consequential. The master, the interlocutor of a lifetime, the thinker whose theory gives shape to the entire Thielian worldview (even the investment in Facebook was justified in Girardian terms: the social network constituted, in Thiel’s formulation, a “scapegoat machine” and a “mimetic device”). The relationship between the two originated in the late 1980s, when the young philosophy student attended the Franco-American professor’s courses at Stanford, and endured until Girard’s death in 2015, when Thiel delivered a eulogy. Thiel subsequently founded Imitatio, an organization dedicated to the study of mimetic theory; he has underwritten conferences, research fellowships, and Girardian publications to a sum estimated in the millions. Girard is the thinker from whom Thiel learned to read the world–and, paradoxically, to invest in it.

Mimetic theory is articulated in three concatenated propositions. The first: human desire is imitative, never spontaneous. We desire what others desire. The child wants his brother’s toy; the entrepreneur wants his competitor’s market; the nation wants its neighbor’s territory. Thiel has applied this insight to the business world with notable precision: he structured PayPal by eliminating every overlap of competencies among employees (each responsible for a single domain, a single evaluative criterion, no internal mimetic rivalry), and he invested in Facebook because he recognized in it the mimetic engine in its pure form–a platform that industrializes imitative desire, converts it into attention, and converts attention into advertising revenue.

The second proposition: when mimetic desire intensifies and the objects of contention grow scarce, violence erupts. The war of all against all–which the Enlightenment claims to have resolved through the social contract–is in fact resolved, in archaic societies, through the scapegoat mechanism: a community in crisis channels its collective violence onto a single victim, kills that victim, and from the killing draws a momentary peace. The victim, first accused of causing the disorder, is subsequently venerated as the source of order: she becomes a god. Every myth, every archaic religion, is–in the Girardian reading–the retrospective account of this founding lynching, narrated from the perspective of the mob that believes itself righteous.

The third proposition–Girard’s boldest–is that the Judeo-Christian revelation breaks the cycle. The Bible tells the same archaic story, but from the point of view of the victim. Job is innocent. Joseph is innocent. And Christ, on the Cross, is the definitive scapegoat: His death reveals once and for all that the mob’s victim is always innocent, that the lynching is always unjust, that the sacrificial mechanism upon which the entire edifice of human civilization rested is a lie. This revelation is, for Girard, the authentic content of the Apocalypse–a word that, as Thiel is fond of reminding his audiences, means “unveiling” in Greek. The Apocalypse is the unveiling of foundational violence. And its effect is catastrophic: once unmasked, the mechanism loses its sacral power. Human societies forfeit their primary instrument of pacification. Mimetic violence, freed from its sacrificial containment, threatens to overflow without limit. The alternative, for Girard, is singular: authentic Christian conversion, the radical renunciation of violence, the imitation of Christ rather than the mimetic imitation of rivals.

Thiel adheres to this vision with a crucial reservation that separates him from his teacher–and that draws him, consequentially, toward Schmitt. Girard was a Catholic pacifist. His ultimate conclusion was that only the renunciation of violence, only the non-rivalrous imitation of Christ, can rescue humanity from the mimetic apocalypse. Thiel shares the analysis but declines the practical conclusion. Co-founder of an intelligence and surveillance company that contracts with armies and secret services, financier of aggressive political campaigns, early supporter of Trump, Thiel is manifestly not a pacifist. In The Straussian Moment, the tension between Girard and Schmitt is resolved with a formula of considerable ambiguity: the “Christian statesman” must find a prudent equilibrium between “the unlimited violence of unbridled mimeticism” and “the peace of the Kingdom of God,” but “would do well, in every doubtful case, to side with peace.” The clause “in every doubtful case” is the aperture through which an entire program of politico-military action can pass: for who adjudicates which cases are doubtful? Who determines when peace ceases to be viable and violence becomes necessary? The Christian statesman, presumably. And who is the Christian statesman, in the Thielian lexicon, if not the enlightened techno-capitalist who commands the instruments–Palantir, Anduril, the Founders Fund–to see what others cannot see and to act where others will not?

The Cathedral and the Devil

There is an image that traverses the entirety of Thiel’s discourse without ever being fully articulated, and yet constitutes its hidden gravitational center: the image of the Cathedral. To comprehend it, one must step outside theology and into the distinctive sociology of Silicon Valley. The term belongs to Curtis Yarvin–programmer, pseudonymous blogger (Mencius Moldbug), and intellectual architect of the neo-reactionary movement more commonly designated the Dark Enlightenment–which for two decades has been working the margins of North American political thought and which, in January 2025, entered the inner precincts of Washington power. Guest of honor at Trump’s inaugural ball, informal counselor to J.D. Vance’s entourage, avowed inspiration for Elon Musk’s DOGE program. Thiel has described Yarvin as his “most important connection.” Yarvin, reciprocally, has described Thiel as “fully enlightened.” Between the two runs a bond at once intellectual and financial: Thiel invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon Corp, through the Founders Fund.

The “Cathedral,” in Yarvin’s usage, designates the informal network of universities, media outlets, government agencies, and international organizations that functions as a secular church–propagating its progressive creed with the same capillarity and the same intolerance for dissent with which the medieval churches propagated dogma. The nomenclature is programmatic. Yarvin’s contention is that the Enlightenment’s secularization has failed: far from emancipating society from religious modes of thought, it has merely substituted one religion for another–egalitarian, woke progressivism–replete with its own rituals, heretics, priests, and inquisitors. The Cathedral is, in essence, the katéchon read in reverse: the force that claims to restrain evil (racism, inequality, climate change) but that, in the view of Yarvin and Thiel, is itself the evil accelerating the advent of the Antichrist in the form of a regulatory world government.

It is here that the devil enters the Cathedral–or rather, that the Cathedral discloses its diabolical nature. The short circuit is vertiginous and warrants close attention, for it is the point at which Thiel’s theology and Yarvin’s politics converge. For Thiel, recall, the Antichrist comes to power by speaking incessantly of Armageddon: he instills the fear of catastrophe–nuclear, climatic, technological–then offers the solution: centralized governance, pervasive regulation, the exchange of freedom for security. Yarvin’s Cathedral is precisely this mechanism: progressive institutions that brandish existential risk (uncontrolled AI, global warming, nuclear proliferation, humanitarian catastrophe) to justify boundless expansion of their regulatory authority. Greta Thunberg, in Thiel’s formulation, is a “legionnaire of the Antichrist,” alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, the philosopher of AI safety, and Nick Bostrom, the theorist of existential risk–all preachers of Armageddon, all, in the Thielian grammar, architects (unwitting or otherwise) of the terrain upon which the Antichrist will erect his dominion.

The metaphor of the Cathedral thus inverts traditional Christian symbolism with remarkable audacity. In classical theology, the cathedral is the house of God, the locus where the community gathers against the disorder of the world. For Yarvin and for Thiel, the Cathedral is the house of the adversary: the temple of institutional conformism, the apparatus preparing a single woke world government. The devil, in this vision, already inhabits the Cathedral–indeed, built it. The Antichrist’s supreme cunning–the one Solovʹëv intuited and Baudelaire, in another context, expressed as the devil’s finest trick being to persuade the world of his nonexistence–consists in masquerading as the architect of the common good.

But the short circuit has a second level, and here Thiel’s argument acquires an irreducible complexity–to its intellectual credit, perhaps, but at notable cost to its practical coherence. For if the devil inhabits the Cathedral, who inhabits Palantir? Who inhabits the global surveillance network that Thiel himself has built? The point has not gone unnoticed. The Washington Post obtained the complete recordings of the San Francisco lectures and analyzed them in detail. The UnPopulist observed that Thiel may be–as William Blake wrote of John Milton–“of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” In his fourth seminar, Thiel described his work at PayPal as “a libertarian guerrilla operation” aimed at preventing the Antichrist from emerging “within the framework of the global financial architecture.” Yet PayPal has become precisely the kind of centralized financial infrastructure that, by Thiel’s own criteria, constitutes potential anti-Christian territory: a global system through which flows of transactions and identities are monitored and controlled. The same observation applies, a fortiori, to Palantir, whose software powers the intelligence apparatuses of half the world–from the CIA to the FBI, from the U.S. military to ICE for migrant tracking, to the Israeli armed forces for target identification in Gaza.

Thiel himself, in his lectures, acknowledges the paradox of his position. The United States, he says, are “the natural candidate for the katéchon” and “the natural candidate for the Antichrist”; “ground zero of the resistance to the world state” and “ground zero of the world state itself.” The katéchon and the Antichrist, he adds, are separated by “a single switch”: the same force that restrains evil can, in an instant, become the force that unleashes it. This admission possesses an authentic tragic grandeur. Yet it remains confined to the theoretical plane. On the matter of practical implications, Thiel is largely silent. The leaked recordings reveal a thinker capable of searching analysis of every form of institutional power except the form he himself exercises.

An Evangelical Post-Theology, or a Catholic Theology for the New Times?

It is here that the theological origin of Thiel’s thought reveals its deep structure. Thiel was raised in an evangelical Lutheran family in Frankfurt, then in California. The fundamentalism of his upbringing gave way, at Stanford, to a faith he himself characterizes as “heterodox”: Christian at the core, but shaped by Girard’s mimetic theory, Schmitt’s political theology, and Strauss’s epistemological elitism. The result is a distinctive Christianity–a Christianity without a church (Thiel declares allegiance to no particular denomination), without liturgy, without a community of the faithful in the traditional sense–but equipped with an operative eschatology and a functional Christology.

This absence of ecclesiology is not a biographical footnote; it is the structural fault line of the entire edifice. A Christianity without a church is a Christianity without a body–and therefore, paradoxically, a Christianity without the Incarnation it claims to defend. If the Church is, in the Pauline theology that Thiel himself invokes, the Body of Christ (soma Christou, 1 Cor 12:27), then a system of thought that preserves eschatology while discarding ecclesiology has excised precisely the dimension by which Christianity is not a gnosis: the concrete, vulnerable, visible community of believers in time. Thiel retains the katéchon–a function of sovereign power–but eliminates the ekklēsia–a community of grace. The result is a theology of sovereignty without a theology of communion, which is, in structural terms, the Schmittian problem in its purest form.

Christ, for Thiel, is above all the revealer of the mimetic mechanism: the one who unmasks foundational violence and opens history to the Apocalypse. This is Christus docens–Christ who teaches, Christ who discloses a structure–but not Christus patiens: Christ who suffers, Christ who enters into the flesh of history and bears its weight in His own body. A Christ reduced to a function of epistemological unveiling is a gnostic Christ: He reveals a mechanism, but He does not save a person. Here it must be said that Girard himself–the mature Girard of Achever Clausewitz (2007)–never reduces Christ to an epistemological function. For Girard, the Cross is not merely the exposure of the scapegoat mechanism; it is the act by which God enters into the place of the victim and, in so doing, transforms the very structure of reality. Thiel’s appropriation of Girard flattens this Christological depth into a diagnostic tool–and it is this flattening that makes possible the subsequent fusion with Schmitt, for whom the theological is always already the political, never the sacramental.

The Antichrist, in Thiel’s framework, is the one who seeks to foreclose the unveiling, to reinstate sacrifice in new forms, to re-found the social order upon new scapegoats (climate deniers, techno-optimists, dissenters from the regulatory consensus). The katéchon is the ambiguous force that restrains both: it holds back Armageddon (total destruction) and it holds back the Antichrist (totalitarian world government), but could at any moment transform into one or the other. This is Girardian-Schmittian Christianity in the theologico-political synthesis of Peter Thiel–a construction of exceptional intellectual ambition, whose inner tensions remain unresolved.

The question, then, is whether this system represents the exhaustion of an evangelical post-theology–a thought that has pushed its Protestant and post-denominational premises to their logical limit and can go no further–or whether it constitutes, on the contrary, the raw material for a genuinely catholic engagement with the questions of technocracy, sovereignty, and eschatological vigilance that Thiel raises with such force. For those questions are real. The ambiguity of the katéchon is real. The danger of a regulatory globalism that extinguishes freedom in the name of safety is real. The mimetic structure of technological desire is real. What is absent from Thiel’s system–and what a Catholic theology would need to supply–is the ecclesial body in which these dangers are discerned not by the solitary techno-capitalist with access to surveillance instruments, but by a community gathered in the Eucharist, under the discipline of a tradition, in the presence of Christ who is not merely a revealer of structures but a Person who says Follow me.

As the German historian Gerhard Ritter observed, “the demonic is not the plain negation of the good; it is not the sphere of total darkness set against full light, but that of the half-light of twilight, of ambiguity, of the uncertain, of what is most profoundly sinister.” Thiel’s thought dwells entirely in this twilight–and it has the honesty to say so. But there is a voice that speaks to this twilight with an authority Thiel’s system cannot accommodate, because it speaks from within the very institution his framework lacks.

On June 29, 1972, the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Pope Paul VI pronounced words whose reverberations have been felt for half a century in Catholic self-understanding. Reflecting on the state of the Church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the Pope declared that he had the sensation that “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered into the temple of God.” And he continued: “There is doubt, uncertainty, questioning, dissatisfaction, confrontation. The Church is no longer trusted; people trust instead the first secular prophet who comes along to speak to us from some newspaper or some social movement, and they run after him to ask whether he has the formula for true life.” Months later, on November 15, 1972, in his general audience address Liberaci dal male, Paul VI returned to the theme with even greater precision: “What are the Church’s greatest needs at the present time? Do not be surprised at Our answer and do not dismiss it as simplistic or even superstitious: one of the Church’s greatest needs is to be defended against the evil we call the Devil.” And: “Evil is not merely a deficiency; it is an active force, a living, spiritual being, perverted and perverting. A terrible reality. Mysterious and frightening.”

Paul VI’s words speak to the same twilight zone that Thiel inhabits–but from a radically different position. Paul VI does not seek the smoke of Satan in the Cathedral of the enemy; he finds it, dramatically, in the temple of God. Not outside, but inside. Not in the regulatory agencies of a secular world order, but in the fissures between the walls of a Church that is at once holy and wounded, the Body of Christ and the vessel through which, precisely because she is a body in history, evil can enter. This is the level that Thiel’s paradoxical churchless Christianity cannot reach: the confrontation with the Antichrist begins not with the identification of an external adversary–the Cathedral, the world state, the regulators of artificial intelligence–but with the interior struggle, with the examination of one’s own conscience, one’s own instruments, one’s own complicity in the structures of a power one claims to resist. It begins, in a word, where Peter Thiel’s remarkable intellectual construction falls silent and retreats: inside the house. As for the rest, one can only trust that “he who brings chaos upon his own house shall inherit the wind” (Proverbs 11:29).

Originally published in .Con, the magazine of the Milan Cultural Center, issue 85, March 13, 2026.