After recent ‘biographies’ of God and the devil, what could be left for historian Philip Almond?Footnote 1 A ‘new biography’ of the Antichrist, of course. As the author readily admits, much of this book synthesises existing research, with a particular debt to Bernard McGinn. Indeed, McGinn's 1994 study, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of Fascination with Evil, remains unsurpassed for theological depth and analytic rigour. But Almond has a flair for presenting complex histories with clarity and wit, and the result here is an engaging narrative well-suited to the perspective of the 2020s.
The book's organising principle is a persistent tension in the way Christians imagined (and imagine) Antichrist. The most important medieval ‘biographer’ of Antichrist, Adso of Montier-en-Der (d. 992), proposed that Antichrist would be a persecuting figure from outside the church, while the most influential medieval writer on Christian eschatology more broadly, Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202), made room for Antichrist as a deceiver who would arise from within. Although Almond also explores tensions between and among the ‘real’ Antichrist who is to come, the ‘spiritual’ Antichrist that may lurk within us all and the many Antichrists of various sorts already present in the world, the push and pull between Adsonian and Joachite conceptions drives his analysis.
Antichrist took shape in the Christian imagination gradually. In the New Testament, the term appears only in the epistles of John. But the Old and New Testaments also refer to the ‘abomination of desolation’ (see Dan 11:31; 12:11; Matt 24:15) and the four beasts from the sea (Dan 7), ‘the man of sin … the son of perdition’ (2 Thess 2:3, AV), the beast from the bottomless pit and the red dragon with seven heads and ten horns (Rev 12–13). By the second century ce, Christians moulded these references into the ‘belief that, before Christ finally comes in judgment, there would arise a powerful eschatological opponent who would mercilessly persecute the Christian faithful’ (p. 40). Irenaeus (d. c.200) added the claim that Antichrist would be a Jew from the tribe of Dan, while Hippolytus of Rome (d. c.236) pushed back the expectation of the imminent arrival of the end, calculating that Antichrist would not be active until the decade before 500 ce. Such early authors already offered visions of Antichrist as both deceiver (a false prophet or Messiah) and tyrant (a reborn Nero or Nero-like ruler), perhaps as a duo that would be both Roman and Jewish, internal and external to the church, coming from West and East. The late seventh-century Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius assigned the Roman Empire generally and the ‘Last World Emperor’ specifically a starring role in the battle against Antichrist, and – not surprisingly for its era – cast Islam (‘the sons of Ismael’), along with Gog and Magog, as the armies of Antichrist.
Adso's On the Origin and Time of the Antichrist (c. 950) is the biggest turning point in Almond's story, because it offered the first true ‘life’ of Antichrist, crafted like a kind of anti-saint's life. For Adso, Antichrist would indeed be a Jew from the tribe of Dan, born in Babylon when the devil entered his mother's womb, eventually arriving in Jerusalem to falsely proclaim himself Christ, persecuting Christians who did not follow him, slaying the returned Enoch and Elijah, and finally being killed by either Jesus or the archangel Michael. The ideas of Joachim of Fiore were of more wide-ranging importance to how Christians viewed the future, but are necessarily given only a condensed treatment here. Almond focuses on the way Joachim interpreted the seven-headed dragon of Revelation 12, with the seventh head as the ‘great antichrist’ whose defeat would usher in the status (or age) of the Holy Spirit. Eventually, after a period of enlightened bliss that could be equated with the millennium, the final Antichrist, Gog, would be defeated at the true end of time. Crucial for Almond is the fact that Joachim had hinted that the ‘great antichrist’ could be both a king/emperor (interpreted for a time as Frederick II, d. 1250) and a carnal pope. The persecuting pseudo-pope was then a major theme developed by Joachite Spiritual Franciscans, most importantly Peter of John Olivi (d. 1298), who did battle with a string of hostile popes. By the time of John of Rupescissa (d. c.1366), a developing ‘Angelic Pope’ tradition rounded out the full cast of characters (namely, Last World Emperor and Angelic Pope vs. persecuting tyrant and pseudo-Pope) who would battle before the thousand-year reign of Christ.
For Luther and the early Protestants, not surprisingly, the idea of the pope as Antichrist took centre stage. The biblical literalism of many Protestants encouraged the scouring of Revelation for minute clues to calculating the imminent arrival of Antichrist, and the splintering of the radical reformers caused them to see Antichrists in a vast array of opponents. Early modern Catholics, for their part, tended to push the brief reign of an Adsonian Antichrist into the more distant future. Almond is at his best – and adds some depth and detail to existing accounts such as McGinn's – in treating the way these themes played out in the ‘scientific’ age of Isaac Newton, when philosophers such as Henry Moore (d. 1684) held that a new age of rigorous rationalism could unlock the secrets of scripture. Today, as Almond argues, ‘Antichrist’ has become a ‘floating signifier’ (p. 274), a label that can be put on anyone or anything perceived as corrosively evil.
Almond concludes by reflecting that the story of Antichrist, in the end, demands that ‘we pursue personal goodness in the hope that, at the end of our part in history, the world will be no worse, and perhaps a little better, for our having been in it’ (p. 290). Amen to that.
