Antichrist, Our Contemporary

“Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil”

By Bernard McGinn

Harper San Francisco

369 pp.; $32.50, hardcover;

$18, paper

“The Renaissance Antichrist: Luca Signorelli’s Orvieto Frescoes”

By Jonathan B. Riess

Princeton University Press

191 pp.; $55

As an interwoven theme in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt observes that evil as an imaginary thing is fascinating, but in reality one is nearly always struck by its torpor, its lifeless, dull banality. So habitual had become Eichmann’s lies and self-deceit that even at the point of death he could utter only cliches; the life-giving touch of reality could not come near him. It is perhaps part of the lesson of Antichrist that the attraction of this topic for modern minds, as well as for medieval and ancient ones, is gained at the level of the imaginary–an imaginary evil that veils its brooding dullness and the dustiness of real death.

Two recent books engage the Antichrist tradition as, for the most part, a current of the human imagination, best captured in legend and art.

A comprehensive attempt to follow the story of Antichrist as it winds its way into modern times is made by Bernard McGinn in his Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. Beginning with Jewish apocalyptic influences, he moves to the early Christian vision of Antichrist, to the coalescing of a generally consistent image in antiquity and the early Middle Ages; from there he studies the changes that take place in the high and late medieval period and in the Reformation, the decline of Antichrist speculation in the modern era, and the residual power of the image of personified evil in our own day.

“Apocalyptic is the mother of all Christian theology,” Ernst Kasemann once said. If true, what use can be made of such a notion? How does one move from the highly symbolic Jewish apocalyptic writings to the more or less literal expectations of the Antichrist?

McGinn attempts to chart a “third way” between the literalism of, say, an Isaac Newton and the scoffing dismissal of Voltaire, who said of Newton’s literalistic readings of biblical prophecy, “Sir Isaac Newton wrote his comment upon the Revelation to console mankind for the great superiority that he had over them in other respects.” Neither scoffing, nor yet engaging in speculation, McGinn classifies the rise of Antichrist with legend: that is, “history aspiring to the level of myth,” with “myth” in this case understood as attempts to “establish the world of meaning within which ancient societies . . . tried to make sense of reality.”

According to McGinn, the historical currents that gave rise to the Antichrist “legend” include Jewish exposure to the combat myths of the Near East with their personification of evil in a Satanlike figure. In a parallel development, Second Temple Judaism anticipated the arrival of a messiah, and in some communities, such as Qumran, two messiahs: a priestly messiah in the line of Aaron and a royal messiah of David’s line. As apocalyptic eschatology more and more articulated its expectations in concrete historical form–escaping the mythical in illo tempore mode of expression–it can be seen as inevitable that a sort of antimessiah would come to represent the other pole in the antagonism between good and evil.

Judaism did not merely adapt new modes of expression from neighboring cultures, but revised and corrected them in keeping with a distinctive religious insight. Jewish apocalyptic speculation in the Second Temple period disdained the cosmic dualism of surrounding cultures. The very idea of a creaturely figure, motivated to do evil, suggests that on a higher level, the evil will never succeed. It is not capable of contending in an ultimate sense. It gains its power only by imitation and deceit. In the words of Gregory the Great, Antichrist is “the head of all hypocrites . . . who feigns holiness to lead to sinfulness.”

The ambiguity of the New Testament writings with regard to whether this evil comes to expression in “many antichrists” (as in 1 John), or “many false messiahs” (as in the synoptic Gospels), or in the single figure of Paul’s “man of lawlessness” was not entirely resolved in the early Christian community and its traditions. The principle of the Antichrist was often seen as inhering in the struggles of the church with heresy and in the personal struggles of individual Christians. Thus, early in the fifth century, Augustine could speak of the Antichrist as embodied in the schismatics and heretics of his day, cautioning his Christian readers that “everyone must question his own conscience whether he be such.” And by the end of the next century, Pope Gregory’s view of the Antichrist would be the dominant one: that “Antichrist’s work is done daily among the wicked.”

Nonetheless, the church’s understanding of the Antichrist was never entirely defined by this inner moral interpretation. Instead, history constantly brought to the surface new expectations, identifying Antichrist with persons and institutions. Early medieval Catholicism feared the advent of an iniquitous pope, whose power in the throne of Peter was wielded by deceit and motivated by the desire for power. Still, also evident was a real restraint in identifying the Antichrist with any particular figure. As late as the fifteenth century, Savonarola’s strong denunciation of church and society in Florence did not include denouncing the pope as Antichrist.

The Reformation marked a turning point in the Antichrist tradition. In the years leading up to the Reformation, McGinn writes,

“Antichrist lived on in a variety of guises. . . . For many he was the standard Final Enemy, however near or far off. For others he was one of several players on a confusing apocalyptic stage. Still others were fed up with useless speculation about the end. The decree Supremae majestatis praesidio of the Fifth Lateran Council, adopted on December 19, 1516, condemned all attempts to fix the time of Antichrist’s coming and the end of the world. The irony in this was that within a decade many in Europe would be convinced that there was indeed no need at all to speculate about when Antichrist would come–he was already present in the papacy!”

The developing tradition came to be polarized into two distinct polemic thrusts during the years after the Reformation. It was “no longer a question of multiple forms of Antichrist beliefs . . . coexisting within a common frame of reference; it was rather a sundering of mutually exclusive conceptions fundamentally at odds.” Protestantism did not so much identify Antichrist with “a pope,” nor certainly with an opponent of the pope such as was done with Frederick II even after his death. Instead, “Protestant Christianity from the start made identifying the institution of the papacy with Antichrist a fundamental tenet of belief.”

Here it is well to keep in mind the highly charged apocalyptic tone characteristic of Reformation teachings; as Heiko Oberman, the distinguished Reformation scholar, has commented, “Luther was proclaiming the Last Days, not the modern age.”

If there were a sort of rhetorical Richter Scale, then Luther’s calling the pope Antichrist would have set the seismograph aflutter; the same epithet hurled at Saddam Hussein in 1990 would hardly register. The apocalyptic image of Antichrist once carried far more weight, in terms of real historical dread, than it does today.

Does Antichrist, then, have contemporary relevance? Does anyone anticipate a literal coming of the false messiah, other than the Christian fundamentalists who, McGinn claims, are the only ones left who take such things literally?

Suppose we bracket out the fundamentalists and literalists, calculating only the effect of the Antichrist tradition upon those beyond the reach of literal expectations. I am more than willing to hear what McGinn has to say on this point–as long, that is, as I am not required to give up the possibility of the concrete fulfillment of what now presents itself to us as psychological, social, inward, and intuitive reality.

In modern times, as McGinn rightly detects, the best indicators of the continuing potency of Antichrist apocalypticism are to be found in the arts. Citing Charles Williams’s “All Hallows Eve” and Vladimir Solovyov’s “War, Progress and the End of History,” McGinn demonstrates the power of art to draw from the Antichrist tradition in meaningful ways.

Moving to the very eve of the modern era, Jonathan B. Riess finds the single most compelling example of Renaissance interpretation of the Antichrist in the frescoes of the Cappella Nuova in Orvieto, a city of the Papal States. The subject of Riess’s study, “The Renaissance Antichrist: Luca Signorelli’s Orvieto Frescoes,” is that portion of Signorelli’s work known as “The Rule of Antichrist,” dated shortly after 1500.

Judging from the color plates and the black and white details included in this extended study, the work draws the observer involuntarily into its setting–one populated by figures both contemporary to the artist and antique, figures fantastic (the demon), stereotypical (the Jew-Moor), and literal. The painting itself centers in the figure of the Antichrist, whose guise calls to mind the element of the Antichrist tradition that emphasizes deceitful imitation as well as opposition to Christ.

The figure draws the observer by its central location in the fresco, the larger-than-life stature of the image, the intense or “hot” colors of the Antichrist and the immediately surrounding figures, and the interplay between the terrible simulacrum of Christ and the humanoid demon who whispers in his ear (not a monstrous demon such as one finds in Durer, Signorelli’s contemporary, but a presence more disturbing, perhaps, because of its human likeness). Such is the intimacy of the two figures that one cannot determine whether the left hand that emerges from the cloak of Antichrist is his own or the demon’s. (Interestingly, this very image was chosen for the cover of McGinn’s book.)

Riess challenges the now conventional interpretation (first advanced by Andre Chastel in 1952) that Signorelli’s Antichrist was inspired by the late Savonarola (d. 1498). Such an interpretation, says Riess, “reduces Signorelli’s painting, one of large and philosophic implication, to . . . mere poster art.” More likely, he argues, the painting was inspired, not by some matters already resolved in Savonarola’s death, but by the critical historical crises of the day. Riess recalls the words of Kenneth Scott Latourette, that “To the hypothetical observer from Mars, as late as 1490 it would have seemed that in the eight-centuries-old struggle between the Cross and the Crescent, the latter was on the way to final triumph. The future seemed to lie not with Christ but with the Prophet.”

But has there ever been a time when the forces arrayed against Christ did not seem more substantial than otherwise? Signorelli’s painting suggests that we must look again. If we do so, we will see that the veil of strong power masks the dull torpor of an incessant lie. The eyes of Signorelli’s Antichrist are vacant. His gestures are mechanical, like those of a puppet. Solovyov’s Antichrist trades in false compassion. Williams’s uses illusion. Eichmann’s cliches hint at an imaginary nobility.

McGinn’s account of “two thousand years of human fascination with evil” is directed at the legendary veil that conceals from the world the dreadful banality of the object of its fascination. Signorelli’s “Rule of Antichrist,” so well illuminated under Riess’s critical skills, acknowledges evil’s seductive power while unmasking its pretensions. In a sense, both books remind us, it is only in the imagination that Antichrist can ever exist, precisely as Antichrist–as the messiah presented falsely.