Adso of Montier-en-Der - Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist

Wikipedia:

Adso of Montier-en-Der (Latin: Adso Dervensis; 910/920 – 992) was abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Montier-en-Der in France, and died on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Biographical information on Adso comes mainly from one single source and has come under question, but the traditional biography depicts him as an abbot who enacted important monastic reform, as a scholar, and as a writer of five hagiographies. His best-known work was a biography of Antichrist, titled "De ortu et tempore Antichristi", which combined exegetical and Sibylline lore. This letter became one of the best-known medieval descriptions of Antichrist, copied many times and of great influence on all later apocalyptic tradition, in part because, rather than as an exegesis of apocalyptic texts, he chose to describe Antichrist in the style of a hagiography.

An excerpt from, "Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist" By Adso of Montier-en-Der, PBS:

This treatise was written at the request of Queen Gerbera of France for clarification on the details of the rise and life of the Antichrist. The author, a monk named Adso, writes his response in the form of a saint's life, a literary form established at the time. It is an important document in the history of apocalypticism because it summarizes the traditional stories of the Antichrist in an accessible and popular way. It also helps establish the idea of the "Last World Emperor," who will unite Christianity and defeat the Muslims before the Antichrist arises. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the letter was revised many times, under various psuedonyms, and widely distributed. [This excerpt omits the prologue to Queen Gerbera]

When you wish to be informed about the Antichrist the first thing you want to know is why he is so called. This is because he will be contrary to Christ in all things and will do things that are against Christ. Christ came as a humble man; he will come as a proud one. Christ came to raise the lowly, to justify sinners; he, on the other hand, will cast out the lowly, magnify sinners, exalt the wicked. He will always exalt vices opposed to virtues, will drive out the evangelical law, will revive the worship of demons in the world, will seek his own glory (John 7:18), and will call himself Almighty God. The Antichrist has many ministers of his malice. Many of them have already existed, like Antiochus, Nero, and Domitian. Even now in our own time we know there are many Antichrists, for anyone, layman, cleric, or monk, who lives contrary to justice and attacks the rule of his way of life and blasphemes what is good (Rom. 14:16) is an Antichrist, the minister of Satan.

Now let us see about the Antichrist's origin. What I say is not thought out or made up on my own, but in my attentive reading I find it all written down in books. As our authors say, the Antichrist will be born from the Jewish people, that is, from the tribe of Dan, as the Prophet says: "Let Dan be a snake in the wayside, an adder on the path." He will sit in the wayside like a serpent and will be on the path in order to wound those who walk in the paths of justice (Ps. 22:3) and kill them with the poison of his wickedness. He will be born from the union of a mother and father, like other men, not, as some say, from a virgin alone. Still, he will be conceived wholly in sin (Ps. 50:7), will be generated in sin, and will be born in sin (John 9:34). At the very beginning of his conception the devil will enter his mother's womb at the same moment. The devil's power will foster and protect him in his mother's womb and it will always be with him. Just as the Holy Spirit came into the mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ and overshadowed her with his power and filled her with divinity so that she conceived of the Holy Spirit and what was born of her was divine and holy (Luke 1:35), so too the devil will descend into the Antichrist's mother, will completely fill her, completely encompass her, completely master her, completely possess her within and without, so that with the devil's cooperation she will conceive through a man and what will be born from her will be totally wicked, totally evil, totally lost. For this reason that man is called the "Son of Perdition" (2 Thess. 2:3), because he will destroy the human race as far as he can and will himself be destroyed at the last day.

You have heard how he is to be born; now hear the place where he will be born. Just as Our Lord and Redeemer foresaw Bethlehem for himself as the place to assume humanity and to be born for us, so too the devil knew a place fit for that lost man who is called Antichrist, a place from which the root of all evil (1 Tim. 6:10) ought to come, namely, the city of Babylon. Antichrist will be born in that city, which once was a celebrated and glorious pagan center and the capital of the Persian Empire. It says that he will be brought up and protected in the cities of Bethsaida and Corozain, the cities that the Lord reproaches in the Gospel when he says, "Woe to you, Bethsaida, woe to you Corozain!" (Matt. 11.21). The Antichrist will have magicians, enchanters, diviners, and wizards who at the devil's bidding will rear him and instruct him in every evil, error, and wicked art. Evil spirits will be his leaders, his constant associates, and inseparable companions. Then he will come to Jerusalem and with various tortures will slay all the Christians he cannot convert to his cause. He will erect his throne in the Holy Temple, for the Temple that Solomon built to God that had been destroyed he will raise up to its former state. He will circumcise himself and will pretend that he is the son of Almighty God.

He will first convert kings and princes to his cause, and then through them the rest of the peoples. He will attack the places where the Lord Christ walked and will destroy what the Lord made famous. Then he will send messengers and his preachers through the whole world. His preaching and power will extend "from sea to sea, from East to West" (Ps. 71:8), from North to South. He will also work many signs, great and unheard-of prodigies (Apoc. 13:13). He will make fire come down from heaven in a terrifying way, trees suddenly blossom and wither, the sea become stormy and unexpectedly calm. He will make the elements change into differing forms, divert the order and flow of bodies of water, disturb the air with winds and all sorts of commotions, and perform countless other wondrous acts. He will raise the dead "in the sight of men in order to lead into error, if possible, even the elect" (Matt. 24:24). For when they shall have seen great signs of such a nature even those who are perfect and God's chosen ones will doubt whether or not he is the Christ who according to the scriptures will come at the end of the world.

He will arouse universal persecution against the Christians and all the elect. He will lift himself up against the faithful in three ways, that is, by terror, by gifts, and by prodigies. To those who believe in him he will give much gold and silver. Those he is not able to corrupt with gifts, he will overcome with terror; those he cannot overcome with terror, he will try to seduce with signs and prodigies. Those he cannot seduce with prodigies, he will cruelly torture and miserably put to death in the sight of all. "Then there will be tribulation such as has not been on earth from when the nations began to exist up to that time. Then those who are in the field I will flee to the mountains, and he who is on the roof will not go down into his house to take anything from it" (Matt. 24:21,16; Dan. 12:1). Then every faithful Christian who will be discovered will either deny God, or, if he will remain faithful, will perish, whether through sword, or fiery furnace, or serpents, or beasts, or through some other kind of torture. This terrible and fearful tribulation will last for three and a half years in the whole world. "Then the days will be shortened for the sake of the elect, for unless the Lord had shortened those days, mankind would not have been saved" (Matt. 24:22).

An excerpt from, "Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France: Adso’s “Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist” Reconsidered" By Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews:

Over the last two thousand years, western political discourse has frequently reserved a special place for the Antichrist. From the early Christian thinking which identified him with the Roman Emperor Nero to the more recent political invectives which railed against supposed modern incarnations such as Saddam Hussein and Ronald Reagan, Christ‟s final enemy has become a byword for ultimate human evil and has therefore proved to be an evocative, flexible and timeless vehicle for polemic of all kinds. In the history of ideas about the Antichrist, few authors have been as influential as Adso, usually identified as abbot of the monastery of Montier-en-Der in the Champagne region from 968 until 992, and best-known as author of the “Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist”, composed between 949 and 954 at the request of Queen Gerberga of West Francia. Adso‟s short treatise describes how the Antichrist will be born in Babylon under diabolical influence to Jewish parents, how he will “win over kings and princes to his cause”, and how, preceded by two prophets, he will be received in Jerusalem as a false messiah before being killed by Christ in advance of Judgement Day. None of this will take place, according to the treatise, while the “Roman Empire” (represented by the kings of the Franks) persists, or before its final ruler abdicates on the Mount of Olives and thus “consummates the Christian Empire”. The key to the tract‟s influence lay not in any originality of thought (most of what it said was drawn from canonical texts like the commentary on 2 Thessalonians by the ninth-century theologian Haimo of Auxerre and the myth of the Last Emperor preserved in Latin versions of the seventh-century Syriac text known as the Pseudo-Methodius) or aesthetic virtue (Adso‟s attempt to reconcile diverse sources led to a certain amount of repetition and contradiction), but rather in its innovative structure. By moulding the scattered exegetical and legendary material into a simple biographical format, Adso was the first author to truly personify the Antichrist; and by presenting him as an anti-saint whose life could be understood as a photo-negative of Christ‟s at every stage, he seemingly struck a chord in medieval culture. The work‟s impact was almost instant: within a couple of years of Adso‟s death, his “Letter” was already being read and used in the entourages of such notable millennial figures as Archbishop Wulfstan of York and Emperor Otto III. The modern critical edition of the treatise is based on a staggering 171 manuscripts, which testifies eloquently to its great influence on numerous major writers of the central and later middle ages.

Stephen Sizer On The History of Christian Zionism + The Scandalous Origins of Dispensationalism

They won't stop at banning priests. They never do.

Wikipedia:

Stephen Robert Sizer (born 27 July 1953 is a priest in the Church of England. He is banned from serving as a priest until 2030. From 1997 to 2017, he was vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water, in Surrey.

Sizer is known for his opposition to Christian Zionism, which is the basis of his 2003 PhD thesis and the focus of his published works, and for his controversial views about Jews. In October 2012, the Board of Deputies of British Jews lodged a complaint against Sizer with the Church of England under the Clergy Discipline Measure alleging that he had made antisemitic statements and published links to antisemitic web sites. Although he did not admit culpability, at a conciliation meeting in October 2013 Sizer agreed to have his online web usage monitored.

In 2015, the Board of Deputies lodged a further complaint against Sizer, this time for posting a link accusing Jews and Israel of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks in the United States. He was censured by the Bishop of Guildford, who imposed a complete ban on Sizer's use of all social media for at least six months.

In 2022, a Church of England tribunal found that his conduct had been "unbecoming to the office and work of a clerk in Holy Orders, in that he provoked and offended the Jewish community" and, by posting a link in 2015 to an article that was "virulently antisemitic in its content", he had "engaged in antisemitic activity". In January 2023 Sizer was prohibited from licensed ministry in the Church of England until 2030.

An excerpt from, "The Road to Balfour: The History of Christian Zionism" By Stephen Sizer, Britain Palestine Project, November 2, 2012:

The late 18th and early 19th Centuries saw a dramatic movement away from the optimism of postmillennialism following a sustained period of turmoil on both sides of the Atlantic. There was the American War of Independence (1775-1784), the French Revolution (1789-1793) and then the Napoleonic Wars (1809-1815).  In 1804, Louis Napoleon had been crowned Emperor of the Gauls in the reluctant presence of the Pope.

During the Syrian campaign of Napoleon’s Oriental expedition, in which he had sought to defeat the Ottoman rulers, cut off Britain from its Empire, and recreate the empire of Alexander from France to India, he become the first political leader to propose a sovereign Jewish State in Palestine:

‘Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the Rightful Heirs of Palestine. Israelites, unique nation, whom, in thousands of years, lust of conquest and tyranny were able to deprive of the ancestral lands only, but not of name and national existence … She [France] offers to you at this very time, and contrary to all expectations, Israel’s patrimony … Rightful heirs of Palestine … hasten! Now is the moment which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of your rights among the population of the universe which had shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among the nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Yehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and in likelihood for ever (Joel 4:20).’

Napoleon believed that with compliant Jews controlling Palestine, French imperial and commercial interests as far as India, Arabia and Africa could be secured.  Neither Napoleon nor the Jews were able to deliver. Nevertheless his proclamation ‘is a barometer of the extent to which the European atmosphere was charged with these messianic expectations.’

In 1807 he plotted the division of Europe with the Czar of Russia and began a blockade of British sea trade with Europe. Two years later he arrested the Pope and annexed the Papal States. He then began the systematic destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in France, seizing its assets, executing priests and exiling the Pope from Rome. By 1815, Napoleon’s armies had fought, invaded or subjugated most of Europe and the Middle East, including Italy, Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia, Palestine and Egypt. Napoleon appointed his brothers as kings of Holland, Naples, Spain and Westphalia in what is today Germany. He even gave his own son the title ‘King of Rome’. His plan was to create a United States of Europe, each state ruled by a compliant monarch, subject to himself as ‘supreme King of Kings and Sovereign of the Roman Empire’. Numerous preachers and commentators speculated on whether Napoleon was indeed the Antichrist. Charles Finney, for example, predicted the imminent end of the world. In 1835 he speculated that ‘If the church will do all her duty, the Millennium may come in this country in three years.’ William Miller narrowed the return of Christ down to the 21st March 1843, while Charles Russell more prudently predicted that Christ would set up his spiritual kingdom in the heavenlies in 1914. For many years, Russell’s popular sermons linking biblical prophecy with contemporary events were reproduced in over 1,500 newspapers in the USA and Canada.  This sectarian speculation came to be embraced by mainstream evangelicalism through the influence of J. N. Darby and the Brethren.

The revolution in prophetic and apocalyptic speculation concerning the Jewish people and the return of Christ can be largely attributed to the Scottish, Edward Irving1, also the forerunner of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.

Given his growing popularity Irving was invited to preach at the annual service of the London Missionary Society in 1824, and a year later in 1825 to the Continental Society, in which Henry Drummond was already influential. Irving’s address on that occasion was provocatively entitled, ‘Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed’. Irving controversially insisted that far from being on the threshold of a new era of blessing, the Church was about to enter a ‘series of thick-coming judgments and fearful perplexities’ preparatory to Christ’s advent and reign. Irving was clearly convinced that the Lord would return in his generation,

I conclude, therefore, that the last days… will begin to run from the time of God’s appearing for his ancient people, and gathering them together to the work of destroying all Antichristian nations, of evangelising the world, and of governing it during the Millennium…

Irving’s premillennial and prophetic views concerning Israel came to have a profound influence over many Christian leaders and politicians not least John Nelson Darby, the founder of the Brethren and Henry Drummond (1786-1860), a city banker and politician, who later founded the Catholic Apostolic Church.

On the first day of Advent in 1826, the same year Irving was translating Lacunza’s work, Drummond opened his home at Albury Park to a select group of some twenty invited guests to discuss matters of prophecy. These included the Revd. Lewis Way who had helped found the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Among the Jews, or London Jews Society, as it was more commonly named, along with Joseph Frey. Also present was Hugh McNeile, another Anglican who, in 1830, published a book entitled ‘The Prophecies Relative to the Jewish Nation,’ from Albury Rectory. In this book McNeile made frequent references to ‘dispensations’ and the future national pre-eminence of Israel.Some twenty men attended the first conference and in the region of forty attended one or more of those held at Albury. The majority were like Lewis Way and Hugh McNeile, were Anglicans, although others were Moravian, Church of Scotland and Nonconformist ministers. Irving was to write of the first such conference,

…the six days we spent under the holy and hospitable roof of Albury House, within the chime of the church bell, and surrounded by the most picturesque and beautiful forms of nature… of which I can say is this, that no council, from that first which we convened at Jerusalem until this time, seemed more governed, and conducted, and inspired by a spirit of holy communion.

Similar premillennial prophetic conferences were held at Albury each year until 1830, before proliferating, apparently under the increasing influence of J. N. Darby to other venues including the Powerscourt Conferences in Dublin held in the 1830’s.

John Nelson Darby is regarded by many as the father of Dispensationalism and the most influential figure in the development of Christian Zionism. He was a charismatic figure with a dominant personality. He was a persuasive speaker and zealous missionary for his dispensationalist beliefs. He personally founded Brethren churches as far away as Germany, Switzerland, France and the United States, and translated the entire Scriptures into English.  The churches Darby and his colleagues planted with the seeds of Premillennial Dispensationalism in turn sent missionaries to Africa, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand and, ironically, to work among the Arabs of Palestine. From 1862 onwards his controlling influence over the Brethren in Britain waned due, in particular, to the split between Open and Exclusive Brethren in 1848.  Darby consequently spent more and more time in North America, making seven journeys in the next twenty years. During these visits, he came to have an increasing influence over evangelical leaders such as James H. Brookes, Dwight L. Moody, William Blackstone and C. I. Scofield.

Video Title: The Scandalous Origins of Dispensationalism. Source: The Conquering Truth. Date Published: July 9, 2024.

The Antichrist In The 16th Century

 

Martin Luther, John Dee, and Pope Paul III. 

The Protestants arrived on the historical scene in the 16th century by declaring the papal authority in Rome the Antichrist. 

This was a turbulent period. End times propaganda was in the air. The European public's susceptibility to religious extremism was at an all time high. Theological learning was becoming deinstitutionalized, and ancient manuscripts and philosophical books were being translated into common languages. 

An excerpt from, "Martin Luther’s Views on the Antichrist" by Dennis Pettibone, Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, 2007: 

If Protestantism owes its very existence to Luther’s conviction that the papacy was the Antichrist, it might be instructive to inquire why Luther held this view and under what circumstances he came to this conclusion. We will see that he came to this view slowly and reluctantly, driven by historical circumstances and theological reflection. We will also briefly note the comparable views of other Protestant Reformers and their predecessors. Looking at the idea that the papacy is the Antichrist of prophecy in its historical context might give us a rational basis for evaluating it.

We will focus primarily on Luther because it was his views on the subject that triggered the Protestant Reformation. However, we should note that Luther was far from the first person to hold this view. Luther himself credited John Huss with being the first to call the pope an Antichrist. Huss did indeed consider the Pope to be the Antichrist, but he was not the first to do so, nor was his mentor, John Wycliffe, although Wycliffe and at least some of his Lolland followers, including Sir John Oldcastle, held this belief. This idea also circulated among the Waldensians, the Albigensians, and the Fraticelli, a group of Franciscans with more regard for the rule of St. Francis than for papal authority.

. . .Martin Luther was probably unaware of the previous attacks on the papacy when, in 1517, he drafted his 95 Theses. If he had been, he would have been unsympathetic. At the time he regarded John Huss as a heretic. His target was not the papacy; it was a greedy Dominican monk named Johann Tetzel who was distorting Catholic doctrine by exaggerating the benefits of indulgences. Luther had no intention of splitting the church: he was only trying to protect his parishioners.

Enraged, Tetzel made sure that Rome knew what was happening. This set in motion a chain of events that led to a summons for Luther to appear before a papal representative. It also led to a theological attack on Luther’s position by Sylvester Cardinal Prierias, the papal court’s chief theologian. Prierias wrote, “He who does not accept the doctrine of the Church of Rome and pontiff of Rome as an infallible rule of faith, from which the Holy Scriptures, too, draw their strength, is a heretic.” Furthermore, “Whoever says that the Church of Rome may not do what it is actually doing in the matter of indulgences is a heretic.” Prierias had transformed the debate from a question of procedure to one of authority.

An excerpt from, "John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature" by Deborah E. Harkness, Cambridge University Press, 1999, Pg. 136 - 139: 

Today we tend to group all beliefs that the world is ending under the rubric of "apocalypticism." In the early modern period, however, apocalyptic expression fell into several different categories: apocalypse, prophecy, and eschatology. Neither the interest in the final days of the earth nor the response to that interest was homogeneous. While some speculation and divination was tolerated, other opinions met with considerable resistance. Still, the belief that the end of the world was approaching continued to flourish well into the seventeenth century, where it took on a new cast within shifting social, cultural, religious, and economic contexts. The lines dividing apocalypticism, prophecy, and eschatology were never so clearly demarcated as is suggested here, but it is important to distinguish among them because the distinctions can help us to understand why Dee was initially "well received" by monarchs and church officials yet later turned away when his angelic revelations became increasingly apocalyptic.

An apocalypse was a particular genre of speculation about the final days whose authors claimed to have received a direct revelation from a divine agency - either God, an angel, or a saint. Apocalypses were usually communicated to the world through prophets, as in the case of Girolamo Savonarola. Prophecy was a dangerous business in early modern Europe; Savonarola's public execution in Florence in 1498 reminded everyone from common astrologer to exalted natural philosopher of the risks implicit in making predictions about the future that claimed to rest on divine directives. The interpretation of signs of the End of Days, or eschatology, was different from either apocalypticism or prophecy. Most apocalyptic writings in early modern Europe were not actually apocalypses but eschatologies.

Eschatologists like Gabriel Harvey who commented on natural disasters claimed no privileged and direct line of communication from God but instead pointed out the importance of natural signs. Early modern eschatalogical texts attempted to fit recent events into preexisting canons of apocalyptic signs, though some advanced radically new interpretations. Discussing and analyzing signs of the earth's predicted demise was a popular industry in medieval and early modern Europe. The list of pamphlets and books on the new star, on the grand conjunction, and on hosts of natural marvels like monstrous births or rains of blood suggests that anyone might have his views on the subject published. Presses throughout Europe issued one apocalyptic interpretation of contemporary events after another to meet the seemingly insatiable demands of readers. Sheltco à Geveren's Of the Ende of this Worlde, and the Seconde Commyng of Christ, for example, was quickly translated by Thomas Rogers from its original Dutch into English and reprinted in London five times between 1577 and 1589. Printing facilitated the formulation of a widely recog nized canon of eschatological signs ranging from natural and supernatural events to military skirmishes, all of which mounted with alarming speed as the fifteenth century moved into the sixteenth. No longer was knowledge of surprising or unusual events confined to their immediate locales by the limits of word-of-mouth transmission. What this signified in practical terms was that the Catholic church was unable to control the spread of prophetic messages and guide their interpretation. At the Fifth Lateran Council convened in 1512, the Church officially renounced the popular enthusiasm for eschatological speculations that were being printed, circulated, and discussed by those outside its authority.

Just as the printing press was challenging Catholic authorities in the cities of Europe, so the Reformation (whose main proponents made good use of the new printing technology) was establishing alternative forms of worship. The Reformation of the church, coming as it did in the midst of a series of eschatalogical signs, was given a weighty role in Protestant accounts of the world's progress toward redemption. The Catholic church responded with its own program of reform, claiming sole responsibility for leading humanity into the next spiritual age of restitution and rebirth. The jubilee year of 1600 became the focus for Catholic eschatologists. Among the Protestants, the exact time of the Second Coming was more imprecise; many thought that God might begin the next age between 1583 and 1588. This time frame was particularly potent because of its proximity to the great conjunction of 1583, and because prophecies often referred to miraculous events as happening 1,558 years after Christ's birth.

The Antichrist In The White House

Trump is a man with zero taste.

Donald Trump is spiritually a Jew who hates Gentiles and Christians. He's not an American and I think he's admitted that by his actions in office.

We need to stop pretending about who and what this creature is. Whether the Rothschilds have him on tape raping and killing children or whether he's Israel's proxy by choice doesn't matter. The result is the same. He is a threat to world peace.

When he was running for President he was a totally laughable character who didn't pose any serious danger to America or the world. He entered the political arena like a bull in a china shop, and began disparaging other political candidates for fun. He was an amusement. 

After Mr. Trump went to Washington everything changed. The political capital that he built up, which wasn't his to begin with, was quickly spent on Israel's every wish and policy directive. He has done Netanyahu's bidding from Syria to Spain. They might go after Italy next and blow up the Colosseum.

Trump believes himself to be a clever political animal but he simply tapped into public anger like any demagogue. The political system in the U.S. was already dead by the time he arrived on the scene. He just swooped in like a vulture and now he's feasting on the carcass.

One of the flaws of democracy is a political outsider like Trump or Obama can rise relatively quickly, promising to give the people the sun, moon, and stars. They are sold as saviour figures. And when they don't deliver the goods they're discarded just as quickly, to be replaced by the new shiny object in the next election cycle. There are no consequences. The political system marches on like nothing happened. 

In a different system, less democratic and less forgiving, like in Russia or China, the man at the top has to be more true to his word. 

Elites in non-democratic systems have to stay on their toes. 

Western oligarchs have had it easy because the democratic ritual of the election cycle is the perfect release valve for public anger and frustration. 

But the ballot box is not a true referendum on anything. The democratic mandate is one of the most dangerous political inventions, and also the most useless. 

If any liar and common thief like Trump can get elected then what good is democracy?

The World Ruler As Antichrist

The Antichrist label has been used as a powerful religious device to label one's political and religious enemies. 

Every sect and political power has cast the other side as the Antichrist, be he Napoleon, Hitler, Attila the Hun, Muhammad, or gnostic rebels in the Middle Ages, just to give a few examples.

A highly religious population, immersed in Biblical imagery and history, can be easily mobilized at the mere suggestion of the Antichrist. It's an easy propaganda victory for any ruler or rebel. Casting one's enemy as the Devil incarnate in the Abrahamic context is a cheat code. It's a little too easy. 

Popes wielded this label to great effect when their word still held meaning. Islamic rulers have also utilized this religious power when it benefited them, labeling whomever they didn't like as the Antichrist or Satan. The Ayatollah famously branded the United States the Great Satan. That was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. 

In fact, that's true for a lot of these examples. Hitler's enemies were not saints. Neither were Napoleon's. 

But history remembers them as saints because they won.

If you win you're the Messiah and the saviour of the world. If you lose you're a good for nothing rebel, devil, dictator, monster, terrorist, genocidal maniac, the complete opposite of everything holy and good.

II.

An excerpt from, "The Great Code: The Bible And Literature" by Northrop Frye, Penguin Group, Pg. 122-126:

The Bible does not regard the world ruler as necessarily an evil or sinister person. It is only that he rules the kind of world in which one of his successors will sooner or later become so. The Pharaoh who knew Joseph and welcomed Israel into Egypt was finally succeeded by a Pharaoh who tried to exterminate the Hebrews by genocide. Cyrus of Persia, and to some extent Darius, are referred to with the deepest respect, but their successor Xerxes, the Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther, is very nearly persuaded into an anti-Jewish pogrom. Alexander the Great gets very little attention in the Bible, though Josephus has him welcomed into Jerusalem by the high priest with many mutual expressions of esteem. But eventually his empire produced Antiochus Epiphanes, who began the ferocious persecution of Jews that provoked the Maccabean rebellion. Under the Roman Empire Paul maintains that "the powers that be are ordained of God" (Romans 13:1), but before long we have Nero and other persecuting emperors.

The reason for this degeneration of the world ruler is one that takes us back to the two forms of social contract that we saw arising out of the pagan and Biblical cultures. The Classical social contract is the one that we see in the trial scene at the end of Aeschylus' Oresteia. It is a vision of justice and equity in which man, nature, and gods are all included. The gods ratify it, and if they were not there we should have nothing but the purely automatic reactions of nature represented by the Furies, the agents of the natural force of nemesis, to keep a balance in human affairs. In the Biblical contract, as we saw, nature is not an immediate participant: the contract is between God and his people, and if the people are as loyal to it as God is, the nature around them will be transformed into a quite different world.

As social conditions change to those of empire, however, it becomes more and more obvious that the ruler is the one essential force that holds the contract together. Hence he begins to take on divine qualities, as the adopted son or, as in Egypt, the incarnation of his god. It is at this point that Jesus' principle, that one should render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's (Mark 12:17) runs into trouble. Sooner or later there will be a Caesar who will demand what is due only to God, that is, divine worship.

The act of Antiochus Epiphanes that outraged the Jews even more than his cruelties was his desecrating of the temple by rededicating it to Zeus and erecting an altar and perhaps a statue there (I Maccabees 1:54). This sacrilege is called, in the AV's somewhat cumbersome rendering, "the abomination that maketh desolate" (Daniel 11:31). It is referred to again in the Gospels (Matthew 24:15) in connection with the calamities of further persecutions, not impossibly with reference to a supposed desire expressed by the Emperor Caligula to put his own statue in the same place.

In any case a cult of the divine Caesar was established at Rome, and an act of observing it, however perfunctory, was obligatory. Society is never tolerant about anything it attaches real importance to, and this act was important as the symbol of the Roman way of life. But it was, of course, precisely the act that Jews and Christians could not observe. Hence, although Christianity was not set up on a revolutionary basis, and on the contrary stressed its loyalty to the secular power, it was compelled to behave exactly like a revolutionary organization. There have been many explanations for Christianity's triumph over all other religions of its time, but the most visible explanation was the brilliance of its revolutionary tactics. It set up a counterpart of imperial authority in the Church which could go underground in times of persecution, until the time came for it to emerge and take over, or at least merge with, temporal power. Marcus Aurelius spoke of the parataxis, the military discipline, of the Christians as their strongest asset.

Already in the New Testament a conception has emerged of an "Antichrist," the enemy of everything Christ stands for, and who seems to have some connection with the persecuting emperors. Paul, despite his emphatic counsel of submission to the Roman power, gives us a description of

... The son of perdition, Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. (II Thessalonians 2:3-4)

The imagery here is clearly derived from Daniel's "abomination." In the Book of Revelation (13:18), a "beast," a figure of the Antichrist type, is referred to by a cipher, the number 666, which is generally thought to spell out the name of Nero, even though the author of Revelation may have lived under a later emperor.

The Book of Revelation was later assumed to be a prophecy of the future troubles of the Church, which left commentators on it free to identify its sinister images of Antichrist and Great Whore with whatever they were most afraid of in their day. The Great Whore, of whom more later, is identified in the text with the Babylon that carried the Jews into captivity, and evidently also with the Rome of the persecuting Caesars who represented the same kind of thing in the author's own day. Dante identified these images with Philip of France and the Avignon Papacy. Some Protestant polemic of the sixteenth century regarded the Roman Church as an extension of the Roman Empire, identifying that Church with the Whore, and the Pope with Antichrist. Blake identified them, more traditionally, with a recrudescence of state power that he saw taking shape in his day; this he called "Deism" and saw as leading to the annihilation warfare that he identifed as a degenerate form of "Druidism." We should call it "totalitarianism": the effort to conceive the state as a single body incarnate in its leader, the "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer" of Hitler's Germany. It might even be said, from some points of view, that the only mark of genuine distinction in that otherwise rather shabby tyrant was the seriousness with which he took his Antichrist role, as a figure to whom everyone in Germany was to render thanks for his daily bread.

The time of Christ was also the period of the great consolidation of Classical literature under Virgil and Ovid. Here, as we should expect, the controlling imagery is that of cyclical movement, which had expanded to take in such larger rhythms as the precession of the equinoxes. Hence there were many theories about a new cycle of history, just as there are theories about an "age of Aquarius" now. One famous expression of these theories is Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, a congratulatory poem on the birth of a child, thought to be influenced by the apocryphal, or rather pseudepigraphical, "Sibylline Books." This poem speaks of a new golden age when nature will resume its paradisal shape and "the serpent shall die." Christianity promptly seized on this poem as an unconscious prophecy of the Christian Messiah, but at the same time it ignored or rejected all cyclical theories of history. Augustine's attack on this kind of cyclical speculation in The City of God is much later, but reflects a consistent Christian view.

In Dante's Commedia Virgil serves as guide for the whole area that is controlled by the natural cycle---the hell at the center of the earth and the mountain of purgatory on its other side. At that point Virgil has to leave Dante, who from there on is guided by Beatrice instead, because Virgil is never to see the beatific vision. His vision on earth got as far as renewal, but never broke through to resurrection. In our day we have the reverse movement in D. H. Lawrence's story The Man Who Died, which assimilates Jesus to the revolving cycle of nature. In this story Jesus, reviving in the tomb, becomes the lover of a priestess of Isis who has been told to "wait for the reborn man," and at the end of the story he leaves her with a promise to return. Other assimilations of the Christian story to the cycle of rebirth are in Robert Graves's King Jesus and in Yeats's Vision. In the latter the planetary conjunctions symbolized by the phrase "A Full Moon in March" embrace both the assassination of Caesar and the crucifixion of Christ.

The Aeneid is also dominated by the cycle of revolving years, and its main theme is the establishment of a new Troy and a new cycle of history. The crucial point of its vision is in Aeneas' journey, in the sixth book, to the lower world, where he sees the great wheel of history turning to bring Rome to world power. Some conception of reincarnation, which is of course entirely consistent with such a vision, seems to be included. It is clear that in the Stoical world view, as expounded by Posidonius and others, which was a strong influence on Virgil, the pagan contract is beginning to narrow down. The gods are nature spirits in origin, but as the sense of natural law, as manifested in the cycle, develops, the arbitrary characteristics of such gods, derived as they are from unpredictable elements in nature, fade into the background. In the action of the Aeneid Juno's willful aggressiveness is not only childish but futile, and even Venus is hardly more than decorative. The real power is an inscrutable will that manifests itself only in the divine supervision of Aeneas' struggles to establish a beachhead in Italy and bring about a new phase of history. Virgil is still a long way from saying that only one god is necessary---the divine will that holds together social and natural law---and that Caesar is the central manifestation of this will. But the tendency is there, the Aeneid being essentially a poem in which the house of Caesar occupies much the same place as the line of David in the Bible.