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.
