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.