“I honestly don’t know. Certainly not in any crude or obvious way.”
“Oh no,” B said, with a small, private smile. “I’m sure Fr. Lulfre wouldn’t react in any crude or obvious way. Fr. Lulfre is nothing if not subtle.”
Sunday, May 19 (cont.)
The Antichrist over coffee
Heinz and Monika Teitel had disappeared without my noticing it. They now reappeared wheeling a coffee cart down a dim corridor that opened up behind B’s chair. Incongruously, I thought, it was time for a little kaffeeklatsch. I accepted a cup, along with a small, flavorless pastry dusted with powdered sugar, and retreated to my seat while the others engaged in low, apparently inconsequential conversation around the cart. Shirin alone ignored the whole thing, staying where she was in order to think her own thoughts.
I closed my eyes and found the interior rooms of my head quite thoroughly deserted.
When, after ten or fifteen minutes, everything was cleared away and everyone was seated again, B began to speak in his normal, unhurried way.
“In light of what we’ve heard here tonight,” he said, “I’ve decided to alter my plans for the next few weeks.” Except for Shirin, who reacted to his words as blandly as if she’d spoken them herself, his listeners were clearly astonished.
“Everyone here, except, I believe, Albrecht, has been with me through at least one full series of lectures. This means you know what Jared doesn’t know. You know why there are pickets out there denouncing me as the Devil’s Spawn, Beelzebub, the Beast, and indeed the Antichrist himself.”
“They picket because they do not understand,” Frau Hartmann grumbled.
“What do you think, Shirin?”
“They picket because they do understand,” Shirin replied grimly.
B said, “I’m afraid Shirin is right, Frau Hartmann. But whether she’s right or you’re right is beside the point. Fr. Lulfre and probably others of his rank have made themselves our judges, and these men won’t be polling the masses for their views. Don’t you agree?”
This question was for me, and I told him he was absolutely right.
Heinz Teitel raised his hand. This awkward young man, along with his wife, Monika, seemed the least at home of anyone in this oddly assorted group. With apologies for wasting the others’ time with a question they probably didn’t need answered, he asked if I would explain briefly the meaning of the term under discussion. “Neither of us was brought up in a religious household,” he said. “I think we have always assumed that the Antichrist is more a symbolic person than a real one, like Mammon or Pandora.”
“That’s not at all an easy or obvious question,” I told him, “and I’m not an expert by any means, but I’ll do my best. The Antichrist is a central figure in the mythological history of the cosmos as it was widely understood in ancient times—in our culture, as B would say. The culture of the Great Forgetting perceived the universe and humankind to be the products of a single creative effort that had occurred just a few thousand years ago. It perceived the events of human history to be the central events of the universe itself, unfolding over a fairly brief period of time. Only a couple hundred generations of humans had lived from the beginning of time, and it was imagined that only a couple hundred more would live before the end of time—perhaps even less than that. It’s important to realize that the people of this time had no conception of a universe billions of years old and with more billions of years ahead of it. As they imagined it, the cosmic drama was only a few thousand years old—and was not far from being over. The central issue of this cosmic drama was a struggle between good and evil being waged on this planet. Among the Jews, who were probably the most potent religious mythologists of the age, the is
sue would be settled by two champions. God’s champion, the Messiah, was expected momentarily, and his appearance would mark the beginning of the final days. An adversary would also appear—Satan’s champion, a Man of Sin. The two champions would battle, the forces of evil would be vanquished, and history and the universe would come to an end.
“Early Christian authors had the same vision of history, but for them, of course, the Messiah had already come, and all that remained was for the Man of Sin to come. Now that the Messiah had been named as the Christ, his adversary could be named as the Antichrist. Now that the Messiah’s mission was plain, his adversary’s mission was plain. Since Christ came to lead all humanity to God, Antichrist will come to lead all humanity to Satan. And Antichrist will not fail, any more than Christ failed. Antichrist will be loved and followed as fervently as Christ—but only for a time, of course. Ultimately, after a cataclysmic battle, the forces of God will triumph, bringing history to its conclusion.
“This clear vision of the Antichrist became muddled and trivialized in succeeding centuries as one generation after another found someone to lambaste with the name. Anyone widely feared or hated could expect to be called the Antichrist, and eventually both sides of the Reformation had to bear the label. After this period, from the seventeenth century on, people were sick of the whole idea. Every generation continues to nominate a candidate of its own—Napoleon or Hitler or Saddam Hussein—but no one takes it very seriously.”
A restless silence greeted this summary. Everyone seemed to wander off mentally for about a minute and a half, then Heinz was ready to go on.
“I can understand why no one takes it seriously,” he said. “What I cannot understand is why you take it seriously. You and your order and your Fr. Lulfre.”
I admitted it was a good question. In fact, I admitted it in several different ways as I tried to figure out how to explain why it was possible to continue to take the Antichrist seriously. Finally, I said, “This situation was foreseen by the early Christian theologian Origen. I don’t mean this exact situation. I mean that what he foresaw is applicable to this situation. He said, in effect, that every generation will produce forerunners and prefigurements of the Antichrist, and these will deserve the name insofar as they embody the spirit of the Antichrist. It’s from among this number that at last one will come who deserves the name in its proper sense. It is for this one that we maintain our vigilance.”
“What does that mean—one who deserves the name in its proper sense?”
“This is precisely what can’t be known in advance. It can only be known in the event itself. That is, when we see the real Antichrist, then we’ll know what the name means. Then we’ll say to ourselves, ‘How could we have imagined that Nero was the Antichrist—or the pope or Luther or Hitler?’ The real Antichrist will reveal to us the meaning of the prophesy itself. Indeed, that’s how we’ll know him. He’ll be the one who shows us what it means to be the Antichrist.”
The condemned is sentenced
The silence that followed this speech was a deadly one. At last young Albrecht broke his silence to ask B why he would change his plans for my sake. I was surprised when he spoke not with a German accent but with an English one.
“To get rid of him the sooner,” B said simply.
“If you want to get rid of him, let us do it—Heinz and Michael and me. We could take him out and dump him in a lake or something.”
“I doubt if that would do much good. What do you think, Jared?”
“I agree, it wouldn’t do much good. I’m infinitely replaceable, and if I went missing, suspicion would fall on you almost immediately.”