The Spirit of Antichrist and the Forerunners of Antichrist
From the second chapter of St. Paul's
Second Epistle to the Thessalonians it is clear that the teaching about the
Antichrist enters into the content of the earliest apostolic evangelization.
After giving a description of the Antichrist in the third and fourth verses of
that chapter, the holy Apostle writes further to the Thessalonians. "Do
you not remember that when I was still with you, I told you this?" (1
Thess. 5:5) One cannot help considering it noteworthy that in the short period
that he spent in Thessalonika that holy Apostle Paul not only did not pass over
the teaching on the Antichrist in silence, as something of secondary nature and
not very important, but rather considered it necessary to expound this teaching
in complete detail. And in this, his second epistle, he merely repeats what he
had earlier said about the Antichrist with his own mouth. But why is it so
important to know this teaching? Because, as the Holy Fathers warn us
beforehand, he who ignores this teaching, considering it unimportant and not
essential in Christianity, will not recognize the Antichrist and will worship
him. But is it really possible not to recognize the Antichrist?
Yes, it is possible! This is what
Bishop Ignatii (Brianchaninov), who collected into one place everything said
about Antichrist by the ancient Holy Fathers, says about it: [quotes from Vol.
IV, p. 297] "Antichrist will call himself a preacher and restorer of true
knowledge of God: those who do not understand Christianity will see in him a
representative and champion of true religion and will join themselves to him.
Antichrist will appear to be gentle, merciful, full of love and of all virtues:
he will be recognized as such and obeyed on account of his most exalted virtues
by those who recognize fallen human nature as the truth... Antichrist will
offer to mankind the organization of the highest earthly well-being and
prosperity, he will offer honors, wealth, majesty, and bodily comforts and
pleasures: those who seek earthly things will accept the Antichrist and call
him their master.
Antichrist will reveal before mankind
a shameful display of striking miracles similar to the cunning presentation of
the theater... he will instill fear by the terrors and wonders of his miracles,
and by them satisfy vanity and human pride, he will satisfy carnal sophistry
and superstition, and will confuse human learning: all men who are guided by
the light of their fallen nature and who are foreign to guidance by the Light
of God will be attracted to obey the deceiver." The Antichrist will be accepted
with excitement by apostates from Christianity, but is deserving of deep
attention and mourning, as the Holy Fathers note, that the chosen themselves
will be uncertain about the person of the Antichrist, so skillfully will he be
able to conceal from external observation the Satanic evil roots in him.
"The Antichrist's opponents will
be considered trouble-makers and enemies of the general welfare and good order,
they will be subjected to both concealed and open persecution, torture, and
execution." All who refuse to worship the Antichrist will fall into the
most painful and difficult position: "their small number will seem
insignificant before all mankind, and their opinion will be thought especially
feeble, subject to general contempt, hatred slander, and oppression; violent
death will be their lot." Pious Reader: Do you not find that the picture
described above to some extent reminds one of what is already going on in the
world?
Yes! But where is the Antichrist? Has
he come already? We do not see yet Antichrist himself, but his spirit obviously
is settling in and already beginning to rule in the world. A large number of
forerunners of Antichrist are preparing with tremendous energy for his arrival,
his triumph, and his enthronement among mankind. Of course, a very long and
considered preparation is necessary for the Antichrist to be able to be
accepted amongst Christian people. It has been and is being conducted from the
very times of the Apostles with every greater intensity. Thus, even the Apostle
St. John the Theologian wrote in his First General Epistle: "Every spirit
which does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God:
but that is the spirit of Antichrist, of which you have heard that it should
come, and even now it is already in the world" (1 John 4:3). "Who is
a liar but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist, that
denies the Father and the Son" (1 John 2:22), and finally, "As you have
heard that Antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists" (1
John 2:18).
The learned commentator on the Holy
Scripture, Bishop Michael, remarks that in the Greek original the name
"Antichrist" has the definite article, which completely distinguishes
this name as that of a well-known, definite person, while the other
"antichrists" do not have a definite article and, consequently, as
being "many," are distinguished from him. These "many
antichrists" are only the forerunners of that Antichrist who will appear
before Christ's second Coming and the end of the world: they are, as it were,
"reflections" of their "Prototype" - the individual
Antichrist who is to come. They bear the spirit of Antichrist, and it is their
task to lay the proper groundwork for the advent of Antichrist and to create
propitious circumstances for his appearance in the world. These
"forerunners" of the Antichrist also direct that world-wide process
which the Apostle St. Paul called "apostasy" (II Thess. 2:3). The
essence of this process is Christian mankind's ever greater departure from the
genuine, uncorrupted teaching of the Gospel and the replacement of the Gospel
commands with other ideals. The destructive nature of these ideals proposed to
mankind by the Antichrist's forerunners is that they sometimes seem acceptable
for Christians, compatible with Christianity, while in reality they are
profoundly opposed to it; they gratify human passions and lusts and confirm
mankind's fallen nature in its fallen state.
Can one trace this process of
"apostasy" in history and in life? One both can and should! One
should, in order to save oneself and one's neighbor from being attracted into
this process, draw back from it, save oneself from being infected by the spirit
of Antichrist which more and more is taking over the world. The devil, of
course, could not reconcile himself to the appearance of Christianity in the
world, and so from the times of the Apostles we see the "spirit of
Antichrist" at work in Christian people. The first "forerunners of
Antichrist" were Simon Magus, Cerinthus, and the Nicolaitians, with whom
the Holy Apostles had to fight. Then came the Gnostics and a whole crowd of
every possible sort of heretic with which the Holy Fathers and teachers of the
Church had to fight over the course of several centuries.
In the first ten centuries of the
Christian era the spirit of genuine faith and piety was, however, still strong
enough in Christians that it enjoyed every time a brilliant victory over the
"spirit of Antichrist"... and the Church of Christ, despite all the
heavy trials it endured, was triumphant over its enemies. But then by the
middle of the eleventh century the "spirit of Antichrist" had so
firmly taken root in the West that it was able to completely tear away a whole
half of Christendom from union with the Universal Church. The result of this
was "Papism" with its many and varied departures from genuine
Christian teaching on faith and piety – with its newly conceived dogmas,
defective morality, indulgences, the "sacred inquisition", and
similar perversions. This was the first decisive victory of the
"forerunners of Antichrist". Others soon followed it.
At the end of the middle ages, to
totally root out the remnants of Christianity, the same "spirit of
Antichrist" conceived in the bosom of "Papism", which had torn
itself away from the true Orthodox Faith, movements which were completely
opposed to Christianity – unrestrained free thought, "humanism",
which places man himself in the place of God, and.... finally....
"atheism" or total godlessness. It was not without the strong
influence of those movements that there occurred in the 16th century a schism
within the Papal church organization itself, becoming known as
"Protestantism", which supposedly undertook to reform the Church, but
which in reality went further on the way of "apostasy" and denied the
very essence of the Church. Protestantism in turn began more and more to break
up into fragments, "sects" – many of which at the present time have
departed so far from Christianity that they deny its most important dogmas and
even faith in the Divinity of the Founder of Christianity, the Lord Jesus
Christ. This process by which the bigoted and ridiculous new sects are
constantly arising has not stopped even now. It is extremely characteristic how
clearly the "spirit of Antichrist" is manifested in all these sects.
The majority, if not all, of them talk
a lot about the Second Coming of Christ and await him with special impatience
and excitement (i.e., Adventists), but they are silent about the advent of the
Antichrist which will precede it, or else they affirm that the Antichrist
already exists in the person of the Pope of Rome. Typical in this regard was
the conference held in Evanston, organized by Protestants and sectarians and
conducted under the device: "Christ – The Hope of the World". Much,
very much was said at this conference about the "Second Coming of
Christ" and about the blessings which it would bring to men on earth (!?),
but there was total silence about the Antichrist! Does this not naturally lead
one to the thought that Protestants and sectarians are gradually being prepared
by their leaders to accept the Antichrist when he appears as Christ Himself?
At the same time the clearly
antichristian teachings of materialism, socialism, and Marxism-communism are
appearing and being propagandized in the West, and social and political
organizations with secret worship of Satan are spreading their nets ever wider,
acting just as the Antichrist himself will act, "with diabolical
craftiness and hypocrisy" (as Bishop Ignatii puts it). The heads of these
organizations, these truly "foxes in heart and wolves in soul" (as
St. Nilus the Myrrh-gusher of Mt. Athos said) are gradually taking control
through out the whole world not only of public and political life, but also of
people's religious life. This is all directed to one goal – the preparation of
conditions propitious for humanity's accepting the Antichrist and worshipping
him as its king and god.
The chief hindrance on the way to the
attaining of this goal was Orthodox Russia, the only powerful support of the
true Orthodox Christian faith in the world with its Emperor, the sovereign
defender and protector of the whole Orthodox Church. In the course of two
centuries the "forerunners" of the Antichrist worked systematically
and stubbornly to transform the Russian Orthodox Empire into the atheist Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics. When this was achieved, a new effort was
undertaken with the aim of destroying the Orthodox Church itself, working
simultaneously in two directions: by means of horrible, unheard of
persecutions, all but surpassing the persecutions of the first centuries of
Christianity; and by means of dissolution from within, with the help of Living
Church ideas, renovationism, and the planting of all sorts of free-thinking
modernist tendencies in the spirit of Protestantism.
In the end, in most Orthodox countries
which survived devastation, the remnants of the local Churches were made into
sorry tools of a power at war with God. Bountiful fruit, however, had been
gathered by the "spirit of Antichrist" in other Orthodox churches
too, which remained free. They are strongly infected by the poison of
free-thinking liberalism and modernism which is leading them to merger with
Protestantism. Thank God, there is still a remnant in them which has not bowed
the knee before the "spirit of Antichrist" which is ever more and
more raising its head! Our Russian Church Abroad is still remaining firm also,
although the followers of the approaching Antichrist have created a destructive
schism in it, and now they are trying to destroy it completely, wipe it off the
face of the earth, using for this all possible means, the chief of which is
lying and slander, the natural weapons of the father of lies and slander from
the beginning, the devil. The spectacle in the world is in general quite without
cheer, and would be a cause to get discouraged and fall into despair if we did
not know that "it is thus written" in the
Word of God and all of this must be
so. What should we do and how should we react? "Apostasy is permitted by
God", as one of the great instructors in the spiritual life of our time
Bishop Ignatii (Brianchaninov) teaches us, "do not attempt to stop it with
your powerless hand. Flee from it yourself, protect yourself from it; that is
enough for you to do. Learn to know the spirit of the age, study it, so
whenever possible you will be able to avoid its influence... Only God's special
mercy is able to stop this all-destroying moral epidemic, to stop it for a
while, because it is necessary that everything foretold by the Scriptures
happen. Judging by the spirit of the times and the intellectual ferment one
must suppose that the building of the Church, which has been shaking for some
time, will fall quickly and horribly. There is no one to stop and oppose it.
The measures undertaken to support it are borrowed and hasten its fall, rather
than stopping it. There is no one who can be expected to restore Christianity!
The vessels of the Holy Spirit have
finally dried up everywhere, even in the monasteries, those treasures of piety
and grace... The salt has lost its savor. In the chief pastors of the Church
there remains only a weak, dim, inconsistent and incorrect understanding
according to the "letter" which kills the spiritual life in Christian
society and destroys Christianity, which is an action, not a letter. It is
distressing to see to whom the sheep of Christ have been entrusted, to whom
their direction and salvation have been committed. But this has been permitted
by God... God's merciful patience delays and postpones the decisive
disintegration for the small remnant of those being saved, while those who are
decaying or have decayed attain the fullness of their corruption. Those who are
being saved must understand this and make use of the time given them for
salvation. May the merciful Lord shield the remnant of those who believe in
Him! But, this remnant is meager and is becoming more and more so... "Let him
who is being saved save his soul," [Vol. IV and the Patericon] says the
Spirit of God to remnant Christians.
Since the time when Bishop Ignatii
wrote this, the situation in the world has grown worse, not better. "Since
the Antichrist will have as his main task the drawing away of everyone from
Christ," says the other great spirit-filled preceptor of our time, Bishop
Theophan the Recluse, "he will not appear as long as royal authority
remains in force. It will not allow him to develop, it will hinder his acting
in his own spirit. This, then, is the "one who holds back" (II Thess.
2:7). But when royal authority falls, and the people everywhere institute
self-government (republics, democracies), then there will be room for the
Antichrist to act. It will not be hard for Satan to prepare voices in favor of
renouncing Christ, as experience showed during the French revolution. There
will be no one to pronounce an authoritative veto. And so when such regimes,
suitable for disclosing the Antichrist's aspirations are instituted everywhere,
then the Antichrist will appear. [Commentary on II Thess. 2:6, page 504]
What Bishop Theophan predicted has
happened: the Antichrist's "forerunners" have done their job – the
"spirit of Antichrist" is installed everywhere, having everywhere
established "regimes suitable for disclosing the Antichrist's
aspirations". Remembering Bishop Ignatii's words that "the Antichrist
will be logical, just, and the natural result of the general moral and
spiritual direction of mankind", we leave it to the reader attentive to
surrounding life to draw his own conclusions from what has been said above,
while, on our part, we can only repeat: "Let him who is being saved save
his soul!"
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