Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil by Bernard McGinn (review)

604BOOK REVIEWS Volume 2 also has a comparison of texts discussed, detailed footnotes packed with information other than routine bibliographical data, and a useful bibliography . Yes,AHistory ofthe Bible as Literature tot readers ofmany interests is cause for rejoicing. S. G. Hornsby, Jr. LaGrange College Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. By Bernard McGinn. (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco. 1994. Pp. xiii, 369.»35.00.) Bernard McGinn is now established as one of the greatest living historians of Christian thought. His series The Presence of God (Crossroad, 1991) has no peer in the history of spirituality and can be compared in depth and scope only toJaroslav Pelikan's monumental five volumes on The Christian Tradition (Chicago, 1971-1989). In addition to his grasp of spirituality, McGinn has also published extensively on the history of eschatology and of apocalypticism. From this background, the author was well placed to investigate the history of the Antichrist from the first through the twentieth century. As the second millennium approaches, speculation about eschatology has increased, though mostly among fringe groups. But the film 2007 already prepared the way for a broad and general interest in the idea of millennium, and McGinn's book speaks with great clarity and readability to the general audience as well as to the scholar. McGinn is one ofthe historians, like Pelikan, Francis Oakley, and Alan Bernstein, demonstrating that the history of ideas is not only alive and well but is producing better work now than ever before. The existence of Antichrist beyond the human imagination is not the main point at play here. Rather, the author emphasizes that the concept ofAntichrist, like the concept of the Devil, informs us about human perceptions of evil. Theoretically, the Antichrist is best defined as the evil essence of human opposition to the goodness of Christ. Historically, there have been many diverse ideas of what the Antichrist "really" is: a single son of Satan, who will appear at the end of the world; a collection of people such as apostates and heretics; an institution; a symbol of the evil in others or in ourselves, the last an idea not invented by modern subjectivists but going back at least as far asAugustine. The book is successfully organized along chronological lines with attention to a variety of topics in each period. Though the emphasis is on theology, McGinn successfully treats graphic arts, literature, and popular religion as well. Beginning with a study ofJewish thought before the time ofChrist, in which among other things he connects the origins of Antichrist with the origins of Satan, particularly in apocalyptic literature, McGinn goes on to early Christianity . The first mention of Antichrist is in the Johannine letters. McGinn BOOK REVIEWS605 shows how the Jewish tradition of concentrating evil in a historical figure such as Antiochus IV developed into the Christian pattern ofidentifying tyrants such as Nero as the Antichrist, though there was also a tendency to identify Antichrist as a group of heretics such as gnostics, or as a political institution such as the Roman Empire. Augustine identified the Antichrist with heretics and schismatics but cautioned that we must also guard against Antichrist in the evil inclinations within ourselves. For Augustine and his successors, the Antichrist was above all "the power of the Lie." Without dwelling on trivial details, McGinn provides a good account of important depictions of Antichrist by such medieval figures as Gregory the Great, Adso, Joachim, and Gerhoh; he also points out the increasing use of Antichrist as a rhetorical device against one's opponents during the reform controversies of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. The rhetorical utility of the Antichrist increased still more from the thirteenth century, when the Emperor Frederick II could be named Antichrist by papalists. Papal propagandists reaped the whirlwind in the later Middle Ages, when John Wycliff and then John Hus called the pope, or the papacy in general, the Antichrist. The political rhetoric of Antichrist reached its height among the Protestant reformers ofthe sixteenth century, when Catholic theologians such as Bellarmine and Suarez had to spend (or waste) considerable ink in refuting the identification of the pope with Antichrist. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Protestant propagandists...