Constructing Antichrist: Paul, Biblical Commentary, and the Development of Doctrine in the Early Middle Ages

6. Conclusion

  Conclusion P{ It should be no surprise to any student of early medieval literature , and especially of early medieval exegesis, that the fruit of medieval thinking was a synthesis of earlier patristic authorities. What I have studied across eight centuries is the emergence of an early medieval exegetical tradition. Early medieval exegetes constructed a reading of 2 Thessalonians that united and synthesized opposed positions , and thus arrived at a complex new understanding of the presence and absence, the immanence and imminence, of the apocalyptic Adversary. But such a synthesis was not simply the product of some medieval deference to authority or predisposition to harmonizing apparent opposites. If these traits are truly to be found in the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, they do not suffice to explain away the synthesis of presence and anticipation in the 2 Thessalonians commentary tradition. The synthetic readings I have identified represent efforts to discern the sense and structure of Christian eschatology , which is always rooted in the past (in the life and identity of Jesus), but projected toward the future (toward the consummation of time and history in the end). In other words, these synthetic readings give shape to medieval Christian life and history as suspended between the resurrection of Christ and the heavenly Jerusalem. In so doing, they preserve the dynamic tension of the New Testament’s apocalyptic symbols and develop Pauline eschatology in greater detail. 239 The Early Medieval Synthesis: Summarizing the Chronological Argument The roots of the exegetical tradition around 2 Thessalonians are sunk in the soil of conflict. In the late fourth and early fifth centuries , the commentaries of Ambrosiaster, Pelagius, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, together with Jerome’s letter to Algasia, express what I have taken to be the “mainline eschatology” of the ancient Christian Church. Though there are some differences of opinion upon the details of the end, these four texts share the general conviction that the “rebellion” will be a distinct historical event in the future and that Antichrist will be a concrete individual acting in history . But this general consensus faced a formidable adversary. Augustine of Hippo accuses those who maintain such a realist apocalyptic eschatology of “presumption.” To pretend to know clearly the details of the events of the end is to reach beyond the grasp of human knowledge. One can know only the essential facts of the coming of Antichrist and the end. With Tyconius, Augustine offers an alternative reading of eschatology that posits that the importance of texts such as 2 Thessalonians lay in their immanent spiritual meaning, as an assessment of the divided body of the present Church in which there are many antichrists. While dogmatic summaries of the essential events of revealed eschatology are permitted, they are clearly subordinated to the immanent moral understanding of eventual judgment. By the fifth century, then, it is clear that opinion upon matters eschatological is divided. The majority of early Christian exegetes of 2 Thessalonians believe that the letter offers a historical account of the end of time and the coming Antichrist. Consequently, they endeavor in their commentaries to understand the particular historical details to which the letter seems to refer. Against these figures stands Augustine. While he shared the support of thinkers such as Jerome in opposing a millennialist reading of the Apocalypse, and while he, 240 / CONCLUSION too, will agree to the most general outline of “eschatological events,” including the rise and the fall of Antichrist, he seems to stand alone (with only the heterodox Tyconius) in his consistent resistance to any detailed realist eschatology. Nevertheless, because of his position as the preeminent Doctor of the Western Church, his opinion would hold formidable authority for the centuries that followed . Early medieval exegetes quarry the patristic writings—commentaries , letters, sermons, and treatises—for any reference to 2 Thessalonians or the figures and doctrines to which it refers. These comments form the building blocks, the bricks and mortar, from which early medieval exegetes construct their own commentaries, and, in so doing, construct the symbol of Antichrist himself. These opinions —of Ambrosiaster, Pelagius, Jerome, Augustine, Theodore, and even Gregory—together form what Pierre Hadot has called the “topics” of an exegetical tradition, the “formulae, images, and metaphors that forcibly impose themselves on the writer .l.l. in such a way that the use of these prefabricated models seems indispensable to them in order to be able to express their own...