Nicholas Berdiaev, Metropolitan Anatolii (Khrapovitskii), anti-Tolstoian pamphlets

The Prologue defines the Antichrist as the archetypal evil human being who is to come at the end of the world before being finally defeated by the army of Christ. The aim of this book is to tell the story of the Antichrist from its beginnings in the New Testament period up to the present time. It shows that the complex idea of the Antichrist was the result of an array of tensions within the concept of the Antichrist that developed over the first twelve centuries of the Common Era. It also shows how the story of the Antichrist absorbed a significant number of biblical figures – Gog and Magog, Behemoth and Leviathan, the beasts from the earth and the sea, the mark of the beast and his number, the false prophet and the destroyer, along with a number of other legends – Alexander the Great, Simon Magus, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Nero. It indicates that the story was enriched as it spread from Christianity into Judaism and Islam.

The figure of Antichrist does not appear as such in Christian Scripture; it is instead constituted by the interactions of several exegetical and theological strands in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This chapter studies the contours of that developing tradition, casting forward even into the present invocations of Antichrist in contemporary thinkers such as René Girard and Giorgio Agamben.

To understand fully English medieval history writing, it is necessary to recognize the ways in which Christians interpreted universal history as teleological, as ranging from creation to doomsday, and as including both past events and future expectations of the Last Days. This essay surveys the apocalyptic nature of universal history based on four scriptural structures: the two dispensations encapsulated in the Christian Bible and symbolized by Synagoga and Ecclesia; the Pauline Three Laws (ante legem, sub lege, and sub gratia); the visions of Daniel interpreted as prophesies of four sequential kingdoms concluding with Rome; and creation week considered as an analogy for Six Ages of the World. The essay then examines in greater depth the intertwining of history and apocalyptic prophecy in two English manuscripts: the thirteenth-century Gulbenkian Apocalypse illustrating the Latin commentary on Revelation by Berengaudus; and a fifteenth-century Carthusian miscellany depicting the Middle English Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius.

Assuming that one cannot fully appreciate the later adaptations/appropriations of the Faust legend without some knowledge of the legend’s origin, this chapter examines the sources of the Faust legend. The Magus legend provides one of these sources, since many of the stories later told about Faust appeared earlier in the accounts of charismatic conjurers such as Simon Magus, St. Cyprian, and Theophilus, all possible forerunners of Faust. The medieval biblical cycle plays, featuring malicious Devils and presumptuous Antichrists, and the medieval morality plays, with their cunning Vice tempters and psychomachiae between good and evil, provide another important source. Having canvassed the literary influences on the Faust legend, this chapter undertakes a search for the historical Faust. In 1587, the numerous accounts of a rather shady miracle worker named Faust were published by Johann Spies in a book popularly known as The German Faustbook. Later sometime between 1587 and 1592, a mysterious figure, identified only as P. F. Gent (Gentleman), adapted this text into English. This chapter concludes by comparing the German and English Faustbooks, delineating how each contributes its own vision to the Faust legend.