The Anti-Antichrist

...No Laws, No Caesars

The archetype of the antichrist carries mischievous power and prescience at almost any time. It is the esoteric province of those drawn to an underworld of conspiracy theories. It’s a world of embattled reactionary politics, and a kind of radical fringe gnosticism. On the other hand, to ask where the seeds of tyranny might be quietly gestating, emerging or normalizing themselves, is one of civilization’s constant duties to itself.

The idea as we find it in ancient Jewish literature bears several striking qualities.

One is the image of the false dawn, the false era and the false saviour. The antichrist is, obviously, an anti-messiah; a figure who appears to hold the possibility of healing, peace and abundance in their hands. They hold extraordinary promise, and so they demand exceptional allegiance. They may well call for an exceptional suspension of moral principles. If you want to bring about the messianic age you're going to have to break some eggs.  

Another idea is the image of the grim catastrophe before the sunrise. There is a sense of inevitability about the antichrist. Evil, in its hubris, has to climax. It always overreaches. Its self-defeating diabolism has to play out, because an inability to relent is intrinsic to its driven nature. Tyranny happens and tyranny fails. The idea is rather deterministic in this sense, but we should remember that it comes from a political imagination forged under violent occupation. It reminds the oppressed that the tyrant comes closer to destroying himself with every bloody step he takes along his doomed road. “The powers of this age,” as the messianics would say, “are coming to nothing.”

The antichrist is such a fertile, resonant and maddening image that it has quite outgrown its use in holy writ. Nowadays everyone gets to be the antichrist for fifteen minutes. The term and its related references only appear a handful of times in the New Testament, often mis-quoted. However, it's not a peripheral idea. The antichrist appears very commonly in the New Testament as a silent shadow to its mirror image, which appears on nearly every page. 

I am referring, of course, to the anti-antichrist.

It will help to give a spacial sketch of things here. The antichrist is a false image of the real thing: a deviant, peripheral to the centre where the true Christ sits at the heart of everything. 

And yet, the commonplace language of the messianic movement played endless games with this picture. They rarely spoke of the Messiah in this way, drawn at the centre of the map. Instead, their rhetoric consistently placed the Messiah as a deviant against the deviant, a parody of the parody, enthroned in dusty places more peripheral still. They consistently described the Messiah as the anti-antichrist. Or, to put it less awkwardly, the anti-Caesar. 

Whenever they put pen to paper and wrote that the Messiah is kyrios “Lord,”—in an empire whose mantra was “Caesar is kyrios!”—they crowned that peasant-Messiah as the anti-Caesar.

Whenever they put their names on letters and documents calling the peasant Messiah the “son of god,”—in an empire where the coinage declared that Caesar was the “son of god,”—they crowned that miscreant the anti-Caesar.

Whenever they said that Jesus was the saviour—in an empire where Caesar was hailed as “saviour of the world,”—they crowned this death-row walker the anti-Caesar.

Whenever they spoke of the “faith” of Jesus—in an empire which demanded “faith” in Caesar—they crowned this marginal nobody the anti-Caesar.

Whenever they talked of the life messianic age to come against the miseries of the present evil age—in an empire that claimed that Caesar’s golden age had begun—they crowned this deviant the anti-Caesar.

When they called all this subversive rhetoric the euangelion—the same term used by Rome’s propaganda machine—they announced in this marginal pauper the advent of the anti-antichrist

The wilful and playful abuses of Rome’s political language in messianic texts are unyeilding. The effect is sparky and makes good sense of Roman distaste toward that sect. The Messiah was the anti-Caesar at every possible turn.

Meanwhile, the messianic presence at the heart of everything was a sort of secret that was only occasionally allowed to escape, with the greatest caution. Even in the rather liberated poesis of Revelation, when the lion is expected to sit on the throne, it is a butchered lamb who limps onto the stage.

See, this game? This constant shift to the back of the queue. The Messiah sinks down beneath the grandeur of sovereignty and reappears among the oppressed, the ruined and condemned. The Messiah forgoes power from above and reappears in otherness down below. It was not Caesar himself who was the problem—not some particular man. The problem was the paradigm of one Caesar after another, holding together a world of debt, law, violence and mastery. If the Messiah was just the next Caesar, or even the last, then nothing was changed. The world of law and violence goes on and on and on.

The Messiah refuses the position of power and adopts, instead, the posture of deviance and refusal.