4 - Antichrists, Present and Future

Summary

This chapter begins with an account of the depiction of Muhammad the prophet as the Antichrist at the time of the Crusades and its beginnings in Muslim Spain. It then segues to a discussion of the development of the figures of Al-Dajjal, the Muslim Antichist, and Armilus, the Jewish Antichrist. There follows a snapshot of ‘lives of the Antichrist’ in the year 1200 from Roger de Hoveden’s Annals, the one derived from Adso, the other from Joachim of Fiore. These two 'lives of the Antichrist' provided the conceptual space for debates over the next 600 years about who the Antichrist might be and whether he would come from inside or from outside of the church. It also continues the discussion of how the debate about the Antichrist now became focused around disputes over authority within and outside of the church. It analyses the Antichrist accounts of Gerhoh of Reichersberg, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Hildegard of Bingen. It concludes by establishing Joachim of Fiore’s ‘Antichrist’ as a crucial development in the history of the Antichrist by suggesting the idea of a papal Antichrist.