I’ll try to make this short rather than any kind of argued out esssay. An antichrist phenomenon can be human but also of course ideological, or the two more or less coinciding - a person spearheading a mode of thought that is spiritually an antichrist.
As ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now there are many antichrists.
John 2:18
Two of the most potent ‘antichrists’ in the relatively modern era are Nietzsche and Lenin. I think Lenin could be said to be a more potent figure here than Karl Marx given Lenin managed to turn Marx’s ‘communist manifesto’ into political and totalitarian reality. Communism is of fiercely materialistic nor atheistic in doctrine, and Lenin said for example that “Every socialist is an atheist as a rule,” also that “There is nothing more abominable than religion,” and “All worship of a divinity is necrophila”. Merriam-Cambridge Dictionary defines necrophila as: being sexually attracted to dead bodies, or sexual activity with dead bodies.
A crude narrow mind is of course its own defence - the hard crudeness of this egotistical state appears to this self as the obvious ultimate truth of life, and anything supposedly beyond itself, like the spiritual, is inconceivable and so effortlessly dismissed as deceit or delusion. The dogmatically atheistic ideology of totalitarian socialism/communism was in very safe hands with someone as narrow as Lenin.
Nietzsche was obviously a far deeper man intellectually than the far more worldly Lenin, who rather than expound on the nobility of power, like Nietzsche, wanted it very much in the raw, so to speak. But whoever you are, however brilliant, thought is a means of temptation, and particularly if pride is involved, one can open oneself up to increasingly dark ideas, which intoxicate one at a virtually sensual level as their megalomaniacal element increases. The very fact of ‘stepping over’ morality - of justifying sin as the highest virtue proves to oneself one’s own brilliance, this superman soaring above the ignorant masses. Nietzsche even wrote a book The Antichrist, and more or less randomly opening it yields for example:
One does well to put gloves on when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do so. One would no more choose to associate with ‘first Christians’ than one would with Polish Jews . . . Neither of them would smell very pleasant. I have looked in vain for so much as one sympathetic trait in the New Testament; there is nothing, free, benevolent, honest in it. Everything is self-deception.
As said, that really is a random opening of it, and there is no need to go deeper into the matter here. It’s pretty self-evident that Nietzsche is not being unfairly maligned as an antichrist.
And now from the Orthodox Christian anthology, The Philokalia, Vol. 4, Theoleptos of Philadelphia (1250-1325) writes:
When the sun sets, night comes; when Christ leaves the soul, the darkness of the passions envelops it and incorporeal predators tear it asunder.
These are deep matters and certainly can’t be reduced to any obvious reductionist logic, but think of a damaged immune system, and its openness to attack. And in terms of the Christian/antichristian dichotomy, this line from 1 Peter 5:8:
Your adversary the devil prowls like a lion seeking someone to devour.
The very ideas from the likes of Lenin and Nietzsche are very much of the adversary, and they have pushed away a spiritual defence of which affairs they are catastrophically ignorant. The ‘incorporeal predators’ may happily use their human allies or receptacles for many years to come, or they may simply tear these spiritually undefended souls asunder. There is no loyalty here! (Just to add, I’m not in the remotest, arguing that some kind of deeper deductions can be made about ailments and struggles - I’m just dealing with these two larger than life figures.)
And so I’ll end with a few images of these two potent antichrist symbols:
Above Lenin in 1920.
Lenin in 1923.
“The invalid is a parasite on society. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medications ought to entail the profound contempt of society.” Again from literally at random opening a page of
The Antichrist - and to add, this above is the catastrophic and catatonic state in which Nietzsche saw out his days.
