Fr. C.C. Martindale, S.J. On The Anti-Christ

Have either John or Paul prophesied the Advent of a definite individual Antichrist at the end of time? No.“End of the World,” and the events surrounding it, must necessarily occur as historical events, it seems equally necessary that they must express themselves in something concrete, either a man, or a group, or a political or systematic unit of some sort; but the Old Testament, Saint Paul, and Saint John use their image of a definite one person precisely when their gaze is fixed rather on their own time, which is, in a sense, the least “real,” most transitory, plane of all those that they contemplate. Babylon, Tyre, Antiochus, Rome – and all the persecutors of all history for ever, are but the crude material examples of a much deeper and abiding truth, just as the Two Witnesses stand as symbol of that residue of the Faithful who never cease their promulgation of God’s truth even in the worst of persecution, and, “though they be dead, yet shall they live,” as Our Lord promised; and just as we ought not to try to tie them down to definite personalities, like Moses and Elias, Elias and Enoch, Peter and Paul, so neither should we seek to assign a definite individual as the captain of the enemy host that forever bears hard upon them.
There is certainly nothing to prevent our surmising that the enemies of God may be led or represented by an individual, at the end of human history just as at any other time; indeed, since the

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