On the Antichrist 5

Summary

Fr. Athanasios Mytilinaios expounds Saint Cyril of Jerusalem's Fifteenth Catechesis, teaching that the end of history brings a new world through renewal rather than annihilation. He reads Psalm 101 to mean that the heavens will grow old like a garment and be changed, not reduced to nothing, and distinguishes physical decay from moral aging, arguing that creation has aged through sin rather than mere cosmic exhaustion. From Genesis he shows that God created space, time, heaven, and earth from nothing while remaining distinct from them in essence; because only God has relation to nothingness, he could return creation to nothing, yet instead renews it in a second creation, a palingenesia. He warns against the Manichaean and syncretistic worship of sun and moon, since Christ is no created luminary but the Savior of creation, and applies Cyril's counsel that believers neither speculate about the Antichrist nor sink into careless spiritual sleep.