On the Antichrist 9

Summary

Fr. Athanasios Mytilinaios continues Saint Cyril of Jerusalem's fifteenth catechesis, tracing Daniel's abomination of desolation through Antiochus Epiphanes and Roman imperial desecration to its final fulfillment in the Antichrist. He reads Paul's prophecy in 2 Thessalonians as the clearest sign that the Second Coming will not occur before the apostasy and the revelation of the man of lawlessness, noting that Paul had clarified some points orally, leaving the restrainer obscure to later readers. The Antichrist is a real human being, not an incarnation of Satan, whose hidden presence is disclosed only when his public work begins; the titles man of lawlessness and son of perdition mark his extreme rebellion against God and his own destruction by Christ. Daniel's phrase about changing laws and times he reads as a deep alteration of divine and natural order, and he presents modern humanism as the ancestral sin renewed, the attempt to become gods without God, preparing the age of the Antichrist.