cover image Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil

Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil

Bernard McGinn. HarperOne, $32.5 (369pp) ISBN 978-0-06-065543-3

Rarely has a historian of Christianity pierced a murkily inchoate human impulse with so much enlightenment as McGinn, a leading apocalypticist and the editor of Paulist Press's Classics of Western Spirituality series, does here. McGinn interweaves evidence from history, theology, biblical interpretations, literary references from Dante to Dostoyevski and even pop bestsellers to rivetingly discuss the concept of Antichrist. From the closing of the first millennium A.D. and Christian end-time speculation about the coming of the Antichrist (``a final human opponent of all goodness''), he traces the evolution of the Antichrist belief from its Judeo-Christian origins to its high point in the Middle Ages and on through present-day televangelists What McGinn also reveals is how a myopically constricted worldview often has led to intolerence and persecution. (Dec.)