The Principle of the Antichrist in Balthasar’s Theo-Drama

Last updated on: October 15, 2007 at 7:08 pm by Henry Karlson

The Principle of the Antichrist in Balthasar’s Theo-Drama 2007-10-15T19:08:06-05:00 Henry Karlson

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If the Good, the Truth, and the Beautiful are One through self-sacrificial love, then an explicit rejection of one is an implicit rejection of all. Of course, this implicit connection is most often not understood by the one who says No to one. Indeed, this implicit No to all of them is hardly apparent to most Christians. But if that No is lived out to its final conclusion, the explicit No to one will become an explicit No to all. In this fashion, Hans Urs Von Balthasar understands the ramifications of the post-Christian No to Christ as leading to the “anti-Trinitarian” standard of the powers of evil, a standard which will be fully revealed and released upon the face of the earth once they have culminated in the production of the Antichrist.

The world is in the midst of a drama where people are called to say either Yes or No to Christ. The Yes leads one to deny the self, to surrender an erroneous claim to infinite autonomy, so that such a person can be included in Christ. Through Christ, the Spirit resurrects them, transfiguring them into something greater. They become who they were meant to be, and this person is a person in communion with others, never an individual alone to themselves. “When a human being becomes a person, theologically, by being given a unique vocation and mission, he is simultaneously de-privatized, socialized, made into a locus and a bearer of community,” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama III: Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ. trans. by Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 271.

A No to Christ leads one to hold on to themselves and their autonomy, trying to wrestle the power which is needed to continue in their non-redeemed state. “But the creature’s refusal to acknowledge the presence of the Giver in him erects an internal barrier within him in virtue of his finite freedom, a barrier that positively excludes God’s self-giving as his origin and goal,”Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama II: Dramatis Personae: Man in God. trans. by Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 214. Rejecting God, rejecting the origin and source of existence, this individual will have to sustain themselves by the power of their own will and whatever they can use from the world at large to keep that power going. This power, believed to be good, seeks to establish its desires, a relative good, as absolute, and propagates a lie. The greater the lie, the greater the power needed to preserve it, so that in the greatest, most absolute lie, the lie of the Antichrist, there will be the greatest, most perverse abuse of power. This must be seen as equal and opposite to the powerlessness of Christ on the Cross. “Here again we are confronted with the complete Antichrist, endowed with total power, as the No to Christ’s total powerlessness,” Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama IV: The Action. trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 447.

Humanity, once it has rejected the way of Christ, only looks for the way of power, of dominion and control, most often through technological advancement, for their temporal salvation. Yet, any such utopian dreams fashioned upon power, with its “miracles,” prove to be fantasies (or lies) which help lead the path to the Antichrist. “The Hellenistic oikoumene and the Roman world empire were pale anticipations of what today can be achieved by the modern stockpiling of arms and modern propaganda. Weapons produced on the pretext of being for man’s redemption would suffice to destroy the entire world, not just once but many times over, and their material potential conceals the spiritual potential of the ‘plan’ that opposes the redemption effected by Christ,” ibid., 441. Indeed, one can place the Marxist ideology and the attempt of Soviet Russia to put it into practice next to the modern, secular state of Israel, and see how both of them represent a similar, anti-Christian, materialistically minded, utopian vision. “The effective challenge comes from a secularized Israel that, frustrated in its Messianic hope, tries to promote salvation in and through the technological age. It is explicitly atheistic and anti-theistic vis-à-vis the ancient God, Yahweh who has failed; and it is explicitly anti-Christian, insofar as Jesus’ claim to fulfill this salvation in himself is proved to be a pitiful failure, doomed in its very concept. Marxist anti-theism organizes and channels all the pagan, diffuse, anti-Christian atheism and gives it a shape, a plan, a striking force. It may do this by interpreting the Messianic expectation as a dialectic that presses forward with iron necessity; or it may take the ‘watching and waiting’ that is built on a concrete faith in Yahweh’s promise, substituting it for an abstract ‘principle of hope’ that is empty, cheerless, and grounded on nothing but itself,” ibid., 439-440.

Yet, there is more to the story. The Book of Revelation, while not to be seen as a book predicting historical events, must be seen as representation the ongoing, dramatic battle occurring between the powers of darkness and Christ, a battle which culminates in the Antichrist and his persecution of the saints. If the Good, the Truth, and the Beautiful are One in and through self-sacrificial love, the Antichrist and his rejection of all, must also be seen as the active reversal of all. If the way of Christ is the way of self-sacrificial love, then the Antichristian principle is seen in the perverse, hedonistic approach of post-Christian humanity as it lives in the world seeking only for greater and greater self-seeking pleasure, an approach which culminates in the vision of the Whore of Babylon. “However, evil, the rejection of love, is compelled to assume a perverse outward shape of love, manifested in the Arch-Whore of Babylon, ‘mother of harlots and of earth’s abominations’(17:5), with whom ‘the kinds of the earth have committed fornication, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich with the wealth of her wantonness’ (18:3). Here love is perverted into pleasure and the accumulation of wealth, just as Paul sees licentiousness and greed together (Eph 4:19; 5:3; Col 3:5),” ibid.,452.

Balthasar, following Revelation, sees that the Christian response to all of these must always be one and the same: it is following the way of Christ who died in powerlessness without any attempt to control or dominate his opponents. Through history, martyrs have represented Christ more than any other, because they follow Christ unto death; yet, this has been the means by which Christianity has spread as a religion. The blood of the martyrs seeded the faith throughout the nations. But, in the end, when the height of the human No to Christ is manifest, when the way of Christ has been made known throughout the earth so there is no new mission, the Church will find itself in its darkest hour. “In this period, the Church will no longer be primarily a missionary Church where her blood is the ‘seed’ of her newly planted communities (as in Acts, which gives the paradigm for all missionary epochs); now she enters the final phase, sharing in the Passion of Christ, who confronts the mysterium iniquitatis in an entirely new way: he disarms it from within by enduring suffering,” ibid., 449. Political power will reach its height; there will be no place for the Christian to flee from its wrath. “The total embrace of political power means that there can be no remaining sanctuary, nowhere to emigrate; this obliges the Christian to take his stand publicly,” ibid., 450. Like Christ, this public stand for truth, goodness, beauty and love will require them to follow through into the darkness of powerlessness, in the pains of defeat, where it will seem the No with its power is victorious. “This eschatological opposition between the apparent omnipotence of evil and the apparent mortal powerlessness of believers cannot be dismissed as a mere vision. It is genuine prophecy,” ibid., 452. One can but wonder, if Christ experienced the pain of Godforsakenness on the Cross and in his death (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), what kinds of feelings and emotions the last martyrs will feel. They will be tempted, even as Jesus, to get off the Cross, to forsake the path, and to follow the way of the No, the way of power, the way of self-glory.

Yet, even if humanity is on the downward spiral, and violent regimes are on the rise, we must be reminded, to say Yes to this, even if it is for the sake of self-preservation, is ultimately to abandon the way of Christ. “Must violence after all be opposed by violence? The strategy of the Cross was a strategy in death, at the border-crossing into the kingdom beyond. As a strategy, it cannot be applied in its totality — or as the only one — in the midst of earthly power struggles. On the other hand, we have no example from the life of Jesus in which he fought for his cause with earthly means of power. (Not even the cleansing of the Temple.) And it is quite irrelevant to attempt to revive the Old Testament theology of Yahweh’s ‘holy’ wars; at most, they can be regarded as typoi, anticipations (1 Cor 10:6); Christians cannot clam them as their own à la Islam,” ibid., 485. It is for this reason why Pope after Pope says violence cannot be used as a means to end violence; the Christian response is difficult. “For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it,” (Matthew 7:14 NRSV).

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