The Antichrist: A New Biography

Philip C. Almond

oct 2020 · Cambridge University Press

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The malign figure of the Antichrist endures in modern culture, whether religious or secular; and the spectral shadow he has cast over the ages continues to exert a strong and powerful fascination. Philip C. Almond tells the story of the son of Satan from his early beginnings to the present day, and explores this false Messiah in theology, literature and the history of ideas. Discussing the origins of the malevolent being who at different times was cursed as Belial, Nero or Damien, the author reveals how Christianity in both East and West has imagined this incarnation of absolute evil destined to appear at the end of time. For the better part of the last two thousand years, Almond suggests, the human battle between right and wrong has been envisaged as a mighty cosmic duel between good and its opposite, culminating in an epic final showdown between Christ and his deadly arch-nemesis.

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Philip C Almond is Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the University of Queensland. His many books in the fields of religion and intellectual history include God: A New Biography (I.B.Tauris, 2018), Afterlife: A History of Life After Death (I.B.Tauris, 2016), The Devil: A New Biography (I.B.Tauris, 2014), The Lancashire Witches (I.B.Tauris, 2012), England's First Demonologist (I.B.Tauris, 2011), Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Among other languages, his work has been translated into Catalan, Dutch, German, Hungarian and Polish.