“The Apocalypse Has Begun”: Ivan Illich and René Girard on Anti-christ

Abstract

René Girard and Ivan Illich agree that history is a continuous and cumulative revelation whose motive principle is the New Testament. They also agree that our world is, for the most part, willfully blind to this reality. Illich says that the temptation of Anti-Christ “disappeared” from the Church’s teaching and has remained invisible to its secular offshoots. Girard finds “Anti-Christ” in the contemporary stance that repudiates Christianity and claims superiority to it, while at the same time drawing on it. We “criticize Christianity with Christianity,” he says but never acknowledge where our superior airs have come from. He calls it “an imitation of Christ which [is] at the same time a total betrayal of Christianity.”