3. Middle- Age Views. — In the Middle Age it was the prevailing opinion that Antichrist would either be brought forth by a virgin, or be the offspring of a bishop and a nun. About the year 950, Adso, a monk in a monastery of Western Franconia, wrote a treatise on Antichrist, in which he assigned a later time to his coming, and also to the end of the world (see Schrcickh, Kirchengesch. xxi, p. 243). He did not distinctly state whom he meant to be understood by Antichrist (Ha- genbach, Hist, of Doctrines, § 203). "A Frank king," he says, "will reunite the Boman Empire, and abdi- cate on Mount Olivet, and, on the dissolution of his kingdom, the Antichrist will be revealed." The same writer supposes that he will be born in Babylon, that he will be educated at Bethsaida and Chorazin, and that he will proclaim himself the Son of God at Jeru- salem (Tract, in Antichr. apud August. Opera, ix, 454, Paris, 1637). In the singular predictions of Ililde- garde (f 1197), Antichrist is foretold as the spirit of doubt. She states that the exact season of Antichrist is not revealed, but describes his manifestation as an impious imitation or "parody of the incarnation of the Divine Word" (Christian Remembrancer, xliv, 50). See Hildegarde. But "the received opinion of the twelfth century is brought before us in a striking man- ner in the interview between Richard I and the abbot Joachim of Flcris (f 1202) at Messina, as the king was on his way to the Holy Land. ' I thought,' said the king, ' that Antichrist would be born in Antioch or in Babylon, and of the tribe of Dan, and would reign in the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem, and would walk in that land in which Christ walked, and would reign in it for three years and a half, and would dispute against Elijah and Enoch, and would kill them, and would af- terward die; and that after his death God would give sixty days of repentance, in which those might repent which should have erred from the way of truth, and have been seduced by the preaching of Antichrist and his false prophets.' This seems to have been the view defended by the archbishops of Rouen and Auxtrre, and by the bishop of Bayonne, who were present at the interview, but it was not Joachim's opinion. He maintained the seven heads of the Beast to be Herod, Nero, Constantius, Mohammed, Melsemut, who were past; Saladin, who was then living; and Antichrist, who was shortly to come, being already born in the city of Rcme, and about to be elevated to the apostolic see (Roger de Hoveden, in Richard I, anno 1190). In his own work on the Apocalypse, Joachim speaks of the second Apocalyptic Beast as being governed by 'some great prelate who will be like Simon Magus, and, as it were, universal pontiff throughout the world, and be that very Antichrist of whom St. Paul speaks.' These are very noticeable words. Gregory I had long since (A.D. 590) declared that any man who held even the shadow of the power which the popes of Rome soon after his time arrogated to themselves would be the precursor of Antichrist. Arnulphus, bishop of Orleans (or perhaps Gcrbert), in an invective against John XV at the Council of Rheims, A.D. 991, had de- clared, that if the Roman pontiff was destitute of char- ity and puffed up with knowledge, he was Antichrist; if destitute both of charity and of knowledge, that he was a lifeless stone (Mansi, ix, 132, Ven. 1774) ; but Joachim is the first to suggest, not that such and such a pontiff was Antichrist, but that the Antichrist would be a Universalis Pontifex, and that he would occupy the apostolic see. Still, however, we have no hint of an order of men being the Antichrist; it is a living individual man that Joachim contemplates." Amal- rich of Bona (f 12th century) seems to have been the first to teach explicitly that the pope (i. e. the papal system) is Antichrist: Quia Papa esset Antichristus et Roma Babylon et ipse sedet in monte Oliveti, i. e. in pinguedine potestatis (according to Crcsarius of
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Heisterbach ; comp. Engelhardt, Kirchenkistorische Ab- h mdlungen, p. 250, quoted by Hagenbach). The Ger- man emperors, in their contests with the popes, often applied the title Antichrist to the latter ; we find in- stances of this as early as the times of the Hohenstau- fen. Emperor Louis, surnamed the Bavarian, also call- ed Pope John XXII the mystical Antichrist (Schrockh, xxxi, p. 108). John Aventinus, in his Annalium Boi- orum, libri viii, p. 651, Lips. 1710), himself the Romish writer, speaks of it as a received opinion of the Middle Age that the reign of Antichrist was that of Hilde- brand (f 1085), and cites Eberhard, archbishop of Salz- burg (12th century), as asserting that Hildebrand had, "in the name of religion, laid the foundation of the kingdom of Antichrist 170 years before his time." He can even name the ten horns. They are the "Turks, Greeks, Egyptians, Africans, Spaniards, Eng- lish, French, Germans, Sicilians, and Italians, who now occupy the provinces of Rome ; and a little horn has grown up with eyes and mouth, speaking great things, which is reducing three of these kingdoms — i. e. Sicily, Italy, and Germany — to subserviency ; is persecuting the people of Christ and the saints of God with intolerable opposition ; is confounding things hu- man and divine, and attempting things unutterable, execrable" (Smith, s. v.). Pope Innocent III (A.D. 1213) designated Mohammed as Antichrist; and as the number of the beast, 666, was held to indicate the period of his dominion, it was supposed that the Mo- hammedan power was soon to fall.