The kingdom of antichrist is within you, part 1

I aimed to write about John Vervaeke and AI, but funnily enough, this came out instead

Christ submits to betrayal and arrest, but not as one compelled to by necessity. Peter misses the point and participates in the same egregious violence to which he’s reacting.

The line between good and evil doesn’t pass between ourselves and others. Solzhenitsyn taught us well about this. But our understanding of where this line does pass is complicated by this week’s liturgical festivities in ponderous ways. This week we have been celebrating the Ascension of Christ, a feast that exists largely in our perception. Christ, all the while He was condescending to sojourn with us, never ceased being up above whither we eventually saw Him ascend. Nor did He depart from us when we literally saw Him depart from us, as the kontakion of the feast says, “Thou didst ascend in glory, O Christ our God, in nowise departing from us, but remaining inseparable, and crying out to those who love Thee: I am with you, and no one is against you!”¹

No one is against you. Yet on the Sunday in the afterfeast of Ascension, we mark the occasion by celebrating the anathematization of Arius at the First Ecumenical Council by the 318 God-bearing Fathers. How are we to understand that Arius is not against us? The Ascension, a feast of perception, in a way never occurred to Arius because the person of Christ never rose in his heart to the level of consubstantiality with God the Father. Naturally, of course, Ascension occurs to everyone regardless of belief since that is Arius’s humanity as well as yours and mine that’s being united to divinity in the person of Christ. But that union isn’t historically new to Ascension; all that’s new is the joining of faithful disciples’ perception to the mystery, such that they are now identified with the body of Christ. Hence the body of Christ both ascends and remains (to be animated by the Spirit).

Instructively, Mary Magdalene, when the resurrected Christ first appeared to her, was told not to touch Him, because He had not yet ascended to His Father (John 20:17) — that is, He had not yet ascended to His Father in her heart; she still was loving Him as a man and not as God, and so touching Him at that point and having His humanity confirmed to her could have been spiritually disastrous (she mistook Him for the gardener, for goodness’ sake). It’s not as if Christ couldn’t have been touched before forty days elapsed. A week later He’d be inviting Thomas to touch Him, and Thomas would reveal his worthiness to do so by immediately proclaiming Jesus “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28), performing a little Ascension already in his heart.

But Arius never did this. He never participated in the story of the Church except as a betrayer. And so he casts himself out by his stubborn wrong belief, an action recognized by the Church when they anathematized him. Neither was his belief deemed wrong arbitrarily; profound negative consequences precipitate from his doctrine. If Christ the mediator is not consubstantial with God, there is no union; there is no love consummated between God and creation. Arian teaching breaks love and denies its existence. It depicts worship of God the Son as an act of idolatry. Indeed it is idolatrous, as Arianism displaces the love of God with a humanist love of self. Thus the Church in her prayers curses Arius and tells of his demise in many colorful ways. Helpfully so; it is very instructive for us. Inseparable from embracing the perception of Christ’s Ascension to the Father is cutting off the resistance to that perception. When we pray (and this is a prayer), “The infamous Arius, who adulterated the Orthodox Faith with his foolish mind, was cut off from the Church like a rotting member,”² we anagogically purge from our souls all God-denying, love-breaking Arian foolishness and rot. The fanciful cosmology, the prized ideas; above all, the self-loving pride and resistance to correction — they all must be purged to join the body of Christ.

We anathematize the person of Arius, however, and not the beliefs, because beliefs are not to be reified; they don’t exist apart from the people who believe them. But the modal beliefs (and practices attending the beliefs) are the only reasons persons are ever cut off from the Church. The excommunicated certainly weren’t created for that; the logos of a person, God’s intention for his or her existence, is never bad but always good — regardless if divine intentions are contradicted. No matter. As when God redeemed Joseph’s malevolent brothers, those who bend their modes of being toward non-being are nonetheless used to exhibit the goodness of God just as easily as if they hadn’t. “No one is against” the Church because the Church is united to God, and God has no opposites. By grace, energetically, the Church is raised above the dialectic of being and non-being that defines creation and makes possible the good-and-evil dynamic. We see this most clearly in the story of Judas Iscariot, the archetype of the antichrist to whom Arius is regularly compared, as with the verse, “The sower of tares, who was called the namesake of rage [Arius], could not hide from ineffable Providence; for, having imitated Judas, like him the most wicked one burst asunder.”³

Judas is often depicted by the heretically minded as a dialectical necessity to the story of Christ, as if Christ could not accomplish His saving work without this opponent. Of course that’s what self-important traitors are going to think, but nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, the Gospels (especially John’s), continually depict Jesus as being in danger of His life during His ministry. Before the Passion He evaded that danger because the time had not yet come. He did not need Judas to betray Him; He could have given Himself over to being murdered at any time. But He arranged the events around His death so that the full meaning of what was happening could be revealed to us in type. Jesus made use of Judas, but He didn’t need him. Just because Christ is free to operate in the midst of those who would oppose Him (as if they could) doesn’t mean He needs them. He doesn’t need specific opponents — He moreover has no need of any opposition generally. Because sin is in the world, a layer of Death and Resurrection is added to the downward swooping arc of Incarnation and Ascension, but God’s divinizing love for His creatures wouldn’t be diminished by sin’s absence. The pattern of Death and Resurrection consequent to sin is already found in the pattern of Incarnation and Ascension. Sin accomplishes nothing. The opposition of Judas and those like him accomplishes nothing. Perhaps realizing this, Judas raced to die on a tree before Christ could, but still, his oppositional preemption accomplishes nothing.

None of which is to say we are to be indifferent to the attempts at opposition — that would be the inverse error of giving Judas too much credit. To be indifferent to evil because it’s relative to good is to make an absolute out of the relativity of good and evil, which is just really evil. The fight to relate the relative goodness of creation to the absolute goodness of God in the face of relative evil (which tries to relate everything to itself) naturally proceeds with partiality, with love; that’s precisely how ill intentions are undone in the first place. Thus both “no one is against” the Church, yet the Church purposefully does not commune with everyone. Some people are expelled, and some people are kept from ever joining — on account of their modes of belief, not because of their person.

All of this, believe it or not, was meant to be a prelude to talking about YouTube guru John Vervaeke, particularly his recent sermon on the creation of AI, which a friend impelled me to watch. I’ve mostly only ever seen Vervaeke in dialogue with Jonathan Pageau, so for me this was eye-opening to what in fact are the contours of this man’s beliefs. Rhetorically I want to say “antichristian” doesn’t begin to describe it, but, no, antichristian is in fact an apt beginning — and ending! — to a description of this video. I just find it that repulsive.

In response to it, though, I can’t just strike out in reaction like Peter cutting off the ear of some unfortunate high priest’s servant just following orders. So I’ve found myself writing all this instead. My first concern here has to be awareness of my own weakness and not dialectically reacting to the ungodly in such a way so as to increase the ungodliness. Those who vainly think they’re on the side of good push down against those who also vainly think they’re on the side of good. In dialogue they can mount the ziggurat of knowledge together, ever getting closer to goodness, and ever refining their vanity as they go. Eventually as they crest the ziggurat they whittle their imperious vanity down to a single point, against which dialectically hangs the fullness of their “virtue”.

This is what the Antichrist is all about. The prefix anti — before it means ‘against’ — primarily means ‘in place of’. So if an anti-something is against something, it’s because it wants to be that something instead. And false christs, Jesus says, will perform such wonders so as to deceive, if it were possible, even the elect (Matt. 24:24). If the level of deception is to be that high, I imagine the Antichrist recapitulating all antichrists to be a picture of perfect Christian virtue save that one vain thought that holds all his façade together. This is what I’ve seen within myself anyhow, this little fruit pit of potential evil I’ve been shown within my soul.

For the betrayal of Judas at Gethsemane represents a choke point in the story of the Christ followed by all Christians. Judas exists in a kind of ageless embrace with Jesus, and until each of us Christians reaches the moment of our arrest, every step we take towards Christ is also a step towards the Antichrist. On account of the vanity with which we practice the commandments, it can be an open question as we approach Christ whether our destination is not rather His betrayer. Judas himself, after all, arrived at the point that he did by no way other than discipleship. This question should arouse in us a robust fear of God, even as the more dominant love of God and beauty of Christ draw us closer to the moment of arrest — after which our vanity is left to hang itself and burst asunder. Glory Alleluia! I cannot tell you how much I look forward to experiencing this victory of God’s over vanity.... In tastes here and there I already have, enough to know for certain the victory exists, but the fullness of the experience, the fullness....

Of course that means that I would have to be arrested, but that is not something to be feared as if something strange were happening to me. God survives all opposition, even death, because God has no opposites, and no one is against Him.

But from this dynamic that I’m describing which is internal to the Christian life, I think it is easy to see how we end up in the ecclesiastical situations we see in this world, wheat and tares all bunched up with each other until the harvest. The kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet that gathers up all kinds and draws them to shore, the good to be collected and placed in vessels, and the bad to be cast away (cf. Matt. 13:47–50). So it is with the Church. This is another aspect to the danger of reacting against a worldly figure like John Vervaeke, the danger of mistakenly thinking the line of good and evil is drawn between the Church and the world. If anything it is drawn between the Church and the antichurch, the two standing shoulder-to-shoulder, phasing in and out of each other. It can be observed in the long history of heresies and schisms that never seems to quit, false images of the Church that are presented as the Church; but the trail of Orthodoxy and heterodoxy is just a result of this micropattern observable within: Every time a confessed Christian sins, a false image of Christ is presented. In the end, all these false images will be added up and recapitulated in one. Insofar as we are still on our way to Gethsemane, insofar as we still participate in the body of Antichrist, even while we participate in the body of Christ, our wavering repentance causing the one to phase in and out of the other — insofar as we have not yet been arrested, we have no justification to point to someone else and say, “Antichrist!” Rather like the disciples we should ask, “Is it I, Lord?” (Matt. 26:22).

We should ask like the disciples, “Is it I, Lord?” (Matt. 26:22), and not as Judas who says, “Is it I, Rabbi?” (Matt. 26:25), as if the Lord were but a teacher to be surpassed.

But hell’s bells, I sure can point to the beliefs and teachings in that Vervaeke video and say antichrist. I can say it as if I’m gazing down into my own soul, purging my guts in an act of confession. I’ve called this post ‘part 1’ because I recognize it calls for a ‘part 2’, following through on a critique of Vervaeke’s video, which is a real doozy. But I’m not committed to writing it yet. It has been all I could do this week to determine what I was able to write, and what I would have to have written before I wrote the other thing, if I wrote the other thing. I don’t know yet. I have something else in mind I might do next week. Maybe after that. We’ll see.

1. From the kontakion for Ascension. In The Pentecostarion of the Orthodox Church, trans. Isaac E. Lambertsen (The St. John of Kronstadt Press, 2010), p. 236.

2. Canon for the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, Ode IV. At Matins on the seventh Sunday of Pascha, during the afterfeast of Ascension. In The Pentecostarion, p. 256.

3. Ibid., Ode VI, p. 257.