Or, some thoughts on how R.F. Benson’s novel serves as an interpretive supplement to Catholic antichrist discourse much as The Omen serves as an unofficial spectacular supplement to evangelical dispensationalism and apocalyptic Christian Zionism
By Sean Moreland, PhD
This post is based on a conference paper I presented at the 2nd biannual conference of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic, Salem, MA, March 2026. It was part of a panel commemorating the 50th anniversary of The Omen organized by my esteemed colleague-in-gothic-and-monster-studies, Regina Hansen.
Hansen’s presentation was developed into her contribution for a special issue of the fabulous digital open-access monster studies journal Monstrum, “The Omen at 50: Reflections on a Horror Franchise.”
The essays included in that issue each offer fascinating and highly disparate perspectives on the film’s achievement and legacy, and you can read them online, gratis, here.
“When the Jews return to Zion
And a comet rips the sky
And the Holy Roman Empire rises,
Then You and I must die.
From the eternal sea he rises,
Creating armies on either shore,
Turning man against his brother
‘Til man exists no more.”
So goes the prophetic poem Catholic priest-turned-Satanist-reborn-Catholic-after-Pauline-Christophany Fr. Brennan (Patrick Troughton) recites to Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck), notifying him of the crucial role Biblical prophecy has assigned his crypto-adopted son Damien Thorn (Harvey Spencer Stevens) in Richard Donner’s classic film The Omen (1976.) The scene in which Brennan delivers this poem, with its masterful tension and powerful performances, has often been singled out by viewers as one of the film’s most unforgettable and frightening.
However, as tens of thousands of the film’s viewers over the last fifty years have discovered after scampering to their Bibles in search of this resonant apocalyptic stanza, it is not found in the Bible at all; nor is it (as some of the film’s intrepid would-be-investigators proposed) to be found in apocryphal apocalypses or the work of early Christian visionary poets.
It is rather the pseudo-Biblical literary creation of the film’s screenwriter, David Seltzer, although its particular conception of Revelation and identification of “antichrist” in the Johannine epistles with the Beast from the Sea of Revelation does resonantly echo prophetic interpretations of several influential 3rd and 4th century patristic figures, especially the first anti-pope Hippolytus of Rome and the “Christian Cicero,” Firmianus Lactantius.
Of the widespread will to believe in the film’s prophetic stanza and the subsequent outrage that it wasn’t “really” Biblical prophecy, Seltzer notes:
“I got in trouble with a lot of people for that. I never did particularly credit it. I mean all of the prophesizing was real, and true, and accurate, and taken from the Bible. The eternal sea, as a matter of fact, was what grabbed me when I was looking for some way to do a story about the devil, the unholy. There was a passage in Revelation that said, “The beast will rise from the eternal sea.” (Rev 13)”
Seltzer further explains, “I was working with all these interpretive texts. And one of them analyzed the eternal sea, as being this sea of revolution … And that sounded like politics to me. And then, “Okay. The son of the devil is coming into a political family… And then I found, “Let he who hath wisdom reckon the number of the beast, and the number is 666,” and I basically turned that into a calendar date for when he would be come to earth. And I was off and running.”
Fr. Brennan’s recitation of Seltzer’s pseudo-Biblical prophecy marks a crucial hinge in the film’s narrative structure, one through which it swerves away from earlier Antichrist narratives. But before I can elaborate on this, I need to circle away from the film in order to lay out a brief and highly selective tracing of the role of Antichrist discourse in the broad history of Christian political theology.
Whereas the term “political theology” in contemporary discourse most often develops from noted Nazi jurist and apologist for totalitarian government, Carl Schmitt’s polemical conception that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” I use the term here more broadly to designate the reciprocal interpenetration of religion and politics, and am interested in the demonstrable ways social and political concepts influence and determine theological ones, that of Antichrist in particular.
Seltzer’s prophetic poem notably avoids the word Antichrist (ἀντίχριστος) leaving it to the interpretation Fr. Brennan presents to Robert Thorn to make this connection. Indeed, the word is used only four times in the Bible, and each of these instances are found in the epistles of John (1 John 2: 18 and 2: 22, 4: 3 and 2 John 1:7), which focus on an ongoing conflict within the faith community they address, in which schismatic beliefs and practices were perceived to threaten the community’s identity and unity. Each of these instances designates not an individual but a type potentially represented by a plethora of persons. “Antichrist” is inherently ambiguous and can be interpreted as meaning both against and instead of Christ, the author of the epistles deploys both meanings — “pseudo-Christ” as well as “opposed to Christ.”
Yet the term was quickly assimilated to a number of other scriptural passages in attempts to harmonize and univocalize them; Antichrist became identified with the “Little Horn” of the “King of Fierce Countenance” (Daniel 7 and 8; Antiochus “Epimanes”); the “false Christ” of Matthew 14); Paul’s “Man of Sin” in 2 Thessalonians); and the “Beasts” of the Apocalypse in Revelations 13, 18). These typological revisions led to the term’s application to a procession of historical individuals, institutions and empires over the history of Christianity, and the word’s ambiguity has fueled its frequent invocation as a kind of regulative principle; the discourse of antichrist as “pseudo-Christ” becomes inseparably linked to concepts of apostasy and heresy that have driven and justified often violent sectarian disputes, while at the same time as “opposed to Christ” it is often used to figure non-Christian religious and philosophical views, from Judaism, Epicureanism, and Gnosticism, to Buddhism, Islam or Baha’ism.
Much like the Biblical terms “Satan” and “Lucifer,” “antichrist” shifts from a nonspecific descriptive adjective or title to mean a putatively preternatural and powerful personality. This discursive shift primarily occurs during the Roman Empire’s spasmodic persecutions of Christians between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE. Hippolytus’s treatise “De Christo et Antichristo” (200-203 CE) dates to Septimus Severus’s reign, and Lactantius’s Institutiones Divinae (Divine Institutes) to Diocletian’s persecution. Both interpreted Rome’s persecutions as precursors to a coming eschatological conflict, one that would only occur after the fall of the Empire.
Lactantius’s 4th chapter founds a distinction between true and false religion that depends upon his etymological revaluation of the Latin word “religio,” exploiting the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius’s earlier use of the word to mean something that knots, binds, restrains and enchains, as opposed to Cicero’s preferred etymology as signifying a careful re-reading of sacred texts: “hoc uinculo pietatis obstricti deo et religati sumus: unde ipsa religion omen accepit, non ut Cicero interpretatus est a relegendo,” which Bowen and Gurnsey translate as “This is the chain of piety that ties and binds us to God; hence the word religion, and not as Cicero takes it, from re-reading.” (Lact. DI 4.28.3-4.)
Lactantius’s subversion of Lucretius’s religio has shaped dominant conceptions of what “religion” means in Christian culture for more than fifteen hundred years. René Gothóni writes that despite “the conclusions of philologists that Cicero’s etymological derivation is preferable,” it is Lactantius’s “that is still presented in nearly all encyclopedias and handbooks.” It played an important role in polemical attempts to discern religion from superstition, and to defend Christianity from rational scrutiny, from late antiquity through the Enlightenment.
The 19th chapter of the Institutes uses the distinction between “true” and “false” religion to leverage an interpretation of antichrist, describing a moment in the future when the world will be unrelievedly “oppressed, since the resources of men shall be insufficient for the overthrow of a tyranny of immense strength.“ This leads to “God, being aroused both by the doubtful danger” and “wretched lamentation of the righteous,” sending a
“Deliverer, and Judge, and Avenger, and King, and God, whom we call Christ,” before whom these oppressors “shall be slain from the third hour until the evening, and blood shall flow like a torrent; and all his forces being destroyed, the wicked one shall alone escape, and his power shall perish from him […] Now this is he who is called Antichrist; but he shall falsely call himself Christ, and shall fight against the truth, and being overcome shall flee.”
Lactantius invokes and echoes the Sibylline Oracles, a collection of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic verses attributed to the prophecies of the ancient Sibyl, who identifies antichrist as the historical emperor Nero, in effect a demonic, resurrected metonym of Rome itself; one identified with “that man of sin [lawlessness]…who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God,” showing himself that he is God” (II Thessalonians II.3-4).
Lactantius’s conception of antichrist, much like his definition of religion itself, exerts a profound influence, but two major candidates for the role of Antichrist would attained widespread acceptance throughout much of Christendom. The first, by the ninth century, was Islam. Christian writers from Eulogius and Paul Alvarus on would write of Mohammed and his successors as antichrist figures. The second, by the sixteenth century, was the Papacy. So, in Martin Luther’s words, “Antichrist is the pope and the Turk together,” “a beast full of life must have a body and soul, the spirit or soul of antichrist, is the pope, his flesh or body the Turk.”
Antichrist figures then became a staple of Gothic fictions in the context of the British anti-Catholic sensibility of the 1790s through to the 1820s, notably including in romances like Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1821). For both Lewis and Mathurin (both practicing Anglicans, the latter a priest in the Anglican Church of Ireand and theologian), antichrist rhetoric functions as a means of distinguishing between “true” and “false” religion, or between “true religion” and “superstition;” in their terms, a distinction between rational Anglican Christianity and the supposed irrational and idolatrous excesses of Catholicism.
This tradition undergoes a renaissance and re-orientation in many late nineteenth-century British novels; for example, in popular Victorian novelist Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and The Mighty Atom (1896), it is materialistic philosophy and Darwinian evolution which assume the role of antichrist, a re-alignment which also marks a sort of return to Lactantius’s condemnations of Lucretius’s and Epicurus’s “blasphemous” atomist philosophy.
Building on this re-orientation was Edwardian novelist Robert Hugh Benson (notably the brother of better-known-writer of weird fiction and ghost stories, E. F. Benson). Son of an Anglican Archbishop, Benson was initially ordained as an Anglican priest, before leaving and becoming ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1904. In his two most popular post-conversion novels, The Necromancers (1909) and his dystopian, apocalyptic Lord of the World (1907), Benson takes the gothic antichrist of earlier anti-Catholic British fictions, weaponizing it instead against the forces of both secular humanism (called “Humanitarianism” in the novel) and Protestantism.
The novel begins with a lengthy recollection by the venerable Mr. Templeton to contrastive Catholic priests Fr. Franklin (a stalwartly conservative Catholic and the novel’s primary protagonist who is also physically identical to its antichrist figure) and Fr. Francis (a Modernist priest who, as is the way with progressives and Modernists in fictions written by arch-conservatives, eventually apostatizes altogether.) Benson uses this recollection to bring the reader up-to-speed on how the novel’s god-denying 21st century dystopia came about; socialists took over the Labour Party (the horror, the horror!); the Nicene Creed was dissolved from the “The State Church,” then the Bible was abandoned as a source of ultimate authority due to a combination of German hermeneutics and “the Kenotic Theory.” (Benson 2.)
Then a relatively unknown junior socialist senator from Vermont named Julian Felsenburgh emerges upon the world political stage, brokers a peace with first Asia’s and then Europe’s rival factions, leading to his eventual eponymous ascension. Benson revels in describing the messianic enthusiasm that engulfs the world at Felsenburgh’s rise to power, a rise he emphasizes as due to Felsenburgh’s warm embrace by the (now clearly Christless) “State Church.” Probably the foremost theme of the novel is how evil imitates and “apes” good. Though they are doubles of each other, Franklin develops as a personality (one that in many ways reflects his author’s) character while Felsenburgh remains a cipher. For Benson, the spirit of Antichrist comes into the world as Felsenburgh, much as Satan enters Eden as the serpent, but Felsenburgh himself lacks personality; power is given to him by a world willing to believe he can save it.
Benson’s novel has notably been recommended by no less than three of the 21st century’s Popes. In 2015, Pope Francis told journalists to “ read it” to understand the ongoing “ideological colonization” of the family; it is a rather cryptic remark, given how little attention Benson’s novel pays to the family or families. Francis again recommended the novel in 2023, his emphasis shifting to its prophetic depiction of a future dominated by technology and the threat this ultimately poses to humanity (a theme notably echoed by billionaire Peter Thiels’s recent Girard- and Schmitt-redolent rants about antichrist and katechon.) Francis’ predecessor, speaking as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, also recommended Benson’s “prophetic” novel in 1992, and his successor, Pope Leo XIV, speaking in September 2023 as Cardinal Robert Prevost, likewise recommended it for its “prophetic” portrayal of the dangers of secularism. Based on these papal prescriptions, it seems Benson’s novel now serves, however unofficially, as an interpretive supplement to Catholic antichrist discourse, much as The Omen has come to serve as an unofficial spectacular supplement to evangelical dispensationalism.
The Omen is often considered part of an informal trinity of influential supernatural horror films whose presentations of the collision between secular modernity and millenarian Christianity fueled the Satanic Panic of the late 70s and 80s (the other two being 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and 1973’s The Exorcist.) Riding on the success of both previous films, The Omen tapped into the same parental fears with a narrative that crystallized the anxieties of parents around the generational alterity of their children.
According to producer Harvey Bernhard, The Omen started with a conversation between him and Robert Munger (who later served as religious advisor for the film). Both emphasize that they took the theological concepts behind the film very seriously, an emphasis apparently retained by Seltzer’s original screenplay, which clung close to the prophetic antichrist discourse while bathing in the grotesque imagery of Revelation and robing itself in the stereotypical iconography of the Satanic Panic. Director Richard Donner realized he couldn’t believe in a movie about a child Antichrist, and insisted on re-focusing the narrative, removing much Biblical imagery and explicitly preternatural elements. Donner stated that he approached the film instead as focusing on a family’s mental and emotional crisis, and that despite its many unsettling events, he tends toward a psychological interpretation of the film.
It is precisely this ironic distance from the prophetic antichrist discourse from which it draws inspiration, and its affective relocation from supernatural prophecy to family drama, that makes the film stand out from its assorted gothic antichrist progenitors and descendents. Seltzer recognizes as much himself: “What made the original Omen work was an innocent villain. A kid who you knew had no idea what the mantle was that he was carrying. And finally, why his life had to end.”
Despite its stirring-up of Satanic Panic anxieties and evident contribution to the imagery and rhetoric of both pop-cult apocalypticism and Christian Zionist eschatology, The Omen’s legacy ultimately derives more from its compelling exploration of Robert’s traumatic conversion narrative. As Carol Clover argued, occult possession films dramatize: “The quandary of the rational male faced with the satanic or its equivalents…. Should he cling to his rational, scientific understanding” or “yield to the irrational?” In The Omen, “the irrational” means Robert’s leap of faith to a supernatural belief that ultimately requires the sacrifice of his (adopted) son. It is largely through this gothic refraction of the Abrahamic Akedah that The Omen transcends its initial conception, one that Seltzer points out is more faithfully and cringe-worthily embodied in the 2006 remake, so heavily dependent on his original screenplay that he was ultimately given sole credit for writing it, despite having no involvement in its production.
