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The Miracles of Antichrist, A Novel
The Miracles of Antichrist, A Novel
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"The Miracles of Antichrist," is set in the weird Etna region of Sicily.
The story is founded on the legend of the false image of the Bambino of Aracoeli, which, finding its way into a village on Mount Etna, brought various blessings to those who appealed to it for help... the miracles of antichrist.
As the story progresses we recognize in the legend an elaborate symbolism. The true image of the Christ child stands for Christianity, the false for socialism, which "loves, and renounces, and teaches, and suffers like Christianity, so that it has every resemblance to the latter."
Its blessings, however are temporal rather than spiritual,—like the counterfeit Bambino, it bears upon its crown the inscription: "My kingdom is only of this world." The parallel between Christianity and socialism is continued in the love story of the sole survivors of two families of the old Sicilian nobility, Gaetano, the socialist, and Micaela, the Christian.
The continuous story is as interesting as the legends and folklore of the Sicilian peasantry, told in the form which they have assumed among a superstitious and poetically-minded people after transmission from mouth to mouth for hundreds of years. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Selma Lagerlöf's book is the manner in which she has entered into the lives of a people in race and temperament so remote from her own, interpreting with the insight of genius the quaint superstitions, the picturesque poverty, the fierce vindictiveness, and the impulsive devotion of these children of nature.
The story is founded on the legend of the false image of the Bambino of Aracoeli, which, finding its way into a village on Mount Etna, brought various blessings to those who appealed to it for help... the miracles of antichrist.
As the story progresses we recognize in the legend an elaborate symbolism. The true image of the Christ child stands for Christianity, the false for socialism, which "loves, and renounces, and teaches, and suffers like Christianity, so that it has every resemblance to the latter."
Its blessings, however are temporal rather than spiritual,—like the counterfeit Bambino, it bears upon its crown the inscription: "My kingdom is only of this world." The parallel between Christianity and socialism is continued in the love story of the sole survivors of two families of the old Sicilian nobility, Gaetano, the socialist, and Micaela, the Christian.
The continuous story is as interesting as the legends and folklore of the Sicilian peasantry, told in the form which they have assumed among a superstitious and poetically-minded people after transmission from mouth to mouth for hundreds of years. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Selma Lagerlöf's book is the manner in which she has entered into the lives of a people in race and temperament so remote from her own, interpreting with the insight of genius the quaint superstitions, the picturesque poverty, the fierce vindictiveness, and the impulsive devotion of these children of nature.
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