But Evil needs actors, convinced free agents. Agents are recruited by means of epistemological intrigue; its prototype was the dialogue of the Serpent of Eden with Eve. The story of the apple tells about the birth of the passion of knowledge. The temptation of a person who wants so much to throw himself into the abyss under his feet is the temptation of gnosis (see the analysis of three temptations in N. Berdyaev's article "The Grand Inquisitor"). Knowledge is not just "much sorrow"; it does not quench, it conceals death, false likeness to God as a step towards it, and epistemological suicide. In relation to Adam, Eve appears as the Antichrist-provocateur with the promise of ready-made knowledge, deadly for the perfect beings of Eden. It is not without reason that the demonic reputation of the First Eve, Lilith, who became, according to the Talmud, the mother of Ahriman (the spirit of destruction and catastrophe), as well as the wife of Samael (identified in the Jewish tradition with Satan), who in the text called "On the Origin of the World" is presented in the attributes of an anti-god, is so rich in variants. In "The Rose of the World" by D. Andreev, Lilith is the Antichrist in female form and the mother of the last Antichrist.

Good is entirely essential, it is the "yes" to the world manifested in its entirety. But it quickly satisfies a person, rewarding him with a special kind of spiritual satiety, for which he is never ready and from which he distances himself, sensing danger in satiety. In Dobra there is no "plot", intrigue, final mystery, "there is no zest", as Fedya Protasov said in "The Living Corpse" by L. Tolstoy. Good innocently testifies to itself in the forms of routine, guilelessly, like dawn and rain. Good is not perceived as a multidimensional phenomenon, and this is the misfortune of the fallen consciousness, accustomed to epistemological intrigue in the space of the "antinomies of reason," to cognitive adventurism. In Evil there is an impulse towards the new, consequently, towards the future, in which the will to history is clothed. Good is ahistorical, it is in the eternal plane of existence. And this is his trouble: there are no good roads to the Good. The road of holiness (the acquisition of the Holy Spirit as the goal of Christian life) is closed to the ordinary person, it is the path of ascetics and escape from history.

The philosopher could have asked the Tsar to forgive the murderers of Alexander II, but Seraphim of Sarov did not stand up for the condemned Decembrists, because most likely he had not heard of them, just as he had not heard of Pushkin.

In order for man to be saved and for evil in the world to be overshadowed by the creative doing of good, man is given the choice and dialectics of movement towards Good along the paths of Evil. The Antichrist is the negative genius of Evil and a historically formed activity. Satan and Antichrist are distinguished as ontological and historical. History in the aspect of the Antichrist is a picture of historical life in its internal catastrophes, fractures, points of application of the force of insidious inhibitions, breaks, steps, jerks – in a word, the entire geometry of the traces of movement and blows of the historical spring, the course of the "mole of history" and the pulleys of the deus ex machina. If Christ, the pastors and apostles, the holy ascetics and prophets are the "salt" of the earth, sanctifying its grace-filled nature through intercession for the highest Good, then the Antichrist is the healing "poison" of history, the inoculation of Evil and the instrument of God's Wrath. By God's connivance, the Antichrist entered historical space. The throwing of man into the world of time, i.e., history, is the action of an angry Deity. Is it not here that the therapeutic and prophylactic principles that form the basis of the strange mythologem "Fear of God" originate? It contains a lesson in "true wisdom" (Job 28:28; Proverbs 1:7; 9:10), "service" to God (1 Kings 12:14), "reverence" (2 Kings 17:36) and "reverence" (Neh. 1:11). But the main thing is that the Old Covenant of Good is imprinted in this phrase: "The fear of the Lord is to hate Evil" (Proverbs 8:13). On the fear of God he founded himself not a purely emotive, as in the Old Testament, but a logical principle of discernment of that which is so similar in the completely evil world of signs, but so opposite in essence: the angel and the aggel, Lucifer the Lucifer and the Morning Star (Rev. 2:28; 22:16; 2 Pet. 1:19). The Devil, Satan, Beelzebub, Abaddon, demons and evil spirits have been preserved in the demonic pantheon of the New Testament and organically fit into the enemy legions of the evil spirits of the Slavic myth. Connected with them by the threads of inspiratively successive Evil, the figure of the Antichrist presented something new. Like Satan, he is "the ruler of the darkness of this world" (Eph. 6:12); like the devil, he is "a spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience" (Eph. 2:2); like Abaddon, he is "a murderer from time immemorial" (John 8:44) and, like all of them, is an apostate and the father of lies. His novelty is that he is a man and that he can be fought by human means of exposure. He is a false messiah and is identified by signs of false righteous rhetoric. He is full of words, like a fish in scales. As soon as the evangelistic role of Christ was opposed by the false priority word of the Antichrist, the struggle against the latter became a matter of culture. The historical duty of the Christian turned into a rhetorical task: recognize the enemy by his words. The Jews found this task beyond their strength. Christ was accepted as a false messiah, so that Golgotha and the redemption of the faithful on the cross could take place. The Jews did not save Christ, but they saved Christianity. The eternal lesson of Golgotha never became historical: a lie is more convincing than the truth, a false messiah is more charming than a righteous man, the priority word of truth gives way to the elegant rhetoric of another benefactor of humanity.

The man of history is immersed in the world of fictions. The main parameters of its social existence are deeply relativized. The Antichrist is the 20th symbol of historical fictitiousness. Impersonal, he cuts the face of the world. Having no inheritance, he owns the world. Devoid of perspective, he promises an eternal reign of equality on earth. Fiction of an event, it initiates historical eventfulness. Inhuman, pleasing to man. Fundamentally unsystematic, he builds programs of well-being. Doomed, embodies Fate. He is a living figure of the relational world, which becomes through its negation and inner self-discrimination. The Antichrist is the figure of transition, the dynamic moment of its self-movement and self-negation, the figure of the death of the process, the provocation of destruction. Like Satan, he can only build mimicries of order, denying ready-made structures of existence. The evil joy of destruction cannot be his joy; He draws "his" food for emotions from within the stolen corporeality, leaving it states of anguish, despondency and sadness, even despair (precisely defined by Orthodoxy as the most sinful and fraught with the disintegration of the "I").

The Antichrist is well aware that his kingdom will be brought to an end, and the teleology of his presence here turns out to be imaginary. Lies have no system, said V. Rozanov; S. Bulgakov and N. Lossky denied Evil a reasonable goal-setting. The pseudo-creative nature of the World Evil and its confidants fosters an ontological habit of Evil in the most stable pictures of the world. It is at the center of romantic and symbolist pictures of the world. It is at the center of the image of the Universe for the adherents of the Marcionite heresy and for Satanails of all stripes.

In A. Remizov's novella "The Ditch" (written in 1914-1918), its hero, Anton Petrovich, reflecting on the early Gnostic Basilides (about whom L. Karsavin wrote an article with the expressive title "The Depths of Satan" [45]), "life was imagined<... > a vicious circle of hopelessly existing from eternity and insurmountable by nothing in the centuries black evil.

And he not only reconciled himself and did not seek a way out of this evil circle, on the contrary, he wished that the evil black circle would remain so forever. That was his faith."

Reality appears to the hero's eyes as a page from the Apocalypse; this is the world created by the Gnostic Demiurge and the Antichrist: "And there, under the itch and clatter of restless airplanes, flocks of the cleverest black birds gathered: as soon as human fresh meat begins to smoke on the torn earth, there will be a great fare for crows!

And there, under the earth, cracked under the heavy ear, white grave worms flowed to begin their insatiable grub, "there will be a feast for the worm too!

And there they forged two great cups of silver: one for the bitterest sorrow, the second for flammable tears. And there, the demiurge called out to the demiurges:

"Come! let us make man in our image and likeness!"

And slowly the serpent penetrated from the lips of the ugly clubfoot of the fleshy man.

And there — and the silt was opened deep above the doomed earth by a punishing angel and, formidable, raised a burning torch — and threw it to the ground." [46]