Contemporaries read disasters as Antichrist signs while Isidore saw an age of peace

Evidence

This optimistic view of the present colors Isidore’s view of the future: there is no sense, in any of his historical works, of the imminence of the world’s end, of the coming of Antichrist. Pope Gregory the Great, at the height of the Lombard invasions of Italy (c. 590), had proclaimed “in this country where we live the world no longer announces its end but demonstrates it.” Other Latin writers of the fifth and sixth centuries had seen either the crumbling of Roman hegemony or the spread of heresy (or both) as the work of Antichrist, sure signs that the end was near. For Isidore, on the contrary, a new age of Christian peace is dawning, a hoped-for end to war and heresy. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 106

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how apocalyptic readings track political optimism versus despair; echoes the tension between providential doom-scrolling and triumphalist historiography.
• QUESTION: Isidore’s total absence of apocalypticism is odd given Gregory the Great’s contemporaneous doom — worth chasing what made Seville’s context different from Rome’s.