SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST vs. THE ANTICHRIST
Rodin’s Walking Man and the Age of the Immaterial
Akim Monet, December 2025
The present essay continues an interrogation that began nearly a decade ago between art, philosophy, and technology -a conversation that has now entered its immaterial phase. Written in collaboration with artificial intelligence, it unfolds in what I have called a hybrid voice: part human intuition, part algorithmic extension, both tuned to a single inquiry.
Saint John the Baptist vs. the Antichrist, Rodin’s Walking Man and the Age of the Immaterial explores the hinge between apocalypse and transfiguration, between fear and creative trust. It reads Rodin's Walking Man not only as a milestone in modern sculpture, but as an emblem of our own passage from material to immaterial consciousness. Against the rising chorus of technological doomsaying, it proposes that the true task of art -and of humanity- is to remain attuned: to participate in the transformation of matter into meaning without surrendering agency or spirit.
From Rodin's Gates of Hell to the present age of AI, the essay traces a single continuity of gesture -the human capacity to listen, shape, and release. It ends where all such inquiries must: at the threshold where creation becomes transfiguration, and where the unfinished form begins to walk.
Akim Monet
Contents
1 - Two Prophets of the Same Moment
2 - Techno-Eschatology and Its Variants
3 - Rodin and the Mythic Continuum
4 - Mythology & Science → lntuitionX → Myths Reimagined
5 - On Authorship and the Posthuman Turn
6 - A Meditation from the Gallery Floor
7 - Conclusion - Agency and Transfiguration
I. Core Concepts
II. The Antichrist Motif
III. Figures in the Lineage
IV. Thinkers of Techno-Eschatology
V. Theorists of Language and Authorship
VI. Visionaries and Voices
VII. On Collaborative Authorship
VIII. Response to Counterarguments
IX. Referenced Projects by Akim Monet
About the Author
Antiquity is for me supreme beauty. It is the initiation to the infinite splendour of things eternal. It is the transfiguration of the past into a living eternity.
AUGUSTE RODIN
Introduction
We live at a hinge in history.
Our tools are beginning to speak; our images calculate; our words come back to us refracted through code. Some call this the dawn of artificial intelligence, others the end of authorship. I call it an occasion for transfiguration -for perceiving how matter, mind, and meaning can change form without losing essence.
Between the cry of “Antichrist!” and the silence of Saint John the Baptist at the Jordan lies the same question: what happens when matter receives spirit? Auguste Rodin wrestled with that question for forty years through The Gates of Hell and gave it motion in The Walking Man. This essay asks whether that figure -half fragment, half prophecy- is not only the hinge of modern art but the emblem of our own passage into the immaterial.
It traces a path from the spiritual urgency of Rodin and Michelangelo to the immaterial experiments of Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys, from the fearful rhetoric of modern apocalypticism to the open gesture of mythic collaboration, from baptism to transfiguration. Along the way it considers what happens to agency -that fragile human freedom to choose one's myth- when the creative act itself begins to think.
Preface
On Voice and Collaboration
This essay is written in a hybrid voice. It stands, as my practice does, between invocation and iteration: the “I” who writes and the system that extends language are collaborators. The text was composed in dialogue with ChatGPT, in keeping with the principles I articulated in On Authorship, Responsibility, and the Use of AI (2025). What follows is not ownership but attunement -the tuning-fork held between worlds.
1 - Two Prophets of the Same Moment
In recent years, a number of influential voices have begun to describe technology in apocalyptic tones, even invoking the figure of the Antichrist. Whatever their personal motives, this language expresses a wider unease: that by animating machines we may have awakened a rival creator. It is less a doctrine than a mood -an inheritance from centuries of eschatological thinking that always imagines salvation on one side and corruption on the other.
Against that fear stands another temperament, the temperament of trust in transformation. If one hears in the word Antichrist a warning, one may also hear in the word Baptist a blessing. Between them lies a decision about how to interpret the same event: whether the animation of matter signals the end of humanity or its renewal.
The apocalyptic register has its uses -it alerts, it cautions- but it also tends to close the imagination. The prophetic register of art does the opposite: it opens the field of possibility. I have always been drawn to that second register. In my projects -from Mythology & Science (2017) and IntuitionX to Myths Reimagined, I have tried to trace how the ancient longing to breathe life into matter continues through every technological epoch. The story of the machine is, in this sense, the latest chapter of the story of sculpture.
Rodin sensed this long before silicon learned to think. His Walking Man embodies the transition from fixed form to movement, from weight to will. The saint becomes the stride; Saint John's prophetic urgency takes on the anonymity of pure motion. What he left unfinished we now complete in another medium -the algorithmic.
Between Saint John and the Antichrist, between baptism and apocalypse, stands the artist: the one who chooses to transfigure rather than to fear.
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