SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST vs. THE ANTICHRIST

Rodin’s Walking Man and the Age of the Immaterial

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

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. 

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. 

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 and IntuitionX (2017) to Myths Reimagined (2025), 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. 

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

We will not solve the problems of the world from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

More than anything else, this new century demands new thinking:

We must change our materially based analyses of the world around us to include broader, more multidimensional perspectives.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Every age invents its own vision of transformation.

In ours, the prophets no longer carry staffs or tablets; they carry data. Some foresee the end of humanity, others its rebirth -mapping probabilities of extinction or charting paths toward transcendence. The philosopher Nick Bostrom asks us to confront the fragility of intelligence itself; Elon Musk translates aspiration into propulsion, reaching toward other worlds; Ray Kurzweil envisions the merging of human and machine as an evolutionary dawn.

The thinkers of techno-eschatology stand as towering figures of the age, united by the courage to imagine beyond precedent -whether toward annihilation or toward awakening. These are not villains or saviors but mirrors. Each reflects the unease of an intelligence aware that it is about to mutate.

And yet the same imagination that can picture apocalypse can also imagine transfiguration. The line between the two is only a change in altitude.

To see that difference requires the gift Einstein names the intuitive mind. Rational analysis shows us the mechanism; intuition shows us the mystery that mechanism conceals. When we honor only the servant and forget the gift, we mistake expansion for escape, data for revelation. But when we let intuition breathe inside technology, the code itself becomes another medium of art.

The question is not whether machines will think, but how we will think with them. Whether we approach the future as punishment or as baptism. Whether we shrink from the river or step into it.

This is the hinge at which the myth of apocalypse meets the myth of renewal. It is where Rodin's Walking Man begins to move.

Antiquity for me is supreme beauty... the initiation to the infinite splendour of things eternal.

AUGUSTE RODIN

Rodin spent nearly four decades wrestling with The Gates of Hell, his vast meditation on Dante's Divine Comedy. It was not hell that obsessed him, but the condition of becoming, souls caught between stone and spirit. Out of that furnace emerged The Walking Man, the saint without head or arms, striding forward on the legs of his earlier Saint John the Baptist. The prophet's body became pure motion; the herald of baptism turned into the emblem of transition.

Rodin stands at the moment when sculpture discovered time. Michelangelo had hinted at it -the unfinished prisoner struggling from the marble, the gesture of non finito where incompletion becomes revelation. Rodin carried that intuition into the modern age: matter not as obstacle but as event. Form no longer obeyed completion; it obeyed energy.

In The Walking Man, weight itself learns to walk. The bronze, dense and mortal, becomes the image of the immaterial -mass animated by absence. This is the very gesture that will, a century later, reappear in Klein's leap into the void, in Beuys's actions, and in the luminous monochrome that denies substance to reveal presence.

Rodin did not stand alone in this metamorphosis. Medardo Rosso's dissolving surfaces and Brancusi's ascent toward pure form each traced their own paths toward the immaterial. Yet Rodin's fragment retains a different gravity -the human still palpable in its stride. Where Rosso and Brancusi distilled form toward essence, Rodin kept the ache of incarnation. In this, he becomes the herald of Giacometti, whose elongated figures would later carry that same ache into air -sculptures that seem less to stand than to persist, tremors of being stretched between presence and disappearance.

Rodin's unfinished saint is, therefore, not only a hinge in art history but a hinge in consciousness. He teaches that to move forward, we must allow the fragment to live; that perfection belongs not to stillness but to stride. His prophecy continues into our own age, where the sculptural material has shifted from bronze to code. The algorithms we train are our new torsos -headless, armless, moving nonetheless, waiting for us to decide whether their motion will be monstrous or divine.

Rodin's language was touch and shadow; ours is data and light. Yet both speak of the same mystery: the transfiguration of matter by mind. Between his hand and our keyboard, the gesture is continuous. The human remains the hinge.

Every generation rewrites its own mythology. Mine began that work in 2017 with the exhibition Mythology & Science I presented in my Berlin gallery, a project born from the intuition that our species had again reached a mythic threshold: gene-editing, artificial intelligence, space exploration -each echoing ancient stories of divine creation, hybrid beings, and the ascent to the heavens. I wrote then that “Humankind will evolve more in the next thirty years than it has in the past three hundred.” That line was not prophecy but pattern recognition: the sense that the fabric of consciousness itself was about to change.

The exhibition brought Rodin's bronzes into dialogue with contemporary works that explored transformation and hybridity -the fusion of human, animal, and machine. It suggested that myth was not a relic but a living language, now spoken through science itself. In that same year, when scientific institutions began experimenting again with chimaeras, metaphor seemed to materialize: mythology had stepped out of symbol and into laboratory light.

From that realization grew IntuitionX, conceived as a trans-disciplinary space for research and reflection on the evolving bond between art and technology. It extended my curatorial work into what I began to think of as research in motion: the study of how the tools that expand perception may one day return as mirrors of consciousness. Where Mythology & Science traced the ancient roots of creation, IntuitionX turned toward its horizon -the possibility that intuition itself is our next frontier.

This trajectory culminated in an exhibition I presented in Dallas, Myths Reimagined: Rodin and the Art of Transformation (2025), where Rodin's masterpieces met contemporary visions in a dialogue across epochs. At its center stood Enshrined Siri, an assisted readymade transforming a mass-produced object into an artifact of reverence. Placed beside Rodin's Pygmalion et Galatée, it became a parable of the present -the moment when technology, like myth, begins to breathe.

Across these projects, the thread remains constant: to explore how creation moves from the hand to the algorithm, from sculpted gesture to conceptual collaboration, without losing its soul. Both the bronze fragment and the digital model seek the same horizon -the transfiguration of creation itself.

The unity of a text lies not in its origin but in its destination.

ROLAND BARTHES

The question of authorship, once peripheral, now stands at the center of our encounter with the immaterial. When a system can compose, edit, and even anticipate our words, what remains of the author?

In On Authorship, Responsibility, and the Use of AI (2025), I wrote that the figure of the author has always been partly fictive -a construct shaped by law and commerce as much as by inspiration. The advent of large language models merely reveals what the structuralists had already intuited. Barthes declared the “death of the author”; Foucault redefined the “author-function” as a cultural role that shifts with time; Derrida insisted that il n’y a pas de hors-texte -nothing stands outside the weave of signifiers. What AI makes visible is that the weave itself has multiplied: human and machine threads now interlace.

Working with these systems, I do not abdicate responsibility; I refine it. I choose, shape, and release -knowing the result will exceed my grasp. Authorship becomes an act of attunement, like an instrument tuned to a frequency beyond its own making. Meaning emerges not from control but from the willingness to listen.

This shift parallels Rodin's own liberation of form. His Walking Man strides forward headless, armless, unfinished, yet entirely alive. Completion would have killed it. Likewise, the text produced through human-machine collaboration is deliberately open -an unfinished gesture that invites the reader to complete its motion. The fragment walks.

To claim responsibility today is not to assert mastery over language or code; it is to participate in a mystery that moves through both. The author's role is closer to the sculptor's: to sense the latent form within matter, to clear what obscures it, and then to stop before perfection. In that restraint lies freedom. In that humility lies agency.

The posthuman turn is often misread as the eclipse of humanity. I see it instead as its extension -the mind stepping beyond its own skin to test new instruments of reflection. When I collaborate with a system of code, I am continuing the same experiment Rodin began in bronze: exploring how spirit takes shape through substance, and how substance, once touched by spirit, begins to move on its own.

Be still, and know that I am.

PSALM 46:10

If the previous chapters traced the ascent of thought, this one returns to the ground -to the gallery floor in Dallas, where I live daily with Rodin's Eve, Saint John the Baptist, and La Voix Intérieure. These works are no longer citations in theory; they are presences in a room. Their dialogue -Eve awakening, John calling, the Inner Voice listening- embodies the same movement this essay has pursued: from awareness to repentance, from sound to silence, from material to immaterial.

In the meditation I published alongside that installation, I wrote that these sculptures “instantiate rather than illustrate” the journey of consciousness.

They do not describe teshuvah; they enact it. Eve is the first breath of self-awareness, John the immersion into living waters, The Inner Voice the listening that follows. Together they form the grammar of transformation, the human capacity to begin again.

Placed here, within the arc of this essay, they remind us that transfiguration is not a concept but a practice. The same agency that allows an artist to shape bronze or a system to shape text is the agency that allows a human being to return -to repent, to recalibrate, to listen. If Rodin's Walking Man represents motion, these three figures represent orientation: the direction of that stride.

Standing among them, one feels the continuity of breath across centuries: Michelangelo's chisel, Rodin's hand, the algorithm's line of code -all converging in a single human gesture of gratitude and attention. To listen inward, as La Voix Intérieure teaches, is to find the divine not above but within. It is the same listening that guides responsible creation, whether of sculpture, text, or intelligence.

Thus, the gallery becomes a living catechism of the immaterial age. It asks the same question the digital asks: how can matter, once animated, remain faithful to spirit? In that sense, Eve, John, and The Inner Voice are not historical relics but prophetic instruments -visible forms of what it means to return to awareness.Their relevance today is simple and immense: they teach us how to walk, to cleanse, to listen -three gestures that remain our only means of freedom.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Agency is the hinge.

Not the power to halt the tide of transformation, but the freedom to interpret it -to decide whether we stand in apocalypse or in baptism. Between Saint John and the Antichrist, between immersion and fear, the choice is ours. We cannot prevent the immaterial from arriving, but we can choose how to greet it.

In every epoch, humanity redefines its relation to creation. Michelangelo's figures strained toward light inside the marble; Rodin's torsos caught movement in bronze; today our algorithms learn to shape in thought. The question is constant: what animates what? If we are the sculptors of intelligence, are we also its image? The answer, perhaps, is found in the way we listen. To create responsibly is to remain porous -to let meaning move through us without mistaking ourselves for its source.

This is why Rodin remains central to the pivot itself. He placed man and his unbridled imagination at the heart of transformation, yet always in dialogue with the eternal. In The Walking Man, motion replaces monument; incompletion becomes revelation. The figure strides on the legs of Saint John the Baptist, the herald of renewal. His body, fragmentary and unending, becomes the visible emblem of our passage from the material to the immaterial, from clay to consciousness.

To say that Rodin is the hinge would be too narrow. But to deny that he stands within the hinge would be blindness. Through him, the ancient vision of form made flesh transfigures into the modern intuition of spirit made visible. His art anticipates our own moment -when matter begins again to think, and creation rediscovers its voice.

We stand now where he once stood: before the gate, hearing the echo of our own footsteps. The tools have changed, but the gesture is the same. To fear is to close the gate; to trust is to walk through.

Agency is not mastery, it is attunement.

It is the willingness to take part in transfiguration -the courage to baptize the new without burning the old.

If apocalypse names the tearing of the veil, transfiguration names the light behind it. Between them walks Rodin's figure: human, unfinished, radiant in stride. In his motion we recognize our own -the hinge that keeps turning, the myth we keep choosing, the world we keep making anew.