“O tempora, o mores!”
Marcus Tullius Cicero growled these famous words to the Roman senate in the first century BC to decry the deterioration of civilized society. “Oh the times!” he lamented. “Oh the standards!”
Today, over two thousand years later, the world is still going to hell in a handbasket.
The evidence is all around us. There are wars and insurgencies everywhere. Every day political corruption is exposed in one place or another, and disgraced politicians scuttle off to exile, prison, or death. Traditional marriage is breaking down. The divorce rate is soaring. And what’s the matter with kids today?
When things really are falling apart
Of course, if you listen to what the politicians were saying at the time, all of these things have been happening ever since the dawn of recorded history.
However, sometimes civilized society really is falling apart.
Cicero had good reason to beat his breast about the times and the standards. He was living in the final decades of the Roman Republic, as it descended into civil war and dictatorship. In due time, Cicero himself was hunted down and executed during the power struggles that consolidated Julius Caesar’s position as dictator of the Roman Empire.
Are we living today in the modern equivalent of the fall of the Roman Republic? Are we headed for societal breakdown and destruction as the doomsayers shout in our ears via newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet?
Or are we in the end times predicted in the Prophets, the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation? Is Jesus Christ about to return to the earth Rambo-style to annihilate all the unbelievers and set up an eternal kingdom for the Elect on a brand new Earth version 2.0?
After all, we are living in a time of massive upheaval. The dizzying pace of scientific, technological, social, political, and spiritual change would make our cities and our society almost unrecognizable to someone who lived only a century or two ago. That’s especially amazing considering that in earlier times various human cultures commonly went for a thousand or more years with little change in their simple, agrarian way of life.
What’s going on here? Should we brace for impact?
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue
Back in the sixth century BC, the prophet Daniel was also living in a time of massive upheaval for his culture and civilization. As a young man he was taken captive to Babylon when the Babylonians conquered the kingdom of Judah and decapitated Jewish society by carrying off all of its educated upper classes and resettling them in Babylon.
Daniel’s own world had been destroyed. So it’s not at all surprising that many of his visions, stories, dream interpretations, and prophecies have an apocalyptic tone.
The first of these is the story of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue, and Daniel’s interpretation of the dream, in Daniel 2.
In this story, told with great dramatic flair, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, has a dream of an enormous, dazzling statue with a head made of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay. As Nebuchadnezzer watches, a rock is cut out, but not by human hands, and the rock smashes the statue’s feet, causing the whole statue to break into tiny pieces that are blown away by the wind. The rock then becomes a huge mountain that fills the whole earth.
Daniel interprets the dream as a prophecy of four kingdoms, one after another. Daniel, ever the smooth politician, says to King Nebuchadnezzar, “Your Majesty, you are the king of kings . . . . You are that head of gold” (Daniel 2:37, 38). The succeeding kingdoms, however, would be of lesser and lesser quality, until the last one became unstable and broke apart. Then, Daniel said, the God of heaven would set up a kingdom that would last forever—symbolized by the rock that smashed the statue and then became a mountain that filled the whole earth.
There have been various attempts to link the kingdoms foretold in Daniel 2 with succeeding empires and kingdoms of the ancient world. The one that stubbornly resists any political, material-world interpretation, though, is thet last one: the one that filled the whole earth, and would never be destroyed. So far, every nation, kingdom, and empire in the history of the world has had its beginning, its middle, and its end. And no kingdom has ever filled the entire world—even the entire ancient world. The Roman Empire came close. But even the Roman Empire had its borders, and there were other nations and empires outside those borders.
However, if we consider, instead, that Daniel’s prophecies, as part of the Word of God, are really about spiritual events rather than worldly and political events, we can find far greater meaning in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue.
The Ages of Humanity
Daniel was not the only ancient writer to picture succeeding kingdoms, or ages, as progressing from gold to silver to bronze to iron.
In his didactic poem Works and Days, the Greek poet Hesiod, who probably lived about a century before Daniel, pictured human history as divided into five ages:
- The Golden Age
- The Silver Age
- The Bronze Age
- The Heroic Age
- The Iron Age
As in Daniel’s interpretation of Neduchadnezzar’s dream, these ages represent a long, slow decline of humanity.
Many centuries later, at about the time of Jesus Christ, the Roman poet Ovid, in his work Metamorphoses, similarly divided human history into four mythical ages:
- The Golden Age
- The Silver Age
- The Bronze Age
- The Iron Age
Once again, these ages start with a Golden Age of justice and peace and then successively decline to end in an Iron Age of impiety, immorality, rampant greed, and warfare.
In each case, the poets saw themselves as living in the final, corrupt Iron Age.
The sweep of the Bible story
If the four ages represented by the four metals in Daniel 2 and in ancient Greek and Roman mythology represent successive ages of humankind, how does this relate to the sweep of human history as portrayed in the Bible?
As it turns out, the ages of humankind, and especially the version found in Daniel, makes perfect sense if we think of it as offering a vast, panoramic view of human spiritual history as narrated in the Bible story.
The Golden Age is a reference to the earliest times of humanity. In Biblical terms, it started when humans first became spiritual beings. This early time is represented by the Creation story and the Garden of Eden in the first chapters of Genesis, when humans were close to God and lived innocently in the garden where God placed them.
When that early innocence was lost in the mythical story of Eve and Adam eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, humanity went downhill fast. The corrupted remnants of that Golden Age came to a spectacular end in the Great Flood of Genesis 6–9.
At that point, a new Silver Age began among Noah and his descendants. Gone was the innocent, loving closeness to God. It was replaced by the development of agriculture, cities, civilization, written language, and all the other fruits of human intellectual development. It is from this time period that the seeds of the ancient mythical stories come to us.
The end of the Silver Age is not as clear in the Bible story as the end of the other ages. It seems to come in Genesis 11 as the early, mythical stories of the Bible give way to stories about people such as Abraham who were likely real individuals rather than figures representing whole cultures as in the earlier stories.
The early times of the Hebrew people, stretching from Abraham’s immediate ancestors to the end of Genesis and the period of slavery in Egypt, is the Bronze Age of human spiritual history. This was a time of simple farmers, shepherds, and nomads following the basic rules of God as they understood them.
With the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law from Mount Sinai begins the Iron Age of human spiritual history in its Biblical version. This was an age of strict adherence to unbending laws, enforced through severe punishments for anyone who disobeyed them. The rest of the Old Testament story covers this low and brutal Iron Age of our spiritual history. And like Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, it ended in a time of division and breakup represented by the feet made partly of iron and partly of baked clay.
Now we can easily see the meaning of the rock cut out with human hands, which smashed the statue and then grew into a mountain that filled the whole earth. In the Bible story, the kingdom that would never end is none other than the spiritual kingdom set up by Jesus Christ. The four Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles tell the story of the founding of that kingdom and its early beginnings.
The end of Christianity as we know it
Unfortunately, though the reign of Jesus Christ was never to end, the earthly version of that kingdom—namely, the Christian Church organized and institutionalized in the centuries after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—shared the same fate as the four previous spiritual ages on earth. It, too, began with great love, enthusiasm, and promise, only to decline over the centuries into an institution bent on worldly power and wealth, and riven by internal controversies. Institutional Christianity split into warring factions, becoming its own version of the feet of Nebuchadnezzar’s statute made of iron mixed with baked clay.
In that descent into spiritual division and destruction, the love and light of Jesus Christ largely perished from the Christian world.
The spiritual cataclysms that would bring the reign of that church to an end are described symbolically in the final book of the Bible: the book of Revelation. We don’t need to dwell on the details. Suffice it to say that beginning with the Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the near total control that the Christian Church had held over the minds and societies of Western world for nearly fifteen hundred years started to crumble.
In the new intellectual freedom of that time, people began to question old doctrines and dogmas. We took a fresh, more rational, and more scientific look at the world around us, and began to reshape human society based on the emerging new understanding of material reality.
And those of us who are aficionados of the spiritual writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) believe that the new understanding of spiritual reality he offered played a key part in the breakdown of the power and influence of the old Christianity, and the beginning of a new spiritual era and a new form of Christianity.
The New Jerusalem
That new form of Christanity is pictured in the Bible story by the descent of the holy city, the New Jerusalem, described in the final two chapters of the book of Revelation.
In the vision that John saw with his spiritual eyes, the old heaven and the old earth are swept away, and a new heaven and new earth take their place.
John was not talking about the literal, physical sky and land any more than Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue was really talking about earthly kingdoms. Instead, John’s vision is about a time in history when Christianity as we have known it up to that time will come to an end, and human society, both civil and spiritual, will be transformed into something brand new—something that has never before existed on the earth.
The times that John predicted in the last two chapters of the last book of the Bible are the times we are living in right now.
What other explanation could there be for the sweeping scientific, technological, political, and social changes of the last few centuries?
Throughout much of the world, absolute monarchy—which had previously dominated the earth for thousands of years—has given way inexorably to new forms of popularly elected and installed governments.
Meanwhile, in the past two centuries, science and technology have developed at an accelerating pace such that we now take for granted automobiles, airplanes, computers, cell phones, and many other technological wonders that make it possible for us to do things undreamed of in earlier eras of humanity.
And socially . . . well, isn’t that where the world is going to hell in a handbasket? Aren’t morality, traditional marriage, and all the values we hold dear breaking down and being replaced by chaos and uncertainty?
Chaos comes before a new order
Relax.
All the social chaos and uncertainty we are now experiencing is simply the death throes of old prejudicial, unjust, and ultimately inhuman ways of thinking, feeling, and living in community with our fellow human beings.
Yes, it’s going to take a while for the dust to settle. But what’s happening now is not the destruction of society. Rather, it is the airing of ancient evils that have been with us all along, but that we were never ready to face and overcome.
Every new evil, every new war, every new disturbance or injustice that hits the news is an opportunity for us to look old evils in the face and finally, gradually, painfully put an end to them. Only when we have faced and overcome those old evils with the power of the new light now given to us by God can we bring in a more loving, more just, more humane, and more spiritual society.
No, the world is not going to hell in a handbasket. The world is going to heaven in a horseless carriage. We’re just hitting a few potholes along the way.
For further reading:
- Is the World Coming to an End? What about the Second Coming?
- The Christian Church is Coming to an End
- Christianity is Dead. Long Live Christianity!
- How Big is the New Jerusalem?
- Can We Really Believe the Bible?
- Heaven, Regeneration, and the Meaning of Life on Earth
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
Thank you for this uplifting website. I struggle to read Swedenborg’s writings but find amazing comfort in them when I do. Your website is a bit like a vitamin pill. It gives you a wonderful dollop of spiritual food without the need to cook and prepare a meal (although I know that a meal is vitally important.
Hi Bronwyn,
Thanks for your comment. Glad you’re enjoying the website!
I may not be much in the kitchen, but I do enjoy whipping up a nice spiritual meal for anyone who cares to partake of my style of culinary creation! 😉
Dear Lee,
I reread your+my article “The Christian Church is coming to an end” and then I got to this interesting article. Thank you for it! I appreciate the five-fold division of mankind´s spiritual history. But the ending of the article is too optimistic for me. The historical optimism that you propose would be the second extreme to “the world is going to hell in a handbasket”. To my mind, Swedenborg stands just in the middle of these two extreme opinions. The descent of mankind´s mind into nature and matter has been going on since the first fall of mankind in the garden of Eden. And this trend has not stopped, neither it has been changed by the First or Second Coming of the Lord into the world. These Comings or Revelations brought about much change in the spiritual world, but not so much (as one might desire) in the natural world. Their task has been to establish firm islands for the believers on which this descent, that is the strengthening influence of hell into the world, can be opposed and overcome. We know that the Lord strives to keep up the equilibrium between good and evil in the world, but he does not wish the victory of either of these sides. Such victory would make the world an end.
Radko
Hi Radko,
Thanks for your further thoughts.
I would say, rather, that God does wish for the side of good to win the victory. God is continually working to pull every single one of us human beings out of hell, and to lift us up to heaven.
However, God also recognizes that each individual and each society and generation must fight that battle for themselves. That is why God keeps us in an equilibrium between good and evil as long as we are living here on earth.
That does not mean, though, we can make no progress at all, and will always be at a stalemate. Rather, it means that if and as we do make progress in choosing good over evil, God opens up deeper evils for us to face, battle, and overcome.
I do believe that, as chaotic and materialistic as things seem right now, this world has made some progress in overcoming old evils. For just one example, consider that in the world today, there aren’t any significant empires anymore. Perhaps the last of them was the Russian empire, which fell apart three decades ago now. Maybe more will arise. But today people seem very resistant to the idea of being ruled by foreign powers. And the whole idea is rather out of favor among the developed nations. Most nations are now self-governing, even if the quality of those governments varies all over the map.
As for the human mind’s fall into matter and nature, I would say that hit its low point at the time of Christ. Even Christianity as an institution was quickly corrupted. However, I think people still think more spiritually today than 2,000 years ago. For example, huge numbers of people now believe that the afterlife will be on another plane of existence (in the spiritual world), not in a renewed version of the physical world. That is a major advance over what the bulk of people believed at the time of Christ.
And another thought occurs to me: Swedenborg himself spent the first two or three decades of his adult life focused almost entirely on science and technology—i.e., on natural and material things. Yet this formed the foundation for his later spiritual experiences and writings. I tend to think that the same will be true for today’s fascination with science and technology among the educated people of the developed and developing nations.
Meanwhile, here is one more article you might find on-point to this discussion:
If the Second Coming has Already Happened, When do Things Start Getting Better?
Hi Lee. As much as fundamentalists and hardcore evangelicals like to scream and bleat about how terrible and awful the modern world is, I wholeheartedly agree with you that, on the whole, we are progressing to a better society and world. Often, when I go out to lunch with my family, I look around at large groups of people chatting, eating good food, and laughing, and think to myself how such peace and joy among so many people must be very pleasing to God.
When my dad went on about the state of the world once, I asked him point-blank if he would prefer to live in Biblical times as an ancient Israelite, where war was a fact of life, minor diseases could kill, and he’d be stoned to death for doing any sort of “work” on the Sabbath (he’s big on community service in his neighborhood). Given that comparison, he did mention that, compared to Biblical times, things are better in at least some ways today. To the point, I think our outlook on the world depends, to a great extent, on the lenses we choose to view it with.
Some of us choose to look at the wars that are still happening, the divorce rates, and the supposedly corrupt morality of modern society (which in many cases is just self-righteous, dare I say Pharisee-esque, pearl-clutching). Others look at the abundance more and more people enjoy every day, the groups of people living peaceful, happy lives full of love and friendship, and the progression of society towards justice and equality for all people and nations. In terms of what God wants for humanity and societies, while I still think we have a ways to go, I think God is much happier with the state of the world today than, say, the 1900s or even 100s, because more people are living happier and more peaceful lives.
God Bless,
Chad
Hi Chad,
I couldn’t have said it better myself!
En qué fechas se podria situar la edad y la de plata? gracias!
Hola José,
Lo siento. Hablo solo un poquito de Español. I will have to answer you in English. English also so that others who follow this blog can read it.
Since the general time periods are given for the other ages in the article, I presume that even though you didn’t explicitly specify the Golden Age, your question should be translated into English as, “On what dates could the Golden Age and the Silver Age be placed? Thanks!”
Edit: I just noticed that your first attempt to post this question went into the spam folder (sorry about that!), and that it did explicitly specify the Golden Age:
This could be translated into English as:
It’s a good question, and not one we can answer with confidence, because Swedenborg never assigns any specific time periods to the Golden and Silver ages. And even if he had attempted to do so, knowledge of human pre-history and early history was in its infancy in the 18th century when Swedenborg lived. In those days, it was still common to believe the traditional dating of the creation of the world as having taken place around 6,000 BC. So Swedenborg wouldn’t have had the basis to assign any accurate time periods to those ages anyway.
Also, these ages are characterized by the spiritual or psychological state of the people in the eras they refer to, and our inner state isn’t always obvious from the outward appearance of how we live physically. Judging by how they lived, these early people would look primitive by modern standards. But the idea is that inwardly, they had a rich spiritual life that isn’t obvious from the outward appearance.
Though Swedenborg didn’t give us any dates, a British New Church (Swedenborgian) author has suggested some dates in this book, which is available in a Kindle edition on Amazon here:
The Five Ages: Swedenborg’s View of Spiritual History, by P.L. Johnson (I will receive a commission if you purchase the book using this link.)
It is also available directly from the publisher, the Swedenborg Society in London, at this link:
The Five Ages: Swedenborg’s View of Spiritual History, by P.L. Johnson
Of course, it’s in English, but since its Kindle, I presume it can be translated into Spanish.
The short version is that Mr. Johnson dates the Golden Age, which Swedenborg calls the Most Ancient Church, to the Paleolithic Age, which, in his chart, is the time before 8,000 BC, and the Silver Age, which Swedenborg calls the Ancient Church, to the Neolithic Age, which Johnson dates between 8,000 BC and 3,000 BC.
These dates are approximate, of course. The ages took place at different times in different cultures and civilizations around the world. But this gives some idea of how the Golden and Silver Ages might be dated.
As for when the Golden Age begins, this would not be at the beginning of humans as a species, but the time period when humans first rose up from being mere animals, aware of and focused solely on this earth and material things, to when humans first began to have an awareness of God and spirit. The Creation stories in the Bible are not about the literal creation of the world and of the plants, animals, and people on it, but about our first creation as spiritual beings. In short, the Creation stories are about when we stopped being mere animals, and began to have the higher levels of rational and spiritual thinking that distinguish humans from animals.
If we were to attempt to link this to some recognizable event in human pre-history, my theory is that it corresponds to the time we first began to bury our dead, which currently is believed to have taken place about 100,000 to 130,000 years ago. The beginning of the practice of burying our dead, and the associated rituals, suggests that by that time we had a concept of the afterlife. This would mean that we had some concept of things higher than or beyond the material world. If Mr. Johnson is correct that the Golden Age ended in the transition from the Paleolithic era to the Neolithic era, this would place the Golden Age from about 130,000 years ago to about 8,000 BC.
However, as Mr. Johnson points out in his book, some cultures on earth are still living in earlier ages. So really, these ages overlap with one another among different people and cultures on this earth.
And once again, since Swedenborg didn’t tie these ages to any particular earthly time periods, these are just speculations and best guesses as to what time periods they occurred in.
If you really want to dig into it, I would recommend purchasing The Five Ages, and reading Mr. Johnson’s ideas about this for yourself.
So, does this mean that before the Golden Age, the “pre-Adamites” didn’t yet go to heaven? Thank you very much for your answer!
Hi Fernando,
Swedenborg didn’t write a lot about the pre-Adamites, and what he did write is mostly in his unpublished work Spiritual Experiences. The main entry about them is in Spiritual Experiences #3390–3394. There are a few other mentions of them in Spiritual Experiences and in his indexes of that work, which mostly recapitulate what he said in his main entry about them. There is also one mention of them in his published works, in True Christianity #466, in which he lays out the biblical basis for the already existing idea that the earth was populated before God created Adam. The idea of pre-Adamites was not original to Swedenborg. It was something that was already being discussed in the Christian culture of his day.
The entry on pre-Adamites in Spiritual Experiences has three key points relevant to your question:
Though Swedenborg doesn’t explicitly answer your question, putting these three points together provides the answer that yes, the pre-Adamites can and do go to heaven, but to a very external part of it, as suggested by their correspondence with the pubic hair. Presumably there are also corresponding hells in which pre-Adamites who were evil live. Just as hair is not highly alive in the way that the various internal organs of the body are, and yet does have some kind of minimal life in it, so spiritually the pre-Adamites have minimal spiritual life, but they do have spiritual life, which is why they continue into the afterlife and live to eternity.
This is in contrast to the earlier evolutionary phases of the human species in which there was no spiritual awareness or life at all, but hominids (they can hardly be called “human”) were mere animals, even if they were fairly successful animals due to their larger brains and resulting greater intelligence, their upright posture, opposable thumbs, social structure and communication capabilities, and so on.
These earlier evolutionary phases were preparing and developing the human physical organism until it was sufficiently advanced and complex to be able to host a human spirit. At that point we became actual human beings capable of the higher mental functions of rationality and spiritual thought, and even more importantly, capable of the higher human will or motivation functions of being able to have unselfish love for God and the neighbor.
Animals are not capable of either of these types of functions. They cannot reason, and cannot think about God and spirit. They also cannot operate unselfishly, even if may appear as if they can. The appearance comes from, for example, the behavior of pack animals in which an individual may prioritize the well-being of the pack over his or her own well-being by, for example, fighting a rival pack and potentially dying to preserve the life and position of his or her own pack. But this is not actual unselfish behavior. Rather, the concept of “self” in these animals is not individualistic, but is collective. The individual animal has an extended “self” that includes the entire pack.
But does that pack animal have the capability of extending that “unselfishness” to a rival pack? No. Animals are not capable of “loving their enemy as themselves,” as humans are. That’s because they do not have the higher heart or will levels of being able to love God above all, and their neighbor as themselves.
One more thing. I should modify my previous answer a bit, at least in theory. The earliest people who buried their own dead, thus demonstrating some spiritual awareness, may not have actually been part of the Most Ancient Church. They may, rather, have been pre-Adamites, who came before the Most Ancient Church represented by “Adam,” or humanity. This has two ramifications:
Both of these points, as with the rest, are rather speculative. But I now lean toward thinking that the Most Ancient Church itself may have started considerably later in human pre-history. As to when that would be dated, based on my current meager knowledge of human paleontology, I wouldn’t even want to hazard a guess. But it’s possible that there is some other inflection point in our development as a species, similar to when we first began to bury our dead, that might suggest a beginning point for the Most Ancient Church.
Incidentally, the New Century Edition generally uses the term “the earliest church” rather than “The Most Ancient Church.”
These are all very interesting questions to exercise one’s brain on, even if they’re peripheral to our spiritual life and regeneration. They’re certainly not essential Christian doctrines. But we Swedenborg nerds have to have something to geek out about! 😀
Thank you so much for your reply. Perhaps the Golden Age began with the Cognitive Revolution and cave art (70,000–40,000 BCE), since Patrick Johnson’s painting mentions revolutions (agricultural, industrial, etc.). Regards
Hi Fernando,
You’re welcome. And that’s as good a guess as any. I’m not conversant enough with the early development of human culture to hazard a guess myself.
An interesting wrinkle is that when Swedenborg explains the two Creation stories, he interprets the first one, the Seven Days of Creation, as the development of the spiritual understanding or intellect, and the second one, the Garden of Eden up to Genesis 2:17, as the development of the spiritual will, or love. Presumably there were corresponding expressions of these spiritual developments in the development of human culture as studied by paleontologists.
The main point is that there might be multiple inflection points along the way denoting the beginning and development of the Most Ancient Church.