Black Golden Age

The poetic imposition of metallic ages upon history—always viewed in retrospect or awaiting realization in the future, because we always, always live in the bottom-most iron age, and with clay feet yet—arises, I think, from the same faculty where poetry arises, a sense that we come from a higher realm. When ages are projected into the past or the future, the times are secular. We’re living in the flatlands. When such a state is projected vertically to Heaven, the times are religious. Progress is the word we use to say that we’re approaching—in horizontal time, of course—the Golden Age. But when chaos begins to cloud up the sky to such an extent we no longer see the promised light of dawn just below the horizon, there is a tendency to imagine that times past might have been much better and that we are declining.

I confess this to be one of my failures—hence frequent contrasts here between the secular and the religious, with the implication added that the religious is better. But when I look at things through the lens of daily life, is that really true? From time to time I make some efforts to check. It’s easy to do. I pick a century and look up what happened then. The process is always sobering, although I learn some history. I put a magnifying glass on any past period, and what I see is pretty much the same thing. What history records are so-called important events—almost always wars. The well-off are always very few, the majority always labors in some misery, certainly those at the margins. Punctuating this are names of wise people here and there, the names of great books or sagas.

The important difference between all earlier ages and ours came with the invention of ways to use fossil fuels—and then their massive exploitation. This lifted the status of the masses all across the world. But. But it also brought about an unprecedented growth in population quite unthinkable, in fact, had coal and oil not happened. Progress therefore has had an actual physical underpinning. And if we now feel a decline—and who can doubt it—it is because the population is still growing while the Age of Fossils is pumping its way to a terminus.

The poets of old were expressing something inwardly felt but wrongly projected. And their imaginations failed them. They settled on the metals, rather than on organic chemicals. If Virgil had projected an Age of Oil, he would have been right on target. Alas, for my grandchildren’s children that age is also coming to an end.

Attitudes to Iron

One of our most persistent tendencies as humans is to produce the mirage of the Golden Age. We project this age both backward and forward in time. It is a poetic creation (of course). In the Greek-Roman the poet Hesiod (didn’t those fellows have a first name?) produced the metallic classification—Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron. In all of the variants of it, surprise!, we always live the Iron Age, whenever we happen to live. Paradise is the golden age of the Hebraic tradition, but because it appears in the Bible, the Garden does not usually appear in a recital of ages.

A comment here about the Heroic age—clearly not a metal. It was Hesiod’s way to refer to a period like our Second World War, thus when great heroes fill the earth—the Greatest Generation, etc. In Hesiod’s case, the reference is to the twelfth century BC, the time of the Trojan War. There are wars, you see, dime a dozen, and then there are Wars!

Golden ages that we find looking back we also discern ahead in time. But those who see the gleam of gold ahead are still writing in the Age of Iron. That age we know only too well. Virgil, positioned at the transit between the Roman Republic and Roman Empire—well, actually, in the early Empire, foresaw a future golden age in these lines (Eclogue IV, 5-8):

The age Cumaean Sybil sang has passed.
New centuries begin to roll at last.
Virgo now reigns, Saturn resumes the throne,
The Iron Age is past and gone,
A golden race arises from the rust.
Heaven has sent a new breed down to us.

Yes, I’ve tackled Virgil too, but not the Latin—just “fixing” translations into English.

Indeed one’s tempted to judge a culture by the poetic images by means of which it captures the looking back and looking forward. The glory of the Second Coming contrasts sharply with the Marxist future in which a Classless Society dawns as the State Withers Away.

The certainty that all ages are made of iron recurs to me every time I look closely into a period as yet unfamiliar to me—particularly when that time is described by a contemporary. In the high Middle Age Dante looked back to Virgil’s time in awe—and ahead to the effective restoration of the Holy Roman Empire. His own time was corruption squared, of course. He transcended this feeling by writing poetry about an idealized Beatrice in the heights of Heaven.

A transcendental attitude toward the grind of the Age of Iron is relatively rare—and a transcendental but practical approach does not attract the masses either. That attitude is encased in the saying: “Be in the world but not of it.” The maxim is very well known and has an unambiguously religious flavor. For this reason lots of people think that it is somewhere in the Bible. Google shows many people trying to find it there.

The curious fact is that this saying comes from the Sufis—and isn’t in the Qur’an either. Its original is Persian: Dar Dunya Básh: Az Dunya Mabásh. Be in the world but not of the world. It’s a rhyming maxim, thus mnemonic. Not that it takes a rhyme to remember it.

The more ordinary attitudes to life in this valley are resentment, aggression, combat—or withdrawal, indifference, resignation. Being in the world, to the contrary, strongly suggests sincere, energetic, and active participation—including service and effort—but with the heart detached. By “world,” of course, neither the Sufis nor the public nor I really mean the wonders of nature or the starry skies.