The Kingdoms That Pass

Around the stories of fidelity, the book of Daniel meditates on the power of kings and the meaning of history. Through dreams and signs, it shows the mightiest empires rise, grow proud, then collapse, while one kingdom alone will never pass, that of God. To believers crushed by the force of empires, the message is a liberation: these powers that seem eternal are counted, weighed, and already doomed to ruin.

The statue with feet of clay

The king of Babylon has a dream that troubles him, and Daniel alone, by the grace of God, can reveal it to him when the king has even forgotten its content. The king saw an immense statue, made of gold, silver, bronze, and iron, but with feet of fragile clay. A stone, cut from the mountain without human hand, comes to strike the feet, and the whole statue collapses and vanishes like the chaff of grain in the wind, while the stone becomes a mountain that fills the earth. The metals, ever baser, are the empires that follow one another; their feet of clay tell their hidden fragility. The stone is the Kingdom of God: “the God of heaven will raise up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, and whose sovereignty will pass to no other people.” Daniel 2:44 This kingdom is not built by the hand of men, and it will not end. The Church has recognized in it the reign of Christ, that rejected stone become the holy mountain. Tradition has read in the four metals the succession of the great empires known to Israel, from Babylon to the Persians, then to the Greeks, then to Rome; but the essential is not to name them, it is in the law they all illustrate. Each empire believes itself of gold, indestructible, and each rests in reality on feet of clay. What seems most solid is the most fragile, for what is not of God does not last.

The pride of the king brought low

The same king, at the height of his glory, grows proud of having built Babylon by his own power alone. At once his reason leaves him: he is driven out among the beasts, eats grass like an ox, his hair like eagles’ feathers, until he lifts his eyes to heaven and acknowledges that the Most High reigns over the kingdoms of men and gives them to whom he wills. Only then does he recover his reason and his throne, and he blesses God. This strange story carries a constant truth of the Bible: God brings down the proud and raises the humble. Power is never a property of man, but a deposit received, of which he will have to give account; he who forgets it and takes himself for a god prepares his own fall. It is the law the Virgin Mary will later sing in her Magnificat: God casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the humble. The greatest king of the earth, reduced to grazing grass like a beast, experiences it to the very depths: as long as he believed himself a god, he lived like a beast; the moment he acknowledges God, he becomes a man again. Humility does not lower man, it restores him to his true greatness.

The words on the wall

A last king of Babylon, during a sacrilegious feast where they drink from the sacred vessels torn from the Temple of Jerusalem, sees a hand appear that traces mysterious words on the wall; the king turns pale, his knees knock together. Daniel alone deciphers them: they announce the end of the reign. “you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Daniel 5:27 The king has been counted, weighed, judged, and his kingdom is given to others. That very night, Babylon falls into the hands of the Persians, and the king is killed. The scene has become the symbol of every power that thinks itself untouchable: at the moment it feasts in its complacency, profaning what is holy, its sentence is already written on the wall. The words traced by the hand, which have remained famous, are three terms of weight and reckoning: counted, weighed, divided. God has counted the days of the reign and closed it; he has weighed the king in his balance and found him wanting; he has divided his kingdom and given it to others. Under the image of the interrupted feast, it is the judgment of God that speaks: no power escapes that balance where, one day, the real weight of a life is measured.

The Kingdom that does not pass

From these three scenes emerges the great lesson of the book. The empires follow one another, each believing itself eternal, and each vanishes in turn; history is a procession of powers that rise and fall back. One reign alone escapes this law, that of God, the stone that becomes a mountain, the kingdom that will never be destroyed. For believers crushed by a persecuting empire, it is an unshakable hope: their executioners will pass like the others, and nothing will remain of them but dust, while the Kingdom of God will remain. The Gospel will take up this announcement when Christ proclaims that the reign of God has come, a reign that is not of this world, that grows like a small seed become a great tree, and that no force can bring down.