Economy of joy 8 / Nebuchadnezzar's long-cherished dreams of power and our struggle to recognize the moment when we begin to believe we are invincible
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on June 17, 2025
«Do not imagine yourselves to be above other men, for your profiles are worn down by the fingertips of coin handlers. You are in truth nothing but temporary guardians, uncertain of changing laws, unstable borders, and fickle tribes... And if your nature and dignity drive you to war, then in the name of God, wage war on poverty, wage war on stupidity, wage war on cruelty, wage war against the ignorance of the educated and against the barbarism of civilians.»
Giovanni Papini, Lettere agli uomini del Papa Celestino Sesto, ‘Ai reggitori dei Popoli’, 1946, pp. 119-123
The heart of the Sabbath, and therefore of the sabbatical year and the Jubilee, is a long and tenacious apprenticeship to learn the right relationship with time and its discipline, which is echoed in the wonderful sequence of verbs in the infinitive in chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes - ‘there is a time for ... and a time for ...’. Sabbatical humanism is also, and above all, the first essential lesson in learning the craft of time and timing. Those who learn this special wisdom find themselves equipped with a precious resource for managing crises, maintaining relationships, nurturing a vocation, processing grief and great failures, and not losing the golden thread of life, especially in its final stretch, which, as in every race, is the decisive one.
After looking at the decline of Solomon, today we reflect on an episode concerning another king, this time Babylonian, the great Nebuchadnezzar (6th century BC), whom we find in the book of Daniel. These two stories contain a similar lesson with different nuances. They both speak of the Sabbath of the heart, the sabbatical year of the soul, the great jubilee of our individual and collective lives. In particular, this story from Daniel allows us to understand in its raw essence the terrible logic of the management of power, success, and greatness.
“As the king walked on the roof of the royal palace in Babylon, he said, ‘Is this not the great Babylon that I have built as my royal residence by the power of my might and for the glory of my majesty?’” (Daniel 4:26-27). The king is in his legendary hanging gardens. He is in the constant company of a powerful thought, which grows until it becomes the dominant one, the master of all his thoughts. The king is convinced that he has created an extraordinary kingdom, a fantastic achievement, and that all this success is solely the result of the ‘strength of his power’ and ‘for the glory of his majesty’. He contemplated his achievements and took pleasure in them, feeling himself to be their sole master, absolute and almighty sovereign. He ‘pretended’ in his mind, enchanted by another ‘infinity’. But while he is still absorbed in this strange contemplation, a voice from heaven bursts forth: “I speak to you, King Nebuchadnezzar: your kingdom is taken from you!” (Dan 4:28).
This royal walk reveals to us a profound and constant law of the rise and fall of peoples, communities, organizations, and individuals. When life works and brings fruit and success, especially when it brings great and astonishing success, sooner or later the dominant thought of Nebuchadnezzar arrives. Here is its grammar. At the beginning, in a first phase that generally coincides with youth, people and communities who find themselves administering great talents are too busy managing their lives as they run and grow to have the time and conditions to formulate a theory of the causes of their success. They just live, partly because young people feel they don't know their true talents well enough, and they're often plagued by the so-called ‘impostor syndrome.’ Then, in adulthood, their relationship with their success starts to change and go downhill.
We begin to convince ourselves that we are the masters of what we have created, and one day we find ourselves in the garden of Nebuchadnezzar. We become the absolute rulers of our empires—no dictator is born a dictator, he becomes one one day while walking in his wonderful garden.
It is terrible and astonishing what happened to that great king: ‘He was driven from the company of men, he ate grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, his hair grew like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds' nails' (Dan 4:30). In the space of a thought, in the time of a short morning walk, the king finds himself transformed from the greatest ruler into a Dantesque monster, into Cacus or Malacoda. From demigod to werewolf.
An important detail should be noted. If we read the first part of chapter 4 of Daniel, we realize that Daniel (interpreting his dream of the great tree being cut down) had prophesied to Nebuchadnezzar that he would be transformed into a beast twelve months earlier (Dan 4:22). A year therefore passes between the prophecy and its fulfillment. Why, we ask ourselves, did the king not stop and continue to cultivate his thoughts for a whole year? Why did he not make a U-turn in his life? The possible answer is sad and ruthless: when terrible dreams of omnipotence come into the nights of kings (and ours), the decline has already begun some time ago: the point of no return has already been passed.
The spiritual illnesses of the soul resemble those of the body. There is usually a long incubation or latency period, months and years in which the illness grows, but we are unaware of it. We might sense it sometimes if we were attentive to the kind of life we lead, to our food, habits, stress, deep spiritual pains, and if we were able to listen to our friends (if we have any left) who say uncomfortable things to us because they are true. But in the meantime, the disease grows until it crosses the critical threshold when we finally realize what we have already become, without knowing it. That thought of a solitary walk in the garden had long since taken hold of the king's heart, occupying his whole soul and his whole life. The prophet, by vocation, sees ‘in dreams’ the signs of the metamorphosis that has already begun, even if it is not yet evident enough. He already sees beasts where everyone else still sees kings, men, and women. The prophet is the tac of the soul, the scintigraphy of the hearts of people and communities, who therefore sees health and pathology first and more clearly.
When a thought, which over time has become ideology, takes hold of the heart, the most natural thing we do is to delegitimize the prophets, to believe that they are the delusional ones, not us. Because almost all of us prefer an illusory life to a disappointed one, and around us there is an entire industry of producers and sellers of illusions, with sophisticated marketing techniques. Then, finally, the day comes when the metamorphosis becomes visible to all. But it is too late.
The time of the beast described by Daniel is a terrible time, and a very long one: it lasts “seven times.” We are afraid, we feel at the mercy of life and of everyone, we feel a great nostalgia for all the ‘Saturdays’ we have not celebrated, intoxicated by our success. It is a time of immense pain, of exile, of true ‘humiliation’, which comes from the muzzle that finds itself in contact with the ‘humus’ - if hell exists, this is its time on earth.
During this long period, many die, but some manage to rise again.
The grammar described by Daniel, already very serious for individuals, becomes devastating when it concerns an entire community, a movement, an institution, or a business. Almost always, in their development, the day comes when they feel like masters of the ‘kingdom’. Time passes, and the terrible day of the beast arrives. The few individual and collective stories that have not been devoured by their great success are those that have ‘known how to do Shabbat’. These are people, communities, and businesses that have stopped (the verb ‘shabbat’ also means ‘to stop’) and made a U-turn. They have become small, poor, humble, fragile, and then in the desert they have sung the song of the doe. They deliberately destroyed their great palace and their many visible and invisible shrines, and began to walk naked as on the first day, rising again as wandering Arameans, nomadic inhabitants of a mobile tent.
This shabbat is (almost) impossible (I have only seen it in two or three people in my life). The collapse of great empires is (almost) inevitable - and perhaps it is good that they collapse, to release new energies, to use those ruined stones to build new cathedrals. However, we can all learn to manage the phase that follows the collapse of an empire. Even destruction can become the creator of a good future, it can prelude a good season of life that is more human and more real than that of past successes and greatness. The time of true prayer can begin, because in the gardens of Nebuchadnezzar, people do not pray to God but only to themselves.
This possible good outcome of the ‘time of the beast’ is announced to us by Daniel in the most beautiful message of this terrible chapter: “At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High” (Dan 4:32). The time of the beast is not infinite. One day it ends. After the seven times have passed, the beast-king raises his eyes again, becomes human once more, begins to look at the sky again, and blesses God. Even hell on earth is not forever; it is possible to escape from the descent into hell—the Crucified One tells us so, Dante tells us so, our hearts tell us so.
Daniel, however, teaches us something important, perhaps even crucial. Those seven times were Nebuchadnezzar's “sabbatical year.” He did not choose it, he did not know it, he did not want it. But he lived it because life gave it to him freely. Even for a powerful and cruel king, there was the gift of the Sabbath. These ‘Sabbaths of the beast’ are often the last resort with which life saves us, preventing us from dying under the rubble of our empires. To us, it seems only an immense, infinite failure: but instead, it is only a mysterious salvation. That terrible time of a forced Sabbath was the only possible salvation for that ancient king. There was no more authentic sabbatical than that experienced, unwillingly, by the people of Israel during the Babylonian exile. Who knows if the author of the Book of Daniel, speaking of the time of that king's beast, was not referring to the exile-Shabbat of his exiled people?
We have not understood Shabbat. We have forgotten the Bible, forgotten all the prayers, forgotten the discipline of the earth. But the God of life continues to love us, and sometimes, without our knowledge, Shabbat comes, hurts us and blesses us during the struggle. It is announced to us by a dream, a prophet, a friend. It comes, we do not recognize it as a gift, we suffer greatly. In reality, it is saving us, but we do not know it. It is a resurrection, but we see only three crosses. We convince ourselves that the time of the beast will be endless. Instead, on another day, we wake up outside the tomb.
