The Golden Age, the End of the World, and the Eternal Structure of Being

Across cultures and centuries, humanity has remembered and imagined paradises. From the Garden of Eden in Genesis to the Satya Yuga of Indian tradition, from Hesiod’s Golden Age to the legends of the Isles of the Blessed, there persists a memory of a time when harmony reigned: no sickness, no war, no toil, no estrangement. The earth gave freely, and human beings dwelled in intimacy with the divine.

Just as universal, however, is the prophecy of restoration: an age yet to come when harmony will return. Christianity envisions the Kingdom of God, Islam speaks of the renewal of creation, and many indigenous traditions await a restoration of balance between humanity and earth. Yet, strikingly, this hope is often preceded by visions of collapse: apocalypse, catastrophe, the “end of the world.” In the Book of Revelation, destruction precedes the new Jerusalem. In Zoroastrianism, fire purifies the world before its renewal. In Hinduism, the dark Kali Yuga ends only to give way to another Satya Yuga. Even secular eschatologies—climate collapse, technological doomsday—carry this same archetypal structure: devastation preceding restoration.

Why this twofold intuition—the nostalgia for a paradise lost and the expectation of a paradise to come?

The Roots of the Intuition

At the heart of this universal imagery lies the duality of human experience. On one hand, we live as empirical selves, bound by time, subject to loss, estrangement, sickness, and death. This empirical existence carries an ineradicable sense of alienation, as though something essential has been forgotten. On the other hand, within each of us resounds the voice of the transcendental self—the unshakable awareness of eternity. We cannot fully believe in our own annihilation, nor can we extinguish the certainty that joy, peace, and harmony are somehow destined to be.

These two dimensions coexist in tension:

• The empirical self feels abandoned in a fallen world, exiled from the golden garden.
• The transcendental self intuits that such exile cannot be ultimate, that harmony must necessarily return because Being cannot be destroyed.

It is this tension that generates the myths of both a lost paradise and a future restoration. The “end of the world” signifies not the annihilation of Being but the end of the illusion in which the empirical self is trapped. When Jesus says, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation… for behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20–21), he names precisely this paradox: the future golden age is not an outward event in linear time, but the unveiling of what has always been—eternity, within and without.

Apocalyptic Literature as Symbolic Threshold

Seen in this light, apocalyptic visions do not describe an actual annihilation of the world, but the collapse of the order built on the illusion of becoming. Revelation’s cosmic upheavals, Daniel’s beasts, or even modern dystopias—all symbolically express the breaking of the temporal cage. What “ends” is not the earth itself, but the belief that earth and beings are subject to nothingness, to beginning and end.

Thus, the apocalyptic is not destruction but unveiling (apokalypsis). It is the removal of the veil of time’s illusion, the shattering of nihilism. What follows is not a new creation ex nihilo but the appearing of what has always been—the earth as eternal, the beings as eternal, destiny as the saving structure of Being.

The Philosophical Resolution

Here philosophy provides the necessary grounding. Emanuele Severino shows that the belief in becoming—the idea that beings come from nothing and return to nothing—is the root of all alienation. If what is can also not be, then every joy is threatened by annihilation, every harmony doomed to be lost. The myth of the golden age testifies to our memory of Being’s eternity, while the myth of apocalypse testifies to our intuition that the lie of becoming cannot stand forever.

What traditions intuited symbolically, philosophy unveils with necessity:

• The past golden age is not simply a myth but the recognition that no harmony, once appeared, can ever cease to be.
• The future golden age is not a mere hope but the necessary destiny of Being: the eternal return of every moment, not in time, but in the appearing of eternity.
• The end of the world is not cosmic ruin but the necessary collapse of nihilism, the dissolution of the belief that nothingness rules over Being.

The Appearing of the Earth That Saves

Ultimately, these intuitions point toward what Severino names the appearing of the earth that saves. The earth is not doomed to perish; it is eternal. The saving earth is the unveiling of this truth, in which the tension between empirical alienation and transcendental eternity is resolved. What is intuited as paradise lost and paradise to come is in fact the eternal paradise of Being, ever-present, though veiled.

The golden age lies neither behind us nor ahead of us, but within the eternal structure that underlies all appearing. To live toward it is not to await a future world but to awaken to the eternity of this one. What seemed like memory and prophecy are not illusions but signs of necessity: the inevitable recognition that what appears does so only because it is eternal — and in appearing, unveils that eternity to us.