The cyclical aspect of time is obvious, and visible far upstream from any scientific modelling or measurement of time’s cycles. The sun, moon and stars rise and set, day after day, night after night. The moon runs through its phases, month after month. Summer, autumn, winter, spring succeed each other without interruption. Living things, generation after generation, are born and die, having replaced themselves with others just like them. The rain and snow fall and fill the lakes, streams and oceans. Then the clouds fill again, and the rain returns. As the Preacher writes:
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
Modern geology and cosmology have told us that, behind these cycles, are great linear processes, that the earth and sea, the sun and moon, the planets and stars, and all living beings, were not always as they are now, and are still changing, unthinkably slowly, into something else. But we did not need these new sciences to teach us that the circle was not the only time-line: indeed, we could never have designated time as cyclical unless it were possible to imagine it otherwise.
Modern geology and cosmology have told us that, behind these cycles, are great linear processes.
Without writing, peoples can have no history: oral transmission will not preserve distinct records of the past beyond a few generations. So non-writing peoples often perceive time as primarily cyclical. Yet all such peoples, it seems, also have within their account of the past a notion of a great time-before-time, a period of world-creation and of a now lost or diminished cohabitation between gods and men. Even on its own, this conception is enough to break time’s cycle: there was a past, beyond the recurring circles, when things were not just as they are now.
We think of time as a line, because we think of death with fear and wonder. Before the words quoted above, the Preacher wrote “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” The Hebrew conjunction can in fact be rendered by either “and” or “but”, and both are fitting. Generations come and go as part of the earth’s seemingly endless continuance. Yet, for us, who are puzzled by death, our disappearance is not merely a stage in the eternal cycle, but an end. The earth abideth, but I do not.
Is history another cycle, like those of the earth and sky?
With the coming of writing, and of history-writing, a new question arises. Is history another cycle, like those of the earth and sky? Or is it a line, like the life of one man? To write history at all, one must believe, at least temporarily, in the line: there has to be a story, with its beginning and end. Each story must also be different from the others: otherwise there is no need to write more history. The Trojan War can be told of again and again: each new bard shall tell the old tale as best he can. But the Peloponnesian War needs to be told of only once: the next historian’s work is to tell of the wars of his time and place.
Yet, for the ancient historians, the suspicion still lingered that they were setting out episodes of one vast cycle, that men would do the same things again and again, that the rise and fall of nations was no different in essence from the coming and going of the seasons. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done”. To this the Preacher adds: “There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come”. But the historians fought against such oblivion, believing that, by creating records (an “everlasting” one, Thucydides boasted, and he is yet to be proven wrong), they could at least see and make known how the cycles unfolded. Writing made time linear, but the historians, in a sense, then wrote to retrieve knowledge of the cycle which their form of writing had beaten back.
There is a terror in the circle: it is a road that takes us only back where we started, subduing human affairs to the rhythms of the life of beasts and trees. But there is also a terror in the line, if it is a road without end or purpose. If history is not merely folding back on itself, where is it going?
Among the ancients, some believed in a great final conflagration, ending all things, including history, and followed by a re-birth: all the small cycles we can see or record are wheels within a great wheel of universes, coming and going, infinitely. This meant an end to history, but not an end of history. The story reaches no climax or resolution: it is merely cut short, as the devouring fire consumes the world. And then it begins again.
For an end of history, we must look to the Last Judgment: this new belief that came from the Jews and was made fully manifest by Christians. The Christian End Times share with ancient cosmologies the belief in a destruction and renewal of the world. But they also affirm, against the Preacher, that there will be “remembrance of former things”. History ends not with obliteration—the erasure of every letter of the past—but with the scroll of judgment, in which all the past is recorded so as to be finally weighed and understood. Judgment too carries its terror—and Revelation is a terrifying book. But judgment at least carries the hope of a final truth that is neither—vanity of vanities– the circle’s infinite loop nor the line’s road to nowhere.
