Time Lines and Circles

Until the dawn of Christianity, all of the Eastern and most of the ancient world conceived of time as cyclical, not linear. In the West, Augustine was among the first to insist on linear time as opposed to cyclical, although arguably the seeds of his insights were drawn from the Old Testament. Augustine was confident that time was real, linear, and going somewhere. It was increasingly filled with meaningful content, and nothing that occurred along its course would ever be repeated. In Christianity there is a sense of a “fall from grace”—being thrown out of paradise, to live in sin until Armageddon—a belief that works well with linear time. But Christianity aside, much of Western society, both religious and secular, has been driven by a linear notion for quite some time, drawing a diagonal line through cyclical time in minds of many