Environmental recurrences and religion

The cyclic theory of time has been held in regard to the three fields of religion, of history (both human and cosmic), and of personal life. That this view arose from the observation of recurrences in the environment is most conspicuously seen in the field of religion. The observation of the generation cycle has been reflected in the cult of ancestors, important in Chinese religion and also in older civilizations and in precivilizational societies. The observation of the annual cycle of the seasons and its crucial effect on agriculture is reflected in a ceremony in which the emperor of China used to plow the first furrow of the current year; in the ceremonial opening of a breach in the dike of the Nile to let the annual floodwaters irrigate the land; and in the annual “sacred marriage,” performed by a priest and priestess representing a god and goddess, which was deemed to ensure the continuing fertility of Babylonia. A cycle longer than that of the seasons is represented by the recurrent avatars (incarnations) of the Indian god Vishnu, one of the most popular deities of Hinduism, and in the corresponding series of buddhas and bodhisattvas (buddhas-to-be). Although the only historical Buddha was Siddhartha Gautama (6th–5th century bce), in the mythology of the northern school of Buddhism (the Mahayana) the identity of the historical Buddha has been almost effaced by a long vista of putative buddhas extending through previous and future times.

In contrast to northern Buddhism and to Vaishnava (Vishnu-devoted) Hinduism, Christianity holds that the incarnation of God in Jesus was a unique event, yet the rite of the Eucharist, in which Christ’s self-sacrifice is held by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians to be reperformed, is celebrated every day by thousands of priests, and the nature of this rite has suggested to some scholars that it originated in an annual festival at the culmination of the agricultural year. In this interpretation, the bread that is Christ’s body and the wine that is his blood associate him with the annually dying gods Adonis, Osiris, and Attis—the divinities, inherent in the vital and vitalizing power of the crops, who die in order that people may eat and drink and live. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but, if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).

The cyclic view in various cultures

The cyclic view of history, both cosmic and human, has been prevalent among the Hindus and the pre-Christian Greeks, the Chinese, and the Aztecs. More recently, the cyclic view has gained adherents in modern Western society, although this civilization was originally Christian—that is, was nurtured on a religion that sees time as a one-way flow and not as a cyclic one.

The Chinese, Hindus, and Greeks saw cosmic time as moving in an alternating rhythm, classically expressed in the Chinese concept of the alternation between yin, the passive female principle, and yang, the dynamic male principle (see yinyang). When either yin or yang goes to extremes, it overlaps the other principle, which is its correlative and complement in consequence of being its opposite. In the philosophy of Empedocles, an early Greek thinker, the equivalents of yin and yang were Love and Strife. Empedocles revolted against the denial of the reality of motion and plurality that was made by his Eleatic predecessors on the strength of mere logic. He broke up the Eleatics’ motionless, and therefore timeless, unitary reality into a movement of four elements that were alternately harmonized by Love and set at variance by Strife. Empedocles’ Love and Strife, like yin and yang, each overlapped the other when they had gone to extremes.

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Physics and Natural Law

Plato translated Empedocles’ concept from psychological into theistic terms. At the outset, in his view, the gods guide the cosmos, and they then leave it to its own devices. But when the cosmos, thus left to itself, has brought itself to the brink of disaster, the gods resume control at the 11th hour—and these two phases of its condition alternate with each other endlessly. The recurrence of alternating phases in which, at the darkest hour, catastrophe is averted by divine intervention is similarly an article of Vaishnava Hindu faith. In guessing the lengths of the recurrent eons (kalpas), the Hindus arrived, intuitively, at figures of the magnitude of those reached by modern astronomers through meticulous observations and calculations. Similarly, the Aztecs of Mesoamerica rivaled modern Westerners and the Hindus in the scale on which they envisaged the flow of time, and they kept an astonishingly accurate time count by inventing a set of interlocking cycles of different wavelengths.

Plato and Aristotle took it for granted that human society, as well as the cosmos, has been, and will continue to be, wrecked and rehabilitated any number of times. This rhythm can be discerned, as a matter of historical fact, in the histories of the pharaonic Egyptian and of the Chinese civilizations during the three millennia that elapsed, in each of them, between its first political unification and its final disintegration. The prosperity that had been conferred on a peasant society by political unity and peace turned into adversity when the cost of large-scale administration and defense became too heavy for an unmechanized economy to bear. In each instance, the unified state then broke up—only to be reunited for the starting of another similar cycle. The Muslim historian Ibn Khaldūn, writing in the 14th century ce, observed the same cyclic rhythm in the histories of the successive conquests of sedentary populations by pastoral nomads.

In the modern West, an Italian philosopher of history, Giambattista Vico, observed that the phases through which Western civilization had passed had counterparts in the history of the antecedent Greco-Roman civilization. Thanks to a subsequent increase in the number of civilizations known to Western students of cultural morphology, Oswald Spengler, a German philosopher of history, was able, in the early 20th century, to make a comparative study of civilizations over a much broader spectrum than that of Vico. The comparison of different civilizations or of successive periods of order and disorder in Chinese or in pharaonic Egyptian history implied, of course, that, in human affairs, recurrence is a reality.

The application of the cyclic view to the life of a human being in the hypothesis of rebirth was mentioned earlier. This hypothesis relaxes the anxiety about being annihilated through death by replacing it with a no less agonizing anxiety about being condemned to a potentially endless series of rebirths. The strength of the reincarnationists’ anxiety can be gauged by the severity of the self-mortification to which they resort to liberate themselves from the “sorrowful wheel.” Among the peoples who have not believed in rebirth, the pharaonic Egyptians have taken the offensive against death and decay with the greatest determination: they embalmed corpses; they built colossal tombs; and, in the Book of the Dead, they provided instructions and spells for ensuring for that portion of the soul that did not hover around the sarcophagus an acquittal in the postmortem judgment and an entry into a blissful life in another world. No other human society has succeeded in achieving this degree of indestructibility despite the ravages of time.