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should follow them, so that ‘by learning to know the harmonies and revolutions
of the world, [we] should bring the intelligent part, according to its pristine
nature, into the likeness of that which intelligence discerns, and thereby win
the fulfilment of the best life set by the gods before mankind both for this
present time and for the time to come’ (Tim. 90acd). 6
The centrality of the notion of διάστημα to ancient understanding of
space and time has a further important consequence we should note. It does
not mean that space and time are full of ‘gaps’, gulfs of unmeaning, as it were,
dooming the world of becoming to ultimate meaninglessness. Even for Plato,
for whom there can be no logos of anything in the realm of becoming (Tim.
29d), the truth is quite the contrary: the cosmos, existing in space, and time
itself are creations of the gods; they have meaning that is revealed in their
structures, constituted by relationship. Time is for Plato ‘a moving image of
eternity’ (εἰκὼ… κινητόν τινα αἰῶνος: Tim. 37d): it is ordered towards eternity;
within the realm of becoming it represents eternity as its image. The sequence
of time is not meaningless: it discloses eternity.
The Christian Calendar is a way of bringing into conjunction these
different cycles of cosmic time, and thus bringing together human time—the
time of the microcosm—with the time of the cosmos, or the universe. It is
often said that there are two conceptions of time—one cyclical and the other
linear; one conceives of time either as consisting of recurring cycles, or as
something that moves in a kind of linear way from the past to the future. It
was popular, among theologians of the last century, to oppose these two
notions of time and see the cyclical as in some sense Greek or pagan, in
contrast to a sense of time as linear, moving into the future, which was
regarded as biblical. This seems to me an oversimplification, for cyclical ways
of understanding time are as much a part of the biblical understanding as the
sense of a linear movement from creation to consummation. For it is through
various cycles, that repeat themselves, that we grasp the passage of time. The
day, the month, the year: these are cycles related to the circular movement of
the earth, the moon and the sun, or, as the ancients would have thought of it,
the sun, the moon and the sphere of the fixed stars, for it was the movement of
the sun round the earth that was thought to determine the day, the sequence of
the phases of the moon that determined the month (much as we still conceive
it) and the movement through the zodiac of the sphere of the fixed stars that

6 Translation in F.M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (London: routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1937 [reprint 1971]), 353–4.

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