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The notion of time as cyclical can be regarded from different
perspectives, as I have suggested already. Plato saw time, χρόνος, as a ‘moving
image of eternity’ (Timaeus 37d), manifest in the circular movement of the
heavens. The circular movement gave shape to the movement that
characterizes the life of finite beings, focusing that movement on the stillness
that lies at the heart of reality and reflected in the calm circlings of the stars.
The English, or Welsh, poet, Henry Vaughan, caught something of this in his
poem, ‘The World’:
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d, In which the world
And all her train were hurl’d;

The rest of the poem is mostly concerned with those who cannot see
eternity, this ‘ring of pure and endless light’, but are trapped in dark cycles that
draw them down away from the light: the statesman, the miser, the epicure.
For the notion of the cyclical is ambivalent: we can use the image of cyclical
movement to capture a sense of meaninglessness, or a vortex that sucks us
down, overpowering us. T.S. Eliot called April the ‘cruellest month’, because it
is a month of fresh beginnings, new shoots that spring up full of hope, a hope
that will be exhausted come winter. It ushers in a cycle of meaninglessness, a
cycle in which signs of hope are mocked. This sense of a cycle of
meaninglessness is very powerful; the sense that we are caught in revolutions
that entrap us and bring us round and round to the same thing, making no kind
of advance—all of this is very familiar. The cycles of the liturgical celebration
of the Church—daily, weekly, monthly, yearly—are ways in which the cycles of
meaninglessness in which we find ourselves too often trapped can be redeemed
and find meaning.
But how? The cycle goes round and retraces its course; it is all the same.
‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher… there is no new thing under the sun’
(Proverbs 1.2, 9). There seem to me to be two ways in which the cycles of time
encapsulated in the calendar lead us out of this cycle of meaninglessness. We
have noticed the way in which the day begins as the light fades and moves
towards the rising of the sun, and also the way in which the week of seven days
ends in an eighth day. Both these symbolize a movement upwards, a movement

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