Monotheism as Linear

[Nilus]

Hi, everyone.

I'm writing a paper on the different perceptions of time among civilizations, and I was wondering if you could help me out. It is well known and agreed upon that that monotheistic religions, beginning with the Jewish Tanakh, are founded on a linear, rather than a cyclic, perception of time and history. It appears in Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return, in Joseph Campbell's Masks of God, and was the main topic of Thomas Cahill's The Gift of the Jews. It also appears in may other places. But can anyone tell me who was the first important researcher/ anthropologist/ philosopher who pointed this out? Also, what other major writers have referred to this other than the abovementioned?

Thanks.

[bananabrain]

hi nilus,

It is well known and agreed upon that that monotheistic religions, beginning with the Jewish Tanakh, are founded on a linear, rather than a cyclic, perception of time and history. It appears in Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return, in Joseph Campbell's Masks of God, and was the main topic of Thomas Cahill's The Gift of the Jews.

i'm sorry, but you've been misled. none of the guys you're citing are experts on judaism and, to be honest, if that's the conclusion you've drawn you are unaware of some very basic things about the religion. our concept of time is both linear AND cyclical - in fact, a spiral is a better way of looking at it. the year is a cycle. so are weeks and months, days and even cycles within days occur. for us, all sabbaths are in a sense the first sabbath, identified with the garden of eden. all festivals commemorate the first instance and are as far as possible copies of it. i might almost go so far as to say that judaism is "object-oriented". in fact, when you get into midrashic and kabbalistic sources, the idea that this is not the first universe (or indeed the only one) is well-known, based around the statement that before our Creation, G!D "Created universes and Destroyed them" - this is part of the meaning of the letter aleph, which also alludes to the multidirectional nature of time. of course there is a conception that *humans* experience time as linear, but part of what judaism does is rewire that experience to enable us to draw upon time as experienced by the Divine.

b'shalom

bananabrain

[dauer]

BB,

I think what he's talking about is the fact that the civilizations before Judaism tended to mark the year by cyclical events, but when Judaism came along linear events were also attached to the cyclical model. I'm not disagreeing with you that it's more complicated than "It's cyclical" or "It's linear" but I think there's a definite shift from focus on the round of the year to focus on events in the history of the Jewish people that only concretized with separation from the land, and I would say also with the rabbinic alterations to the calendar like Shavuot as a linear holiday. But even before that the linear element was apparent. Even Shabbat is linked to an event, two events, so even this becomes linear.

Dauer

[bananabrain]

well, if that's the case, i don't really see what's so cyclical about the so-called cyclical religions! and even if Shabbat is linked to an event, it's not really linked to an event in linear time, but to the nature of sacred time.

b'shalom

bananabrain

[dauer]

But it's linear sacred time that's connected to the history of the Jewish people. Shabbat isn't a calendrical event. It's not a harvest festival or anything else. It's linked to creation. That's a linear event. The creation of the world doesn't occur every 7 days. It happens once. But we can reconnect with that moment in time, as with the exodus on Pesach, the wandering and dwelling in booths on sukkot, because these linear events have been connected to the calendar. Thinking however, at this point, has changed.

Sukkot is not simply a harvest festival. That would be cyclical thinking. All of the events on the Jewish calendar are events in Jewish history. Even Shabbat is involved in Jewish history. The Creation is only important because it involves the history of the Jewish people. This view got away from the idea that we are always stuck in the same cycles, history in a round, and moved toward history in a straight line. I wouldn't say it was monotheism that caused it, but whatever shift was happening that time for whatever reason, it seems the Jewish religion got caught up in it.

Dauer

[lunamoth]

90% of this thread is beyond me, but the idea of the human "processing" of time moving from a cyclical into a linear mode with Abraham is interesting (I also read T. Cahill's The Gift of the Jews). I got the picture of a spiral rather than a straight line as well. Who knows if this change actually started with Abraham or if it was a paradigm shift his culture was ripe to make. Certainly even before this shift people were aware of time as linear but there was less appreciation of intentional social advancement, is how I understood Cahill's thesis. If I'm remembering right, he suggested that the big change was from the dawning realization that an indivdual's lives and actions could and would make a difference in the shape of the future society. That each generation would progress, rather than only repeat the cycles of birth, growth, decline, death, changed the concept of time from a cycle to a spiral. So, in my decidedly unscholarly view, it is the future promise to Abraham's descendants in addition to the creation "anchor" that accounts for the shift.

lunamoth