1917. 1941. 1991. Within a single human lifetime the world manages to collapse and be rebuilt — and more than once. This is no accident: every downfall, from Babylon to the 20th century, follows one and the same four-step scenario.
1 · IdolA living idea — God, freedom, the nation, science — is turned into an idol, and people begin to serve it.philosophers call this "objectification"
2 · CollapseThe idol cannot hold: war, revolution, ruin. It falls — and buries its own builders.
3 · CaptivityThe survivors live among the ruins, still serving out of habit an idea already dead.
4 · ReturnSomeone turns back toward the living: a prophet, a philosopher, a poet. With them a new turn of the spiral begins.
So history is not a straight line of progress, nor a closed circle, but a spiral — the same four steps, each time on a new turn. The Bible tells this drama from Eden to the New Kingdom — history repeats it in dates and names.
The blue thread is what is revealed to the human being; the gold is what the human being answers. The beads are living people: in every age its own prophet, its own Abraham, its own Job.
by time — who lived when; by law — who stands on which of the four steps
VIII BCVII BCVI BCV BCIV BCIII BCII BCI BCIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIVXVXVIXVIIXVIIIXIXXXXXI
the ribbon of history — 50 catastrophes, each beneath its own century; hover a marker to read the four steps of the law on that event; colour = the resonating drama