Seite - 111 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/02

Agur’s painting also expresses a critique of male logic, expressed by linear time, while female time is represented as cyclical, thus the male symbols in the paint- ing are the ones painted in perspective. The painter’s claim to change Mondrian’s timelessness into a linear time in her painting is, in my opinion, not totally successful. The two “Times” are not entirely separated. The painting is divided into two parts – at the top, Mondri- an’s geometric forms and the basic colours appear in his own style and at the bottom, the painter introduces the linear time by the laws of perspective. Again we see, as in her other paintings, that those two times exist simultaneously. Today, Westerners live along two parallel axes of time. On the communal and cultural level, the linear time axis is manifested in the grand narratives of history, democracy and capitalism. On the personal and authentic level, West- ern man is caught up in the race towards future success, which is also founded on linear thought and anticipation of the future, albeit on an individual scale. In terms of the religious underpinning of the linear timeline, there is a distinc- tion to be made between approaches that see God as responsible for salvation and approaches that see man as capable of influencing his fate and driving the wheel of fortune. When humans believe they can affect their future, because it is not yet determined, they develop the motivation to launch into a pursuit through time of future personal and authentic success. This motivation may be religious in its origins, but it has undergone a process of secularization. Nevertheless, the axis of personal time is also based on religious patterns of thought. The belief that man can influence his future stems from the biblical conception of time. In the second half of the second century, the Greek philos- opher Galen was the first to point out the difference between the biblical and Greek cultures and claims that the fundamental divergence between the two is the result of two different cosmologies.53 Galen maintains that the principle of God’s free will could only arise against the backdrop of biblical cosmology, ac- cording to which God has the power to bring matter into a state of order. God’s will designs a different future and contains the possibility of creation, change, renewal, exchange, irreversibility and improvement. Galen adds that the lack of free will in classical Greek culture is also a result of its proper cosmology. In an eternal and deterministic world, free will cannot exist – everything is in the hands of fate and necessity. The Old Testament, which posits a world created ex nihilo, pre-supposes the existence of free will.54 This free will is at the basis of the personal authentic axis of time. In today’s technological, consumer capitalist society, time has become a val- uable personal resource linked to success and achievement and perceived as 53 Dihle 1982. 54 Kaufman 1972, 244. Western Apocalyptic Time and Personal Authentic Time | 111www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 95–116