Much of human life involves cycles— some almost unnoticed, others obvious and troublesome. We instinctively accept the regular cycle of day and night, but we may be troubled by the ups and downs of our fortunes, our moods, our health. Is it inevitable that we cannot know recurrent good without also knowing recurrent evil? Or is the solution to resist everything cyclic and attempt to live in a static world?
Christian Science answers these questions by revealing the basic nature of good and evil. Good does not waver or fade, because God is good, eternal, and ever present. Evil is not a force opposed to good but is the lie that good can be absent. Because man is spiritual, the image or reflection of God, and therefore the very embodiment of good, evil is without power to pull men periodically away from good. True cycles, then, are not oscillations between good and evil but timeless and irresistible unfoldments of the nature of good, God. As we welcome this unfoldment in our lives, we gain a clearer sense of God as Soul, the source of all harmony, and the discordant patterns of human life cease to impress us. Mrs. Eddy puts it succinctly: "The cycle of good obliterates the epicycle of evil." The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 270;
But what is an epicycle? The term comes from ancient astronomy. In Ptolemy's geocentric (earth-centered) theory of the universe, planets were assumed to follow complex paths called epicycles, moving in a small orbit around a point which, in turn, made a larger orbit around the earth. When the Copernican hypothesis was verified and planets were shown to move in simple elliptical orbits about the sun, Ptolemy's theory of epicycles faded away.
