"I am a believer in God, of course, but also in something else. I am a believer in Greece. Greece has suffered very much in these last years for sins committed elsewhere and to some extent for sins we committed ourselves. Ours were sins of laxity, as you might say, and those of America and the rest were sins of enthusiasm. They were seized with the joy of an impossible equation, a getting of something for nothing, and the result was that our sleepy little country was brought to a dark place. But I believe it may be that a great reversal is coming, that the focus of civilisation may shift from California and Beijing on and on around the globe until it is once again in Athens, just as Plato once said that it would. In the twelfth book of the Civitas Dei , we find that Plato believed in a circular cosmos. He taught that the universe repeats upon itself, and that one day he would again be teaching in Athens just as he was then. It is the doctrine of apocatastasis: a return to the beginning. I understand there is a proposition of mathematical physics which might support such a pattern."