If God is the author of time, and if by His divine decree we find ourselves immersed in time, fated to swim amid the ebb and flow of temporality, is it even thinkable that God should evince the least hostility toward time? Or if not actively averse to time, to be at least indifferent to its movements? These are questions at the heart of a profound little book written more than a half-century ago by a Jesuit priest named William F. Lynch, whom no one seems to remember anymore, much less read.
The book is called Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination, brought out by Sheed and Ward back in 1960, marking the close of what had arguably been a singularly rich period of literary activity among Catholic artists and intellectuals in this country. It certainly worked a sea change in my own life, for which I am no end of grateful.
So, what is this seminal yet largely forgotten book about? Well, its thesis turns on a certain choice we must make between two opposing currents found in literature and life. Do we follow the dream of Apollo and fly off into pure effortless fantasy, untethered to the world God made, or do we take Christ as our model, for whom the plunge into the mire and the muck of a time-bound world will bring us not just insight in this world but the joys of salvation in the next? Not much room to maneuver, argues Lynch, between the two. And, of course, he makes no secret of his own preference, which is to stand, in the tradition of Cardinal Newman, “firmly and truly” with Christ, who gave Himself over to all the concrete particulars of a life steeped in the world His Father had made and who, in due course, would insert Him into that world in order to have it all remade once it fell into grief and shipwreck.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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“I mean Christ to stand for the completely definite,” declares Fr. Lynch,
for the man who, in taking on our human nature (as the artist must) took on every inch of it (save sin) in all its density, and who so obviously did not march too quickly or glibly to beauty, the infinite, the dream.
And so it follows that the human soul, believing itself wedded to Christ, hoping in Christ, indeed, imagining itself “locked most securely in the embrace of the timeless divinity,” must never, even as it finds itself catapulted into the arms of God,
forego its grip on the humanity and temporality of Christ. The men of the infinite would have us believe that at least in prayer, at least at the moment of union with God, time is transcended and some kind of motionlessness, some kind of quasi eternity is reached. But time is a kind of ontological prayer. There is no other form of union with God. Ultimately the most solid form of prayer for the Christian…is not rest but motion: a coursing, with all the powers of the mind and will and body, through the mysteries—that is, the stages—of the life of Christ. It is no idle phrase that the Church repeats when she says again and again: per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso, through Him, and with Him, and in Him.
In setting out his argument, by the way, Fr. Lynch would keep always in the forefront of his mind a stray comment once made by the poet W.H. Auden, which was that while no one really gives a fig about the sisters and cousins and aunts of the god Apollo, who did not even exist, people are consumed with curiosity to know everything about the life of the God-Man Jesus Christ, who most assuredly did exist. A curiosity not incidentally extending even to a host of non-miraculous details marking the life of Christ. Who more than He, asks Lynch, has ever plunged as deeply into the human predicament, going all the way down into the very bowels of Hell to bring back captives for God? And quoting that magnificent passage from St. Paul, written to the Church at Ephesus while languishing in prison, reminds us how Christ,
Ascending on high (he) gave gifts unto men. Now, that he ascendeth, what is it, but because he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. (4:8-10)
In other words,
God is ironic, and he will not be beaten at his own game, and his game is time. Thus his victory over Satan is internal and complete, not a victory that is extrinsic and Manichaean. His Son is the Sun, but the course of this Sun is through man. Above all he is a bridegroom and an athlete running with joy through the whole length and breadth of the human adventure. He marches to the ultimate of the finite. Wherefore he has been exalted and every knee shall bow to him, of all the things that are in heaven or on earth or under the earth.
How wonderfully eloquent Fr. Lynch manages to be on the subject of time, reminding us on practically every page of Christ’s unvarying resolution to reach right down to the very bottom of the barrel of being—“riding time,” as the poet Hopkins puts it, “like a river.” He does not hover above the flux, in other words, nor does He merely skim along its surface, but He penetrates right down to the very bone and marrow of the human condition.
He assumes a body, which has been the scandal of every docetist (the heretic who holds that Christ did not have a real body), from Marcion to our own day…In the desert he refuses the devil’s temptation of cheap, immediate glory. He weeps over Jerusalem instead of leading it as a great military messiah. When he is taken prisoner, he tells his captors that, if he so wishes, his Father would send him legions of angels—but that he would not ask for them. On the cross he is offered a kind of medication but refuses it.
There is no other human being, he concludes, nor could there ever be one, as entitled as he is, to say with complete and utter authenticity in the teeth of all the terrors occasioned by time: “It is consummated.” It is not strictly true, therefore, to characterize the actions of Christ as someone determined on simply redeeming time.
For time has never needed redeeming; it only needed someone to explore its inner resources fully, and add even further resources to it, as he did. And so powerful and new is the exploration, in his case, that it is crowned not only with insight but with the Resurrection.
The sturdy peasant knows, Fr. Lynch tells us in a wonderful throwaway line, indeed, the souls of the simple surely know, that when one is sick it will not do only to ask the physician to heal us. Time, too, may prove to be a source of healing. Such souls as these, he reminds us,
understand that they must continue to live moment by moment; that time is not an enemy lying in wait outside the self to trap them, but is nothing but the phases of their own life, as much a part of them as their own skin, out of which they cannot leap.
I shall give the last word to T.S, Eliot, who, in that masterwork of Christian verse called Four Quartets, advises us that “Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness.” And that “To be conscious is not to be in time / But only in time,” he adds, “can the moment in the rose-garden, / The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, / The moment in the draughty church at smokefall / Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered.”
And while it is true that “to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time, is an occupation for the saint,” leaving for the rest of us “only the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time,” nevertheless, it remains equally true that even as “this is the aim / Never here to be realized,” we remain yet “undefeated / Because we have gone on trying,” soldiering on in that common Christian quest of the Still Point.
May these few reflections, and those that follow, draw us deeper into the mystery of time, which is God’s first work of creation, along with all the other mysteries that impinge upon our condition as creatures made in the image of God—including, to be sure, that deepest mystery of all: Why being rather than nothingness?
