I’m here returning to a topic ve addressed in a variety of ways on this site – the topic of aging, of moving through the times and stages of human life.
The immediate occasion for this writing is a journal’s rejection of a scholarly article I’ve written about my mentor Lynch’s call for a spirituality for our passage through time. Copied below is most of that article with occasional additions from more recent reflections on time.
It’s quite long, so please feel free to skip through or delete, as the Spirit moves you. As always, please bear with typos and spacing problems I can’t correct.
It discusses three of Lynch’s books – Christ and Apollo (1960), Christ and Prometheus (1970), and Images of Faith (1973) – as well two short writings, one from early in his life (1939), the other from his elder years (1982).
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In Images of Faith, his last published book,[1] Lynch made the following statement:
I repeat that everything I have ever written asks for the concrete movement of faith and the imagination through experience, through time, through the definite, through the human, through the actual life of Christ (IF, 81).
It is my hope that this essay will gradually unfold what Lynch meant by this description of “everything I have ever written.” Yet even at this beginning point the reader may get a feel for the intention of Lynch’s thought from his emphasis on the concrete movement of faith and imagination, and perhaps even more from his rhythmic repetition of the word “through”: through experience, through time, through the definite, through the human, and through the actual life of Christ. Everything he wrote “asks for” this movement. Indeed, he called for it with a constant and restrained urgency.
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An Initial Image
In his essays, William Lynch often began with an italicized summary of key ideas, at times followed by some image to guide the reader through subsequent discussion.
Here is my attempt to do something analogous for this essay.
First the summary:
It’s quite obvious that we humans live within time’s limitations and burdens as well as with time’s opportunities and freedoms. It’s also obvious that “from time to time” we need a break from time’s limits and burdens. Yet we also regularly seek more problematic and “gnostic-fantastic” escapes from those burdens. Thus we have much need of habits and practices of discernment which will enable us to move through the stages and phases of our lives, even unto death. For only this messy human way can lead to a real fullness of life.
Then my attempt at an introductory image:
We celebrate birthdays and holidays like Mother’s and Father’s Day. On such days I remember my parents, and also my children and grandchildren. Such specific memories also inevitably contain, as their background, memories of the stages and phases of my life – the many moments and passages of those years, both as personally experienced and lived through in the of this country (think civil rights and Vietnam and more recently climate change and covid) and throughout the world. I hope that my reader might find an analogous image or sense of their own life to guide them through Lynch’s ideas about time.
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Even with much diminished memory during my own passage through elder years, I nonetheless have personal memories of the four major wars I’ve lived through (WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, and the supposedly-ended “Cold War”) as well as personal memories of many other wars in South and Central America, Africa (especially South Africa), and present wars (especially those in Ukraine and Palestine). And I have accumulated knowledge about so many other wars – in Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Christendom, the European Wars of Religion, the US Civil War, 18th and 19th Century wars of revolution (American and French), the First World War, and so many other historic moments and periods of war and the search for peace. Name a country or continent (with the possible exception of Antarctica) and you call to mind the history of many wars.
Some of these war memories include family memories and the stories of good friends. And these many joyful family memories – births, weddings, reunions, and even deaths – far outweigh the significance of the war memories.
I have still some vague memories of early childhood, many suggested by family photographs. I have clearer memories of elementary and secondary school, though here too photos help. Then many far clearer memories of college and seminary days, of more than 40 years of teaching (high school and university). Many vivid memories of marriage, the birth of children and of grandchildren, the death of parents and of a brother and a son.
These memories are evidence, if such is needed, of the fact that human existence is essentially temporal, time bound and time limited, challenged by time’s possibilities and rooted in past times.
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The philosophically minded may already have picked up on the strange paradox that, as philosopher Lynch puts it, the essence of human life is temporal existence. Or, said differently, there is nothing new in the existentialist philosophers focus on the temporal limitations of human life.
No matter what the stage of our lives, we seem to have some sense of this temporality, of moving through time. This sense or consciousness is very limited in the infant and child but is still present. It increases with the anxieties and aspirations of adolescence. It grows through our more mature and middle years, especially through the press of responsibilities and opportunities. Yet, ironically, this sense of our passage through time is probably most conscious during our elder years of diminishing memory. For only then, with the end approaching, are we most able to have some comprehensive sense of our passage through many phases and stages.
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“OK,” one might say, and quickly add “So what?”. Everybody “knows” all this.
Sic et non, yes and no.
We know but don’t, or don’t understand adequately, and don’t understand and practice ways of living into and through life’s stages. Or so it seems to me.
Always forward, progressing, winning, coming out on top – that’s our far too typical understanding and is inevitably accompanied by mental and physical habits for not failing or regressing. Or so it seems for we “American Adams,” ever born again and starting ever anew.[2]
Of course, some (gnostic) teachings suggest that we can somehow escape or stop time, live in some eternal present beyond the ebb and flow of time. And many seem to embrace that fantastic notion, even try to practice it.
I really don’t know what good Buddhists mean by this “presentness,” though I certainly understand and affirm the need for moments of inner tranquility as a restful pause from the ongoing rush of time. Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and other ecstasies can be helpful (even as they easily become addictive escapes from reality). As, too, moments of quiet prayer, of distilled quiet on a mountain top or along rolling/roiling surf.
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What, then, might be other, perhaps better practices of mind and spirit which would enable us to move through time?
Strangely enough, one can be called “the imitation of Christ.” For it is the Christ, the Word
and Wisdom who came among us in the life of Jesus of Nazareth – who moved with us through human time, from birth to death, with no attempts to escape its challenges and sufferings. That, at least, is the strong suggestion Ignatius of Loyola makes in his Spiritual Exercises. For he asks us, challenges us, to meditate on the stages and phases of Jesus’ life as a way of understanding the stages and phases of our lives, a way of understanding and of living or practicing.
Jesuits provide sermons and retreats and writings about this sense of co-passage with Christ through the times of our lives.
They especially urge, as Ignatius did, the daily practice of “examen” as a key way for staying with the days of our lives. Stopping once or several times a day in order to notice and discern about what’s actually happening as our inner lives respond to the outer passages of the day. Focusing especially on moments or ways the Holy Spirit has moved us into goodness, and thanking God for those moments.
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For Catholics and others there’s also the practice of “saying the rosary” – the mumbling of repeated prayers to Mary and Our Father as we think about the joyous, sorrowful, and glorious “mysteries” of the life of Jesus. A kind of simplified or poor person’s version of Ignatius Exercises.
And there was (no longer except in isolated retreat houses and monasteries) the ringing of the bells for “Angelus prayer” (look it up) and for reciting the “monastic hours”.
Then, too, most widely practiced by all kinds of Christians, there’s the word and sacrament of weekly (or daily) Christian ritual – hearing and commenting on the stories and sharing the memorial rituals of bread and wine. Curious, isn’t it, that the “Last Supper” was anything but the last; for it is the most repeated meal in human history.
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As usual, I ramble. Yet hopefully only to criss-cross the same field from different angles and in different directions in order to gain fuller understanding (the image is Wittgenstein’s, not mine.)
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Aphorisms and Intellectuals
Yet, one might legitimately ask: don’t we already have many cultural resources for understanding and enabling our journey through time? Think but of many aphorisms or folk sayings about taking one step at a time, making haste slowly, enjoying the moment, carpe diem, until death do us part, and vaya con Dios. We have as well many songs and stories which serve us in similar ways.
Lynch and I would answer that question with a resounding “Yes”. Thank the Lord that we do already have such guides for our spirits. Lynch describes such cultural resources as “a body of faith” (or basic trust) on which we all draw. It has taken many millenniato develop. Yet it must constantly struggle against contrary “resources” which seek to undermine faith and turn our culture and society into a “body of unfaith” filled with distrust, even contempt. (More on all this below.)
It is because of his wider reflections on time – such as these ideas about our “body of faith” – that I am here arguing the importance of Lynch’s ideas. Most of us will get by with proverbs and stories, but our public intellectuals – the writers and thinkers as well as all the “ordinary folk” like parents and neighbors whose responsibility it is to maintain and develop our city’s “body of faith” – may find much that is helpful in Lynch’s reflections.
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An Initial Contrast and Hypothesis
Let me now suggest an admittedly simplistic contrast between what I shall call “spirituality es of the moment” and “spiritualities of passage through time.” Said differently, many contemporary spiritualities tend to focus on or emphasize the vertical moment or the height and depth dimensions of spiritual practice. Less emphasized and more needed (this is my hypothesis) are spiritualities which focus primarily on the human journey or passage through time.
By spiritualities focused on the moment, I mean those which affirm and seek openness to peak experiences, experiences of depth or ascent, of the moment which intersects and transcends time, the still point of meditative practice, the sudden awe at the rolling surf or at an achieved mountain summit, the utter emptiness of the desert. The gift of such “moments” (of light or darkness) is immensely important for our spiritual lives, for the journey of our lives. That’s why we celebrate the moments of rapture or vision in the lives of our saints.
Among recent examples of those understandings which emphasize the moment, I think first of Thomas Merton’s regular recourse to the depth presence of God amidst our toils and troubles, and then of his famous Walnut Street “vision”.
There is, Lynch suggests, a similar emphasis in T. S. Elliot’s phrases (in Four Quartets) about the “still point in the turning world” and the “intersection of the timeless with time.” Commenting on those phrases, Lynch argues “it is hard to say no to the impression…that [Elliot’s] Christian imagination is finally limited to the element of fire, to the day of Pentecost, to the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples. The revelation of eternity and time is of an intersection … It seems not unseemly to suppose that Eliot’s imagination…is alive with points of intersection and of descent…. He seems to place our faith, our hope, and our love, not in the flux of time but in the points of time…” (CA, 172).
Lynch also finds the same emphasis in Karl Barth for whom “Christ is the isolated, solitary, and unique Moment in the presence of which all other befores and afters have no power” (CA 16).
The foundational image for all such spiritualities is intersection rather than passage.
Of course, it’s important to acknowledge, as Lynch does, that all such spiritualities are always more complex, more interwoven with the movements of time than these brief references suggest.[3]
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As his first example of spiritualities of passage through time – which certainly admit and embrace moments of depth or tranquility, mountain-top moments – Lynch regularly points to The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.[4] The Exercises were, for him, the primary source for his conviction that our spiritual lives are a passage through time, with many twists and turns, action and suffering, leading thereby unto the fullness of life.
As a further example, Lynch points to Aeschylus (on whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation), for “Aeschylus was possibly the first to teach us that descent into that deeper temporality is the very moving life of the soul” (CA, 53). He means that centuries before Christ it was Aeschylus, as founder of Greek theater, who taught us, by the rhythms and movements in his plays, the utter centrality of dramatic movement through time for knowing and making and saving the human. Said again, he taught us through his plays about “that deeper temporality…rather than the superficial levels of time found in mechanical motion, successive sensations, and the ticking of clocks” (CA, 53).
Among others whose writings explore this sense of passage through time, Lynch notes Cervantes’ depiction of Don Quixote’s passage, in stages through the book, from romantic dreamer to a decent fellow who has become kin to his servant Sancho (IF, 121-24).[5] Earlier he had argued that Don Quixote’s “essential theme [is] the final return of the infinite-directed, the romantic mind to the few basic, narrow realities which in the flesh confront each living soul…” (CA, 40).
Yet, at least for me, Lynch’s most compelling literary exemplification of this passage through time is found in his discussion of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in Christ and Apollo (18-27) – especially his analysis of the younger brother Alyosha’s passage or dramatic movement, in a matter of days, from a deep sense of lostness because of the death of his monastic mentor, Fr. Zossima, to an embrace of his actual vocation to serve the world.
Though my knowledge of music is limited, let me suggest that my contrast of two sensibilities with regard to time is analogous to the difference between melody and crescendo/climax. (This contrast may also serve as a guiding image for what follows here.) We all enjoy the crescendo, but it’s the melody, whether the simple song of the spirituals and monastic chant or the country sound of folk and the foundational melodic movements within symphonies and operas – it’s the melody that gets us through the days and years. Yet, at least as I see it, too much contemporary music (from rock to musicals to cinematic scores) seems to do little more than build into constant crescendos calling for ecstatic applauses.
My contrast is undoubtedly simplistic, as is my hypothesis. But let them stand as a hermeneutic of sorts for further exploration of Lynch’s ideas about time.
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No One Way
It is also important to note at the start, as Lynch himself regularly did, that there is “no one way” for exploring the significance of time in our lives. No neat formula or practical program, no merely conceptual or univocal understanding. One comes gradually to at least some clarity and understanding, in this as in any other human exploration, only via multiple paths and at different times in our lives.
Think for a moment of how we, each of us, have come to understand love, or justice, or freedom. Only through time and different experiences. Or, for that matter, our understanding of church and belief. So too with understanding time. And this itself a good example of the fact that we come to understanding human things only by movement through time.
In what follows, then, I take up a number of different but analogous explorations of Lynch’s writings about time – with inevitable repetitions and crisscrossing – in the hope that I may get to the point where the argument of this essay will make sense.
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Of Rhythm and Its End
Lynch wrote “Of Rhythm and Its End”[6] (one of his earliest published essays) in 1939, as the shadows of war spread across the world.
He opens with the with the observation that during such times “our faith in direction, in the meaning of life and history fails“.7 Such is the fog of war. To which I would add that similar confusions occur during any period of crisis.
Then Lynch makes the startingly simple suggestion that “What we need in such times are habits of soul that are as deep and as old as the first nursery rhyme we ever sang….”[8] We need, in other words, a deeper sense of the rhythmic patterns which sustain us and which, by their implied sense of an ending, restore some elements of direction and hope.
In developing this idea, Lynch discusses the role of rhythm in poetry – in the choral rhythms of Greek theater, but also in the rhythms of speech and gesture, the give and take of dialogue as well as movement, which we find in any good cinema or theater. He notes especially the rhythm of the sonnet with its final couplet as perhaps the simplest example of the rhythm of poetry more generally.
Lynch then passes to far more fundamental forms of rhythm: “the pulsing of the blood stream, the movement of day after day, the growth and decay of things….”[9] Then a glance at the rise and fall of civilizations and his articulation of the faith that “Christ alone” gives to these historic rhythms a real sense of ending: “the Mystical Body of Christ, restoring all things…moving towards the harvest time, moving towards the one fold and the one shepherd.”[10]
He urges us to “feed ourselves…upon rhythms and endings and forms…. We will come to know that the laws of poetry are the laws of our own soul and some day we will insist that the world too shall have them”[11] – these laws of rhythm and ending.
Unfortunately, we still live, and will long have to live, with “the fog of war” and an often-dismal sense of crisis and darkness. Yet the simplest of rhythms (these are my examples) like rocking a baby to sleep or cheering together at the ball game – the simplest of rhythms do bring the comfort of real hope, the kinds of on-the-ground hope which enables us to endure that wider suffering. How much more, then, the rhythm of the spirituals (singing “She’s God the Whole World in Her Hands” while rocking the baby) and much of the music of our churches?[12]
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Christ and Apollo[13]
Lynch’s most sustained discussions of time and our passage through time are found in Christ and Apollo (1959) and in Images of Faith (1973). Christ and Prometheus (1970) also contributes to those discussions. Here I first shall follow some threads from the former, then below ideas from the latter two books.
Let me begin with a series of citations and comments:
Of all the finite, limited things with which the imagination is confronted, time perhaps is the most limited… a succession of pure instants [from which] nothing survives…an inexorable flow…. [Thus] there is an instinct in us which rebels against time [by seeking] a moment of peace or goodness…some kind of eternity…. (CA, 31-2)
Perhaps we experience the relentless movement of time, pushing us constantly, leaving us endlessly. So we must find escapes from time.
Due to the encroachments of automation and the terribly repetitive, unfeeling nature of much of our daytime work, we have been led to create a night-time culture…. This night-time culture is largely an attempt to provide a sensational and sentimental dream life in which real time is arrested or forgotten, and the coming of the next morning indefinitely put off. (CA, 36-7)
Rushed through the day, we get our drinks and dance the night away, or (more typically and ironically) we watch TV to be entertained by shows about entertainers!
We Americans, of course, also pride ourselves on being hard-working doers, often working well into the night. Often (at least when Lynch wrote) taking a break only for church on Sunday.
The [hard working] American may go to church on Sunday…but secretly conceives of this church-going as a kind of escape from the temporal…. Church-going is on the level for these people with going to a romantic movie in the evening after having worked hard all day…. (CA, 46-7)
It should come as no surprise, then, that Lynch discusses Edgar Allen Poe, that most-American writer who sought “the conquest of time” by evoking in his work “the dream, or ‘nocturnal time’ as opposed to ordinary daytime” (CA, 36).
In Christ and Apollo, which is essentially a book of literary criticism, Lynch gives many other examples of the ways in which contemporary literary talent leads the reader and the culture into dreams of escaping time. He suggests (CA, xiv) that the “Apollo” of his title should be taken as a symbol for the infinite dream even as “Christ” stands for the definite and actual.
As further examples of this apollonian imagination, Lynch (CA, 34-6) discusses Proust “for whom the great enemy of the human race and of human happiness is time, which must be overcome [by discovery] within this inimical element [of] some kind of eternity.” Then French surrealist poets like Baudelaire who said: “One must always be drunk…. In order not to feel the horrible burden of time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the ground, you must get drunk incessantly.” To which Lynch adds: “Drinking halts time and provides the gift, in an instant, of an artificial eternity.”
He also discusses the philosophical foundations of this kind of imagination. He notes that Descartes (CA, 37) launched perhaps “the most ambitious, the most brilliant, and most sophisticated vendetta against time,” and later (CA, 47) mentions “Leibniz, Spinoza, and Kant [who] have held that mind…is already quite full of truth…without being bothered by…the business of living through time.”
As further literary examples of this apollonian imagination, Lynch discusses Graham Greene (CA, 126-28) and Albert Camus (CA, 128-29). He gives even more attention to Eugene O’Neill (CA, 81-88) whose dark dramas, like The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, depict an irredeemable (and thoroughly gnostic) wasteland, while his “theological” plays, like Lazarus Laughed, are “nothing but sheer leaping out of reality… blowing bubbles in an idle dream world.”
Yet, while regularly noting such examples of the instinct in all of us which rebels against time, Lynch nonetheless asserts that “on the attitude we take towards time…on our decision either to strain against it or to accept it, depends all our peace” (CA, 32). Only by accepting time, with its limits and burdens, only by living through time, can we find any real peace.
In support of that claim, Lynch returns regularly to literary works which depict such passage through time. I’ve already noted his argument that “Aeschylus was possibly the first to teach us that descent into that deeper temporality is the very moving life of the soul (CA, 53). I’ve also mentioned his discussion of how the works of both Cervantes and Dostoevsky exemplify such a spirituality of passages through time.
Without going into further detail here, I note Lynch’s discussion of other literary works which, each in its own way, exemplify this passage through time: Fellini’s La Strada (CA, 41-42), Euripides’ Oedipus (CA, 44-5: “Nowhere is time forsaken.”), Dante’s Commedia (CA, 50-51), David Jones’ The Anathemata (CA, 127), and Synge’s Riders to the Sea (CA 146). I note these works because Lynch does. Yet I invite the reader to evoke in personal memory and imagination other works of dramatic art which similarly exemplify the spiritual significance of passages through time.
For Lynch, of course, this passage is possible because time itself is a great good created by God.
Human life is a moving structure of phases (birth, childhood, adolescence, prime, middle age, old age, death) so put together by its very movement to produce insight and illumination…. The temporal flow of human life is therefore a formed thing, a significant form. It is a progressive and planned movement into and within the infinite…. (CA, 38-9; emphases added)
Christ is, for Lynch, the primary example (or prime analogue) of this created structure. Christian faith, then, has as its prime directive that the Christian must stay with this structure:
I mean Christ to stand for the completely definite, for the Man who in taking on our human nature…took on every inch of it…and Who so obviously did not march too quickly or too glibly to beauty, the infinite, the dream. I take Him, secondly, as the model and source of the energy and courage we need to enter the finite as the only creative and generative source of beauty. (CA, xiv)
The Christian generally believes that time is a passageway to the infinite, and that the latter goal cannot be reached by any other means. He believes that the infinite is not a reward for having lived through so dreadful a thing as temporality, but rather that, in a very powerful sense, such an infinite – whether it is beauty or God or peace – proceeds out of time by a kind of extraordinary structural logic. The process is, for the Christian, a weaker but nonetheless true analogue of the manner in which Christ Himself passed through the stages of human life back into the bosom of His heavenly Father. (CA, 40-1)
Christian belief is in its essence belief in a Man who, having “created” time, could not possibly be hostile to it; who had directed it from the beginning by His providence and His having substantially and inwardly shaped it…[and] who finally entered it and grew into it with subtlety and power. (CA, 50)
At one point, Lynch takes up the challenge presented by major modern critics (think both Marx and Freud) that Christianity is an opiate or a sublimation which enables people to dream away from the harsh realities of history and of personal psychology. His response:
I think that Catholic doctrine is the very reverse of this magical idea; rather it is a divine command of the mind and the will to enter, on the divine and human planes, into an historical, actual, and eventful set of facts which penetrate reality to the hilt. And for this summary there are two major pieces of evidence with which every reader is certainly somewhat familiar. The first is the liturgy of the Church which in its changing year reviews the events of the life of Christ. The second…is the Apostles Creed…which begins with God and ends with eternal life for men, but in between is time, the time through which Christ passed and that time through which doctrine implicitly commands us to pass. (CA, 58-9)
Again, Lynch returns frequently to Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises as his primary example of a spiritual practice for our passage through time. His analysis of the Exercises emphasizes “Ignatius’ plea that we direct our search for God through time, reality, and the self” (CA, 61). Lynch’s own grounding in Ignatian spirituality was most fully expressed in an essay on “St. Ignatius and ‘The New Theological Age’” which he contributed to a special issue of Thought on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Ignatius’ death.[14]
There he analyzes our “new theological age” (what we’d today call “the signs of the times”) in terms of two understandable but antithetical spiritual movements among our people. First is the movement within, a movement seeking a deep peace because the surface realities of our machine civilization are almost unbearable. Yet, this movement within (with its ecstasies and fantasies) eventually fails to bring peace, or at best some momentary peace. Thus an alternative movement arises, an attempt to leap beyond this world to God or some infinite. Yet this movement also ends up empty because it cannot leave behind the inescapable realities of our embodied selves and our world. It leaves us, as Marx and Freud correctly asserted, only with a religious illusion.
Lynch then issues a plea to “thoughtful Christian men and women, and especially to the theologians and writers among them, to theologize…in such a way that they are aware of the tremendous new spiritual forces that are now at large among us.” He makes a similar plea to the modern non-Christian thinker and writer that she too note “the awful inadequacy, despite its power and beauty, of the point at which we have actually arrived and the final primitiveness of these separatist movements which now begin to overwhelm them.”[15]
Lynch issues his plea to both Christian and non-Christian in the hope that they might join in the much-needed elaboration, in their critical and in their creative writings, of spiritualities or sensibilities more adequate to the needs of our times. (How about some really good love stories instead of the typical fantasies which sell so well? Or even some real stories about war and peace instead of the extravaganzas of violence which provide such escapes?)
To that end he then offers “a relatively brief look at the theology of St. Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises…to consider whether it might not have some shocking relevancy”[16] for our common problem. Why? Because (again) of “Ignatius’ plea that we that we direct our search for God through time, reality, and the [embodied] self.”[17]
Christ and Prometheus
I indicated above that Christ and Prometheus (1970) further expands Lynch’s ideas about time. It was his contribution to the “secular city” debate in Christian theology during the 1960s and 1970s. The book argues that Christian faith needs to find “a new image of the secular” and thus a new image of itself – new ways of understanding both the great good of our Promethean (or modern) times and of Christianity’s new servant and prophetic role in both enhancing that good and criticizing its errors and excesses.
I do not intend here any summary of the book’s typically complex argument. Rather, I wish here simply to note three of the key ways in which the book exemplifies and embodies Lynch’s ideas about moving through time.
First, the book takes up the widely accepted idea that human history has moved through three great “Axial” or “Promethean” periods. First there were the initial gifts of fire and alphabet from Prometheus which are described in ancient mythologies. Something like this, Lynch says quite simply, must actually have happened. Then there was, during the second Promethean period, the emergence of civilization in the great city-states of India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and thence in Greece and Rome. Finally, there is our own Promethean era – typically seen as beginning with Enlightenment and Revolution, though rooted in Renaissance and Reformation, and continuing through our modernity’s present struggle with doubt (or post-modernity).
My point here is not to rehearse this modern history (nor the ecclesial and theological responses to it during the past several centuries). Rather the point is quite simple. We are, today, children of those past “stages and phases” of human development. Our world is the result of such millennial movement through time. We now live within its consequences.
Second, in the book’s opening sentence, Lynch again draws upon Aeschylus whose genius (during the second great Promethean era) “is able to direct our thoughts to the constant dramatic process by which human civilization moves through pain to higher moments of achievement and some verge of innocence…” (CP, 3).[18] A bit later, he tells us that Aeschylus also provides a broad formula for understanding this constant dramatic process:
He tells us in the Agamemnon [the first part of his Oresteia trilogy] that every story begins with a plunge into action…the action meets reality, has every sort of unintended consequences, and passes through a suffering history; through suffering the action reaches a new insight or point of reconciliation. These words summarize all: drama, pathos, mathos. (CP, 26)[19]
We act, we experience or receive (suffer) the consequences of our acts, and through that acting and suffering we (ideally) learn how to move forward. Again, my point here is not further discussion of the stages of that process (in life and history), but to emphasize that it is a process of living through time – for the ancient Greeks as much as for we moderns.
Thirdly, as a further way of emphasizing these ideas about time, Lynch structures his book not in terms of typical chapter-formatting, but according to the stages or “acts” of most theater. He begins with a Prologue, then proceeds through three Acts and ends with an Epilogue. He thereby indicates that the Promethean or the secular-sacred drama of our era moves through such acts or stages. He further suggests that we today seem to be experiencing a period of suffering and doubt about the consequences of the initial stages of modernity, a period many describe as postmodern.
In these ways, and in others, Christ and Prometheus exemplifies Lynch’s understanding of time’s passages and contributes to our understanding of the times through which we are now living.
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Images of Faith
I come now to Images of Faith, especially to its last chapter on “The Images of Faith and Human Time” (IF, 109-75), as my third major source for Lynch’s ideas about our passage through time.
The book is a quite difficult read,[20] partly because Lynch chooses to imitate the style Pascal’s Pensées by breaking his writing into relatively short meditative sections, each enriched by a very broad range of reference, and only broadly or analogously connected with preceding and subsequent sections.[21]
Let me first focus on the second meaning of the book’s title (and the second part of the book) which concerns how faith imagines the world. Lynch’s initially startling suggestion is that, while faith imagines the world in many ways – justly, compassionately, mercifully – one of the most important ways is with irony or ironically.
Faith imagines the world and time ironically because it understands that our human journey involves many setbacks and failures, dramatic reversals and unexpected detours, and the constant coexistence of contraries (such as the expected and the unexpected). Faith, in other words, understands that these and other forms of ironic reversal inevitably shape our human journey through time. (More below.)
The first meaning of the book’s title, and the explicit focus of its 2nd chapter (“Reimagining Faith”), is that we must think about faith less as some world-transcending ascent,[22] than as a great Dionysian depth within us (think of it, if you will, as a deep eros or an untamed id) – a force which continually moves us into the world, but a force which must be tutored and disciplined, not destroyed but given form and shape in actual human relationships of trust and civility. Into what Lynch calls “the body of faith”, a reality which takes many analogous forms, most visibly that of “the human city” itself. Said differently, the “human city” (great or small or familial) either embodies and is held together by basic human trust or, when pervaded by deep distrust and fear (as our “cities” so often are), it ceases to be human city and is reduced into polarized camps.[23]
Only the greater force of irony (Socratic, dramatic, and especially “the irony of Christ”) is capable of thus educating and civilizing that Dionysian force and thereby building a truly human city.
In Chapter 3, “The Structure of the Irony of Faith,” Lynch discusses his understanding of such irony, including his ideas about the central significance of “the irony of Christ.” There he says that “the irony of Christ is Christ himself.” It is not simply Jesus’ often ironic words (that the poor shall inherit the earth) but Jesus’ actual life – his birth in a stable, soon exiled, later a laborer, then a wandering prophet, welcomed to Jerusalem on a donkey, but soon crowned with thorns and executed as a political rabble rouser – it is this journey which led Jesus back to his Father. The irony of Christ, in other words, promises salvation by passage through its opposites – through such poverty and rejection, through suffering and real death.
***
Before turning to a more specific discussion of the book’s final chapter, allow me to risk wordy repetition by making hopefully helpful and “Lynchian” observations about time and irony.
Time itself is perhaps the greatest and most powerful force of irony in social as well as individual life. It is, one could even say, God’s great irony—a comic irony since time can be and often is essentially hopeful, though we know that it can also be deeply tragic. For the dramatic movement of both comedy and tragedy, on the stage as in life, not only takes time and involves a sequence of “acts”, but also involves time’s hard, at times even cruel, but also creative ironies.
Is it not, for instance, fundamentally both ironic and comic that we dreamers of great dreams and planners of important, even magnificent projects, can and must actually live only in the step-by-step smallness of actual human time. Whatever the glorious dreams of last night, or the great plans for tomorrow, even the greatest political and military leaders must still put one foot and then another on the floor each morning, still speak or write only one word at a time in order to complete a sentence, much less a grand oration or an entire book. And then risk becoming like Napoleon who, in 1812, had to face the terribly destructive reversal of his great plans.
Human time is inescapably momentary and we are essentially time-limited, indeed time-bound creatures. Yet human time is not simply momentary. It is also sequential and directional—a matter of stages and phases intended (by God and ourselves) to get someplace.
Thus it can and should be comic (in the word’s most fundamental sense) as a source of realistic hope. Yet we pursue that directionality and achieve realistic hope only by moving in time and growing through life’s stories and stages—only as our “Dionysian” energies are continually tutored by irony and thus brought “down” into reality by such passage and suffering.
We may well curse the reality of time, and perhaps often do—when we are tired or bored and can’t wait to end some drudgery, or when, by contrast, we are excited and can’t wait for an anticipated goal, whether returning home or departing on an adventure, initiating some plan or attaining some victory. For political leaders like Macbeth, as well as for ordinary folk, the “petty pace” of “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” often seems God’s curse rather than any blessing. Yet blessing it fundamentally is, according to Lynch, however difficult or tedious or ordinary the actual passage.
How so? Because time is God’s great ironizing instrument for saving us from the many false absolutes and mad visions, the towers of Babel which continually tempt us and our leaders to leap from the small but firm path of the human. Yet that path is always temporal and time always leads or forces us back to it. Or, perhaps better and more fundamentally stated, time itself is that inescapably human path.
For time is not just the relentless ticking of some great cosmic mechanism. Rather, whatever the physics of cosmic time, human time is for us (even for the great theoreticians of such physics) essentially rhythmic and dramatic, not some external thing but a force interior to the moments and directions of our lives and of our human city. In Lynch’s oft repeated phrase, human time is the “stages and phases” of actual lives, the rhythms and drama of real life in contrast to revolutionary fantasies of great leaps forward or Gnostic dreams of escape to a timeless utopia. Human time is, in other words, an interior structure of stages and phases which are going someplace, moving into the real realization (if I may be forgiven such a phrase) of the great desires we have felt, the great plans we have made, and the great promises we have been given—perhaps especially those desires and plans, promises and prayers, for justice and peace “on earth as it is in heaven.”
That human time is going someplace, or striving to go someplace, is the constant teaching of experience: of the child coming to itself, the adolescent learning to actually and gradually realize dreams, the conflicted struggles and always partial resolutions of human politics. Living through time has led and continually leads us to realizations of what has been promised. It is, of course, at times immensely difficult to believe what we are taught by such experience and by faith.
Perhaps today it is especially difficult to believe in the significance of the very small dimensions of human time which seem quite literally nothing at all by comparison with modern awareness of the vast stretches of cosmic space and time. Lynch, at least, was very aware of this Pascalian dilemma. For the seeming indifference of the “infinite universe,” with its billions of years and millions of galaxies, to our infinitesimally small earthly existence does often strike modern sensibility as a particularly cruel (even absurd) irony.
Nor need we look only to the silence of the stars to feel such irony about the relative insignificance of human life. For our present moment entails other great temptations, often in direct rebellion against this modern sense of cosmic indifference. I refer to the continual temptation of the “American Adam” to forget and even deliberately flee the past, to embrace the fantasy that totally new beginnings are actually possible in this new promised land.[24] Then to the more specific or historic temptations that especially concerned Lynch in Images of Faith — temptations to absolutized dreams about the human city and, far worse, the temptations of those actual and terrible political movements (both reactionary and revolutionary, at home and abroad) that have sought the violent realization of such fantasies.
For who today dares easily to proclaim the meaningfulness of human time and history—that the “stages and phases” of human time really are “going someplace”—in face of Holocaust and genocide and the failed gods of revolution and counter-revolution. Before such political realities, in such times, do not Macbeth’s powerful words seem to speak the more fundamental truth that “the petty pace of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Neither faith nor experience has any easy “answer” to the cruel ironies of recent history. Thus the different sections of Lynch’s final chapter in Images of Faith take up, one after another, different but central aspects of time’s difficult ironies, building towards a final section on “Death and Nothingness.” The writing, as I’ve said, is dense and difficult because of the difficulty of those ironies, and the difficulty that both faith and experience have in struggling to realize their meaning. Lynch certainly provides no easy answers. Rather he continually says, throughout this concluding series of reflections, that faith and experience can only find meaning and hope—can only come both to know and to believe that life’s stages and phases are going someplace—by passage through these ironies, by undergoing (or suffering) time’s continual pull “down” into the small lines of human life wherein alone the great hopes and promises, both personal and political, are actually (and ironically) realized.
Put differently, even the times when we curse time or when time seems to curse us – times perhaps like our present; perhaps especially such times – cannot be somehow cast off into some outer darkness or in some other way “transcended.” (That particularly modern idea of transcending is pure fantasy.) Rather they must be lived through, and it is in the passage of time, in these stages and phases of life, that irony works its greatest transformations. That, again, is the promise of both experience and faith. That is finally what Lynch calls the irony of Christ. And it happens only in time and only because of time’s often hard edges and difficult passages. In the words of Lynch’s late “Me and the East River” reminiscence: “Always two steps forward and one back” to the realization of life’s “muddy fleshed-out dreams.”[25] (More on this essay below.)
***
I come back to the final chapter of Images of Faith where Lynch asks us to imagine with him – to join his imagining of — the role that irony plays in the stages and phases of the human journey.[26]
He begins “The Images of Faith and Human Time” with following words summarizing much that has gone before:
Man is a temporal, historical being who is to be understood and defined in relation to the internal time scheme he occupies, from birth to death. This is his essence…. And it is by travelling back and forth in certain highly developed ways along the lines of human and Christic time that he lives the life of faith by memory, by action, by hope. Nothing less even begins to define what faith is…. (IF, 109)
Let us watch faith, imagining and experiencing this world, not statically, not all in a moment, not by instantaneous epiphany, but according to the movement and stages of life. (IF,109, emphasis added)
The chapter then develops with typically complex and Pascalian discussions of the seven “stages” of faith’s development. Yet while the list of these stages begins with childhood and ends with death, it soon becomes clear that Lynch is here not only or nor even primarily concerned to discuss the developmental stages typically used in contemporary psychology. Those developmental stages clearly do provide a background or framework for the more “internal passages” (my term) that he is concerned to discuss. He is, to put the matter differently, particularly concerned with the times or phases in human life where the work of irony is especially needed.[27] This is true (as we are about to see) even in “childhood,” and it is clearly suggested by the titles he gives to the successive stages: 2) “the unexpected,” 3) “building a present moment,” 4) “the passage through infinite possibility,” 5) “the passage through the curse,” 6) “tragedy,” and 7) “death and nothingness”.
Lynch’s Pascalian discussion of the role of faith’s ironies in each of these stages makes any summary impossible. Let me, instead, simply walk through these stages, briefly noting just some of his insights about the role of faith and irony in each.
—
First stage: irony and the passage through childhood (IF, 111-25):
The infant’s world, Lynch reminds us, is initially one of absolute unity and pure Dionysian power (the self, the mother, and “god” are an undifferentiated unity), yet even the newborn soon enough has to deal with difference (as the breast is removed and the bad mother appears, and eventually as sibling rivalry occurs). The child learns to deal with such difference in a variety of ways, all ironic but immensely healthy diminishments of that initial absolute. It is an ironic passage from a pure independence to real connection with and growing dependence on a world of objects and persons.
Lynch reviews the work of psychologists like Erik Erickson and Marian Millner for insights into this necessarily disillusioning process. He also discusses the role that children’s literature plays by enabling the child’s journey into a world of objects through an intermediate stage of imagining the world as simplistically divided into very good fairies and very bad monsters – suggesting those elements of the world the child can learn to trust and those he must fear.
Yet soon enough, and perhaps surprisingly, Lynch moves from such typically psychological discussion to an equally extended discussion of Christ’s challenge that we become like little children. And then to our belief that Christ Himself is both Son of the Father and child of the earth, a belief grounded in the Hebrew people being named “sons of the Living God,” and pointing towards the final promise that we are redeemed into being “sons of God” in unity with “the One Son.”[28]
We must, in other words, even as we must develop into adult independence, nonetheless become like little children, daughters and sons of God. And this becoming childlike and dependent is a deeply ironic companion to our quest for independence and maturity. It needs an ironic spirituality or sensibility that can hold together the contraries of dependence and independence; not the easy ironies that embrace the one (independence) while holding the other (dependence) in contempt.
—
Second stage: irony in our passage through “the unexpected” (IF, 125-32):
The child emerges from her initially undifferentiated unity because reality continually offers her the promise of safety and freedom. That promise began in the womb or, as Lynch at times says, it is carved into the very nature of womb and breast. Yet, as noted, the child’s expectation soon meets the unexpected – withdrawal of the breast – and so begins a long and educating passage – an ironizing back and forth – between promise and the unexpected. The breast returns, renewing the child’s sense of hope in what had been promised. Here are some of Lynch’s words about the child’s passage through the unexpected:
From earliest childhood faith becomes an increasingly active dialogue with promise. It is almost like a dance of gestures between the mother and the child, a dance of offer and response, increasing complexity, testing, verification…joys, cries, screams, withdrawals, renewal. (IF, 125)
Yet Lynch soon moves from such psychological discourse to the biblical discussion of God’s great promise to Abraham (IF, 126) that he would be the father of many nations. Indeed, we Jews and Christians and Muslims do recognize Abraham as our common father in faith. Yet, in the well-known biblical story, God first tests Abraham’s faith in that promise with the angelic command that he sacrifice his only son. It is Abraham’s passage through that unexpected and terrifyingly ironic command, and then its reprieve through the sacrificial ram, that then makes it possible for Abraham to become the father of faith.
Lynch then (IF, 127) turns from Abraham to the irony which greets the realization (in the life of Jesus) of many promises made by prophets (“from Moses to John the Baptist”) – promises of a great king, a lord and messiah – are actually realized in the unexpected reality of a king born poor, suffering, and dying in ignominy. It is through that unexpected passage (through suffering and death) that that Jesus truly becomes the expected King. For that passage unto death becomes enormously powerful in the hands of God.[29]
Lynch further enlarges his discussion of promise encountering the unexpected by taking up the terribly unexpected, or the problem of evil (IF, 128 ff). Today it is above all the Jewish people, constituted by God’s promise or covenant, who must contend with the Holocaust’s terrible challenge to that promise. In further discussing this terrible irony, Lynch rehearses both Ivan’s famous challenge to faith (in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov), and the analogous challenge provided by the Book of Job.[30]
—
Third stage: building a present moment (IF, 132-44).
Lynch wants to help us see and feel (as the infant must soon enough feel) that only a good taste of both oneself and of the world, experienced in the present, enables us to imagine and move into a realistic future. He thereby draws upon the fundamental theme of his earlier book Images of Hope – that those with mental illness (as every one of us is to some degree) can only trust a step outside the prison of their hopelessness when they begin to feel (through acceptance by a therapist or simply through the support of a friend) some good taste of the present.
Yet in much of this section (IF, 133, 137-45), Lynch writes to warn us that deeply gnostic ironies are already at work in our culture. They are ironies whose contempt for the present moment becomes the basis for some vision of a leap into a far better future. As instances he discusses in some detail both Freud’s and Marx’s criticism of religious belief (noted above). They assert, in good gnostic fashion, that present reality is a wasteland – there is no good taste in it, we are alienated within it, controlled by the bourgeoisie or by its superego. Surprisingly for me, Lynch also criticizes what was then the new theology of hope[31] for the many ways it too urges a leap beyond an empty present because of a biblically promised eschatological future of justice and peace.
For Lynch these ironies, atheistic or theological, are effectively “ironies of contempt” for present realities. Of course, the real irony is that they inevitably fail because they seek an impossible leap out of time. Only the ironies outlined by Aeschylus and Ignatius, only those ironies which stay with time by finding ways to build a present moment based on a good taste of self and world will lead in the end to some peace or beauty or infinity.
Stage four: “the movement through infinite possibility”
Perhaps today it is especially difficult to believe in the significance of the very small dimensions of human time which seem quite literally nothing at all by comparison with modern awareness of the vast stretches of cosmic space and time. As noted, Lynch, at least, was very aware of this Pascalian irony which might well strike one from adolescence on, and perhaps frequently. For, again, the seeming indifference of the “infinite universe,” with its billions of years and millions of galaxies, to our infinitesimally small earthly existence does often strike modern sensibility as a particularly cruel (even absurd) irony.
There is nothing that modern sensibility is more aware of than that it has moved into a world of infinite possibility.
The new range of possibility exists both on the outside and on the inside of man. There are not only the new vistas of space and time. There are new infinites, new open worlds, that emerge on the inside of man. As an example…think of our infinite freedom as we confront the beginnings of the new world of the genetic engineering of mankind and the determination of the very shape of the human by the new biology. Soon, if not already, individually, nationally, internationally, we shall be allowing and forbidding ourselves possibilities of human development; we shall be much more in charge of the free advance of evolution than ever before.
I want to avoid apocalyptic language…. But is it too much to say that no generations as much as ours has been asked to deal with the problem of infinite possibility and to work out those images which will enable us to cope with it. What, here, are the images of faith? (IF, 144-46)
Said differently, how – challenged (and probably deeply frightened) by such vistas of possibility – does faith’s irony provide us with the images that will enable us to remain both free and quite human?
The apocalyptic images which stream at us from our media respond essentially to our fears, and contribute to their pervasiveness. They are not images of faith.
Faith’s images for the challenges of infinite possibility are, of course, not romantic and rosy, though they are often presented as such in popular preaching and piety – “everything’s gonna’ be all right”. Rather they are appropriately ironic and we clearly have need of our best artists and writers in the ongoing development of such images. Yet we also need Sancho and every other Joe. As Lynch says, ordinary people are much better and realistic imaginers than we intellectuals tend to think. And he goes further. We artists and writers, preachers and politicians need to be constantly in touch with, and learning from, the people of our city and this world, if we are to be able to take up our proper vocation of leading the people. (Such too is Pope Francis’ constant challenge that we go to the margins of society, listen to the migrant, the poor, and all others at the margins.)
What follows is my very brief summary of Lynch’s subsequent discussion (IF, 146-56) of the kinds of images we must struggle against and those we must nurture:
We must (he dares to say) struggle against those images which derive from the prevalent rationalisms of our culture – simplistic images of progress and the universal technical future; religious images of eternal harmony which Ivan Karamazov’s “Euclidian mind” must famously reject; and, of course (he asserts), the corresponding images of God’s goodness and omnipotence “given to us by a long line of Christian philosophers working within the language of Aristotle….” (IF, 150)
What might be a more helpful image of God for us? Lynch turns to the classic Japanese film Roshomon for one suggestion. The film’s central character is a Buddhist monk who has listened to the complaints and sufferings, the claims and counterclaims, of the woman and two men who are involved in acts of theft and rape. Listened to and suffered with. Then Lynch suggests we may best imagine God as somewhat like this monk – in the midst of our world, in both joy and suffering, yet shedding light from the unchanging core of his being.[32] Perhaps something like Jesus!
Lynch ends his discussion of infinite possibility with thoughts about both Providence and promise/covenant as ways in which faith can provide images for our movement into the future. He suggests that we must transform our images of Providence. Then argues much the same for a renewal of the idea of promise/covenant. “Thus promise and Providence are two of the great personal [human] forces which bind the world of infinite possibility.” (IF, 156) And they also guide “the other half of the matter…the joy of infinite possibility, of change, of hope…. It is this positive image of endlessness that is an image of faith….” (IF, 156)
—
Final three stages: “passage though the curse”; “tragedy”; “death and nothingness”
While what Lynch means by “the curse” which was cast upon Adam and Eve can affect us at any age (the curse of pain in childbirth is explicitly mentioned), I choose to discuss it here together with the successive stages of tragedy and death. For death is the central element uniting these stages.
Whenever we experience any of the elements of the curse – in sickness and sweat, labor and thorns – we need imaginations which will enable us to pass or move through it. But here the ironies of faith are increasingly difficult. For we really do experience the curse throughout our lives and into death. Yet in Christian faith the curse is no more (we have been redeemed) even though we continue to experience the effects of the curse. Thence our task and challenge: how keep together the real/experienced effects of the curse with the belief/fact that there is no more curse. Only with great difficulty and more than a little help from friends and culture’s accumulated body of faith.
Here are some of Lynch’s words:
The redemption is there but must be received and imagined. But what is also there are all the powerful and suffering elements of the curse, without now being curse. (IF, 159)
There was the paradigmatic and activating passage of Christ through the curse and through death…. But this paradigm was never meant to act univocally…. We take the hope of the paradigm to make our own passage…. The story is different in every life, but the consequences – the sorrow, pain, death – are always there, as is the central task, with the help of irony, for the transforming imagination. Faith’s final image of the curse is formed by co-passage through the life of Christ and through human form, human limit, and the live consequences of the dead curse. (IF, 158-59)[33]
There is much more that Lynch says about this inevitable passage through the curse, but let me turn instead to his remarks about tragedy which may occur at any of the typical developmental stages and in many stages of national and international life.[34]
Faith and the tragic are, Lynch says, “co-existing contraries,” despite the “prevailing image of faith…that it is not and cannot be tragic.” (IF, 164) “I take death itself,” he continues, “both as fact and as metaphor, to be the central subject of tragedy. By death I mean what the hospitals mean…. As a metaphor it means all the analogous passages of the human spirit into what resembles death…failure, shame…pain, sorrow, and solitude.” (IF, 166)
The chapter’s concluding section about death and nothingness deepen what has been said about curse and tragedy.
Lynch’s argument here is that the Christian (and any person) must learn to accept the reality and finality of death, “the fact that there is a point of absolute non-being in man” (IF, 168). A point he repeatedly calls “the hospital facts” while reminding us of the impossibility of trying to “overcome” such facts (IF, 169).
Yet that is what we so often try to do, to deny the reality of death as nothingness, to see death for instance as a moment of final decision for God or as being swept up into some brilliant light. In fact, he insists, death is a nothingness, with no personal awareness nor any possibility of some final decision, a dark nothingness with no transforming lightness. Previously (IF, 166-67), Lynch had stressed that “faith does not remove death or it passage into helplessness, the end of energy, the reaching of a deep kind of nothingness.”[35]
The ironic aspect of the hospital facts is that they reverse or negate our great expectations, our deep Dionysian desire for fulfillment, and seem to negate Christian faith’s great promises of a fullness of life. For the fact is that we die into or unto nothingness.
Lynch then (IF, 171-74) does a riff on the many ways in which the modern mind has wrestled with nothingness. He briefly notes the efforts of philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger to understand non-being, yet gives more attention to the ironic effort of writers like Sartre and Camus to proclaim, each in his quite different way, the ultimate absurdity of life. He also notes and rejects “the sickly love of death in the decadent Romantics” and poet Sylvia Plath’s “rage against life.” He notes, as well, both Samuel Becket’s preoccupation “with impotence and failure” and Thomas Mann’s way, in Death in Venice, “of filtering into consciousness the growing images of disgust, rot, disease, passion, death” which lay beneath a surface illusion of classical beauty.
Yet, rather than end my brief evocation of Lynch’s discussion of death and nothingness on such high literary notes, let me cite a passage concerning the realities of dying that I (and perhaps my reader) already know something about:
If I really move through all of the stages of man and of faith, it is actual aging and old age that I move through. The bones will really ache. I will really feel aches and pains. I will suddenly begin to see that there are old people in the world, moving slowly…. They have always been with us, but we never saw them. Their fatigue is very great. They have passed through many points of mourning and grief…for the disappearance of beautiful image after image of themselves…. The old sometimes wonder if they will have the strength to pass through the weakness. (IF, 170)
We die a bit with every moment in every stage of life as we move towards death itself. The child dies to its initial omnipotence. So too do we die to various goods as we move through adolescence, middle and then old age.
And here, Lynch argues, faith’s irony is far deeper than the ironies of Sartre and the decadent romantics. Their “ironies of contempt” strip away all illusions and force images of rot and absurdity upon us. Yet faith’s irony understands that “this point of complete impotence, and all its parallel points, becomes the supremely productive area in man.” (IF, 169)[36] “Death becomes the final nothing, the final weakness…but it becomes enormously productive in the hands of God.” (IF, 172) This is the irony of Christ, for his passage through time leads to this point of real death, real impotence. Yet this nothingness becomes enormously productive when God raises Him to fullness of life. It is hard to exaggerate the significance of these sentences for Lynch’s thinking.
—
Me and the East River
I end this walk-about through Lynch’s writings about time with one short essay written towards the end of his life. It stays with me for its wonderful evocation of our theme. Titled “Me and the East River,”[37] it begins as a reminiscence of his own boyhood experiences having grown up next to that great river. He tells us that he’d been hit by a beer truck while crossing 2nd avenue to play along the river (the insurance settlement allowing him to be first in his immigrant neighborhood to go to college). Then he tells a tragic-heroic story about an old man failing in his attempt to rescue Lynch’s childhood friend from drowning when he’d fallen from a riverside pier where they played. And mention of these stories leads him to the fact that we all tell such personal and familial stories, and then to the affirmation that “small though they seem they are the stories of our salvation and worth the telling to our children and our children’s children.”
Why are they “stories of our salvation”? Because it is with such stories that we recount our personal passage through time and remind ourselves of that deeper passage of time which is the life of our soul. Or, perhaps more simply put, they keep us rooted in the actual time of our lives.
Yet Lynch then gives us the fuller reason for his love for the East River. Like so many rivers around the world, it represents a flow into the wider world of the ocean. In his words, “the river [becomes] a symbol…of a passage of human beings into a wider and wider world…. But you get there only through the rough dirty way of the river…. You go forward, on the way no doubt to glory-be…. [Then] You fall back. Yes, always two steps forward and one back…. Back into the river and the dirt of it, back to yourself out of glory be….”[38] “These rivers,” he then adds, “will give check to the perfect dreams of us humans. But they will help us to dream humanly…[into] muddy fleshed-out dreams.”[39]
—
A Concluding Argument
Further review of Lynch’s writings is not possible for reasons of space. Yet I also suspect (and this is my reason for urging the reader to read Lynch) that further citations and commentary by me would probably not help the reader.
That is why I ended discussion of Images of Faith, above, with a citation about his and our own experience of getting old. I am appealing, as a kind of persuasive argument, to the reader’s experience of aging (even if it is not yet old age). I am ending this essay with the suggestion that we all feel in our bones (even those not yet aching) the many ways in which we move through time guided by a sense of both time’s rhythms and endings.
As a form of persuasive argument that “the irony of Christ” is the still deeper guide for our journey, I can only appeal to the reader’s own sense (from belief or culture) that his ironic passage to life is a realistic model, whatever our personal faith, for the human passage through weakness and suffering to some form peace or beauty or infinity.
As to my initial hypothesis: while I thank God for my few momentary experiences of the presence of eternity, I also know that these are graces to enable my far more difficult journey through time to some ultimate peace.
Christ did not move quickly back to the Father. He moved through the stages of his human life, even unto death. As must we.
[1] I shall be using intext citations from three of Lynch’s books with the following abbreviations: CA for Christ and Apollo (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960), CP for Christ and Prometheus (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), and IF for Images of Faith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973).
[2] Lynch writes an essay on our “American Adam” sensibility which is included in his book The Integrating Mind (1959).
[3] Thomas Merton, for instance, was deeply engaged in both Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. He had first come to national attention with the publication of The Seven Story Mountain (1948), the autobiographical writing about his journey through time from humanism into monasticism. The further journey of his life was told in Michael Mott’s biography The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (1984). It is also remarkable in the lives of the great mystic saints how much they moved from visionary moments to founding convents and missions and the like – to their personal (and conventual) movement through time.
[4] For one of Lynch’s discussions of Ignatius’ Exercises see CA, 53-61.
[5] It is unfortunately typical of contemporary American Gnosticism that Broadway’s Man from La Mancha, far from following Cervantes’ original, actually celebrates dreaming “the impossible dream.”
[6] Spirit: A Magazine of Poetry VI # 5 (Nov. 1939) 148-51.
[7] Spirit, 148.
[8] Spirit, 148 (emphasis added).
[9] Spirit, 150.
[10] Spirit, 150.
[11] Ibid., 151.
[12] Having learned to chant the monastic canticle “Salve Regina” as part of evensong in the seminary, its melody stays with me now in my elder years, still giving the day its sense of an ending.
[13] See n. 6 above about pagination in different editions of Christ and Apollo.
[14] Thought 31 (1956) 187-215. The content of this essay is later reproduced in the already-noted pages of Christ and Apollo (53-61).
[15] Ibid., 206.
[16] Ibid., 206-07.
[17] Ibid., 214.
[18] Emphasis mine.
[19] The words are Greek for action, suffering, and learning, but Lynch does not italicize them.
[20]This difficulty is probably why the book, while widely-enough reviewed, does not seem to have been widely read.
[21] It should be clear by this point that all of Lynch’s writings (not just Images of Faith) involve a complex, at times repetitive, crisscrossing and “pascalian” style. It is probably simply the way his mind worked, but it is also a quite deliberate effort to work against our desire for clear definitions and neat but illusory formulas.
[22] Note how this critique returns to my opening remarks about “vertical” spiritualities which seek “some world-transcending ascent”. I first wrote these words during Holy Week when I kept running across comments like the following: “Easter is the demonstration of God that life is essentially spiritual and timeless”(source unknown).
[23] There is a remarkable passage at the beginning of Images of Hope (p.27) that bears summarizing here: “A I see it, we are always faced with programmatic alternatives. We can build a human city…in which all have citizenship, Greek and Jew and Gentile, the black and the white, the halt and the blind…. Or we will decide to build various absolute and walled cities from which various pockets of our humanity will be excluded…. These totalistic, these nonhuman cities offer an extraordinary fascination for the souls of fearful men….” (emphasis added).
[24] See Lynch’s essay “The American Adam” in his book The Integrating Mind (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962, 18-37).
[25] The essay appeared in New York Images 1 (1984) 3-5. New York Images is a journal Lynch founded and edited during the latter years of his life. Only three issues appeared, in 1984, 1985, 1985. It was his final attempt to gather artists and writers whose work would provide truly human images of Lynch’s beloved New York City, and (at least by implication) of any human city. Copies of the three issues can be found both in Fordham University’s library and in its archives.
[26] While writing this essay I came upon a citation from Sr. Margaret Brennan, IHM (1924-2016), one of the early presidents of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR): “Now, in the autumn of my life I see more clearly how events tinged with grief or seeming loss have been invitations for the stretching of my mind and imagination, for the deepening of my faith and the widening of my understanding. It is these [ironic] blessings for which we were born.” Give Us This Day (April 2022, p. 379).
[27] Lynch himself continually uses the terms “stages and phases” to describe our movement through time and, to my knowledge, never differentiates these terms. It helps me to think of “phases” as different kinds of movement within the more typically referenced chronological “stages” (child, youth, young adult…). And to think of “phases,” at least in this case, as the internal and ironic movements which operate within those chronological stages. Yet Lynch never makes such a clear distinction.
[28] Lynch wrote before there was much concern for gendered language.
[29] Here I add a different testimony about this passage through the unexpected: “God leaps into the space between the anticipated and the real and begins to make a noise that is difficult to ignore…. [W]e would be wise to consider whether God is not also speaking to us in those moments when reality is different from what we had expected…. And we can’t expect to comprehend all that is involved in this challenge. Some of its meaning may emerge in time.” Michael Casey, Give Us This Day (5/8/22, p. 75).
[30] These quite remarkable pages are the closest Lynch ever comes to developing a theodicy.
[31] He notes specifically Jurgen Moltmann’s The New Theology of Hope which, “while a good and valuable book” (IF, 137), is nonetheless deeply flawed by its leap from our dismal present because of a promised (eschatological) future.
[32] In this idea, and throughout his discussion of evil and the images of faith, Lynch may again be said to develop elements of his own theodicy. In doing so, he frequently discusses the Holocaust, as well as Ivan Karamazov’s challenge to faith, and then the theodicy he finds in Kurosawa’s Roshamon.
[33] Such co-passage is, of course, the project or work of Ignatius’ Exercises.
[34] The present war in Ukraine is, at very least, a terrible tragedy, death and its analogues are so cruelly present.
[35] Some years earlier, Lynch had written a much fuller and quite brilliant essay on “Death as Nothingness” in Continuum 5 (1967) 459-69.
[36] Emphasis in the remaining sentences of this paragraph has been added.
[37] The essay appeared in New York Images 1 (1984) 3-5. Copies of that journal, which Lynch edited during his final years, can be found in both the Fordham University Library and in its Archives.
[38] “Me and the East River,” 4.
[39] Ibid., 5. (Emphasis added.)
