Downward to the Infinite

What do Sartre, Graham Greene and Laurence Olivier have in common? They are all involved in a modern trend toward an ancient heresy, Manichaeism.

Named for the 3rd century Babylonian Gnostic Mani, who taught that the Creator is an evil being opposed to the good God, Manichaeans viewed the world as bad and salvation as escape from it. Modern Manichaeans are those whose hunger for the spiritual leads them to disdain the material; they try to make the leap of faith without having their feet planted firmly on the ground.

This is the thesis of Jesuit William Lynch, literary critic and assistant professor of English at Georgetown University, and one of the most incisive Catholic intellectuals in the U.S., as he expounds it in a new book, Christ and Apollo (Sheed & Ward1; $5). Manichaeans are every where, says Lynch, particularly in the arts. His case against them: instead of looking directly upward for insight into the in finite, the true way up is the way down --into the finite facts of life. The literary imagination, striving to ascend to free dom, must descend into things, and the model for it is Christ, who "moved down into all the realities of man to get to his Father."

Lynch contrasts Christ and Apollo. Apollo symbolizes the dream, "a kind of autonomous and facile intellectualism that thinks form can be given to the world by the top of the head alone, without contact with the world, without contact with the rest of the self."

Christ, on the other hand, stands "for the completely definite, for the Man who, in taking on our human nature, took on every inch of it (save sin) in all its density, and who so obviously did not march too quickly or too glibly to beauty, the infinite, the dream." Lynch adds: "I keep before my mind the remark of W. H. Auden that no one cares much who were the cousins and the sisters and the aunts of Apollo whereas we are completely interested in every detail of the life and being of Christ."

The New Third Act. The rebirth of Manichaeism can be seen in the theater. Modern tragedy attaches "a very dubious quality of worthlessness, threat, evil, absurdity, to the whole world of situation and existence . . . How often in our generation have we seen the tragic protagonist who is cursed by the necessity of walking, victim and innocent, through an insane world. We need only recall such plays as Sherwood's Idiot's Delight, Paul Green's Johnny Johnston, or Anderson's Key Largo and Winterset, while Sartre gave a definitive formulation, in theory and on the stage, to the principle of the absurd."

Modern tragedy is guilty of another heresy as well--the Pelagian idea* of salvation as strictly a do-it-yourself project. This is evident in the modern tragic hero's tendency to rise above his fate, bloody but unbowed, whereas the traditional tragic hero was reduced at the close to "the very last point of human finitude and helplessness." Today's "attempts at tragedy have abandoned this finite image for a new Pelagian tactic, for a new type of third act, the third act of the power and the exclamation point." Society & Ritual. Similarly, too many people turn in disgust from the finite facts of society and seek to escape toward the absolute. That is wrong, says Lynch: "But the Catholic imagination does not force me to imagine that at the end I must free myself from all human society to unite myself with God. Rather, it helps me to imagine that once I have embarked on a good thing with all its concreteness (here it is society), I can and must carry it with me all the way into the heart of the unimaginable." By contrast, "the Protestant imagination sometimes seems to conceive society to be a necessary evil, to be endured on all the lower levels of being, good to the next to the last drop, but to be abandoned with indecent haste before true insight or the face of the living God." One way to the sanctification of society is through ritual. "By every instinct in them, men desperately need to think and move together, ritually. One of the sources of modern anxiety is surely that people get into too many situations where they do not know what people will think or do next." Ritual is not to be confused with mere ceremonial. "The rhetoric of great human speech is a ritual," says Lynch, "but I have heard it too often torn to the tatters of 'meaningful fact' by fine actors who were intent on showing that they could enter into each line and syllable and movement of the body, thus giving personality and modernity to every fact. The lines were no longer allowed to float out in the air as ritual victories.

Judith Anderson has done this sad thing to Medea and Laurence Olivier has done it to both Oedipus and Richard III." Leap Out of Time. Fear of conformity sometimes results in a false personality cult. "The artist becomes the isolated, romantic hero, instead of taking up the task of building . . . higher and deeper rituals wherein alone personality will be achieved and our cheaper conformities or etiquettes restore themselves to sense." Even in as Roman Catholic a writer as Graham Greene, Critic Lynch finds "a subtle if unconscious demonstration of the Manichaean way"--especially in the novel, The End of the Affair, in which the heroine renounces her lover and dedicates herself to God. Lynch notes that there is no relation between her divine and her human love. "The divine love is in no way achieved in the same act as the human; the latter does not lead to the divine; the divine, once achieved, does not fortify the human . . . This is a solution, indeed, this divine love, but it is not a solution which passes through the eye of a Beatrice, or the life of time. It leaps out of time. It is not a human way.

One has the feeling that Greene has written a Catholic novel that is more Catholic than Catholicism." Theologian Lynch, in short, is an existentialist. But existence does not lead him like Sartre to nausea, but, like David, to dance before the ark.

* Named for the 4th to sth century British monk Pelagius, who held that man could achieve salvation by good works. Pelagianism was branded heretical by five church councils, which upheld the orthodox Christian position that, while good works are important, faith--and hence salvation--depends upon the grace of God.

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