In Christ and Apollo, William F. Lynch argues that our path to insight, beauty, or God must be a narrow and direct one that leads straight through our human realities, through our labor, our disappointments, our friends, our game legs, our harvests, our subjection to time. There are no shortcuts to beauty or to insight. We must go through the finite, the limited, the definite, omitting none of it lest we omit some of the potencies of being-in-the-flesh .... We waste our time if we try to go around or above or under the definite; we must go literally through it. And in taking this narrow path directly, we shall be using our remembered experience of things seen and earned in a cumulative way, to create hope in the things that are not yet seen. ( 7)Father Lynch contrasts this process through the finite with the practice of those "imaginations" that try to achieve a tenuous, mystical contact with the finite, touching it just sufficiently, they tell us, to produce mystical vision, but not solidly enough, they add, for their vision to be impaired by the actuality of things. These imaginations I think of as "exploiters of the real:' They believe the real can be "used" in the name of beauty or God, and they will exploit persons or things without being particularly interested in either. (8) Lynch's study makes no mention of the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, but they are fertile ground to which we may apply Lynch's premise. A number of Hawthorne's tales reveal a distrust in the sort ofleaps into the infinite that Lynch decries, and the characters who attempt this road to enlightenment are ultimately left thwarted and unfulfilled. 1 Embedded in such works is the message that something of greater, more lasting value than what was 343
