The fullness of time as eschatological presence in Auden’s “For the Time Being”

When I was in college, I took a Church history class that used a textbook whose title I don’t remember by a Protestant author whose name I cannot recollect.

What I do recall, however, is that the author attempted to account for what St. Paul meant by the phrase “fullness of time” from Galatians 4:4-5: “But when the fullness of time had come,” explains the Apostle, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption.”

As I recall, the misguided textbook endeavored to assert that the “fullness of time” can be entirely explained in geographic, political, sociological, and economic terms. The implication is that the “fullness of time” is a merely chronological reference, and, most importantly, that it had obtained before Jesus came.

The Owl of Minerva is late to the party

This is a wrong-headed interpretation of St. Paul’s words. Moreover, it deflects from the full meaning of the Incarnation of Christ, which did not come after time had been fulfilled, but which itself was—is—the fullness of time. Of course, the immediate context is St. Paul’s admonition to legalists in Galatia, who were apparently teaching that physical circumcision—according to Jewish ceremonial law—was necessary for Christian conversion. Jesus, St. Paul teaches, is the fulfillment of the law, which had been a schoolmaster until the coming of the Messiah. Thus, ceremonial works of the law are no longer necessary, because their purpose has been fulfilled in the redemptive work of Christ—his Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.

So, while the foundation for the fullness of time had been laid prior to the Incarnation, the fullness itself occurred when Jesus “came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man,” not before. The distinction may seem subtle on its face, but it is profound in its implications. If time had been fulfilled before Jesus became human, the event of the Incarnation would be the first event after the “fullness of time,” rather than both the fullness itself and the fulcrum by which we measure all time. The undergraduate textbook I mentioned above made the Incarnation consequent to the fullness of time, rather than the consummation of time itself.

Thus, the church historian inadvertently diminishes the full meaning of the Incarnation of Christ, not an uncommon error among some—though certainly not all—brands of Protestantism. The error is the reduction of time to mere Chronos—the relentless, repetitive march of the hands of the clock and the pages of the calendar—while ignoring the eschatologically rich Kairos, the time that cuts into Chronos, relativizing the latter’s claim to finality. The author’s chronological error additionally evinces the inherent discomfort that many Protestants have with the Incarnation, with all its sensory implications. They want a spiritual Christ who grants them life in eternity, not the physical Jesus who disrupts human history in his very Incarnation.

Put another way, my author makes the Hegelian mistake of attributing to Chronos itself a kind of ultimacy: history working itself out in some sort of impersonal, autonomous necessity, by which wisdom is achieved by history’s own march toward universal freedom. “The owl of Minerva flies at dusk,” as Hegel famously asserted. This leads to the common liberal Protestant mistake of “immanentizing the eschaton,” as Eric Voegelin famously put it in his The New Science of Politics in 1952.

For the Time Being

In W.H. Auden’s long poem, “For the Time Being” (which he designated a “Christmas Oratorio,” though no musical setting for the entire poem was ever written), Auden explores precisely this theme.

In doing so, he makes a profound contribution to our understanding of how the Incarnation does not merely fulfill time, but fundamentally changes the very nature of time and our relationship to it. Christ not only fulfills time, but he also breaks into it and fractures our understanding of the very notion of things like progress, necessity, and inevitability. In his Incarnation, the Son radically alters our perception of time. “How could the Eternal do a temporal act, The Infinite a finite fact?”, ask the Chorus in Auden’s poem.

This central mystery of Christian faith is ignored by my Protestant author. His is a cosmic Jesus who bounces off the atmosphere of Chronos, but never enters into it, disrupting its claim to inevitability and finality. Kairos—God breaking into time in the Incarnation—is unintelligible to much of the Protestant mind.

But the Infinite becoming a “finite fact” is the very essence of the Incarnation. God intrudes into our cyclical experience of chronological time, restoring the teleologically inflected linear time, ordered toward and by Sabbath rest in God. Thus does Auden account for the cyclical time of hopeless repetition, which the Incarnation transformed into the linear time of eschatological hope:

Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal grief,
These after all are our familiar tribulations,
And we have been through them all before, many, many times.
As events with belong to the natural world where
The occupation of space is the real and final fact
And time turns round itself in an obedient circle.

They occur again and again but only to pass
Again and again into their formal opposites,
From sword to ploughshare, coffin to cradle, war to work,
So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern composed
By the ten thousand odd things that can possibly happen
Is permanent in a general average way.

Till lately we knew of no other . . . .

At risk of putting too fine a point on it, after the Fall and before the Incarnation, life was “one damned thing after another”—the endless repetition of new variations on the same perennial theme of tedium. “For the perpetual excuse/Of Adam for his fall—‘My little Eve,/God bless her, did beguile me and I ate,’” as Auden puts it.

And, of course, time still is perpetual, Sisyphean hopelessness if we have not embraced the Incarnate One who disrupts the cycle, undoes the dreariness, and turns our faces toward the hope and joy of redemption. The Incarnation not only redeems persons, but time itself is re-oriented from repetitive failure to teleological triumph.

It is probably bad form to end an article quoting someone else. But given both the topic and approach to this piece, the only appropriate way to drive home the point is to quote again from Auden’s “For the Time Being”:

Let us therefore be contrite but without anxiety,
For Powers and Times are not gods but mortal gifts from God;
Let us acknowledge our defeats but without despair,
For all societies and epochs are transient details,
Transmitting an everlasting opportunity
That the Kingdom of Heaven may come, not in our present
And not in our future, but in the Fullness of Time.
Let us pray.

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