Just in Time
AFTERTHOUGHT
By JOHN WELLS
THE great advantage, it has always seemed to me, of theology as a hobby is that, unlike other pastimes such as playing the flute or rowing single- handed round the North Pole, it demands no pre- vious experience. Nor does it require any meta- physical experience, as would, for instance, spiritualism: even quite highly paid and estab- lished dabblers in theology, like the Bishop of Woolwich, have admitted that they can get along very well without it. This means that the week- end theologian, starting either from nothing or from the infinitely subtle miracle of existence, can with a little imagination build his own system from a few pieces of second-hand know- ledge, paste them together with a selection of colourful and poetic texts from the Old and New Testaments, and very soon have a meta- physical structure just as solid as that of the College of Cardinals or the Holy Rollers. Indeed, it is that atmosphere of free-for-all, and the desire to establish the validity of at least one Licence to Speculate that has led to the rather hysterical burnings, torturings and mutual denunciations that have divided the Church for so long.
Metaphysics, as even the most devout will readily concede, has made very little progress, compared, say, with astronomy and medicine, during the last two thousand years. There are those who would dispute that it made much pro- gress even then. The theologians, unlike the psychologists, seem a merry little band of men, interested wholly in the theory of their subject rather than in its practical application, following each other round and round in the fog, some- times rather boozy, sometimes starting little fights among themselves, and often crowing with delight as they come upon some theory or heresy they believe to be a brand-new find and which in fact has been picked up, handed round for inspection and abandoned again and again by their predecessors. I was therefore particularly thrilled some three years ago when I was work- ing with some semi-professional theologians in Madrid and made what I then regarded as an astonishing breakthrough, a single blinding in- sight which solved all possible speculative problems once and for all.
The discovery, briefly, was that Time Does Not Exist. Perhaps I should explain in greater detail. The difficulties I had had in the past in completing the conventional Christian crossword puzzle had all been to some extent connected with time. If there was Life After Death, for example, was there also Life Before Birth? Was the explanation that Christ had spent the three days before His Resurrection preaching in Hell really satisfactory in dealing with the problem of those souls unfortunate enough to be born in the several million years before His own Birth? How did one square Christ's words to the dying thief on the cross—"Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise'—with the conventional Christian doctrine of the Day of Judgment and the Resurrection of the Flesh, when all over the 'country the dead would rise simultaneously to face the east as their priest rose at the same moment to face them, having been buried in that position and with that express purpose in mind by their thoughtful kinsfolk? Why should the repentant thief get in there first and spend the centuries until the end of time lolling about on his own with Paradise entirely to himself? Why, in other words, did Eternity, or Timelessness, not 'begin' until the End of Time?
It then struck me, with the silent magnesium flash described above, that Timelessness clearly did exist, had always existed, will always exist, and is existing uninterrupted by what we think of as Time. Time, I decided, was simply an internal measurement used inside our own system for measuring the natural rate of birth, growth, decay and death, and was so regulated as to give the impression that we move through it consecutively, generation `after' generation, whereas we are in fact, in another dimension, all happening at once. Perhaps I should illus- trate my thesis with diagrams. Assuming that in Timelessness there is no Beginning, Middle or End, no Before and no After, our activities, from the first apeman to the last scientist, must be contained in that—as we should think of it— split-second vacuum, just as Time is contained in Timelessness. Time, seen from a position out- side, in Eternity, is not a succession of events, but a single flat one-dimensional fact Seen as a wall-painting or frieze, the whole history of the earth becomes a series of blurred pictures, rather like those of moving athletes in Paris-Match, where every millionth of a second is caught in outline, but which gives the overall impression of the movement as if it were all happening at once. Apemen on this frieze could be seen blur- ring up from ape-babies to apemanhood and then blurring down again to dotage and death. Further along the frieze, you yourself could be seen taking up the SPECTATOR, blurring over the pages until you reached this column, blurring into a nod, and then falling, frame by frame, into a deep sleep. Behind these foreground figures the shapes of growing trees and of build- ings, even of rock formations, could be seen blurring through their more extended changes. I thought we might call it,,poetically, the Wall of Death.
Armed with this key, I immediately unlocked several problems. First of all, the question of the thief loafing around in Paradise was straightened out: the transfer of souls from here to there might appear by our standards to be postponed until the Last Day, but by their standards out there in Timeless Eternity, it was always the First Day, always the same second, so An 33 or AD 1967 melted into one. Secondly, the old determinist nut appeared crackable. Like the athlete moving through the blurred outlines in Paris-Match, we must inevitably move through the events we are, and in a sense for ever are, moving through, though we retain the illusion of Free Will. It also wraps up the question of Recorded Sin: it's all up there on the Wall of Death. The only detail I haven't worked out yet is the Salvation Aspect: how do we escape from Time into Timelessness? In order to assist me in my researches, I wonder whether those of you interested in joining the Church of the Fifth Dimension would be good enough to send your cheques to me here, care of the SPECTATOR, or bring crates of booze and lovely women round to my home address.
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