Theology, Poetics, Psychotherapy—The Field of the Imagination: Some Reflections on the Legacy of William F. Lynch, S.J.

Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Theology, Poetics, Psychotherapy—The Field of the Imagination: Some Reflections on the Legacy of William F. Lynch, SJ.' I vividly recall the high interest widi which I read the series of essays on "Theology and the Imagination" that the late Fr. William Lynch (or "Bill Lynch," as I tiiink of and affectionately remember him) published in the Fordham University quarterly Thought between the spring of 1954 and the summer of 1958. Together, tiiey presented the essential substance of the argument tiiat was to be more elaborately developed in his book of 1960, Christ and Apollo:The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination. And, when this book appeared, it made for me at the time an astonishment that, beyond a small circle (Allen Tate and Wystan Auden and a handful of others), the remarkable intelligence tiiat was at work here attracted virtually no attention at all, this no doubt reflecting the immensity of the distance that separates those granting hospitality to theological perspectives from the general intellectual and literary life of our period.Widiin the theological community itself he was, of course, on the American scene the first thinker since Horace Bushnell in the middle years of the Logos 1:1 1997 Theology, Poetics, Psychotherapygj nineteenth century to take cognizance of how natural and profound an alliance religion has with die procedures ofdie imagination . And in recent years, as this issue has at last begun to captivate contemporary theologians, one is again astonished to remark how much for diem Lynch is as ifhe had never been, for nowhere does one find Julian Hartt, John Coulson, David Tracy, Gordon Kaufman, John Mclntyre, Garrett Green, and various others reckoning with his work in any way at all. Ray Hart's Unfinished Man and the Imagination is, indeed, the only major tiieological text ofrelatively recent vintage that generously acknowledges that, in opening "a path into the tangled growth of 'theology and the imagination,' he "homesteaded ... [a] land that ... [needed to be] cleared."2 It may be that at least in some measure the neglect he has suffered in recent theological literature, as well as in the literature of theoretical poetics, is a consequence ofthe easy informality of his style of thought which led him not to invest much in die niceties and rigors of systematic formulation. It is notable, for example, that, steadily as he meditated on die formative role of the imagination in religion and culture (in Christ and Apollo, in The Image Industries, in The Integrating Mind, and in Christ and Prometheus), he never got round to defining witii any strict precision what he took the concept of the imagination to entail. He had, of course, been deeply influenced by the Maritain of Art and Scholasticism and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry and by the poetics of the New Criticism, particularly by those forms of it represented by such critics and theorists as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate and Francis Fergusson: so one may take it for granted that his never having explicitly deliberated on questions ofdefinition is not itself sufficient evidence of any real confusion about what indeed the concept of imagination embraces. True, he does not set his own views in careful relation to Kant's Einbildungskraft and Hegel's Vorstellung and Coleridge's "esemplastic power" and the various 62 Logos other bench marks in tiieory of imagination. He simply says that by "the total and most ordinary workings of the human imagination "he means notiiing otiier tiian how "men look at the concrete reality of our finite world."3Which was for him at least clearly to indicate that he did not take the concept of imagination to make reference to some special endowment or attribute of die self such as might have been envisaged by the kind of faculty psychology tiiat was a prominent feature of medieval scientia. Nor is he ever to be found invoking die sort of fustian often embraced by the romantic movement which, in its Wordswortiiian version, said that the imagination Is but anodier name for absolute strength And dearest insight, amplitude of mind, And reason in her most exalted mood.4 Wallace Stevens's notion that the imagination is...