Christ and Apollo by William F. Lynch, S. J. (review)

BOOK REVIE\VS Christ and Apollo. The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination. By WILLIAM F. LYNCH, S. J. New York, Sheed and Ward, 1960. Pp. ~67, with supplements. $5.00. In a significant contribution to the contemporary effort to bring together the theologian and the literary critic to·their mutual profit Father William F. Lynch, S. J., has fashioned this probing study of the literary imagination in its various dimensions. Called Christ and Apollo it composes, summarizes and refines many of the arguments and observations presented by Father Lynch in his articles in Thought some hali dozen years ago. At times the terminology is different although the insights are largely the same, most of them touching on the impenetration of the creative imagination by metaphysics and theology. Gathered together and ordered in this book they represent one of the most persuasive and persistent efforts mounted in this country to open literature to a theological critique and to open the mind of the theologian to the dynamics of the creative effort and the uniqueness of creative goals. A praiseworthy effort it is, yet a most difficult one, involving as it does the question of entangling alliances and peevish autonomies in both areas of thought. For a writer who sets out to be both critic and theologian risks the slings and arrows kept, cleaned and carefully sheathed for attack upon those professing just such a delicate and dual vocation. Nor will Father Lynch escape my own particular and partisan darts, as the reader of this review will discover. Nevertheless he deserves well of all of us for a consistent and strongly argued work. It simply happens to be a highly vulnerable work, a target facing two ways-towards literature and towards theology. Yet it is our good fortune that men of the calibre and courage of Father Lynch are willing to face both ways also; then willing to attempt -more perilously-to draw the two images into a single focus now centered upon what we might call total poetic reality, or the mind of man as it is imaged forth in the works of man. The author initiates his critique in the form of an antagonism: Christ and Apollo-which might well suffer a more dramatic reading, Christ or Apollo. Apollo is the symbol of the dream, the vaguely infinite, the indefinite, the romantic; Christ is the symbol of the definite, the limited, the particular, the real. The book as a whole is a brief for the so-called Christie imagination as against the Apollonian imagination, the theme being set fort~ in the Introduction in a very sharp commitment with respect 585 586 BOOK REVIEWS to the finite and the definite in literature. " The literary process is a highly cognitive passage through the finite and the definite realities of man and the world" (p. xiii), literary insight coming from "the penetration of the finite and the definite concrete in all its interior dimensions and according to all real lines " (Ibid.). This thematic thrust rises above the work even in these early stages and remains to dominate the rest of the book, giving a striking unity to the far-ranging considerations contained therein. So, for example, the opening chapter On the Definite establishes once and for all the theme first articulated in the Introduction; this same theme is then explored and expanded in succeeding chapters on Time, on the notion of Tragedy and Comedy, and in the crucial discussion of Analogy which is aimed at confirming the author's position with regard to the centrality of the definite, of fact and event. Then in the two concluding chapters on the Theological Imagination and the Christian Imagination Father Lynch avails himself of the tools prepared in his treatment of the definite and the analogical. Beyond that he has included four interesting Supplements, one a series of texts on the Definite, a second series of texts on Time, a bibliography on Analogy, and a final supplement prepared by John P. McCall on Medieval Exegesis and the senses of Scripture. It should be pointed out that the supplements also tend to support Father Lynch's regent principle with regard to the primacy of the definite and...