Last week’s Catholic Book Club column focused on an American Jesuit who became widely known as a public mental in the course of the twentieth century: John Courtney Murray, S.J. But what if I told you that there was one other American Jesuit, a friend of Murray, whose writings on every part from theater to fiction to politics to civil society to mental health were equally as essential on the time? No, not Walter Ong. No, not Avery Dulles. No, not Bernard Lonergan (he was a Canadian anyway). The scholar in query was a person of great intellect and insight who still today lacks the status he deserves: William F. Lynch, S.J.
I’ll admit I’m biased; in the summertime of 2011, I had the chance to do a directed study of Lynch under John F. Kane, a Regis University professor and an authority on Lynch, who published a hefty mental biography of him, Constructing the Human City, in 2016. I had the possibility to read much of Lynch’s work and discuss it with Kane, including Lynch’s classic books The Image Industries, Christ and Apollo, Images of Hope and Images of Faith. I believe the largest obstacle to Lynch’s rising to the prominence that his work deserved is that he had too many interests, all of which he approached with somewhat digressive movements that avoided the declarative in favor of the descriptive.
One in every of William Lynch’s biggest fans was Flannery O’Connor. Every human beauty, for Lynch in addition to for O’Connor, points toward and is referent to a divine, transcendental beauty.
Though trained as a philosopher, Lynch emphasized concrete and contextualized experiences throughout his writings. The try to escape from time, from embodied realities, from personal and societal movement and development, Lynch wrote, was an aesthetic and spiritual disaster, each for Western culture and for people. Consider the incarnation of Christ, Lynch writes in Images of Faith; what the Christian believes to be an important moment in all creation occupies one tiny moment in 14 billion years of space-time. If Christ will be born in a situation of such sheer irony (a very important concept for Lynch), should that not be a reminder that we cannot and mustn’t try to flee our historical milieus or the context wherein we exist?
Lynch also advanced the notion of the analogical imagination—a way of the world as being suffused with and analogous to an infinite divine reality—years before similar concepts were championed by David Tracy and Andrew Greeley. One in every of his biggest fans was Flannery O’Connor for nearly precisely this reason: Every human beauty, for Lynch in addition to for O’Connor, points toward and is referent to a divine, transcendental beauty. In a 2015 article for America, Mark Bosco, S.J., noted that “Father Lynch’s work validated O’Connor’s particular modernist, even postmodernist proclivities and her own artistic claim to a Christic imagination.” For each, “finite and infinite realities coalesce; so for Father Lynch, as for O’Connor, there isn’t any need to tug together what has never been separated.”
Kane’s book, the primary comprehensive biography of Lynch, also addresses Lynch’s lifelong examination of up to date society through the use of varied images in his writings and talks. In a 2016 review for America of Constructing the Human City, Brett McLaughlin, S.J., quoted Kane’s recognition that as a substitute of in search of a “a scientific or fundamental perspective on Catholic life in america,” Lynch as a substitute was “in all he wrote concerned to know, and to assist us understand, numerous basic ideas which he saw as crucial or foundational for ability to reply to the challenges of our times.”
McLaughlin also noted the strong influence of the spirituality of St. Ignatius in Lynch’s emphasis on God’s thorough engagement with the world: “He identified that faith will need to have a body; spirituality involves concrete motion in time.” The book includes sections on the role of the humanities in society, images of hope and faith (and the way they function with personal and societal woes), a spirituality for public life, the dynamic between the secular and sacred and latest developments in theology.
Lynch advanced the notion of the analogical imagination years before similar concepts were championed by David Tracy and Andrew Greeley.
Lynch also contributed numerous articles to America through the years, including a 1943 essay on a subject America has addressed 4 billion times since: “the vexing problem of the Catholic author.” Is there such a thing? Was there once? Does the Catholic author have something unique to bring to the world? Unlike a few of his successors on this endeavor, Lynch didn’t argue that there was no such thing, or that every one writers sought the identical truth, but as a substitute criticized “those that would warn us not to start to make use of a Catholic language, who will keep insisting that the vision of the author is shared alike by all men—no matter race, color or creed.” Why? Because wrestling with Catholic dogmas and moral teachings was a part of what gave Catholic writers their distinct place on the planet of letters:
Now nobody has so little sense as to suggest that we should be obnoxious inserters of the Catholic word—doing all this with a certain vacuous deliberation. Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for a deliberate supernatural art. For now we have dreadfully exaggerated the need of our men of letters writing with a Catholic subconsciousness only (the occupation of writing becomes more mysterious every single day). But, in point of fact, it’s sharply conceived dogma and the dialectic of the identical that makes all of the difference on the planet.
A comment later in that very same essay gives one other hint as to why Flannery O’Connor found Lynch such an intriguing thinker. “What a pity if we’re led to consider that there will be no writers today until now we have educated the people to the purpose where they may accept the insertion of some kind of realism between the puritanic and the prurient,” Lynch wrote. “Oh yes, it’s an issue, but allow us to be grave enough to acknowledge that it is just a really small a part of the issue.”
I remember considering 10 years ago the identical thought that happens to me in looking back at William Lynch now: He would have made an incredible novelist.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Lord of Hope and Misery,” by Diane Glancy. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
On this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular author or group of writers (each latest and old; our archives span greater than a century), in addition to poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this can give us a likelihood to supply you more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to a few of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
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Completely happy reading!
James T. Keane