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Faith as Imagination: The Contribution of William F. Lynch, S.J.

Cross Currents, Summer, 1998 by John F. Kane

The recent publication of Faith as Imagination: The Contribution of William F. Lynch, S.J, by Gerald J. Bednar (Sheed and Ward, 1996) is a significant event, perhaps of special interest to readers of Cross Currents, which published a number of Lynch's essays in the '60s. In 1991, while praising his work as "one of the most remarkably sensitive and original ... in the literature of our period," Nathan Scott complained of "the remarkable neglect" Lynch has suffered in recent religious thought. Bednar's effort represents the first book-length attempt at an overview of Lynch's thought and achievement. It also provides the first published bibliography of his work.

Until now, most comment on Lynch has focused on one of his books, usually Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination (1960) or Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless (1965), both of which went into several subsequent editions. Specialists knew his An Approach to the Metaphysics of Plato through the Parmenides (1959). Others may have remembered The Image Industries (1959) and The Integrating Mind (1963). Yet the latter, as also his final books, Christ and Prometheus (1970) and Images of Faith (1973), while positively reviewed, do not seem to have been widely read or much appreciated.

Bednar focuses on the significance of imagination for Lynch's understanding of faith, and sees this understanding as a response to the excessively conceptual, dogmatic, and objectivist idea of faith in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic scholasticism. He shows how Lynch's thinking parallels themes in figures like Newman, Blondel, and in some of the Modernists who sought to emphasize the subjective, experiential, and historical dimensions of faith. Lynch's particular development of such themes makes him a key figure in the emergence of a new and more adequate paradigm for understanding faith.

The strength of Bednar's book also leads to weaknesses. He succeeds in giving an overview of Lynch's ideas about the analogical imagination and about faith as ironic, Christic imagination, and in indicating the significance of these ideas within a sketch of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic theology. Yet he covers so much that the resulting presentation is at times flat and on occasion slightly misleading. While he often gives a broad and accurate sense of the whole of Lynch's thought in terms of faith and imagination, much of the rich complexity and depth of that thought remains to be explored. Still, this is a significant beginning.

JOHN F. KANE