Christ and Prometheus; A New Image of the Secular

Lynch, William F.

Religion & Spirituality

Univ of Notre Dame Pr

Christ and Prometheus: A New Image of the Secular

University of Notre Dame Press

Images of faith;: An exploration of the ironic imagination

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination

Christ and Apollo, originally published in 1960, is a classic of literary criticism, a book that Commonweal once predicted may well change the course of literary studies. It did not do that, of course. Its literary, philosophical, and theological presuppositions, as Glenn Arbery points out in his new introduction, were too different from those of the ruling theoretical paradigms for it to be given a hearing And that is precisely what makes it a volume worth returning to. In Christ and Apollo, William Lynch examines the Greek dramatists, Dante, Shakespeare, Proust, Camus, Graham Greene, and other writers in light of their affinities with two opposing tendencies. The symbol of the first approach is Apollo. For Lynch, this is the tendency to want to escape the finite, real world and the human condition of embodiment: it has much in common with what critic Allen Tate called the angelic imagination. The symbol of the other tendency is Christ, the Word made flesh. Artists working in this tradition give readers a glimpse of the infinite by working patiently and honestly with the materials of the finite world, in all its messy imprecision. For Lynch, then, as Arbery points out, limitation, or finitude, is the great human good. Praised by Flannery O'Connor, among others, Lynch's sophisticated work is in many ways an important elaboration of the New Criticism, avoiding that school of thought's formalist excesses while providing it with firmer philosophical ground. For anyone interested in understanding what distinguishes great literature, Christ and Apollo is an essential text.

Christ and Apollo: The dimensions of the literary imagination

Literature & Fiction

An Approach to the Metaphysics of Plato through the Parmenides.

Praeger

The literary process is a highly cognitive passage through the finite and definite realities of humans and the world, says Catholic philosopher and critic Lynch (1908-87), and any effort to keep literature in its rightful relationship with the human and the real is a service to truth, civilization, and literature itself. The title is his proclamation of a new model to replace Nietzsche and Spengler's Dionysus and Apollo. This is a reprint of a 1960 work published by Sheed and Ward, New York. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

History & Criticism

ISI Books

Christ and Apollo juxtaposes Christian definiteness to romantic mythologizing. A strong warning might be in order: anyone coming to this book expecting a comparison of Jesus Christ to the god Apollo or a treatment of Greek mythology next to the Christian story will be disappointed. Lynch's Apollo is not the god who batters Achilles' armor from the shoulders of Patroklos in Book XVI of the Iliad, but the symbol of art as dream reconceived by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. Lynch treats Apollo not as a poetic particular-as real in that regard as Ajax or Odysseus-but as an imaginary deity over against the historical existence of Christ: "I take even the symbol of Apollo as a kind of infinite dream over against Christ who was full of definiteness and actuality-and was on that account rejected by every gnostic system since, even up to now. Even if a little unjustly, let Apollo stand for everything that is weak and pejorative in the 'aesthetic man' of Kierkegaard and for that kind of fantasy beauty which is a sort of infinite, which is easily gotten everywhere, but which will not abide the straitened gates of limitation that leads to stronger beauty." Christ and Apollo presents these "straitened gates of limitation" as the great good of literature. Insisting on the "universal limitation, or particularity" that provokes the response of the imagination, Lynch writes that "the heart, substance, and center of the human imagination, as of human life, must lie in the particular and limited image or thing." This sui generis study reaches into the very heart of literature's nature, from the Greek dramatists to Dante, from Shakespeare to Proust, from Camus to Greene.

Wiseblood Books

Christ and Apollo juxtaposes Christian definiteness to romantic mythologizing. A strong warning might be in order: anyone coming to this book expecting a comparison of Jesus Christ to the god Apollo or a treatment of Greek mythology next to the Christian story will be disappointed. Lynch’s Apollo is not the god who batters Achilles’ armor from the shoulders of Patroklos in Book XVI of the Iliad, but the symbol of art as dream reconceived by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. Lynch treats Apollo not as a poetic particular—as real in that regard as Ajax or Odysseus—but as an imaginary deity over against the historical existence of Christ: 
"I take even the symbol of Apollo as a kind of infinite dream over against Christ who was full of definiteness and actuality—and was on that account rejected by every gnostic system since, even up to now. Even if a little unjustly, let Apollo stand for everything that is weak and pejorative in the 'aesthetic man' of Kierkegaard and for that kind of fantasy beauty which is a sort of infinite, which is easily gotten everywhere, but which will not abide the straitened gates of limitation that leads to stronger beauty." 
Christ and Apollo presents these “straitened gates of limitation” as the great good of literature. Insisting on the “universal limitation, or particularity” that provokes the response of the imagination, Lynch writes that “the heart, substance, and center of the human imagination, as of human life, must lie in the particular and limited image or thing.” This sui generis study reaches into the very heart of literature's nature, from the Greek dramatists to Dante, from Shakespeare to Proust, from Camus to Greene.

Christ & Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination

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