Book Riview
Infinite Lit
Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination
ISI Books, 2004
(411 pages, $15.00, paperback)
reviewed by David Bentley Hart
Few American literary scholars could have known in 1960—the year in which Fr. William Lynch’s Christ and Apollo first appeared—that the reigning school of the “New Criticism” was entering into its twilight. The Eliotic rebellion against Romanticism and the consequent elevation of the Metaphysical Poets to canonical supremacy had become the established orthodoxy. A high formalism—hostile to subjective affectivity, false transcendence, or empty enthusiasm—enjoyed all but unquestioned authority.
Yet only eight years later, Jacques Derrida’s notoriously oracular encomium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins would leave many of the younger denizens of American English departments hopelessly infatuated with movements in French postmodernism that they would possess neither the philosophical erudition to understand nor the good taste to despise. Soon American literary academe’s quest for its holy grail—what Cleanth Brooks called the “well wrought urn” of the perfectly crafted poetic artifact—would be abandoned in favor of more exciting (because somewhat more degenerate) critical pursuits.
Lynch’s Oblivion
This perhaps explains, at least in part, how it is that a book of such impressive originality as Lynch’s should have fallen into obscurity so soon after its publication, and should have languished in near oblivion for at least three decades. Admired as it once was, it was too much a part of a fading moment in intellectual history.
Not to say that Lynch was a slave of his time. True, he (like the New Critics) harbored a wholesomely robust distaste for tendentious schools of literary criticism devoted to questions of ideological or social “relevancy,” but he was also impatient with the desire of many of his contemporaries to seal off the literary artifact so jealously against the contamination of any concern beyond itself as to reduce the literary act itself to a kind of exquisite and intricate autism.
Still, where Lynch diverged from the critical dogmas of his day, he was not precocious: His book contained no hint of an interest in “transgression,” expressed no loathing for “patriarchy” or “phallogocentrism,” evinced no concern for “post-colonial” consciousness, betrayed no anxiety regarding “the absence of the signified,” “queer theory,” “eco-feminism,” “post-globalist Marxism”—none of this was even so much as foreshadowed in its pages. His was, in short, a reactionary text.
Therein, of course, lies its brilliance. Christ and Apollo is a remarkably coherent—if eccentric—attempt to address the critical concerns of its day by way of a retreat to perhaps the most conceptually sophisticated “formalism” of all: the classical Christian metaphysics of the transcendental perfections of truth, goodness, beauty, and (above all) being.
Lynch was, after all, not only a literary scholar, but also a philosopher and theologian of some considerable erudition. As such, his inclination was to approach literature not simply as an object of aesthetic concern, nor even more broadly as a matter of general culture, but as a particular path to a truer vision of humanity, creation, and God.
Divine Particularity
David B. Hart is the author of The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003), reviewed in the September 2004 issue.
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