Building the Human City

William F. Lynch's Ignatian Spirituality for Public Life

Kane

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498239134
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Building the Human City is a first overview of the award-winning yet quite diverse works of Jesuit philosopher William F. Lynch. Writing from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, Lynch was among the first to warn against the fierce polarizations prevalent in our culture wars and political life. He called for a transformation of artistic and intellectual sensibilities and imaginations through the healing discernments and critical ironies of an Ignatian (and Socratic) spirituality. Yet the breadth of his concerns (from cinema and literature to mental health and hope to secularization and faith) as well as the depth of his thought (philosophical as much as theological) led to little initial awareness of the overall vision uniting his writings. This book, while exploring that vision, also argues that the spirituality Lynch proposes is more needed today than when he first wrote.

1

Into the Valley of the Human

The May 23, 1960, issue of Time magazine carried a two-page feature article on William F. Lynch, SJ (1908–1987). Calling him “one of the most incisive Catholic intellectuals in the U.S,”1 the article focused primarily on Lynch’s just published Christ and Apollo. Its title, “Downward to the Infinite,” not only sought to suggest the central theme of that book, but in effect gave one indication of the fundamental intention and direction that runs through the complex and rich body of Lynch’s writings. For the title of this first chapter, I have used one of Lynch’s own images, “into the valley of the human” (IH, 117), as another way to suggest that same fundamental intention and direction. Lynch himself probably gives the most explicit articulation of the basic intention of his work in a passage in his last published book, Images of Faith. There he wrote: “I repeat that everything I have ever written asks for the concrete movement of faith and the imagination through experience, through time, through the definite, through the human, through the actual life of Christ” (IF, 81).

It is my hope that this entire book will gradually unfold what Lynch meant by this description of “everything I have ever written.” Yet even at this beginning point the reader may get a preliminary feel for the intention of Lynch’s thought from his emphasis on the concrete movement of faith and imagination, and perhaps even more from his rhythmic repetition of the word “through”: through experience, through time, through the definite, through the human, and through the actual life of Christ. Everything he wrote “asks for” this movement “into the valley of the human.” Indeed he called for it with a constant, restrained urgency. Thus he continually called us to a way of thinking, to a pattern of habits and attitudes, to the development of the kind of sensibility and spirituality which would make such movement possible, and would thereby counter our regular tendency and temptation toward fundamentally opposed movements of mind and spirit and imagination, especially those which hunger for quick fixes, for leaps into the kind of absolute and final positions which inevitably cause deep polarizations and culture wars in the life of our city.

In its original context, Lynch’s remark about “everything I have ever written” is intended to indicate where he stands on what “many . . . will say . . . happens to be precisely the central question of modern theology” (IF, 80): must theology and the Christian imagination increasingly turn its attention towards this world, towards the secular realities involved in building the human city?2 Lynch’s answer was clearly affirmative. His writings develop a deeply incarnational spirituality, or, perhaps better said, they are a sustained reflection of the significance of incarnation (and of the Incarnation) for the many dimensions of our involvement in worldly or public activity.

Images of Faith, as we will see more fully later, is about the two related meanings of its title: about our images of the nature of faith and about faith’s images and imagining of this world. In taking up those topics, Lynch first criticized one very prevalent image of faith: that it is an essentially interior experience whereby the believer “ascends” to “transcendent” meaning. Rather, he argued, we need to see that faith “has a body.” It is embodied in a complex of relations between self and world. Its primary location, so to speak, is external as much as internal, horizontal as much as vertical. For human faith (or a basic sense of trust) is first nurtured within and embodied in some form of family. Yet the family and its relations of faith and trust exist within that larger body of thought and practice which we call society and culture, but which seen more concretely is the pulsing life of the human city.3 In one very important sense, then, our most basic image of faith should be an image of its social or horizontal life as embodied in a complex web of human relationships of trust and fidelity. And given that basic image of faith, it then makes good sense, to turn to the second meaning of Lynch’s title, to take seriously the ways in which faith (whether religious or more basic human faith) imagines the world and to ask whether faith’s images of this world lead us to the task of building such relationships in the human city or divert us from that task. Of course, the ascending or vertical movement of faith is also crucial, but typically comes later.4 As grace (at least in Catholic understanding) builds on nature, so the ascending movement of faith builds upon faith’s embodiment in and movement through this world, even as, of course, “vertical” faith in its turn clearly must contribute to the development of its “horizontal” body. Thus Lynch says, just before his remark about “everything I have ever written,” that “I am intent on creating, and in a very imaginable way, a body for faith and, very specially, a political and social embodiment of faith” (IF, 80). Nor was this his intent only for his last book. It was true for everything he had ever written.

Of course, all that Lynch meant by faith having a body and contributing to the human city will only gradually become clear in the course of this book. Yet the idea is so central to all of Lynch’s work that I want to emphasize it from the first. For, as I have already suggested in the “Preface,” the goal of this book is to introduce (or perhaps in some cases to reintroduce) Lynch to the kind of philosophically and theologically educated audience that when he was writing knew at least some of his work. I want to introduce him by providing, for the first time, an overview of his work, and thus a clearer sense of what I have been calling its overall intention and direction. In doing so, I hope also to argue that the issues Lynch addressed—which I have suggested in this book’s title by mention of public life, and the human city—are still very much with us, as is our need for the kind of sensibility, imagination, and spirituality he saw as crucial if we are adequately to
address them.

Such an overview is needed because, while Lynch wrote numerous essays and a series of well-received books, the explicit focus of these writings was almost always some particular topic about contemporary public life.5 And those topics varied quite widely. He wrote about cinema and the current state of the literary imagination. He also wrote about mental illness and hope, and about modern technical development and the growing secularity of the human city. He was everywhere concerned with what he saw as basic issues in U.S. culture and politics (in the broadest sense of that word). He was, in other words, primarily a cultural critic and an essayist—what might today be referred to as a “public intellectual.”6

Yet he brought to his essays about particular, topical issues both an uncommonly deep appropriation of foundational philosophical and theological ideas and a deeply integrated sensibility. His thinking and writing, in other words, while topical and contemporary, were thoroughly grounded in fundamental aspects of Western philosophy and Christian thought. Nor did he simply bring such fundamental thinking to bear on the particular issue at hand in a given writing. He was also always concerned to call for and lead us towards a shift or development in the foundations of our own thinking and feeling. Thus it can be said that the goal of Lynch’s essays was invariably twofold: both to make a specific contribution to thought about some particular issue or concern, and simultaneously to contribute to the development of the fundamental or foundational kind of sensibility we need as we seek, in our struggles with such issues and concerns, to build a more human world. This second goal has not been adequately appreciated by many who have taken up Lynch’s writings. Yet it gradually becomes clearer as one seeks to understand the unity of thought and purpose that runs through his
quite diverse writings.

Of course, since the central concern of his writing was to bring the resources of Christian faith into sustained engagement with different arenas of the human and secular activities of our world—with the arts and sciences, with culture and politics, with building the human city—one could perhaps understand the whole of Lynch’s work as contributing to a “theology of the world” or a “theology of secularity.” For such themes were current on the theological scene when he wrote. Yet it is, I believe, more faithful to both his intent and his achievement to understand him as calling for and contributing to a spirituality for public life or for human activity in the secular world. For though he was extremely well grounded in both philosophy and theology, he was not much concerned with contributing to the standard questions of ecclesial theology or academic philosophy. Rather the concern which gave unity to his different writings was his desire to comm...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Into the Valley of the Human
• Chapter 2: A Life in Time
• Chapter 3: The Integrating Spirit
• Chapter 4: Apollo—The Dramatic Imagination
• Chapter 5: Dionysus—The Education of Desire
• Chapter 6: Dionysus—Building the Human City
• Chapter 7: Prometheus—The Secular City
• Chapter 8: Christ and the Valley of the Human
• Afterword
• Glossary
• Complete Bibliography of Writings by William F. Lynch, SJ
• Bibliography of Works Cited