CRITIQUE IMAGINATION AS HEALER OF THE HOPELESS: IMAGES OF HOPE REVISITED

Abstract

Time is not lost, I deem, in bewailing and mourning our fate when answering tears stand ready in the listener's eye.

Prometheus Bound ¹

¹ Lynch's 1970 work, Christ and Prometheus: A New Image of the Secular, explores in three “acts” two pivotal questions that run throughout most of his works: “What is the place of the secular in a totally religious world?” and “What is the place of the sacred in an overwhelmingly secular world?” (p. 15). On page 49 he refers particularly to Images of Hope with these words: “In an earlier book, on hope, I tried to sketch a path of approximation to innocence for the mentally ill. There it was a matter of taking away from the sick the burden of finding a one, nonexistent right way in all situations, an inscrutable way of the will of God, that would come from outside our own wishes and would condition all of these wishes. There is no greater torment than this kind of endless, external search for innocence. We must restore the primacy of man as a wishing being who, as long as he is within reality, creates the right thing by the absolute unconditionality of his own wishing. This wish does not have to go out of itself.” Ironically, he wanted Christ and Prometheus entitled “In Search of Innocence” (p. 36). Presumably, the editors prevailed.

Notes

¹ Lynch's 1970 work, Christ and Prometheus: A New Image of the Secular, explores in three “acts” two pivotal questions that run throughout most of his works: “What is the place of the secular in a totally religious world?” and “What is the place of the sacred in an overwhelmingly secular world?” (p. 15). On page 49 he refers particularly to Images of Hope with these words: “In an earlier book, on hope, I tried to sketch a path of approximation to innocence for the mentally ill. There it was a matter of taking away from the sick the burden of finding a one, nonexistent right way in all situations, an inscrutable way of the will of God, that would come from outside our own wishes and would condition all of these wishes. There is no greater torment than this kind of endless, external search for innocence. We must restore the primacy of man as a wishing being who, as long as he is within reality, creates the right thing by the absolute unconditionality of his own wishing. This wish does not have to go out of itself.” Ironically, he wanted Christ and Prometheus entitled “In Search of Innocence” (p. 36). Presumably, the editors prevailed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James T. Morgan

James T. Morgan is editorial director at Don Bosco Multimedia and is an adjunct professor at Fordham University's Graduate School of Education.