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The Lost Image Of Man
By Julian N. Hartt
131 pp. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1963. $3.50.

Professor Hartt's book is one that overcomes the fatigue which surreptitiously indisposes us towards most of what we read. Not only does he dispel whatever subconscious reluctance an author usually encounters in his reader, he magistrally transforms it into a joyous appetite for a rare kind of intellectual nourishment. The feast is served with dexterity and incorruptible good taste. And it consists of forays into the domain of literature.

Nevertheless, Professor Hartt's essays are as perspicacious as he can be mercilessly persuasive in his own home ground of philosophical theology. He writes with a clarity that can only reflect and heighten the infrangible excellence of thoughts so well coordinated that, as soon as expressed, their style is graced with authority. And, whereas some political parties lose their efficacy when they are no longer in the opposition-largely because theirs was not a loyal but a tactical and diversionary one-Professor Hartt manages at once to govern and to remain in the opposition. A few years ago, with wit and scalpel, he denuded the claim of "our most highly esteemed savants and seers" who, with fear and trembling, announced the emergence of a "post-Christian era" simply because they felt compelled to acknowledge the widening gap between the Christian faith and Western civilization. But now Professor Hartt himself has turned to the "testimonies" par excellence of this post-Christian era: The Lost Image of Man points to his lucid handling of a question to which he still remains allergic.

Based for the most part on the Rockwell lectures he delivered at Rice University, the present work is an analysis of several pieces of literature whose authors include Faulkner, Camus, Joyce, Styron, Koestler, Steinbeck, Moravia, Greene, Durrell, and D. H. Lawrence. The choice is not fortuitous, for each of the six chapters is devoted to a different failure of the traditional image of man-that image which was shaped by the Christian tradition. Without going so far as to say that the Christian tradition is therefore superannuated, Professor Hartt observes nonetheless that modern man's self-understanding has practically resulted in the cancellation of the Christian conception of man: the "Heritage" has deteriorated into Convention," the symbols have been denatured into cliché, so that "the stories of (our) mortal years cannot be told as epic, except, of course, ironically." Dominating the human scene, "pointlessness" has enslaved man to rebellion without a cause; and where it appears to be endowed with a cause, as in Marxist theology, man is reduced to "a grammatical fiction" or to "a metaphysical error."

Shattered also is the dream of innocence. In Camus's The Fall,

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"'Innocence' is the original perfection of egocentricity; and 'Fall' is a chance event which shatters the hitherto impenetrable walls of the self infatuated ego," as a result of which man appears as his own counterfeit. Equally disintegrated is the sexual image of man: Love with "no strings" leads to a dead end, unless it overcomes itself by overcoming its passion to enslave the other person. But then the situation is that of characters who sin without enjoying it, and sex itself becomes pointless and superfluous.

In "the vicissitudes of eschatological man," the author denounces the pipe-dreams of this scientific age, in which Marxism and scientism only delude man in order to despoil him of his humanity. By contrast, the final chapter expresses Professor Hartt's conviction that, regardless of how distorted the traditional image of man has become, no substitute will ultimately rob man of his essential humanity. It is not man who is irremediably lost, but only his traditional self-image, only the traditional "master image" of western culture, namely, the Judea-Christian conception of God. A master image dies when it is reduced to a stereotype, and its meaning fades out, "leaving behind only a thin weak formality." And accordingly the God who corresponds to this master image can also become irrelevant, dead.

Professor Hartt has delved deep into the evidence-not all of it, but certainly a significant segment of it-which is blatantly available in support of the cry that the cultural master image of the classical Christian God is dead. Though he is correct in arguing that this does not invalidate faith in God, he leaves us with the impression that he underestimates the significance of such an event in the life and self-consciousness of Western man, and takes refuge in an affirmation of faith. By doing so, he subordinates literary criticism to his theological prejudice, and the explanation of a novel then becomes an emasculated adjunct of religious apologetics-which usually is not why a novelist writes a novel in the first place. Professor Hartt's approach is therefore dichotomous, pulled as he is by his theological commitment on the one hand and, on the other, by his desire to let the texts speak for themselves-and they either do not justify any optimism as regards the Christian tradition or make it clear that the theologians had better acknowledge the cultural dishabilitation of the master image that bore the Christian era.

For a long time, in the past, theology usurped the role of science. It would be a pity if it now attempted to subdue the vocation of literature to the claims of its own assumptions: their norms and criteria are simply not the same, nor can one expect of the novelist to set up straw idols for the theologian to smash with a self-confident faith. Conceivably, a confession of faith would be understandable in a theological treatise. It

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deprives of some integrity the effort itself of Professor Hartt's otherwise perceptive exploration into the question of man as raised by novelists who precisely represent the conscience of those for whom the Christian "Heritage" has degenerated into "Convention." Unless, of course, Professor Hartt does not quite mean what he says, but means what he does not or would not say.

Gabriel Vahanian
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York