Monthly Archives: November 2009

Theology and the Victorian Novel

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Perkin_corr

With the kind indulgence of Michael Happy, and the pretext of continuing the discussion of the Bible and the nineteenth-century novel, I am pleased to announce the recent publication of my book Theology and the Victorian Novel (McGill-Queen’s University Press).  In it, I discuss the theological dimension of a series of mostly very well-known Victorian novels by Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mary Augusta Ward, and Walter Pater.  The book isn’t exactly a contribution to Frye scholarship, as the primary approach is that of intellectual and cultural history.  However, it is concerned throughout with the relationship between literature and spiritual vision, and a recurrent theme is the way that the Victorians looked to literature for a supplement to or a substitute for the authority of sacred scripture, and for a sacramental revelation of the divine.

In terms of visible traces, Frye’s influence can be seen mainly in the context of genre theory, but I am sure it is more pervasive than the index and notes might suggest.  I first read extensively in Frye’s work while I was in the early stages of working on the book.  Previously I was only familiar with the Anatomy and one or two other short pieces, and I had written a review of The Double Vision when it first came out.  The combination of a sabbatical leave and the need to come to a better understanding of the relationship between the Bible and literature resulted in a prolonged immersion in Frye’s work.  It will be no surprise to those who have read any of my recent posts to learn that Frye’s influence on my book coexists with the influences of Robert Alter, historical scholars such as Stephen Prickett, and postmodern theology.  I have tried to put these together to say something about the relationship between literature and theology not only in the Victorian period, but, implicitly at least, at the present time.

Novels, as I note at the beginning of my Introduction, conventionally are not thought to have much to do with theology.  For example, Milan Kundera begins The Art of the Novel (1986) with the image of Don Quixote riding out into a world marked by the disappearance of God, “the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men.”  But Henry James observes, in a passage I use as one of my epigraphs, “The novel is of all pictures the most comprehensive and the most elastic.  It will stretch anywhere – it will take in absolutely anything.”  My basic argument is that the Victorians stretched the novel form to include theology, which was an important part of the cultural discourse of the time.

Religious Knowledge, Lecture 8

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ark

King David Dancing Before the Ark, 15th century

 

Lecture 8.  November 25, 1947

David and Solomon represent the focalizing of the symbolism of the king, the consolidation of religious and secular authority.  These men are important not so much as rulers as for the consolidating of religion.  David captures Jerusalem, the focus of political and religious aspiration.  But it is the same centralizing of something far more primitive.  It shows up in the Middle Ages in the person of the consolidating figure of the priest-king, the head of religion and state,

Samuel II, Chap. 6: David brings the ark to Jerusalem, the City of David.  Before Jerusalem was taken and the temple was established, the Israelites had a wandering temple, the Ark of God.  This Ark would be the thing that represents the protection of the Israelites by God.  When the Philistines captured the Ark of God, the Israelites knew they were licked.  Then they got it back.  A temple is built for the Ark.  The return of the Ark is told in Samuel, in which it is regarded as a sacred thing, as a reservoir of electric force.  David leads the dancing procession (verses 20-22).

The king who leads the service is also exposed to humiliation.  David is willing to accept this as part of kingship.  Verses 18-19: the entry of the Ark is signalled by a communion feast distributed by the king.  This is repeated in the feeding of the 5000, which is the prelude to the communion feast itself.  The conception of communion is still there.  True honour comes from the act of suffering and humiliation.  David is intimate with God, the chosen Son of God.  It doesn’t make him divine, though.  Psalm 45 shows the symbol of the king.

The city and the temple are seen as the only place were religion is.  God is only there.  The distinction between city and temple is dissolved until there is no distinction.  The king represents the people in a single human form as the elected Son of God.  David is the Son of God and, at the same time, all the Israelites are in the body of David.

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Typology, Kerygma, and Literature

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Elohim

Blake's Elohim Creating Adam

Russell’s latest post on Alter and Frye has got me thinking about my longstanding assumptions about Frye, particularly with regard to the Bible and literature.  The Bible and literature occupy the centre of Frye’s critical universe, and understanding what he says about both is to appreciate the full potential of his critical vision.

The Judeo-Christian Bible as the supreme artifact of Christian culture down to about the 18th century is of course easy enough to assume.  As Frye points out, the Bible is a primary source of imagery and stories well into the 20th century — and, in these apparently apocalyptically-minded times, into the 21st century as well.

But the Bible is not just a source of mythos and dianoia, to use the Aristotelian terms Frye adapts in Anatomy.  It is the source also of a “unique” arrangement of myth and metaphor represented by typology, the progressive succession of type-antitype-type (e.g. Creation-Incarnation-Revelation).  Although Frye rather conspicuously only says it once, he nevertheless observes on page 80 of The Great Code:

The typological organization of the Bible does present the difficulty, to a secular literary critic, of being unique: no other book in the world, to my knowledge, has a structure even remotely like that of the Christian Bible.

That structure is the “double mirror” of the Old Testament and the New Testament — the latter concealed in the former and the former revealed by the latter — which provides the Christian Bible’s kerygmatic vision of the human condition that Blake characterizes as the revelation of  the “human form divine.”  The typological structure of the Christian Bible that furnishes its distinctive double mirror character, however, does not originate with Christianity: the Hebrew Bible is the source of these typological principles, and the first “Christians” were themselves Jews who compiled what would become their “new” testament using the same typological structure of their traditional holy scriptures.  As Frye observes:

Typology in the Bible is by no means confined to the Christian version of the Bible: from the point of view of Judaism at least, the Old Testament is much more genuinely typological without the New Testament than with it. There are, in the first place, events in the Old Testament that are types of later events recorded also within the Old Testament.  (GC, 83)

When Frye suggests, therefore, as he does in The Great Code (and there alone, it might be pointed out) that the culturally ascendant phases of language we have observed so far — the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the demotic — may be, for the first time in human history, about to be succeeded by a kerygmatic phase, he is making about as revolutionary a statement as he ever made.  I’m not sure it is possible to approach his work as a whole without thinking about its implications.

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More Frye and Alter

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Velazquez, Joseph's Coat

Velazquez, Joseph's Coat

One of the fundamental differences between Frye and Alter is that they have such different views of metaphor. For Alter, metaphor is an ornamental frill. He calls it a “rhetorical embellishment” and an “elaboration,” somewhat like an embroidery stitched onto the surface of the literal text. Anything that is not attentive to “the factual report of historical events” becomes, for Alter, “a linguistic gesture.” Similarly, for Alter, typology produces only “lovely designs,” which are not text based “but artefacts of interpretation.”

Frye’s view of metaphor is completely different. Among the numerous theories of this trope––from Aristotle’s transference view through the theories about metaphor as substitution, comparison, transaction (I.A. Richards), and interaction (Max Black)––Frye’s theory seems to me to be unique, based as it is on the principle of identity. His views on metaphor form a part of his expansive theory of language, where identity is both a grammatical and a religious principle, as well as a principle for defining the sense of self (personal identity). Metaphor tells us, as Frye never tires of repeating, that X is Y. Alter, who, as Russell points out, is interested in difference rather than identity, says that “there is no such thing as a truly synonymous narrative event of literary articulation.” This completely rules out Frye, for whom myths and metaphors are synonymous. The principle of identity entails the extraordinarily radical position that X is literally Y. Such different assumptions about how poetic language works means that there is very little common ground on which Alter and Frye can stand. Similarly, if your Bible is the Hebrew Bible, then the question of typology doesn’t even arise.

Alter does grant the obvious, that in the poetic forms in the Bible, one often encounters figurative language, but, he argues, “In the predominant prose narratives of the Hebrew Bible, only the most sparing use is made of either metaphor or simile.” He then illustrates the point by citing a verse from Genesis about Esau’s selling his birthright and one from 2 Samuel about David’s encounter with Bathsheba. What Alter means by “sparing use” is uncertain. Outside of the poems in chapters 1 and 22-23, which contain more than forty metaphors and similes, the rest of 2 Samuel is not without a fairly generous supply of figures: there are more than fifty. While the author of 2 Samuel focuses on the more or less literal account of David’s rise to power and his wayward ways, the author can hardly be said to have been sparing in his use of various tropes. As for Genesis 25, half of which is given over to genealogy, the author’s account of Jacob and Esau is not without a generous measure of linguistic play: “red” (’adom)—Edom; “hairy” (se`ar)—Seir, land of the Edomites; “Jacob” (`aqeb)—heel. Even the Lord, who speaks to Rebekah in quatrains, is given to troping: “Two nations are in your womb.” The tension between Esau the hunter and Jacob the shepherd point backward to the Cain and Abel story. This is not necessarily metaphorical, but it is an archetypal example of the story of the two brothers, one good and one bad, that we encounter everywhere in our stories.

As for Frye’s identifying Joseph’s coat of many colors with fertility, which Alter says is “altogether arbitrary,” this goes back a long way. In an Emmanuel College paper he wrote on “St. Paul and Orphism” (he was 22 at the time), Frye says in a discussion of fertility rites that “Joseph’s coat of many colours is an evident vegetation symbol.” That’s because he read somewhere, as he says later in the paper, that “Dionysos, the fertility god, wears a coat of many colours.” I don’t know Frye’s source here (perhaps Sir James Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, or W.K.C. Guthrie, one of Frye’s principal sources for his paper—he lists twenty-four books), but I doubt that he made it up.

Religious Knowledge, Lecture 7

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zampieri

Zampieri, King David Playing the Harp

Lecture 7.  November 18, 1947

For farming people the sacrifice was concerned with the cycle of crops.  First it was the pastoral, hunting age of existence, the Stone Age.  It was followed by farming, the new Stone Age. To tell this story, the Bible gives us Cain and Abel, the pastoralist and the farmer.  The Bible deals symbolically with what we have dealt with historically.  From the tillers of the soil come the village, the city—the move from stone to bronze to iron.

Out of the unity of social interests comes the unity of religion.  Judaism and Christianity evolve out of a Mediterranean culture and religion.  Palestine would be less independent than any other country because it is at the crossroads of the world.  To expect a unique experience in Palestine would be like expecting New York to be invaded by wild Indians.

Much of the pre-prophetic religion is obliterated because the Old Testament is founded on prophetic writings.  Solomon’s temple shows a generous mixing up of religious influences.  His successors show that every king who Does Right keeps to Jehovah and every king who Does Wrong mixes cults, which include Moloch.  There are hints of pre-prophetic religion in the story of Jephthah’s daughter, and at the end of Judges are queer stories of an abominated religion.

Samuel Book II, Chap. 21, describes an oracle system. When the famine comes one consults the oracle.  David inquires because he is the king and therefore responsible for the famine as the principle of fertility in the society.  It is a private prayer, but really an oracle.  There is a feeling of divine vengeance for some crime, as in Greek tragedy.  Because crime is unnatural, nature must right herself.  It is the act of treachery of Saul that causes the sin that caused the famine.  However, Jonathon’s son is spared.

Ideas persist of a human sacrifice at harvest to right the famine.  The sacrifice originally is the tribe in communion as one man––through the one man who symbolizes the unity of the tribe.   They enter into communion as one body.  For the farmer, the blood becomes the vintage and the flesh the harvest. The man sacrificed becomes the regular recurrence of the cycle of nature as well as the unity of the tribe.  There is no symbolism here; they are the body and the blood.

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Robert Alter and the Bible: A Response to Joseph Adamson

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torah8hu 

Following Joe’s critique of Alter, I too went back to Alter’s essay “Northrop Frye between Archetype and Typology.”  I’ll begin with the conclusion to Joe’s post, where he writes that “Alter simply wants nothing to do with the imaginative element, with metaphor or myth in the Bible, or if it must be admitted, since it is everywhere, only as a kind of rhetorical ornamentation that is easily hedged in by a crabbed and mean-spirited descriptivism.”  I agree that Alter wants to distance himself from Frye’s way of reading the Bible – for reasons that I will get to later – but I find in his work a powerful response to the imaginative element in the Bible.  It’s just that for Alter this element exhibits itself in difference rather than identity, and in particulars rather than typological categories.  Alter ends his essay by saying that “The revelatory power of the literary imagination manifests itself in the intricate weave of details of each individual text.”  Going back to Joe’s conclusion, I would also dispute the adjectives “crabbed and mean-spirited”; Alter reads the Bible as a work of great literature, a revelation of what it means to be human, and an exploration of the way that human lives are embedded in history.  I regard Alter as a major humanist critic, not someone I would put on the same level as Frye, but certainly a literary scholar and critic whom I find in many ways exemplary. 

To reiterate a point I made in an earlier post, when teaching the Bible and literature I set up a dialectic between the approaches of Alter and Frye.  For me, both are necessary.  In looking at Milton, or aspects of Shakespeare, Frye’s visionary-typological approach is a powerful way of seeing what these poets have done imaginatively with the Bible.  On the other hand, in discussing the novel, which in the English tradition at least is profoundly grounded in the Bible, Alter’s commentaries on the Hebrew Bible are an invaluable resource, as of course they are in considering the literary qualities of the Hebrew Bible itself.  Not only do the two critics have divergent ways of reading, but for pedagogical purposes it is useful that one of them writes out of a Christian tradition and the other from a Jewish tradition. 

I have a vivid memory of Alter’s paper at the Frye and the Word conference: for me it had the kind of lucid authority that makes you feel you are in the presence of an exceptional scholar.  (You can see him lecturing for yourself here.)  That conference took place as I was getting ready to teach my course on the Bible and Literature for the first time, and I was therefore especially attentive when Alan Mendelsohn, in his introduction to Alter’s lecture, praised Alter’s translation of the book of Genesis for opening up dramatically new perspectives on that text.  In teaching the course, I have found Mendelsohn’s recommendation to be exactly right: Alter’s commentary reveals countless complexities and subtleties in the text of the Hebrew Bible, which with his knowledge of the European literary tradition he is often able to relate to later literary developments.  (He has since translated the two books of Samuel, the whole of the Torah, and the Psalms.)  I was even inspired by reading these commentaries to start learning Hebrew, in spite of the fact that I am not very adept with foreign languages.  Thus through the long hot summer of 2006, I spent several hours a week sitting down with a handful of undergraduates less than half my age, under the guidance of Wendell Eisener, a religious studies professor at Saint Mary’s who most kindly let me sit in on his class.  I would not claim to be a Hebrew scholar as a result, but I learned enough to start to see how the language works and to be able to use reference tools. 

Joe points out some of Alter’s negative language towards Frye, and I think that this language indicates a certain degree of anxiety.  At least twice, Alter uses the word “beguiling” to characterize Frye’s method of reading the Bible.  This word now has the primary meaning of “charming,” or “diverting attention in a pleasant way,” but it also retains the sense embodied in the root guile of “deluding, entangling with guile.”  Alter is clearly aware of, and wary of, the seductive power of Frye’s way of reading the Bible, which he notes is not merely a practice of worldly criticism but something that includes “a certain homiletic touch.” And Alter does acknowledge that the mythological way of reading exemplified by The Great Code is an appropriate description of the way that many poets in the Christian tradition have read the Bible. 

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Frye and Homosexuality, Cont’d

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Rembrandt's David and Jonathan

Rembrandt's David and Jonathan

 Further to my earlier post:

I’m not altogether sure what Frye intends by what he calls the homosexual or androgynous Jesus, but I suspect it’s related to his notion of the original form of humanity––the adam––before the creation of Eve.  That, in any event, is what emerges from Words with Power (127, 189).  There, as in most of Frye’s references to homosexuality and androgyny, the thrust is less sexual than metaphorical.  But perhaps one could begin to figure out Frye’s views on the issue from those passages where he mentions homosexuality.  Some of these are:

I write you some funny letters, don’t I, for a lover? All convention and all tradition is against me. Everybody thought, up to the last century, and most beyond it, that, as women had brains but no disposition to use them, and resented anything but an emotional reaction, that any kind of love that went beyond the caresses and endearments of a union based frankly and brutally on mutual possession of bodies, had something unnatural about it. But, oh, Lord, how dead, smelly, worn-out, stale that kind of love is! All men, all women, only react in one way to physical intimacy, which was why people had to be so frightfully monogamous. And so prudish too, because if there were no taboos on sex the race would die out. And it’s so hard to get away from that. When D.H. Lawrence started writing, everybody thought he’d be the Messiah of a new, fresh, vigorous kind of loving. Well, he did, until the war got him, or Oedipus, or something: anyway he betrayed his trust and slipped back into all the nineteenth-century drivel with Lady Chatterley. A sensitive, intelligent person in love today is a kind of pioneer. The Greeks started the antithesis between cultured, intellectual love and emotional physical love by making the first homosexual and the second heterosexual—or at least the Christian Church completed the antithesis. I think we might resolve that antithesis today, but with economic conditions as primitive and barbaric as they are, it would only work in isolated cases, of which you and I, thank God, are one. A lot of people, including yourself, squawk and squirm and giggle occasionally when talked to like this—but, while I may sound silly in my manner of expression, or pompous or what not—I know all the automatic reactions—to be educated intellectually is so easy, and to be educated emotionally so difficult—I despise a Philistine so much in the arts, that I can’t be satisfied to be one in love.  (Frye/Kemp Correspondence, 28 June 1935)

Jesus is a Son, but the Son & the Bridegroom are different: that’s why the gospel Jesus is presented as a homosexual (actually androgynous).  The difference comes out in the wedding at Cana [John 2:1–11], which I have no doubt means a wedding where Christ himself was the bridegroom.  But that wedding was not a biographical event in Jesus’ life: it’s a parable of the Second Coming.  Whenever there’s a son there’s a mother, and Jesus declares his independence of his mother here.  The Bridegroom is the sexual Jesus: the Bride is the people, of course, but Jerusalem is the Second Coming of the Virgin individual carrying the Word. (Late Notebooks, 1:277.  See also Words with Power, 202–3.)

I am about to write the world’s profoundest poem, with apologies to William James, the only one who has touched my level of genius:

Hogamus, higamus,

God is polygynous.

Higamus, hogamus,

Christ was androgynous.

(Late Notebooks 1: 274)

[James is said to have awakened one day with this jingle ringing in his head: “Hogamus, higamus, / Men are polygamous. / Higamus, hogamus, / Women monogamous.”]

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The Peacable Kingdom

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350px-Edward_Hicks_-_Peaceable_Kingdom

Bob Denham writes, in response to “Frye on Lincoln“:

We might also call attention to Frye’s concluding paragraph to the Whidden Lectures, delivered at McMaster University on the occasion of the centenary of Confederation:

I referred earlier to Grove’s A Search for America, where the narrator keeps looking for the genuine America buried underneath the America of hustling capitalism which occupies the same place. This buried America is an ideal that emerges in Thoreau, Whitman, and the personality of Lincoln. All nations have such a buried or uncreated ideal, the lost world of the lamb and the child, and no nation has been more preoccupied with it than Canada. The painting of Tom Thomson and Emily Carr, and later of Riopelle and Borduas, is an exploring, probing painting, tearing apart the physical world to see what lies beyond or through it. Canadian literature even at its most articulate, in the poetry of Pratt, with its sense of the corruption at the heart of achievement, or of Nelligan with its sense of unfulfilled clarity, a reach exceeding the grasp, or in the puzzled and indignant novels of Grove, seems constantly to be trying to understand something that eludes it, frustrated by a sense that there is something to be found that has not been found, something to be heard that the world is too noisy to let us hear. One of the derivations proposed for the word “Canada” is a Portuguese phrase meaning “nobody here.” The etymology of the word “Utopia” is very similar, and perhaps the real Canada is an ideal with nobody in it. The Canada to which we really do owe loyalty is the Canada that we have failed to create. In a year bound to be full of discussions of our identity, I should like to suggest that our identity, like the real identity of all nations, is the one that we have failed to achieve. It is expressed in our culture, but not attained in our life, just as Blake’s new Jerusalem to be built in England’s green and pleasant land is no less a genuine ideal for not having been built there. What there is left of the Canadian nation may well be destroyed by the kind of sectarian bickering which is so much more interesting to many people than genuine human life. But, as we enter a second century contemplating a world where power and success express themselves so much in stentorian lying, hypnotized leadership, and panic-stricken suppression of freedom and criticism, the uncreated identity of Canada may be after all not so bad a heritage to take with us. (The Modern Century)

To which Joe replies:

Yes, thanks for this, Bob. And even more powerful perhaps in its evocation of the pastoral myth and its relation to both America’s and Canada’s “buried or uncreated ideal, the lost world of the lamb and the child,” is the passage from the Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, where he speaks of Edward Hick’s great painting of The Peacable Kingdom [shown above].

Here, in the background, is a treaty between the Indians the the Quaker settlers under Penn. In the foreground is a group of animals, lions, tigers, bears, oxen, illustrating the rophecy of Isaiah about the recovery of innocence in nature [11:6-9]. Like the animals of the Douanier Rousseau, they stare past us with a serenity that transcends conscousness. It is a pictorial emblem of what Grove’s narrator was trying to find under the surface of America: the reconciliation of man with man and of man with nature: the mood of Thoreau’s Walden retreat. of Emily Dickinson’s garden, of Huckleberry Finn’s raft, of the elegies of Whitman. . . . This mood is closer to the haunting vision of a serenity that is both human and natural which we have been struggling to identify in the Canadian tradition. It we had to characterize a distinctive emphasis in that tradition, we might call it a quest fo the peacable kingdom (CW 12: 371)

Frye and Homosexuality

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200px-09nolim1

In response to “Thoreau, Frye, and Same-Sex Desire“:

There’s this from Frye’s 1949 diary:

University lecturing is not teaching but a form of intellectualized preaching. You can go into all the world and preach the gospel, but if you try to teach any more than about twelve disciples you’ve had it. Teaching relates two individuals through Socratic love, which has to be homosexual. I can’t really teach a woman, because, being a woman, the things organic to her learning process are female, and shut me out. All I could do would be to identify myself with her animus, which puts me, as I’ve discovered and elsewhere remarked, in a hell of a spot. To teach a boy is to form his character, which means partly to unite him to the males of the tribe. It also involves the sort of love which sees with complete clarity what the boy’s character is: you can’t, that is, teach a frivolous person in the way you would teach a preternaturally solemn one. I’m not a teacher according to this line of thought; and I wonder if it’s possible without some physical interest in men, or sublimation of it. Even Jesus had a beloved disciple, as Marlowe pointed out. I can trace no such interest in myself.

The Marlowe reference: “That St John the Evangelist was bed-fellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom; and that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma” (Richard Baines, “A Note Concerning the Opinion of One Christopher Marlowe, Concerning His Damnable Judgment of Religion and the Scorn of God’s Word,” Christopher Marlowe, Complete Poems and Plays [London: Dent, 1976], 513). The so-called “Baines’s Note” is a series of opinions on religion, said to have been Marlowe’s but apparently penned by Baines in an effort to bring Marlowe before the Court of the Star Chamber.

And these two passages from the Late Notebooks:

Tillich on the miserable reality of the concrete churches: when I went to church in Montreal with Lorna that jackass disrupted the whole feeling of the service by braying about homosexuals. Before the service, I met a woman I’d never seen before who pecked out of me in two minutes the fact that I had no earned doctorate. Malice, like other pacts with the devil, certainly gives one preternatural perceptions, up to a point.

Eros Regained starts with the homosexual refined Jesus lying on the bosom of a male beloved disciple, trying to get away from his mother but still so hung up sexually that he insisted his father was not his father and that his mother was a virgin, rescuing a bride symbolically but saying “don’t touch me” as his last words to a woman. [The notion of the homosexual or androgynous Jesus is repeated here and there in Frye’s writings––scores of times.]

Religious Knowledge, Lecture 6

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abraham3isaac

Carravaggio, Abraham and Isaac

Lecture 6.  November 14, 1947

There are three periods to the Hebrew religion:  Pre-prophetic, prophetic, post-prophetic or priestly.

The pre-prophetic is a mixed cult.  The pre-exilic prophets—Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah—represent a spiritual awakening in history.  It might be part of the general movement of Zoroaster whose teaching affected the life of the Hebrews.  The prophetic follows the worship of Jehovah.  The post-prophetic (priestly) is the legalizing of Jehovah.  This period is Judaism, the founding of the second temple, the synagogue, the Pharisees, and an organized cult.

Amos is one of the earliest prophets.  Genesis and Kings II have four or five main documents showing the people affected by prophetic teaching.  There is no “pure” pre-prophetic phase.  First there was YHVH (Yahveh) which became Jehovah, the tribal, ancestral God of the Hebrews.  This is what the prophets preached.  The pre-prophetic religion which the prophets attacked as not “pure”: that is, it had a mixture of other gods.  The mixing of cults was wrong, and the wrongness hinged on the ritual and the ceremony.

REVELATION IS CONSOLIDATED REALITY

The prophets emphasized doctrine and teaching.  Judaism, or the priestly period, was the synthesis of religious doctrine with the prophetic teaching.  The prophets were actuated by a feeling of moral evil on the part of any mixed cult.

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