Responding to Clayton Chrusch:

Clayton, the one place where I disagree with you is the assumption that the hermeneutic of charity is unorthodox. In fact, it is the essence of Augustine’s hermeneutics as set out in On Christian Doctrine:

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbour does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way.

Also, I think orthodoxy begins with faith, which is not intellectual assent. This is expressed in Anselm’s maxim “credo ut intelligam,” “I believe so that I may understand.” Not a quotation Frye was fond of, as I recall. But it does express the point you are also making, that one should not make “an idolatry of one’s current understanding of God.” The Nicene creed is a statement of faith in the first person plural, at least in its modern translation: “We believe in one God,” etc. is a statement of collective faith. How that faith is understood is a matter for each individual, and develops through that individual’s life. In that sense the language of the creed is more the language of myth than the language of positive knowledge.

Perhaps my use of the term “orthodoxy” has caused some misunderstanding; by it the theologians I was discussing mean an affirmation of the traditional creeds of Christianity. I would distinguish this -radically!-from fundamentalism, which approaches the doctrine of the church not as myth but as positive knowledge, like the student who every few years tells me in the Bible and literature course about the remnants of the ark on Mount Ararat. The type of liberal theologian who was prevalent when I was growing up delighted in shocking people by arguing, in an equally positivistic way that this or that story “did not happen.” I recall Frye saying that to say you do not, or do, believe in the virgin birth is to be theologically illiterate.

In his recent response to Michael Sinding, Michael Happy quotes a passage from one of the Late Notebooks where Frye “wonders with uncharacteristic despair, ‘Why am I so revered but so ignored?’”  In Michael’s words, “Frye was not merely superseded during the post-structuralist realignment, he was pushed aside with what can only be taken as shows of bad faith through misreading and misrepresentation.”  Why was there such hostility, apart from the usual need to misread or discredit precursor figures?  In thinking about this, it struck me that Frye had the bad fortune to publish his major late works on the Bible at precisely the time when literary criticism, under the sway of theory, had largely turned away from any notion of the religious, the transcendent, the spiritual, or the divine.  From the late 1970s to the late 1990s the climate in literary and cultural studies was resolutely secular.  Interestingly, one of the dominant theorists was the ex-Catholic Althusser (who might be thought of as the Auguste Comte of the twentieth century).  Even in the study of religion, the emphasis was on the cultural and the material: I remember a friend who is a church historian telling me of the dominance of Marxist methodology in his own field.  Edward Said, recently discussed by Michael Sinding and Joe Adamson, referred to his own critical project as “secular criticism,” in the sense of criticism occupied with the world and its social and political relationships; in several published comments Said objected to the religious concerns of various other critics.  Such a sceptical, this-worldly critical climate probably accounts for some of the hostile treatment of Frye that Michael mentions.

From the late 1990s, there has been a return of religion in literary studies and theoretical discourse, but – and here I think is part of the source of Michael’s frustration – Frye does not seem to have benefited very much from this development.  I suggest that there are several reasons for this, and in attempting to articulate them I am also arguing that for many people Frye’s work seems remote to the present horizon of discourse about religion.  If it is going to play a larger role in that discourse, beyond the confines of what Michael Happy describes as “the comparatively small Frye community,” I think there will have to be a fairly extensive effort of critical engagement, involving a willingness to think beyond the terms used by Frye himself.  (Here I am agreeing with Michael Sinding’s comments of 19 October.)  I am writing as someone who might be described as standing with one foot in the Frye community, and one foot in the world of postmodern theology, and my aim is not to belittle Frye’s work, but rather to suggest ways in which it needs to be critiqued and “translated” in order for it to play a greater role in both the study and the practice of religion in the twenty-first century.  The problems that I think must be faced are

1. For Frye, in spite of his radical spiritual vision and distance from established forms of Christianity, the Bible was largely identical with the Bible of the Protestant evangelical tradition, that is, it was a book made up of various parts arranged in a specific order that told a specific story of creation, fall, redemption, and apocalypse.
2. Frye’s religious thought, however independent, is in some of its dominant themes and concerns strongly analogous to liberal Protestant theology of the mid-twentieth century, notably in its accommodation to secularization, its realized eschatology and its consequent emphasis on the social dimension of religion.

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