Category Archives: Bible

Christian Love

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Stephen Harper — who walked away from Canada’s commitments under the Kyoto treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — appears in a billboard campaign in Copenhagen, 2009

Our last few posts make this a good time to return to our ongoing “Frye on God” thread. Conservative politicians are the most likely to declare themselves Christians, but they are also the most likely to be missing any sense of Christian charity, especially with regard to the poor and the sick. Stephen Harper’s repetitions of “God bless Canada” do not otherwise appear to display much concern for the welfare of fellow Canadians in need, or for the vast expanses of nature that make up the Canadian landscape. Evangelical Christians, in fact, seem to possess a reckless disregard for the environment. Like other North American conservatives, they deny global warming in large numbers despite a virtually unanimous scientific consensus on the issue. Because big oil interests spend tens of millions of dollars every year to fund global warming denialism, it evidently is possible to serve both God and Mammon if you have a mind to do so. It’s as though a peculiar strain of Christian conservatism believes that, with the End Times coming, it doesn’t matter how much damage is inflicted along the way. As Tina Fey in her most recent rendering of Sarah Palin nicely put it, “I believe that global warming is just Jesus holding us closer.”

Those who cite the Bible as a strict source of authority often seem to have no idea what they’re talking about. The limit of their understanding is usually love. Here’s Frye in “On the Bible”:

[T]he response which the Bible itself insists on, the response of the spirit, is bound up with the conception of love, a word which perhaps means too many things in modern languages and may have rather a sentimental sound. But in the New Testament love is regarded not as one virtue among others but as the only virtue there is, and one which is possible only to God and to the spirit of man, a virtue which, in Paul’s language, believes and hopes everything [1 Corinthians 13:7], and thereby includes all the other virtues because, outside the order of love, faith and hope are not necessarily virtues at all. (CW 4, 164)

“The Tree of Life” and “The Book of Job”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRYA1dxP_0

I saw The Tree of Life last night, and it is a remarkable film. I loved all 14 billion years of it. (Yes, it does stretch back to the creation of the universe, but with emphasis on the last 60 years.)

There are two explicit references to the Book of Job, beginning with the opening title card, which refers to God’s confrontation with Job where God asks in the midst of Job’s terrible suffering what he knows about the origins of creation: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth. . .when the morning stars sang together?” (38:4,7).  The entire movie is keyed to this reference, which even then may not fully penetrate the mood of mystery whose motifs seem to be never-ending rounds of love and loss.

Frye, of course, wrote extensively about the Book of Job — about this climactic confrontation between God and Job especially — and, not surprisingly, offers clarification. From The Great Code:

The fact that God’s speech is thrown into a series of rhetorical questions to which “no” is the only answer seems to give it a bullying and hectoring quality, and certainly there is no “answer” to Job’s problem. But did we ever seriously think that so great a poem would turn out to be a problem with an answer? To answer a question. . .is to accept the assumptions in it, and thereby to neutralize the question by consolidating the mental level on which the question was asked. Real questions are stages in formulating better questions; answers cheat us out of the chance to do this. So even if we are dissatisfied with God’s performance, a God who was glibly ready to explain it all would be more contemptible than the most reactionary of divine bullies.

We remember that Job himself was groping toward a realization that no causal explanation of his alienated plight was possible. In a sense God is speaking out of Job’s own consciousness here: any causal explanation takes us back to a First Cause, that is the creation. The rhetorical questions really mean, then, in this context: don’t look along the line of causes to the creation: there is no answer there, and no help there. How Job got into his position is less important than how he is to get out of it; and it is only because he was not a participant in creation that he can be liberated from the chaos and darkness within it. (CW, 217-18)

Rameses the Great and “Literal” Meaning in the Bible

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0MrvvW_kiY

“New evidence linking Rameses and Moses”

A little synchronicity: Rameses II the Great became pharaoh of Egypt on this date in 1279 BCE; Frye makes reference to him in “Symbolism in the Bible” to correct misapprehension about the “literal” meaning of the Bible. The Bible records not history, but a typological manifestation of concern:

[W]hen John the Baptist is asked if he is Elijah, he says that he is not. Now, there is no difficulty there, unless you want to foul yourselves up over a totally impossible conception of literal meaning: reincarnation in its literal there’s-that-man-again form is not a functional doctrine in the Bible. At the same time, metaphorically, which is one of the meanings of “spiritually” in the New Testament, John the Baptist is a reborn Elijah just as Nero is a reborn Nebuchadnezzar or Rameses II. So, it is not surprising that the great scene of the Transfiguration in the Gospels should show Jesus as flanked by Moses on one side and Elijah on the other — that is, the Word of God with the law and the prophets supporting him. Again, that has its demonic parody in the figure of the crucified Christ with the two theives flanking him on either side. (CW 13, 499-50)

TGIF: “Kotex Classic” — And Frye on Laughter, Menstruation and Apocalypse

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I usually post comedy on Friday assuming that it’s a source of end-of-the-week relief whose relevance is implicit, but today’s post invites more consideration.

Here’s a groundbreaking SNL commercial parody from 2002 featuring Tina Fey, Amy Poeher, Ana Gasteyer, Maya Rudolph and Rachel Dratch. These five women did a lot to change the place of women in comedy over the past decade, and this parody encapsulates how they did it: by demystifying feminine taboos and making them funny on their own terms. You can watch the video over at Funny or Die here.

Meanwhile, here’s Frye in “The Nature of Satire” on our response to the “naive and childlike quality in satire” that arises from otherwise risky subject matter:

[Satire] of this kind is based on a solid physical laugh, an earthquake in miniature, a laugh which begins far down in the abdomen, bursts the vest buttons, rolls the stomach, shakes the diaphragm, suffocates the throat, reddens the face, and finally reduces the whole body to rolling and kicking in an epilepsy of joy, then, after quieting down, returns for the next few hours in a couple of dozen squalls of splutters, gasps and reminiscent chortles, and finally sinks into the subconscious to be left until called for. (CW 21, 48)

In Notebook 12, he reflects on the barriers in getting past the anxiety associated with excretory functions, something that this sort of humor helps to diffuse:

I imagine it will be a long time before we have public toilets without distinction of sexes. That seems to be the last stronghold of the primitive passion for separate houses & initiation rites for the sexes: I am noting a strong desire for co-educational residences & the like, & am wondering if excretion rather than sex is the real basis for sexual segregation. E.g. puberty rites & seclusion at menstruation. (CW 9, 248)

In The Return of Eden, Frye delineates the convoluted relation between creation, sex, shame, and sin in Milton’s Paradise Lost as the state of fallen consciousness:

In refusing to recognize the Son as their own creative principle, then, the devils are closing the gate of their own origin.  This theme of closing the gate of origin recurs all through the epic, and is the basis of the feeling which later appears in humanity as what Milton calls shame.  Shame to Milton is something deeper and more sinister in human emotion than simply the instinctive desire to cover the genital organs.  It is rather a state of mind which is the fall itself: it might be described as the emotional response to the state of pride.

In “The Top of the Tower: The Imagery of Yeats,” Frye provides an apocalyptic perspective on excretory functions:

To return to his creator, man has to come back down again, return on himself, seek the source of creative powers which are close to the sexual instincts, and are therefore in “the place of excrement,” as [Yeats’] Crazy Jane says, partaking of the corruption out of which all life comes [Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop, l. 16.]

And, finally, in “On the Bible and Human Culture” (among other places), he associates the apocalyptic with the female — perhaps the best way to round out any meditation on why menstruation is funny until it isn’t because, like everything else wrongly associated with fear and shame of the human body, it is in fact an intimation of deliverance:

The story of the fall in the Jahwist account tells us that the woman took the initiative in breaking the divine prohibition regarding the tree of knowledge. This was of course a standard proof-text, for many centuries rationalizing a patriarchal social system, and in fact the Jahwist account itself says that patriarchy would result from the fall. Commentary has been so anxious to make this point that it has overlooked the fact that the creation of woman was placed at the end of this creation account, as the climax of the whole procedure. Besides, the conception of fall is unintelligible without its complement of reconciliation. Humanity falls as woman, that is, as sexual being, and it is clear that the eating of forbidden fruit has a good deal to do with the loss of innocence and the developing of the sexual relation as we now know it, or what D.H. Lawrence calls sex in the heard. In the Jahwist account, as in so many forms of social psychology today, morality, the knowledge of good and evil, is founded on the repressing or sublimating of the sexual instinct. But if humanity falls as woman, humanity must be redeemed as woman. In Christian typology the souls of all human creatures, whether they are biologically men or women, are symbolically female, forming the body of the bride Jerusalem or the people of God. The Virgin Mary in Catholic thought is placed at the head of all created human beings, below only the Jesus who was begotten, and she is the second Eve in much the same sense that Jesus, in the Pauline phrase, is the second Adam. (CW 4, 122)

Panoramic and Participating Apocalypse

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Further to the impending Judgment Day, here’s Frye in The Great Code distinguishing between panoramic and participating apocalypse:

There are, then, two aspects of the apocalyptic vision: One is what we may call panoramic apocalypse, the vision of the staggering marvels placed in a near future and just before the end of time. As a panorama, we look at it passively, which means it is objective to us. This in turn means that it is essentially a projection of the subjective “knowledge of good and evil” acquired at the fall. That knowledge, we now see, was wholly within the framework of law: it is contained by the final “judgment” where the world disappears into its unending constituents, a heaven and a hell, into one of which man automatically goes, depending on the relative strength of the cases for the prosecution and the defence. Even in heaven, the legal vision tells us, he remains eternally a creature, praising his Creator unendingly.

Anyone coming “cold” to the Book of Revelation, without context of any kind, would probably regard it as simply an insane rhapsody. It has been described as a book that either finds a man mad or else leaves him so. And yet, if we were to explore below the repressions in our own minds that keep us “normal,” we might find very similar nightmares of anxiety and triumph. As a parallel example, we may cite the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the soul is assumed immediately after death to be going through a series of visions, first of peaceful and then of wrathful deities. A priest reads the book into the ear of the corpse, who is assumed to hear the reader’s voice telling him that all these visions are simply his own repressed mental forms now released by death and coming to the surface. If he could realize that, he would immediately be delivered from their power, because it is own power.

If we take a similar approach to the Book of Revelation, we find, I think, that there is a second or participating apocalypse following the panoramic one. The panoramic apocalypse ends with the restoration of the tree and water of life, the two elements of the original creation. But perhaps, like other restorations, this one is a type of something else, a resurrection or upward metamorphosis to a new beginning that is now present. We notice that while the Book of Revelation seems to be emphatically the end of the Bible, it is a remarkably open end. It contains such statements as “Behold, I make all things new” (21:5); it describes God as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all possibilities of verbal expression; it follows the vision of the restoring of the water of life with an earnest invitation to drink of it. The panoramic apocalypse gives way, at the end, to a second apocalypse that, ideally, begins in the reader’s mind as soon as he has finished reading, a vision that passes through the legalized vision of ordeals and trials and judgments and comes out into a second life. In this second life the creator-creature, divine-human antithetical tension has ceased to exist, and the sense of the transcendent person and the split of subject and object no longer limit our vision. After the “last judgment,” the law loses its last hold on us, which is the hold of the legal vision that ends there.

We suggested earlier that the Bible deliberately blocks off the sense of the referential from itself: it is not a book pointing to a historical presence outside it, but a book that identifies itself with that presence. At the end the reader, also, is invited to identify himself with the book. Milton suggests that the ultimate authority in the Christian religion is what he calls the Word of God in the heart, which is superior even to the Bible itself, because for Milton this “heart” belongs not to the subjective reader but to the Holy Spirit. That is, the reader completes the visionary operation of the Bible by throwing out the subjective fallacy along with the objective one. The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared. (CW 19, 156-8)

John Wyclif, Heretic

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The opening of the Gospel of John from the Wyclif Bible (completed 1385): “In the beginning was the Word”

John Wyclif was declared a heretic by the Council of Constance on this date in 1415, twenty-nine years after his death. His books were burned, his body exhumed and burned, and his ashes scattered in the River Swift.

Despite this effort at obliteration, he remains The Morning Star of the Reformation.

Frye in “Symbolism in the Bible”:

Already in the Middle Ages, the question had arisen of translating the Bible into the vernacular (or modern) languages. It was resisted by authorities of the Church establishment, partly because the issue very soon got involved with reform movements within the Church. One of these reform movements was led in England by John Wyclif, a contemporary of Chaucer in the fourteenth century. His disciples, working mainly after his death, produced an English translation of the entire Bible, which of course was a translation of the Vulgate Latin text, not of the Greek and Hebrew. Nevertheless, the Wyclifite Bible became the basis for all future English translations. (CW 13, 420)

 

Jacques Lacan

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL6rkBSHS4A

A lecture on the unconscious and language with a dramatic interruption by a young audience member

Today is Jacques Lacan‘s birthday (1901-1981).

From “Lacan and the Full Word”:

I am not trying to kidnap Lacan for a religious program: I am merely trying to indicate the places where, in my study of the Bible, epigrams and observations I had read in Lacan began it reverberate. Both the Bible and Lacan present visions of the human situation, with occasional points of contact. But to see these points clearly we have to separate Lacan’s vision from his practice as a psychoanalyst, and the Biblical vision from questions of faith, with their many emotional imponderables. Any contemporary journal devoted to religious topics will confirm that thinkers who have withdrawn from most or all religious belief — Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger — are quite as useful in defining those topics as those who have aligned themselves with such beliefs. The reason for this must be sought for within the nature of language, and the study of language, as I imagine few will deny, has not yet progressed so far into its real depths. (CW 18, 395)

Shelley’s Atheism

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A page from Shelley’s pamphlet

Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford for atheism two hundred years ago today after publishing his pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism.

Frye discusses with David Cayley Shelley’s “atheistic” cosmology compared to Blake’s Biblically-based one:

Cayley: How does Blake relate to the Romantic movement?

Frye: I think Blake wraps up the whole Romantic movement inside himself, although nobody else knew it. You can find a good deal of the upside-down universe in all of the other Romantics, most completely, I think, in Shelley, where a poem like Prometheus Unbound everything that’s “up there,” namely Jupiter, is tyrannical, and everything that’s down in caves is liberating.

Cayley: But Shelley takes this in a more atheistical direction than Blake does.

Frye: Shelley doesn’t derive primarily from the Biblical tradition in the way that Blake does. Blake is always thinking in terms of the Biblical revolutions, the Exodus in the Old Testament and the Resurrection in the New Testament.

Cayley: In other words, Blake has a given structure of imagery from the Bible that he works with, and that distinguishes him from the other Romantics.

Frye: It certainly distinguishes his emphasis from Shelley. (CW 24, 959)

Christina Rossetti

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PAABJ0hH84

Rossetti’s “When I am Dead, My Dearest”

Today is Christina Rossetti‘s birthday (1830-1894).

Frye in “The Bride from the Strange Land,” his essay about the Book of Ruth:

In English literature the best known allusion to Ruth is Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, where the poet says that the nightingale’s song may have pierced “Through the heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears among the alien corn” [stanza 7].  It is a beautiful but curious reference: as we say, Keats certainly knew the Book of Ruth, but there no hint in it that Ruth was ever homesick for Moab or that she regarded the corn fields around her as in any sense alien: after all, her late father-in-law still owned some of them.  The tendency to sentimentalize the story recurs  in a sonnet by Christina Rossetti, called Autumn Violets, which has as its last line “a grateful Ruth tho’ gleaning scanty corn.”  This is not, it is true, a direct reference to the Biblical book, but we may note that actually, thanks to Boaz’ patronage, Ruth did fairly well out of her gleaning.  I make these somewhat pedantic comments because I suspect that one reason for the comparative neglect of the Book of Ruth by later writers is the irrepressible cheerfulness of the story, which is all about completely normal people fully understanding one another, and leaves the literary imagination with very little to do.  That said, we could justify the Keats allusion by observing that Ruth does not give the impression of being merely a mindless puppet of Providence, and may well have had darker and deeper feelings than the narrative presents.  (CW 4, 112-13)

Cardinal Newman

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On this date in 1845, John Henry Cardinal Newman, was received into the Catholic Church.

Frye in The Secular Scripture:

Similarly, Christianity possessed a body of true myth or revelation, most of it in the Bible.  This was distinguished from unauthorized myth by having a large body of conceptual writing attached to it, the doctrinal system of Christian theology.  As with Plato, the Christian has to pass through the doctrinal system before he can understand the myths of the Bible.  In the nineteenth century Cardinal Newman remarked that the function of scripture was not to teach doctrine but to prove it: this axiom shows how completely the structure of the Bible had been translated into a conceptual system which both replaced and enclosed it.  Even the fact that the original data were for the most part stories, as far as their structure is concerned, often came to be resented or even denied.  Whatever resisted the translating operation had to be bracketed as a mystery of faith, into which it was as well not to look to closely.  (CW 18, 17)

Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic and gay, has been an unwavering critic of the Ratzinger retinue in the Vatican, both for its decades-long criminal complicity in child rape and for its ruthless purge of gay clergy.  Sullivan recently put up a very moving post about Catholicism and homosexuality, in which he cites Cardinal Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins as instances of the Church’s hypocrisy on homosexuality, and as proof that a priest can be gay and a superlative Catholic.  You can read the post, “Homosexuals as ‘Victim Souls'”, here.