Category Archives: Creation and Recreation

Karl Barth

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Today is Protestant theologian Karl Barth‘s birthday (1886-1968).

The responses to Nicholas Graham’s query posted Sunday mention Karl Barth and include a digression into Frye’s attitude toward fascism, so we’re putting up two anniversary posts today: one relating to Barth and the other (below) to Nazi book burning.

Frye cites Barth on the metaphor of creation in Creation and Recreation:

I want to begin with what is called “creativity” as a feature of human life, and move from there to some of the traditional religious ideas about a divine creation. It seems to me that the whole complex of ideas and images surrounding the word “creation” is inescapably a part of the way that we see things. We may emphasize either the divine or the human aspect of creation to the point of denying the reality of the other. For Karl Barth, God is a creator, and the first moral to be drawn from this is that man is not one: man is for Barth a creature, and his primary duty is to understand what it is to be a creature of God. For others, the notion of a creating God is a projection from the fact that man makes things, and for them a divine creator has only the reality of a shadow thrown by ourselves. But what we believe, or believe that we believe, in such matters is of very little importance compared to the fact that we go on using the conception anyway, whatever name we give it. We are free, up to a point, to shape our beliefs; what we are clearly not free to do is alter what is really a part of our cultural genetic code. We can throw out varieties of the idea of creation at random, and these, in Darwinian fashion, will doubtless descend through whatever has the greatest survival value; but abolish the conception itself we cannot. (CW 4, 36)

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohD-WUrMsjE

The famous scene in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov is questioned by detective Porfiry Petrovich.  (From the excellent 2002 BBC adaptation of the novel.)

On this date in 1849 a Russian court sentenced Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group; his sentence was later commuted to hard labor.

Frye puts Dostoevsky in very good company in this illuminating moment from Creation and Recreation:

Recently a collection of early reviews of mine was published, and on looking over it I was amused to see how preoccupied I had been then with two writers, Spengler and Frazer, who haunted me contantly, though I was well aware all the time I was studying them that they were rather stupid men and often slovenly scholars.  But I found them, or rather their central visions, unforgettable, while there are hundreds of books by more intelligent and scrupulous people which I have forgotten having read.  Some of them are people who have utterly refuted the claims of Spengler and Frazer to be taken seriously.  But the thinker who was annihilated on Tuesday has to be annihilated all over again on Wednesday: the fortress of thought is a Valhalla, not an abattoir.

This is not merely my own perversity: we all find that it is not only, perhaps not even primarily, the balanced and judicious people that we turn to for insight.  It is also such people as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Holderlin, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, all of them liars in Wilde’s sense of the word, as Wilde was himself.  They were people whose lives got smashed up in various ways, but who rescued fragments from the smash of an intensity that the steady-state people seldom get to hear about.  Their vision is penetrating because it is partial and distorted: it is truthful because it is falsified.  To the Old Testament’s question, “Where shall wisdom be found?’ [Job 28-12] there is often only the New Testament’s answer: “Well, not among the wise, at any rate” [cf. 1 Corinthians 1:19-20].  (CW 4, 39-40)