Clayton Chrusch comments on Russell’s post earlier today:

Was Frye being unfair or am I completely naive?

Chesterton wanted to give his audience clear answers and Frye did not. Frye witheld answers because he didn’t want his audience to be stuck with them. Chesterton wanted to give his audience answers, not because he wanted his audience stuck with them and not because he considered himself the greatest authority on anything and not because he considered his own views to be in their final state, but because he thought that, if people were honest, the truth could take care of itself, and that a clear and honest answer backed by reason is as likely to yield truth through participation in a dialectic process as a reticent answer.

Russell responds:

Clayton, I think (and have attempted to argue in an essay a few years ago) that Frye did not see the positive side of the appeal of tradition and orthodoxy in matters of religious belief. Perhaps in part it was his Methodist upbringing, perhaps the spectacle of Catholic fascism, which he comments on several times, but he doesn’t seem to have had much sense of what Chesterton terms “The Romance of Orthodoxy.”

Jean O’Grady has written an interesting account of Frye’s relationship with the United Church of Canada, showing that he didn’t find it much easier to get on with it than with the Catholic Church. She writes “If one searches the diaries and notebooks for evidence of Frye’s attitude to his clerical role, one may well be startled by the negativity of his remarks” (Frye and the Word, p. 176).

Just for the sake of  general edification, if not just my own, this helpful note from Russell Perkin:

Joe, The quotation you are referring to is from John Henry Newman’s “English Catholic Literature,” one of the essays from the second part of The Idea of a University. (These essays on “University Subjects” are not very well known; they are not included in the recent Yale University Press edition of The Idea. ) Newman wrote:  “I repeat, then, whatever we be able or unable to effect in the great problem which lies before us, any how we cannot undo the past. English Literature will ever have been Protestant.”

Newman, one of the Victorian sages Russell Perkin alludes to in an earlier post, is discussed in Frye’s essay “The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century,” along with Carlyle, Mill, and Arnold. The essay was originally published in The Stubborn Structure, and is reprinted in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, CW17

Very interesting essay, Bob, and a good corrective to my dismissal of Clayton’s invoking of Calvin. I am struck by the second last sentence, and the core idea in the essay of a creative tension of opposites, very much along the lines of the closing passage in chapter 2 of The Secular Scripture:

The combination of the doctrine of the sovereign God with the doctrine of election gives us a working basis to establish the permanence and transcendence of form, on the one hand, and the reality of organic experience, on the other.

In other words: a transcendent revelation in an evolving or dialectical relationship with the reality of human creativity, the sacred scripture and the secular scripture — the two revelations, and the dialectic of two aspects of the same thing. It also reminds me, in the emphasis Frye places on the inescapable fact of cultural history, of a quotation he uses from someone (I forget who) to the effect that: “English literature will always have been Protestant.”

However, what is missing in Calvin is a visionary element, whether sacred or secular. Here is what Frye has to say about Calvin in 1985 (an idea he recurs to elsewhere) when he was well past his majority, to say the least:

The unwillingness of so many religious temperaments to try to grasp the reality of a revelation in any but doctrinal terms recurs in a number of religious communities. . . . The Reformation was founded on the doctrine of justification through faith, but conceiving faith as something to be expressed in the language of creed or thesis minimized the visionary element in it. We notice that Calvin could make very little of the Book of Revelation in his Biblical commentaries; in spite of its dense texture of allusions to the Old Testament, the quality of the language eluded him.(Northrop Frye on Religion, 352)