by Robert D. Denham<\/p>\n
The doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum, the interpenetration, interdependence and unification of opposites has long been one of the defining characteristics of mystical (as opposed to philosophical) thought. \u00a0Whereas mystics have often held that their experience can only be described in terms that violate the \u201cprinciple of noncontradiction,\u201d western philosophers have generally maintained that this fundamental logical principle is inviolable. \u00a0Nevertheless, certain philosophers, including Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhardt and G.W.F. Hegel have held that presumed polarities in thought do not exclude one another but are actually necessary conditions for the assertion of their opposites. \u00a0In the 20th century the physicist Neils Bohr commented that superficial truths are those whose opposites are false, but that \u201cdeep truths\u201d are such that their opposites or apparent contradictories are true as well. \u2013\u2013Stanford L. Drob<\/em><\/p>\n This brief essay explores the connection between Northrop Frye and Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth\u2011century Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, playwright, Copernican activist, hermeticist, excommunicant at the hands of both Calvinists and Lutherans, friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and madcap free\u2011thinker who was burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in 1600 for his heretical theological views.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n The earliest reference in Frye\u2019s work to Bruno is in his student essay, \u201cThe Life and Thought of Raymon Lull,\u201d written for a course in Christian Missions, which Frye took during his final year at Emmanuel College (1935\u201336).\u00a0 Frye includes Bruno among a list of thinkers for whom mathematics is the best approach for understanding the nature of God (CW 3:229), and he notes that Bruno had been haunted by Lull\u2019s efforts to establish a genuine dialectic (CW 3:230).\u00a0 In the early 1580s Bruno had lectured on Lull at the University of Paris and wrote a treatise on his work.\u00a0 And then in a paper Frye wrote for Professor Kenneth Cousland, \u201cGains and Losses of the Reformation,\u201d Bruno is mentioned in passing as one whose scientific work was bitterly opposed by the Catholic Church (CW 3:270).\u00a0 At the end of Frye\u2019s writing career, Bruno makes an appearance in Words with Power<\/em> (1990).\u00a0 For fifty\u2011five years, then, Bruno was lodged in Frye\u2019s consciousness.\u00a0 His own library contains annotated editions of The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast<\/em>, Bruno\u2019s harshest attack on the Catholic Church, and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds<\/em>, one of his major philosophical dialogues.\u00a0 Frye owned a copy of Bruno\u2019s attack on Oxford professors, The Ash Wednesday Supper<\/em>, and he read, or at least was familiar with, Bruno\u2019s comic play Il Candelaio<\/em> (CW 29:346).\u00a0 Whatever else by Bruno Frye read is uncertain.\u00a0 As for secondary sources, we know from his notebooks that he read Frances Yates\u2019s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition<\/em> (CW 6:618), a book he cites in The Great Code<\/em> (CW 19:338 n. 11), and he no doubt also read the chapter on Bruno in Yates\u2019s The Art of Memory<\/em>.[2]<\/a> As we shall see, Frye was also influenced in his thinking about Bruno by Owen Barfield\u2019s What Coleridge Thought<\/em>.<\/p>\n Frye\u2019s most extensive commentary on Bruno is in \u201cCycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake\u201d[3]<\/a> where his purpose is to untangle the influence of Bruno on Joyce\u2019s novel.\u00a0 Bruno was, for Frye, the stalwart defender of the new philosophy and the new science, which sought to replace the earth\u2011centered view of the cosmos with a sun\u2011centered one.\u00a0 His theological views, rather than his defense of the Copernican theory of astronomy, led to his martyrdom at the hands of an anxious Roman Inquisition.[4]<\/a> Frye was fascinated by the memory theaters, his knowledge of Bruno on memory theatres coming from Frances Yates\u2019s The Art of Memory<\/em>.[5]<\/a> Yates\u2019s study of memory from classical times up through Robert Fludd had been triggered some years before by her interest in Bruno\u2019s works on memory, on which she was an expert. \u00a0In another context, Frye devotes two notebook entries to a connection between the character Bruno in John Crowley\u2019s Little, Big and Giordano Bruno<\/em> (CW 5:190, CW 15:330). \u00a0But there are scores of other references to Bruno in Frye\u2019s writing and most of these focus on two related ideas\u2013\u2013polarity and the coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> (coincidence of opposites).\u00a0 Coincidence is both a spatial and a temporal category, meaning either occupation of the same place or occurrence at the same time.\u00a0 Polarity, or the dialectic of opposites, is the antecedent principle for the coincidence of opposites: two contraries must be present for coincidence to occur.\u00a0 In \u201cCycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake\u201d Frye sees polarity as one of the two structural principles of the novel (the cycle is the other), and of course polarity is a primary feature of Frye\u2019s own thought.\u00a0 A dialectic of opposites permeates practically everything he wrote: knowledge vs. experience, space vs. time, stasis vs. movement, the individual vs. society, tradition vs. innovation, Platonic synthesis vs. Aristotelian analysis, engagement vs. detachment, freedom vs. concern, mythos vs. dianoia, the world vs. the grain of sand, immanence vs. transcendence, and hundreds of other oppositions.\u00a0 In the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> alone one can discover more than thirty polar categories.<\/p>\n The principle of polarity, meaning a mutual opposition between two attributes or ideas, can be traced back to Heraclitus.\u00a0 It is developed in the neo\u2011Platonic thought of Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century and is carried into the nineteenth century through Hegel\u2019s brand of German idealism.\u00a0 Frye had known of Cusa\u2019s work as an Emmanuel College student,[6]<\/a> and he later read and annotated Cusa\u2019s Vision of God<\/em> and selections from Cusa in Herman Shapiro and Arturo B. Fallico\u2019s collection, Renaissance Philosophy<\/em>. \u00a0\u00a0Frye refers to Wilhelm Windelband\u2019s History of Philosophy<\/em> as a source for some of his student essays, and it seems likely that his initial knowledge of both Cusa and Bruno derived from Windelband, who discusses their use of the natura naturans\u2013natura naturata<\/em> distinction, their appeal to the coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> principle, and their views of the identity of the part and the whole, among other matters. \u00a0Frye would also have known of Cusa through the writings of the philosopher most responsible for rediscovering Cusa, Ernst Cassirer, who delivered Cusa from his medieval context and established his work as the hallmark of Renaissance philosophy. \u00a0Frye would have encountered Cusa in Cassirer\u2019s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy<\/em>, a copy of which he owned, and in Paul Tillich\u2019s Systematic Theology<\/em>.\u00a0 For Tillich, Cusa \u201crepresents the metaphysical foundations of the modern mind\u201d (History 373).<\/p>\n What Bruno took from Cusa was the basic idea that the two poles of any dialectic are united by a coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> (coincidence of opposites).\u00a0 Cusa sets forth his notion of coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> in On Learned Ignorance<\/em> (1437\u201340).\u00a0 His arguments are somewhat mystical and abstruse,[7]<\/a> but his intent is to seek a synthesis or unity between oppositions he treats in On Learned Ignorance<\/em>: maximum and minimum, being and nonbeing, cause and effect, universal and particular, motion and rest, human and divine, finite and infinite, divisible and indivisible, center and circumference, beginning and end, lower and higher, temporal and atemporal, and humiliation and exaltation. \u00a0Cusa sees the entire universe as tied to an identity of contraries.<\/p>\n Bruno\u2019s view of the coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> was significantly influenced by Cusa, though Bruno\u2019s On the Infinite Universe and Worlds<\/em> has less of a mystical accent:<\/p>\n There are then an infinity of mobile bodies and motive forces, and all of these reduce to a single passive principle and a single active principle, just as every number reduceth to unity, and as infinite number doth coincide with unity; and just as the supreme Agent and supreme active power doth coincide in a single principle with the supreme potentiality, patient of all creation, as hath been shewn at the end of our book On Cause, Origin and the One<\/em>. \u00a0In number then, and in multitude, there is infinite possibility of motion and infinite motion. \u00a0But in unity and singularity is infinite motionless motive force, an infinite motionless universe. \u00a0And the infinite number and magnitude coincide with the infinite unity and simplicity in a single utterly simple and indivisible principle, which is Truth and Being.\u00a0(On the Infinite, Fifth Dialogue<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You see further that our philosophy is by no means opposed to reason. It reduceth everything to a single origin and relateth everything to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide, so that there is one primal foundation both of origin and of end. \u00a0From this coincidence of contraries we deduce that ultimately it is divinely right to say and to hold that contraries are within contraries, wherefore it is not difficult to compass the knowledge that each thing is within every other\u2013\u2013which Aristotle and the other Sophists could not comprehend. (On the Infinite, Fifth Dialogue<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You have heard more than once that some, in whose composition fire doth predominate, are by their own quality bright and hot. \u00a0Others shine by reflection, being themselves cold and dark, for water doth predominate in their composition. \u00a0On this diversity and opposition depend order, symmetry, complexion, peace, concord, composition and life. \u00a0So that the worlds are composed of contraries of which some, such as earth and water, live and grow by help of their contraries, such as the fiery suns. \u00a0This I think was the meaning of the sage who declared that God createth harmony out of sublime contraries; and of that other who believed this whole universe to owe existence to the strife of the concordant and the love of the opposed. (On the Infinite, Third Dialogue<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Bruno conceived the cosmos as an organic whole, and the coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> in the cosmos operated to achieve a unity or synthesis of the contraries, all opposites coinciding in an infinite and divine oneness.\u00a0 For all of the difficulties posed by his often hermetic arguments,[8]<\/a> it is these notions of harmony, synthesis, identity, reconciliation, and unity that attracted Frye to Bruno.\u00a0 Frye was not alone in championing a both\/and rather than an either\/or dialectic.\u00a0 The principle of coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> is found in Hegel, where Aristotle\u2019s law of contradiction is rejected in favor of a synthesis in which opposites are reconciled through a process known as Aufhebung<\/em>.\u00a0 Frye would also have encountered the principle in Carl Jung and its repeated appropriation by Mircea Eliade.\u00a0 Jung, whose work is replete with such oppositions as animus\u2013anima<\/em> and persona\u2013shadow, writes, \u201cThe self is made manifest in the opposites and the conflicts between them; it is a coincidentia oppositorum<\/em>.\u00a0 Hence the way to the self begins with conflict\u201d (Psychology<\/em> 186).[9]<\/a> According to Eliade, myths \u201cexpress on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled at some illud tempus of eschatology, and on the other, the coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> in the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and destructive, solar and serpentine, and so on (in other words, actual and potential)\u201d (449).<\/p>\n As for Bruno\u2019s idea of God, Frye writes that Samuel Butler\u2019s natural theology \u201cbrings us close to Bruno\u2019s doctrine natura est deus in rebus<\/em>, that nature is an incarnation of God in whom \u2018all is in all\u2019\u201d and that in this respect Bruno \u201chad anticipated something of Jung\u2019s \u2018collective unconscious\u2019\u201d (CW 29:342).\u00a0 The reference is to Bruno\u2019s doctrine of immanence in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast<\/em>, which sees the universe as an emanation of God within it:<\/p>\n Jove: [T]his Nature (as you must know) is none other than God in things.<\/p>\n Saul: So, natura est deus in rebus<\/em> [nature is God in all].<\/p>\n Sophia: \u201cHowever,\u201d he said, \u201cdiverse things represent diverse divinities and diverse powers, which, beside the absolute being they possess, obtain the being communicated to all things according to their capacity and measure.\u00a0 Whence, all of God is in all things\u201d (Expulsion<\/em> 235)<\/p>\n Divinity reveals herself in all things, although by virtue of a universal and most excellent end, in great things and general principles, and by proximate ends, convenient and necessary to diverse acts of human life, she is found and is seen in things said to be most abject, although everything, from what is said, has Divinity latent within itself (Expulsion<\/em> 242)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cAll is in all\u201d reminds us of the passage in 1 Corinthians that Frye on several occasions points to: \u201cAnd when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all\u201d (15:28).[10]<\/a> In Words with Powe<\/em>r Frye writes:<\/p>\n The contemporary scientific vision of nature, in spite of its millions of galaxies, continues to speak of a universe, or \u201cone-turning\u201d totality which forms an infinite circumference enclosing us on all sides. Here the human being\u2019s natural place is the centre of an expanding sphere, instead of hanging between an upper and a lower world like the samphire-cutter in King Lear<\/em>.\u00a0 The corresponding spiritual vision would be a vision of plenitude in which each human being is a centre and God a circumference, or \u201call in all,\u201d in Paul\u2019s phrase (1 Corinthians 15:28). The proverb says that God\u2019s centre is everywhere and his circumference nowhere, but in a human perspective the divine circumference would be everywhere too, as a centre has no identity without a circumference.<\/p>\n The sense of allness, if there is such a word, transcends the totality of \u201call things,\u201d which suggests a number to be counted, however large a number, and is the basis for the conception of the spiritual world usually called pantheism. \u00a0Traditionally, \u201call things\u201d refers to the totality of created beings, as in Revelation 21:5 (\u201cBehold, I make all things new\u201d). \u201cAll in all\u201d takes us further than statements of the \u201call is God\u201d or \u201call is one\u201d type, where the predicate \u201cis\u201d re-inserts the duality the statement itself attempts to deny. \u201cAll in all\u201d suggests both interpenetration, where circumference is interchangeable with centre, and a unity which is no longer thought of either as an absorbing of identity into a larger uniformity or as a mosaic of metaphors. (CW 26:165\u20136)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Lying behind this passage is the ghost of the geometrically minded Bruno, whose On the Infinite Universe and Worlds<\/em> speaks to the point of obsession about the infinite universe whose center is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere.<\/p>\n Frye associates Bruno with the principle of identity rather than analogy.\u00a0 In several somewhat cryptic juxtapositions in his \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebook<\/em>s, where Frye is developing an outline of the conceptual displacements of myth, it appears that he takes Bruno\u2019s drive toward identity and unity as set over against the Thomistic analogia entis<\/em>, the theological notion that while we cannot know God directly because his infinite and perfect nature transcends any names we could apply to it, we can have limited, indirect knowledge of his being through analogy with our own being or with the created world: it is the practice of drawing conclusions concerning God from the known objects and relationships of the natural order.\u00a0 Here is one of the notebook entries:<\/p>\n I wonder if I can really exclude metaphysical displacements from the Third Book.\u00a0 Surely I need some of this essential & primary displacement.\u00a0 I start, after all, with the symbolic or schematic universe.\u00a0 This schematic universe is not the objective world, but a mythical analogy of it.\u00a0 Still, attempts to fit it to the objective world have been constant & generally accepted before our own time.\u00a0 The most important conceptions seem to me to be:<\/p>\n a)\u00a0 Analogy, especially the Thomistic analogia entis<\/em>.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been fascinated by this ever since my \u201cgeneral note\u201d to FS [Fearful Symmetry].[11]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n b)\u00a0 Coincidence of contraries, the doctrine of identity as manifested through the appearance of opposites: the Cusa-Bruno movement in the Renaissance and its Romantic revival. (CW 9:69)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here what Frye seems to be outlining is the opposition between analogy, as in Aquinas, and identity, as in Cusa and Bruno.\u00a0 For all of his analogizing, Frye will always come down on the side of identity (the principle behind metaphor) rather than analogy (the principle behind simile).[12]<\/a> In this, Bruno is his confrere.<\/p>\n Frye refers to Bruno\u2019s coincidentia oppositorum<\/em>, which is set over against the cyclical principle of Spengler and Vico, as \u201can interchange of opposites\u201d (CW 15:269), \u201ccoincidence of contraries\u201d (CW 9:69), \u201ccoincidence of opposites\u201d (CW 9:84), and \u201cidentity of polarized opposites\u201d (CW 29:348).\u00a0 Sometimes Frye recurs to the Latin phrase (CW 9:70, 89).\u00a0 In his Late Notebooks<\/em> Frye uses the phrase \u201cunity of opposites,\u201d which he connects with Bruno, to describe the struggle\u2011of\u2011brothers theme in Finnegans Wake<\/em>: \u201cthe union of the dreamer with the twin brother who\u2019s dreaming him\u201d (CW 6:430).[13]<\/a><\/p>\n Frye\u2019s linking \u201call in all\u201d with interpenetration lies at the heart of his anti-Cartesian efforts to get beyond either\/or oppositions.\u00a0 I have written elsewhere about interpenetration as a key concept in Frye\u2019s late work.[14]<\/a> Frye uses the word in historical, philosophical, social, and scientific contexts, but its primary context is religious.\u00a0 When in one of his notebooks Frye links Bruno with Hegel (CW 9:84), he has in mind the process by which they resolve antitheses.\u00a0 In Hegel\u2019s case the antitheses are canceled but the identity of each term in the opposition is preserved and then lifted to another level.\u00a0 Again, Hegel refers to this process as Aufhebung<\/em>.\u00a0 Frye refers to it as interpenetration, which is the most important of the many verbal formulas he uses in his late work to push language toward expressing the ineffable or capturing the highest mode of thought.\u00a0 Frye discovered the historical analogue for interpenetration in Spengler; the philosophical in Whitehead, Plotinus, and Hegel; the scientific in David Bohm, Karl Pribram, and Fritjof Capra, and the religious in the Mahayana sutras, particularly the Avatamsaka Sutra. \u00a0Although Frye never makes an explicit connection between Bruno\u2019s coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> and interpenetration, the former is clearly an analogue of the latter.<\/p>\n Following his claim in one notebook that the whole\u2011part antithesis is resolved by interpenetration, Frye inserts the parenthetical remark \u201cColeridge through Barfield\u201d (CW 5:179).\u00a0 The reference is to Owen Barfield\u2019s What Coleridge Though<\/em>t, which provides a detailed exposition of Coleridge\u2019s understanding of interpenetration, a dynamic and generative process that does not reconcile polarities but recreates a new entity from them.[15]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Coleridge, in fact, uses the word \u201cinterpenetration,\u201d maintaining that only through the imagination can one see the power \u201cof interpenetration, of total intussusception, of the existence of all in each as the condition of Nature\u2019s unity and substantiality, and of the latency under the predominance of some one power, wherein subsists her life and its endless variety\u201d (qtd. in Barfield 52\u20133).[16]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Polarity, the two forces of one power, is, Coleridge says in the Statesman\u2019s Manual<\/em>, \u201ca living and generative interpenetration\u201d (qtd. in Barfield 36).\u00a0 Barfield points to analogues of Coleridge\u2019s theory of polarity in Lull and Bruno, and Frye understands Coleridge as participating in a Romantic movement to revive the Renaissance coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> (CW 9:69). \u00a0One also encounters interpenetration in Shelley\u2019s idea that the elevating delight of poetry \u201cis as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our Own\u201d (Defence<\/em> 31).\u00a0 Here is one of Frye\u2019s versions of polarity: \u201cThe revealed community would have to be based on some such conception as Christ, who is conceived metaphorically, as an interpenetrating force we\u2019re a part of and yet is also a part of us\u201d (CW 20:383). \u00a0In his essay on Joyce, Vico, and Bruno, Frye writes that in Finnegans Wake<\/em> \u201cwe are reminded of Bruno\u2019s personal motto, used at the beginning of his play Il Candelaio<\/em> and elsewhere: in tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis<\/em> [\u201cin sadness happy, in happiness sad\u201d], the Latin motto on the title page of Bruno\u2019s play. \u00a0The solemn and the gay are interchangeable aspects of the same thing, and this may well be the essence, for Joyce, of Bruno\u2019s theory of polarity (CW 29:346).\u00a0 In the same essay Frye reports that Joyce told Harriet Weaver that Bruno\u2019s philosophy \u201cis a kind of dualism\u2014every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realize itself and opposition brings reunion.\u201d\u00a0 He then adds that \u201c[m]ost writers would be more likely to speak of Hegel in such a connection\u201d (CW 29:334).\u00a0 Frye himself would be one of those writers, and yet Bruno is clearly for him a precursor of what he found in Hegel.<\/p>\n The thrust of these observations, then, is to suggest that Frye\u2019s idea of interpenetration is rooted in and partially defined by Bruno\u2019s principles of polarity and the coincidence of opposites.\u00a0 The idea that two things are the same thing (as in metaphor) is for Frye better captured by \u201cinterpenetration\u201d than by \u201cidentity\u201d; for interpenetration, whether of unity and variety, wholes and parts, totality and particularity, self and other, human and divine, suggests more strongly than does identity that each half of the dialectic retains its own distinctiveness while each is also present in the other.\u00a0 This idea of preservation is contained within the process of Bruno\u2019s coincidentia oppositorum<\/em> and Hegel\u2019s Aufhebung<\/em>.\u00a0 Unity, as Frye is fond of insisting, does not mean uniformity.\u00a0 Moreover, interpenetration is a more dynamic concept than identity, the former implying a free flow back and forth between, in Coleridge\u2019s phrase, the \u201ctwo forces of one power.\u201d\u00a0 Bruno\u2019s speculations suggest that once we get beyond the assumptions of Cartesian coordinates and Aristotelian causality the idea of the coincidence of opposites is not so inexplicable a paradox as it initially might seem.<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n Abbreviations for Frye\u2019s Collected Works:<\/p>\n CW 3 =\u00a0 Northrop Frye\u2019s Student Essays, 1932\u20131938<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.<\/p>\n CW 5 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks, 1982\u20131990: Architecture of the Spiritual World<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000.<\/p>\n CW 6 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks, 1982\u20131990: Architecture of the Spiritual World<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000.<\/p>\n CW 13 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003.<\/p>\n CW 15 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks on Romance<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Michael Dolzani. \u00a0Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004.<\/p>\n CW 16 = Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Angela Esterhammer.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005.<\/p>\n CW 18 = \u00a0\u201cThe Secular Scripture\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006.<\/p>\n CW 19 = The Great Code: The Bible and Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Alvin A. Lee.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006.<\/p>\n CW 26 = Words with Power: Being a Second Study of \u201cThe Bible and Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Michael Dolzani.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008.<\/p>\n CW 27 = \u201cThe Critical Path\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963\u20131975<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Eva Kushner and Jean O\u2019Grady.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009.<\/p>\n CW 29 = Northrop Frye on Twentieth\u2011Century Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Glen Robert Gill.\u00a0 Toronto: u of Toronto P, 2010.<\/p>\n Barfield, Owen.\u00a0 What Coleridge Thought<\/em>.\u00a0 Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1971.<\/p>\n Bruno, Giordano.\u00a0 The Ash Wednesday Supper<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner.\u00a0 Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977.<\/p>\n ______.\u00a0 The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. and trans. Arthur D. Imerti. \u00a0New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1964.<\/p>\n ______.\u00a0 On the Infinite Universe and Worlds<\/em>.\u00a0 See Singer.<\/p>\n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. \u00a0The Friend: A Series of Essays<\/em>. \u00a0London: George Bell and Son, 1890.\u00a0 Section I, Essay 13.<\/p>\n Cusa.\u00a0 See Nicholas of Cusa.<\/p>\n Denham, Robert D.\u00a0 Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World<\/em>.\u00a0 Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004.<\/p>\n Drob, Stanford L.\u00a0 The Doctrine of Coincidentia Oppositorum in Jewish Mysticism<\/em>.\u00a0 2000.\u00a0 http:\/\/www.newkabbalah.com\/Coincshort.pdf<\/p>\n Eliade, Mircea.\u00a0 Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader<\/em>. \u00a0Vol. 2. \u00a0Ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty.\u00a0 New York: Harper, 1976.<\/p>\n Frye, Northrop.\u00a0 Mito metafora simbolo<\/em>.\u00a0 Trans. Carla Pezzini Plevano and Francesca Valente Gorjup.\u00a0 Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1989.<\/p>\n Graham, Brian Russell.\u00a0 The Necessary Unity of Opposites: The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye<\/em>.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011.<\/p>\n Hopkins, Jasper.\u00a0 Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance:\u00a0 A Translation and an Appraisal of \u201cDe Docta Ignorantia.\u201d<\/em> 2nd ed. \u00a0Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1990. \u00a0http:\/\/jasper-hopkins.info\/DI-Intro12-2000.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n Jung, Carl.\u00a0 Psychology and Alchemy<\/em>. \u00a0Trans. R.F.C. Hull.\u00a0 2nd ed.\u00a0 Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968.<\/p>\n ______.\u00a0 Two Essays on Analytical Psychology<\/em>.\u00a0 Trans. R.F.C. Hull.\u00a0 Cleveland, OH: World Pub. Co., 1953.<\/p>\n Nicholas of Cusa.\u00a0 On Learned Ignorance<\/em>.\u00a0 See Hopkins.<\/p>\n ______.\u00a0 The Vision of God<\/em>. \u00a0New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978.<\/p>\n Salusinszky, Imre.\u00a0 \u201cFrye and the Art of Memory.\u201d\u00a0 In Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999.\u00a0 39\u201354.<\/p>\n Shapiro, Herman, and Arturo B. Fallico, eds. \u00a0Renaissance Philosophy: Volume II: The Transalpine Thinkers: Selected Readings from Cusanus to Suarez<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Modern Library, 1969.<\/p>\n Shelley, Percy Bysshe.\u00a0 A Defence of Poetry<\/em>.\u00a0 In Shelley\u2019s Critical Prose<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Bruce R. McElderry.\u00a0 Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1967.<\/p>\n Singer, Dorothy Waley. Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, With Annotated Translation of His Work \u201cOn the Infinite Universe and Worlds.\u201d<\/em> New York: Henry Schuman, 1950. http:\/\/www.positiveatheism.org\/hist\/bruno00.htm#TOC<\/a><\/p>\n Tillich, Paul.\u00a0 A History of Christian Thought from Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Carl E. Braaten.\u00a0 New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.<\/p>\n Yates, Frances A.\u00a0 The Art of Memory<\/em>.\u00a0 Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.<\/p>\n ______.\u00a0 Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition<\/em>. \u00a0London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964.<\/p>\n Notes<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> After I had completed this brief essay I came across Brian Graham\u2019s The Necessary Unity of Opposites: The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye<\/em>, a book that considers the various ways that Frye attempts to transcend oppositional thinking in the spheres of literature, politics, education, and religion.\u00a0 He does not discuss Bruno.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Frye never refers to the chapter on Bruno but he twice mentions that he read Yates\u2019s book: CW 24: 932 and CW 27: 262.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> A similar form of this essay, entitled \u201cVico, Bruno, and the Wake,\u201d was published in Italian in Mito Metafora Simbolo, 163\u201381.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> \u201cIf the sun is one of the stars, it is at least conceivable that the stars are suns, centres of other systems with no relation to man. The espousal of this doctrine by Giordano Bruno was one of the reasons why he seemed so horrifying a figure to the jittery church of 1600\u201d (CW 27:339\u201340).<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> On Frye and memory theaters, see Salusinszky.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Frye refers to Cusa in his student essay on \u201cThe Augustinian Interpretation of History\u201d (CW 3:215).<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> See Hopkins\u2019s Introduction to On Learned Ignorance<\/em>.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Frye writes that Bruno\u2019s \u201cleaps are so vast and various that even specialists on him find him hard to keep up with\u201d (CW 26:48).<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology<\/em> Jung writes: \u201cit is necessary to give special attention to the images of the collective unconscious, because they are the source from which hints may be drawn for the solution to the problem of opposites.\u00a0 From the conscious elaboration of this material the transcendent function reveals itself as a mode of apprehension mediated by the archetypes and capable of uniting the opposites\u201d (120).<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Frye quotes the phrase, which also appears in Paradise Lost<\/em> 3.341, in CW 6:657, CW 18:413, CW 13:93, and CW 16:44<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> See the \u201cGeneral Note: Blake\u2019s Mysticism,\u201d CW 14:415\u201316, where NF contrasts Blake\u2019s analogia visionis<\/em> with \u201cthe more orthodox analogies of faith and being.\u201d\u00a0 On the analogia entis<\/em>, see also CW 6:623, 680, CW 9:70, 84, CW 13:17, 258, 350, 351, 359, and CW 19:44.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Here is another example of the opposition: \u201cTwo Irish geniuses, Yeats & Joyce, sum up the cloven fiction of today.\u00a0 Yeats\u2019 traditions are Platonic, Protestant & concerned with an analogia fides<\/em> antithetical to nature. \u00a0Joyce\u2019s are Aristotelian, Catholic & concerned with an analogia entis<\/em>\u201d (CW 15:96).<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> In \u201cCycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake<\/em>\u201d Frye does not connect the rivalry of brothers to Bruno\u2019s principle of polarity, noting instead only the biblical parallels.<\/p>\n [14]<\/a> See chap. 2 of my Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World<\/em>.<\/p>\n
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