{"id":14465,"date":"2010-08-01T00:00:54","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T04:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=14465"},"modified":"2010-08-01T00:00:54","modified_gmt":"2010-08-01T04:00:54","slug":"frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/","title":{"rendered":"Frye on Religion in the Late Notebooks: A Little Anthology"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"latenotebooks\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Notebook 27.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[87]\u00a0 Re the previous (but one) note: expanded consciousness is not religion, of course, but it may be the precondition for any ecumenical or everlasting-gospel religion.\u00a0 Note that the gospel-church begins with ecstatic phenomena (speaking in tongues), and that our own time is rich in frenzies and hysterias along with more genuine phenomena.\u00a0 LSD (when it\u2019s a good trip) appears to increase the intensity of the feeling of oneness with the object.<\/p>\n

[104]\u00a0 The Word-Spirit dialogue is slowly assuming a spiral or ladder shape: it conceivably might work out to a counterpart of Hegel\u2019s Ph [Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em>], only in images instead of concepts, with a religion of parable forming its crisis.\u00a0 And, of course, there\u2019s the other great hope that it would follow the four levels of meaning.<\/p>\n

[106]\u00a0 The dialectic movement from creation to exodus is clearing.\u00a0 The forming of a specific mythology is the only possible response to a hidden creation.\u00a0 As Blake says, religion is a specific social development of the Poetic Genius [All Religions Are One<\/em>].\u00a0 In a sense a mythology negates or denies the creation, on Hegelian principles.<\/p>\n

[128]\u00a0 In metaphor, as I said, across [par. 122], we have Joseph \u201chere\u201d and bough \u201cthere\u201d: by identifying them in an assertion which \u201ceverybody\u201d knows is not \u201creal\u201d identity we eliminate space and have only verbal space.\u00a0 Similarly with myth and time.\u00a0 The god, I said, stabilizes the metaphor: all religions lean in a subjective (Dionysian) direction, where you identify with the god through a group, or an objective one where the god remains transcendental and adored.<\/p>\n

[136]\u00a0 I\u2019ve mentioned how in the 19th c. religion gets identified with the find-the-true-church puzzle [par. 43].\u00a0 Newman is the pattern here.\u00a0 I suppose S.K.\u2019s [Kierkegaard\u2019s] attack on \u201cChristendom,\u201d perhaps even Nietzsche\u2019s anti-Xn [anti-Christian] polemics, are a kind of neo-Protestantism.<\/p>\n

[151]\u00a0 Thus, without losing its specific historical orientation through Judaism and Christianity, the Bible is an archetypal model of a perennial philosophy or everlasting gospel.\u00a0 At least, that\u2019s what I\u2019d call it if I were writing a book on religion.\u00a0 We really do move from creation to recreation.<\/p>\n

[197]\u00a0 I have very few religious books, & those I have stress the mystics.\u00a0 I have great difficulty, nonetheless, in reading, say, Boehme, because mystics (less true of Boehme than of others) seem so masochistic: isn\u2019t this stuff just wonderful that we have to say we believe anyway?\u00a0 But now Boehme is making more sense as I move closer to light and signature symbolism.\u00a0 Once more, it\u2019s not that I \u201cbelieve\u201d him but that this is the kind of link between the Bible and the creative imagination that I\u2019m looking for.<\/p>\n

[206]\u00a0 I need more on primary & secondary concern.\u00a0 I want the Innis stuff about Reformers & Marxists settling into an adversary situation.\u00a0 Marxism in theory transcends ideology, & some bourgeois masochists (Barthes) go along with this.\u00a0 But when we look at what Lenin says about religion it\u2019s clear that a counter-ideology is being set up: there\u2019s no transcendence of ideology.\u00a0 So my faith-ideology-secondary concern and charity-transcendence-primary concern still stands.<\/p>\n

[207]\u00a0 Anyway, the religious-secular dichotomy doesn\u2019t work, except as an illusion of ideological adversaries.\u00a0 A \u201cpro-religious\u201d attitude merely keeps an \u201canti-religious\u201d one in business, and vice versa.\u00a0 That\u2019s the real implication of my aligning revolutionary psychologies in Biblical religions and Marxism, not some bromide like \u201cMarxism is really a religion after all\u201d (though I\u2019ve said it is in interviews).\u00a0 Everybody knows that all religious social phenomena are inextricably bound up with \u201csecular\u201d elements in politics and economics.\u00a0 So in reverse.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[208]\u00a0 To call religion an illusion or communal neurosis, as Freud does, says nothing either: we create all our reality out of what begins as illusion, and living under social discipline is itself a neurosis.\u00a0 What Freud said of religion was, in effect, precisely what Karl Krauss [Kraus] said of Freudian therapy; that it is the disease of which it professes to be the cure.<\/p>\n

[209]\u00a0 This dissolving of the religious\/secular dichotomy would take me quite a long way.\u00a0 What does have to be abandoned in religion are the things that violate primary concern, like human sacrifice or persecution of \u201cheretics.\u201d\u00a0 But such things are, again, inseparable from \u201csecular\u201d forms of tyranny, cruelty or exploitation.\u00a0 A superstition is something we do without knowing why we do it; if we are faced with the question of why we do it, we must rush in to plaster it over with rationalizations.<\/p>\n

[278]\u00a0 I\u2019ve said elsewhere in this notebook that I\u2019m not interested in the clich\u00e9 \u201cMarxism is really a religion after all\u201d [par. 207], but in the fact that the religious-secular, theist-atheist antithesis doesn\u2019t make sense anymore.\u00a0 It restates the old business about the resemblance between Biblical & Classical myths.\u00a0 The paranoids said the heathen fables were all devil\u2019s parodies; the reasonable people said they were the natural man\u2019s counterpoint to revealed truth.\u00a0 Today there are thoughtful people in Latin America and elsewhere who realize that Christianity and Marxism sooner or later have to kiss & make up: there are paranoids in Marxism yelping about \u201cideological contamination\u201d and now I see the Vatican bureaucracy has come out with a no-you-mustn\u2019t admonition to politically radical priests.<\/p>\n

[379]\u00a0 There\u2019s no sense in writing this book at all unless I can work out a third stage of myth beyond the poetic.<\/p>\n

[401]\u00a0 The church & the world both educate, but the world does a far better job, & in modern society the relevance & value of a religion is gauged by the quality of its worldliness (i.e. its urbanity).\u00a0 Matthew Arnold\u2019s argument, put on a historical basis, would be something like this: originally all cultural activities were in a sense religious.\u00a0 To the extent that a<\/em> religion separated itself from the rest of culture, it started heading for sectarianism.\u00a0 To the extent that it rejoins the total body of culture, it improves itself as well as the culture.<\/p>\n

[402]\u00a0 At the same time I don\u2019t want my dialectic of belief & vision to get caught in Arnold\u2019s Hebraic-Hellenic one, which is mostly horseshit.\u00a0 But if mythology is prior to ideology, then the arts and not philosophy are the primary analogies of religion.\u00a0 Even the sacraments, the traditional primary analogies, are closer to the arts than to argument.<\/p>\n

[408]\u00a0 I\u2019m no evangelist or revivalist preacher, but I\u2019d like to help out in a trend to make religion interesting and attractive to many people of good will who will have nothing to do with it now.\u00a0 The literalist view of meaning makes those who take it seriously hysterical.\u00a0 Before long they\u2019re saying that serious writers are wallowing in filth, that children should be spanked as often as possible, that not going to church\/mass on Sunday is a mortal sin, that it offends God to call one\u2019s bum an arse, & the rest of the dreary rigmarole.\u00a0 I suppose the root of the hysteria is the threat of hell: I note that these people are always hailing with delight something like herpes or AIDS or, of course, any uncertainty connected with evolution or the pill.\u00a0 Under the law, the more religiosity, the less charity.<\/p>\n

[445]\u00a0 The religious perspective is essential to the study of literature: some people resent this because they cannot think of religion as anything but an ideology to be either believed or disbelieved.\u00a0 Then there are all the students who tell me that they can\u2019t take the \u201cdogma\u201d but feel that there\u2019s something about religion that\u2019s real.\u00a0 When I define this something as mythology, a created fiction (tautology, really), just as the world described in Genesis 1 is a created fiction to God, they get confused.<\/p>\n

[500]\u00a0 The worst governments are those with double ideologies, where a political doctrine is backed by a religious one, as in Iran.\u00a0 Israel is better, but I\u2019d hate to live even there.\u00a0 But South Africa\u2019s apartheid is buttressed by a remarkably dismal Dutch Reformed creed, and fifty years ago the word \u201cChristian\u201d in the name of a political party meant \u201cRoman Catholic Fascist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notebook 44.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[8]\u00a0 Religion may be an \u201cultimate\u201d concern, as Tillich says: it can\u2019t be a primary one.\u00a0 We can\u2019t live a day without being concerned about food, but we can live all our lives without being concerned about God, impoverished as such a life would be.<\/p>\n

[48]\u00a0 Wisdom in the Bible is an outgrowth of Torah, instruction, the completion of the knowledge of good and evil in its genuine form.\u00a0 Biblical wisdom is not just wisdom, not the wisdom of Egypt or Sumeria, any more than its Yahweh is Ptah or Enki.\u00a0 It has affinities, of course, but not to the point of blurring its identity.\u00a0 That\u2019s why Hebrew wisdom develops dialectically into prophecy, which again is Biblical prophecy, not Zoroaster or Tiresias prophecy.\u00a0 All religions are one, not alike: a metaphorical unity of different things, not a bundle of similarities.\u00a0 In that sense there is no \u201cperennial philosophy\u201d: that\u2019s a collection, at best, of denatured techniques of concentration.\u00a0 As doctrine, it\u2019s platitude: moral maxims that have no application.\u00a0 What there is, luckily, is a perennial struggle.<\/p>\n

[103]\u00a0 I\u2019m wrong about religion as an ultimate but not a primary concern.\u00a0 Where did I come from and where am I going are primary concerns, even if we don\u2019t believe there are any answers.\u00a0 But if only the social institution answers, the answer is ideological only.\u00a0 Maybe that is<\/em> something we learn about only from literature, but God, the digging & burrowing to get at it!<\/p>\n

[143] \u00a0The more doctrinaire forms of Marxism (Stalin & the gang-of-four Maoists) attempt to replace mythology wholly with ideology, and, consistently with that, deny that anything transcends the human individual except the human social.\u00a0 I\u2019ve often felt that an over-emphasis on the social perspective, whether Marxist or not, ignores the whole \u201claboratory\u201d aspect of fiction: the isolating of an individual from his social context to study those things that only the individual can experience.\u00a0 (Which is practically every experience in itself<\/em>, as distinct from its similarities in others.)\u00a0 The question is that the mythological perspective of tradition may lead to some kind of religious transcendental, as it so often does in practice.<\/p>\n

[165]\u00a0 Note how the variety of body metaphors dries up under the Cartesian pressure of regarding the body as a mechanism.\u00a0 The liver as the seat of passion has gone; the metaphorical \u201cheart\u201d remains, but anyone who, like Sibbes, wanted to publish a rather attractive set of sermons on the Song of Songs would hardly call it Bowels Opened<\/em>.\u00a0 Only the brain remains the subject of a dispute as to whether it\u2019s the source or the transmitter of consciousness.\u00a0 I think the latter: I think there is only Spirit as subject and Otherness (the source of our life, origin and destiny) united by the Word, the articulate spirit, and the intelligible guide to the Otherness, for which \u201cFather\u201d is a better metaphor than the \u201cMother\u201d that identifies it with Nature.<\/p>\n

[166]\u00a0 This sounds like the Hindu trinity in reverse: it\u2019s the \u201cFather\u201d who is destroyer and preserver, and Shiva appears to be the Spirit.\u00a0 Not that it matters so damn much when they\u2019re all the same god.\u00a0 But the Bible insists that the real Otherness is not nature.\u00a0 In the study of nature all metaphors are pernicious: as soon as the metaphor becomes inevitable we\u2019re in the religious area.<\/p>\n

[167]\u00a0 Then again, as I\u2019ve always known, all the grim and hateful aspects of the Father-God in traditional religion are derived from Nature, especially in her white-goddess or terrible-mother aspect.<\/p>\n

[168]\u00a0 Why does the Word have to become flesh?\u00a0 Presumably so that mythically it can accomplish a quest, and metaphorically identify all the categories of being.\u00a0 In Xy [Christianity] the judgment of society & the conquest of death & hell have now taken place: the identity of all being has still to come.\u00a0 Surely I\u2019m doing something more than just playing around here.\u00a0 The Spirit is a community at first, hence a sheltering womb: individual growth is portrayed in Jesus\u2019 \u201cfather\u2019s business\u201d episode [Luke 2:49].<\/p>\n

[193]\u00a0 In a more sensible Christian world people would move in and out of Catholic and Protestant lifestyles, instead of all this ideological crap about once-for-all baptism or conversion, always having to be either in or out of the church.\u00a0 Maybe that will happen when we get rid of the religious-secular antithesis, stop thinking that \u201cWhy does a God permit so much evil and suffering?\u201d is a serious question, and start asking the question in its genuine form: \u201cWhy do we<\/em> permit so much evil and suffering?\u201d<\/p>\n

[206]\u00a0 I want, of course, to write one more major book, concerned with the relation of religion to literature.\u00a0 [cf. 267 below]\u00a0 So far the articulating of this book eludes me, though the fragments that have come clear seem to have the requisite originality.\u00a0 The opening is all right: there are two parts to it, myth & metaphor.\u00a0 The first part speaks of myth as having an ideological function, in contrast to folktale & legend, but being superseded as language by dialectical prose.\u00a0 The poet to this day owes his authority to the preserving of mythological language.\u00a0 This makes him more primitive, but prevents him (and society) from pure ideological obsession.\u00a0 The units of poetry are metaphors, which in literature are hypothetical only, but are attached to what I call existential metaphor, the \u201clunatic and lover\u201d of Theseus\u2019 speech [A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, 5.1.7].<\/p>\n

[256]\u00a0 A developed civilization has a plurality of connected but autonomous pursuits, of which literature is one.\u00a0 A primitive society has all its cultural activities closely linked to religion.\u00a0 Hence the ecstatic nature of dances & myths where the \u201clet\u2019s pretend\u201d hypothesis is swallowed up in participation.\u00a0 But a modern performance of Hamlet<\/em> is not just let\u2019s pretend either, except that the audience at least is expected to distinguish fiction from fact, with enough detachment to know it\u2019s a play, and enough sensitivity not to say that it\u2019s just a play.<\/p>\n

[267]\u00a0 I don\u2019t think the doleful mood recorded on p. 80 [par. 254] is the final answer.\u00a0 It\u2019s common knowledge that religious movements are ideological, and closely parallel political & economic ones.\u00a0 The seminal but immensely overstated parallel of Weber between Protestantism & the work ethic is an example.\u00a0 The other side of this is that theological structures provide diagrammatic models for political & economic programs (cf. the ideologies of the 17th c. English revolutions).\u00a0 I am not interested in the relation of religion and literature, where there may be any number of \u201ceither-or\u201d contrasts and dilemmas\u2014aporias, we knowledgeable people call them\u2014but in the relation of the Bible & Western literature.<\/p>\n

[274]\u00a0 The vulnerable parts of the Bible for this approach are the creation myths in Genesis, Ruth & the Song of Songs, Job, John, and of course the Apocalypse.\u00a0 Oh, God, I hope this is the great religio-literary revolution I\u2019ve dreamed of bringing off, and isn\u2019t just one more illusion of the same old illusion.<\/p>\n

[372]\u00a0 What attracts me about Val\u00e9ry is (a) his secularizing of all the religious metaphors of Mallarm\u00e9 (b) his continuing of the Boehme tradition.\u00a0 Mallarm\u00e9 really does talk sometimes as though he thought literature was a \u201csubstitute\u201d for religion, though of course no \u201csubstitute\u201d can have more than an ersatz<\/em> reality.\u00a0 I suppose he would say, if he were using my terms, that literature is the antitype of what religious symbolism hazily points to.\u00a0 This is a defensible view in itself, but criticism has further to go than that.<\/p>\n

[397]\u00a0 I seem to be moving toward some kind of final statement, but it doesn\u2019t have to be a single unified statement.\u00a0 The book these notes are preoccupied with is the main job, but there\u2019s a number of other things I want to do that this book can\u2019t cannibalize.\u00a0 The education hamper-spanker is on its way, but there are still over twenty unpublished, or rather unreprinted, essays.\u00a0 Most of them will probably get absorbed in Words with Power, but some won\u2019t: the Wagner, the Morris, the Vico perhaps, the Vico-Bruno-Joyce, the Castiglione, the More\u2019s Utopia paper I\u2019m doing now, the Wiegand lecture, the Royal Society symbols paper, the Smith paper perhaps\u2014that\u2019s nine, even if the others (Ontario 1784-1984, the short lyric introduction) get squeezed out, and the various religion papers (Montreal, Chicago, Vision-Belief, Way, Ladder, etc.) get absorbed in here.\u00a0 I think the Ruth paper will still make a tenth.\u00a0 [These last papers are (1) \u201cThe Mythical Approach to Creation,\u201d presented at the meeting of the Learned Societies, Montreal, 4 June 1985; pub. in Myth and Metaphor<\/em>, 238\u201354. (2) \u201cThe Expanding World of Metaphor,\u201d presented at the meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Chicago, 8 December 1984; pub. in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion<\/em>, 53 (December 1985): 585-98; rpt. in ibid., 108-123. (3) \u201cThe Dialectic of Belief and Vision,\u201d presented at the School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto, 3 December 1985; pub. in Shenandoah<\/em>, 39, no. 3 (1989): 47\u201364; rpt. in ibid., 93\u2013107. (4) \u201cThe Journey as Metaphor,\u201d presented at the Applewood Centre, Toronto, 8 October 1985; pub. in ibid.,, 212\u201326. (5) \u201cRepetitions of Jacob\u2019s Dream,\u201d presented at the National Gallery, Ottawa, 13 October 1983; pub. in The Eternal Act of Creation<\/em>, 37\u201349.\u00a0 Of these 1 and 5 are in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em>.]<\/p>\n

[444]\u00a0 Protestantism is a wonderful religion: I wish I knew what Tillich meant by his \u201cprinciple.\u201d\u00a0 It has no real cultural substance.\u00a0 One thinks of Hopkins as a Catholic poet: one doesn\u2019t think of Byron & Shelley & Keats as Protestant poets, even though two of them were buried in the \u201cProtestant cemetery\u201d in Rome.\u00a0 The hidden genius of the faith of the released Word transmuted them into something rich and strange.<\/p>\n

[707]\u00a0 The 30s of this century were frightened by the power of the masses led by a mass-man, and religious people turned to the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, as the source of verbal as opposed to brutal power.\u00a0 But the Incarnation is only the Apollonian or order side of the Word; the Resurrection, the Dionysian expression of the power, completes it.\u00a0 Well, who denies that?\u00a0 I\u2019m trying to get at the tension of opposites.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notebook 46. <\/strong><\/p>\n

[49]\u00a0 The individual grows out of the community: an infallible communion, whether Christian or Moslem or the Holy Communist Church of China, keeps human beings in an embryonic state.\u00a0 The metaphors of flock and sheepfold are very dangerous.\u00a0 What is the continuous<\/em> function of the church?\u00a0 What chance has one to develop an individual religious consciousness if the communal body isn\u2019t there?<\/p>\n

Notebook 47.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[21]\u00a0 All critics stop here {at the ideological stage} who are not primarily concerned with literature but with the relation of literature to a more central interest, whether historical, radical, feminist, or the like.\u00a0 To deal with literature itself in terms of its own mythical & metaphorical language we have to take one more step.\u00a0 (Of course the same principle applies if the central interest is religion.\u00a0 Kerygma poses special problems, but religion as a social institution is still soma psychikon).\u00a0 Kerygma is a form of language, or rather a function of language.<\/p>\n

Notebook 48.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0 In the GC [The Great Code<\/em>] the apocalyptic symbols are of two kinds: the provided<\/em> ones and the achieved<\/em> ones.\u00a0 The achieved are the images of human work in transforming animal, vegetable & mineral worlds.\u00a0 The provided ones are symbolized by the paradisal: angelic & divine orders are projected, though symbolically they\u2019re provided too\u2014provisional, let\u2019s say.\u00a0 Man is in the middle, with the two forms meeting in him.\u00a0 This is the whole riddle of religion: eliminating the provided is arrogant humanism: it makes a divinity out of the psychotic creeps who pollute the earth.\u00a0 Eliminating the achieved is irresponsible fatalism.\u00af<\/p>\n

Notebook 50. <\/strong><\/p>\n

[603]\u00a0 Everyone knows with half his brain that the language of religion is myth and metaphor; with the other half we continue to use rhetorical adaptations of conceptual and dialectical language.\u00a0 Intro. [NF underscores the point several times in the Introduction.\u00a0 See WP<\/em>, xv\u2013xxi.]<\/p>\n

[680] \u00a0Four: the sacraments of religion may be \u201cmore\u201d than symbolic, but the understanding of them must approach them symbolically before they can mean anything \u201cmore\u201d than that.\u00a0 To try to decide at what point some sacramental kerygmatic essence enters that takes it \u201cbeyond\u201d symbolism would be a dreary & futile exercise.\u00a0 It\u2019s an intensification of the symbolic, not a transcending of it.<\/p>\n

Notebook 52. <\/strong><\/p>\n

[209]\u00a0 The Feuerbach principle, that man creates God in his own image, is the one that all religions apply to all other religions except themselves.\u00a0 But it can of course be applied to them by others.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t the least objection to having it said that my religion is essentially my own creation.\u00a0 I feel that it must be that way because my understanding of anything is finite; but I think the position I do hold is one that enables me to crawl a little farther and discover a bit more.\u00a0 Faced with a Jew, a Moslem, a Catholic, an atheistic humanist, I should not deny for a second that they also have positions from which to advance.\u00a0 All this is very elementary: one assumption I\u2019ve so far left aside.\u00a0 I am what I am because of certain historical events: the Protestant Reformation, the Anglican settlement, the Methodist movement, the transfer of religious energies to the New World.\u00a0 Hence if I express a tolerance that grants to any position the capacity of moving nearer whatever truth is, I am also annihilating history, assuming that all religious theory and practice today begins in a kind of apocalypse in which past history has exhausted its significance as such.\u00a0 The nineteenth-century obsession with conversion, mainly from Protestant to Catholic positions, was a desperate effort to keep history continuous: I think it no longer works, if it ever did.<\/p>\n

[302]\u00a0 3.\u00a0 The tentative, as above [par. 300].\u00a0 The metaphor can be easily abandoned, because it isn\u2019t taken very seriously in the first place.\u00a0 Even metaphors like \u201cChrist is God and Man,\u201d which are the basis of Christianity because the real nitty-gritty of any religion can only be expressed in metaphors, are like a rope bridge across a gorge.\u00a0 You may commit your life to a belief that it will get you across, but there will be moments when you wish you hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

[395]\u00a0 Let us now put this into some kind of historical context.\u00a0 In the earliest traces of human creativity we can discover, such as the cave-drawings in Altamira or Lascaux, we see pictures of animals, drawn with joy and exuberance under the most fantastically difficult conditions of positioning and lighting.\u00a0 We can isolate various aspects of the impulse to produce these paintings, the most obvious being the magical impulse, to ensure a plentiful supply of game.\u00a0 But no single aspect, magical, religious or aesthetic, brings us to the centre of the titanic will to identification with the objects represented.\u00a0 That seems to be what has been called a participation mystique<\/em>, a sense of identity with the object which is not verbal but existential.\u00a0 We notice that some of the figures are those of sorcerers or shamans dressed in animal skins, another aspect of identification.\u00a0 Similarly, the earliest use of music seems to have been primarily ecstatic (as on p. 4).\u00a0 Also rituals.\u00af<\/p>\n

[396]\u00a0 In this context, the verbal metaphor represents a cultural stage where there is a strong sense of a cleavage between subject and object.\u00a0 Positively, the metaphor creates what Martin Buber would call a world of \u201cThou\u201d between the worlds of the ego and the \u201cit.\u201d\u00a0 So even in religions that no longer accept deified nature-spirits, the language about God still has to remain largely metaphorical, as it does in the Bible.\u00a0 The central Christian doctrines, for example, are still metaphorical in grammatical formulation, as in \u201cChrist is God and man.\u201d\u00a0 But to the extent that the sense of a subject-object partition of experience grows, metaphor becomes increasingly hypothetical, and hence confined to the literary orbit of experience, where we make no assertions or denials but only imaginative postulates.\u00a0 play (Bacon).\u00af<\/p>\n

[397]\u00a0 {The bridge of ropes comment.}\u00af\u00a0 Much of the conviction expressed by so many contemporary writers about the death of God and the disappearance of the religious dimension of experience is derived from the negative and ironic aspect of metaphor, the feeling that these are \u201conly metaphors after all.\u201d\u00a0 One writer who shared this view of religious experience was Ovid, whose main theme is metamorphosis, in the sense of the collapse of a personality into a purely natural object, in other words the breakdown of metaphor, the expression of a god\u2019s maintaining of the balance.\u00a0 Existential identification, in ritual or elsewhere, is now something to be distrusted: it is Don Quixote at the puppet show, the inability to distinguish reality from fiction; it is hysteria and mob frenzy.\u00a0 The kind of self-identification with fictional figures that we all probably make in childhood is also thought of as immature.<\/p>\n

[515]\u00a0 Well, I must see what Stevens says: I think he\u2019s the brightest hope, though Mallarme and some of the science fiction patterns (Solaris)\u00af have to be examined too.\u00a0 The paradox of nothing.\u00a0 One can only get out of the prison of Narcissus by raising the level of consciousness: maybe religion today has to pass through the Oriental meditation techniques.\u00a0 But then I\u2019ve always insisted that works of art are also objects of meditation no less than mandalas.<\/p>\n

[625]\u00a0 Not much interest in reviving gods or nature-spirits today: rather a feeling of a common consciousness engaged with total nature.\u00a0 Notion of common consciousness in all the serious religions and the scientists too\u2014Schrodinger.\u00af\u00a0 Antithesis between religious and secular doesn\u2019t work any more, if it ever did.\u00a0 All religious phenomena have a secular aspect, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

[904]\u00a0 Totality of community: Christian conception of Christ as total man, also as total intelligible world or word; key to metaphor and the identity of things.\u00a0 Goes beyond Christianity: the old antithesis between the religious and the secular doesn\u2019t work any more, if it ever did.\u00a0 Religion linked to ecstatic metaphor: a man\u2019s religion is what he wants to identify himself with.<\/p>\n

Notebook 53. <\/strong><\/p>\n

[104]\u00a0 Powerful pull toward the primitive submission to doctrine: I\u2019ve always been attracted by those who took religion seriously enough to use it as a basis, but then struggled with it like Jacob with the angel.\u00a0 Blake, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, perhaps Rimbaud, certainly Baudelaire.\u00a0 Nobody gets converted to Protestantism: it doesn\u2019t provide the right primitive basis.\u00a0 It provides only a medium for struggle and, in itself, only a hard Ersatz primitivism.<\/p>\n

[111]\u00a0 First lecture: the only religious minds of any real interest today are those who struggle with their faith like Jacob with the angel, like Emily Dickinson, Blake, Baudelaire, etc.\u00a0 The notion of fighting with one\u2019s faith was denounced in Catholic circles until very recently, and of course still is in nearly all official circles.\u00a0 But it\u2019s gaining ground even there.<\/p>\n

Notebook 55.1 <\/strong><\/p>\n

[11]\u00a0 Whether I have any more books to write or not, I still want to consider the points of silence in religion: the silence of before being, expressed by the word creation; the silence of after being, expressed by the word apocalypse; the incarnating of those silences in human birth and death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Notebook 27. [87]\u00a0 Re the previous (but one) note: expanded consciousness is not religion, of course, but it may be the precondition for any ecumenical or everlasting-gospel religion.\u00a0 Note that the gospel-church begins with ecstatic phenomena (speaking in tongues), and that our own time is rich in frenzies and hysterias along with more genuine phenomena.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,23,111,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-denham","category-collected-works","category-notebooks","category-religion"],"yoast_head":"\nFrye on Religion in the Late Notebooks: A Little Anthology - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Frye on Religion in the Late Notebooks: A Little Anthology - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Notebook 27. [87]\u00a0 Re the previous (but one) note: expanded consciousness is not religion, of course, but it may be the precondition for any ecumenical or everlasting-gospel religion.\u00a0 Note that the gospel-church begins with ecstatic phenomena (speaking in tongues), and that our own time is rich in frenzies and hysterias along with more genuine phenomena.\u00a0 […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-08-01T04:00:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/07\/latenotebooks1.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"268\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"391\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Bob Denham\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Bob Denham\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"23 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Bob Denham\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/#\/schema\/person\/f0d6833dfde3f2793ecbbc6aacd83812\"},\"headline\":\"Frye on Religion in the Late Notebooks: A Little Anthology\",\"datePublished\":\"2010-08-01T04:00:54+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/\"},\"wordCount\":4558,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/07\/latenotebooks1.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Bob Denham\",\"Collected Works\",\"Notebooks\",\"Religion\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/01\/frye-on-religion-in-the-late-notebooks-a-little-anthology\/\",\"name\":\"Frye on Religion in the Late Notebooks: A Little Anthology - 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