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We are delighted to post this response by Michael Dolzani on the question of Frye’s anti-supernaturalism. Michael, editor of several of the Collected Works, will be joining us as a byline correspondent.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I think I understand why Clayton Chrusch refers to Frye\u2019s \u201canti-supernaturalism,\u201d and his entry<\/a> puts its finger on one of those issues in Frye studies whose intractability proves how truly central they are.\u00a0 As Bob Denham says<\/a>, Frye seemed open to belief in all sorts of paranormal phenomena, both the spontaneous ones that occur in s\u00e9ances and the significant coincidences that Jung explained by \u201csynchronicity<\/a>\u201d and also the deliberately evoked and controlled phenomena of magic and occultism.\u00a0 However, Bob notes that Frye did not think of such phenomena as supernatural.\u00a0 A Renaissance magician like Prospero\u2014or, in real life, Marsilio Ficin<\/a>o\u2014believed that he was drawing upon the hidden powers of nature.\u00a0 Such \u201cnatural magic\u201d could be white or black, good or evil, depending upon the will that summons and controls it.\u00a0 Witches may claim to serve the devil, but the devil\u2019s attributes\u2014the cloven hooves, horns, tail\u2014clearly indicate that this kind of devil is merely a nature spirit.\u00a0 The hidden powers of nature can sometimes be imagined as a whole hidden realm, an Otherworld like the Celtic Faerie, and perhaps the Tibetan Bardo<\/a>.\u00a0 But this realm is not supernatural; in the early 1947 essay \u201cYeats and the Language of Symbolism,\u201d as well as in the early notebooks it is closely related to, Frye calls it \u201chyperphysical,\u201d meaning that it is not super-natural, above nature, but an extension of nature.\u00a0 To mistake it as supernatural is an example of what the early notebooks repeatedly call \u201cthe deification of the void.\u201d<\/p>\n But if the deification of the void is false supernaturalism, it is certainly a valid question whether Frye believed in a real supernaturalism.\u00a0 I am not surprised that this controversy has erupted in relation to Fearful Symmetry<\/em>, where Frye is closest to Blake.\u00a0 Blake tended to equate \u201cnature\u201d with \u201cfallen world\u201d in a way that sometimes\u2014misleadingly, I think\u2014suggests that he is the kind of Gnostic<\/a> who rejected the physical world altogether.\u00a0 That cannot really be true:\u00a0 a bird cannot be a world of delight closed to our senses five if it is merely fallen or illusory.\u00a0 But Blake is pushed in that direction by his repudiation of \u201cnatural religion,\u201d all the more so because most of the conventional Christianity of his time and ours is really natural religion in disguise.\u00a0 Natural religion is what happens when the \u201cnatural man\u201d [1 Corinthians 2:14<\/a>], Paul\u2019s term for the fallen aspect of ourselves, tries to imagine the supernatural.\u00a0 The result, as Browning showed, is Caliban upon Setebos<\/a>, the reason being that the natural man cannot think or imagine beyond the natural.\u00a0 What is the natural?\u00a0 In this context, it is the cloven fiction, the split between the subject and a world of objects alienated from the subject.\u00a0 If the natural man is the subject, God must be the ultimately objectified Object, either projected into the heavens as an inscrutable sky-god (Urizen<\/a>, Nobodaddy<\/a>, Shelley\u2019s Prometheus<\/a>) or into the depths as the Immanent Will of Hardy<\/a> and his chief influence, Schopenhauer<\/a>.\u00a0 This is really another kind of deification of the void.\u00a0 Such a God is a Holy Terror, tormenting his followers as he tormented Job, afflicting them outwardly with boils and tragedy, inwardly with the theological nightmares of predestination, the terrors of eternal hellfire, and the intractable guilt of people like Luther<\/a>.<\/p>\n I find that intelligent Christians of good will are puzzled and put off by the anger of people like Blake and Frye.\u00a0 Such Christians are thinking in terms of a God who is, as Clayton Chrusch says, \u00a0the beautiful hope of those who are suffering.\u00a0 But Frye grew up in the realm of Protestant fundamentalism, and I grew up within pre-Vatican II<\/a> Catholicism, with the same rebellious result.\u00a0 Frye, especially the younger Frye, refuses to suppress all the troubling questions; like Job, he stands up and cries out for answers.\u00a0 And unlike Job, but like Blake, he refuses to be shouted down because God has a bigger loudspeaker.<\/p>\n So the natural man cannot be truly spiritual; he can only be superstitious, worshipping and trying to placate a spook conjured by his own anxieties.\u00a0 But Paul\u2019s \u201cspiritual man\u201d is identified by Blake with the imagination.\u00a0 The imagination does not \u201cbelieve in\u201d God:\u00a0 belief is concerned with the evidence for or against objects, and God is not an object.\u00a0 God is not a \u201cfact,\u201d at least not in this sense.\u00a0 The natural man thinks that, if God is not a fact, he must be a mere fiction or illusion, but it is one of the primary missions of Words with Power<\/em> to get beyond that impasse.<\/p>\n That is why I think Sara Toth\u2019s essay \u201cRecovery of the Spiritual Other\u201d (in Northrop Frye:\u00a0 New Directions from Old<\/em><\/a>)\u00a0 is an important contribution to Frye studies.\u00a0 Sara observes that, beginning as early as the 1970s, Frye increasingly speaks of a \u201cspiritual otherness.\u201d\u00a0 To the imagination or spiritual man (or woman), God is \u201cother\u201d and yet not objective.\u00a0 In the Preface to Spiritus Mundi<\/em><\/a>, Frye writes, \u201cFor Blake and Yeats, on the other hand, there is nothing creative except what the human imagination produces.\u00a0 Stevens polarizes the imagination against a \u2018reality\u2019 which is otherness, what the imagination is not and has to struggle with.\u00a0 Such reality cannot ultimately be the reality of physical nature or of constituted human society, which produce only the \u2018realism\u2019 that for Stevens is something quite different.\u00a0 It is rather a spiritual reality, an otherness of a creative power not ourselves; and sooner or later all theories of creative imagination have to take account of it.\u201d\u00a0 Autobiographical aside:\u00a0 my first contact with Frye was in 1976.\u00a0 At the age of twenty-five, I wrote him a fan letter thanking him graciously acceding to my visiting father-in-law\u2019s request to autograph a copy of Spiritus Mundi <\/em>for me.\u00a0 In my letter, I specifically mentioned the \u201cspiritual otherness\u201d passage as seeming like a fascinating new direction for him.\u00a0 He wrote back saying that he was working on a book on the Bible, and that this was one of the issues it was important to get right.<\/p>\n Frye is distancing himself in that Preface from Blake\u2019s identification of the human imagination as God.\u00a0 Although Blake is right in a sense, there is different aspect of God which remains other.\u00a0 What is an otherness that is not objective?\u00a0 It is a \u201cspiritual\u201d otherness.\u00a0 And what does that mean?\u00a0 Well, I wish I knew.\u00a0 I edited Words with Power<\/em>, including the chapter \u201cSpirit and Symbol\u201d that is Frye\u2019s deepest exploration of this, and still feel I do not entirely understand it\u2014though I feel that it does mean something, and though I have been trying to grasp it since I was twenty-five.\u00a0 I think Frye himself was looking for clues in other writers:\u00a0 Sara notes his interest in Buber<\/a>\u2019s I-Thou relationship.\u00a0 I myself have been struck by how, of the two great Protestant theologians of his time, Frye seems more fascinated by the neo-orthodox Barth<\/a> than the liberal Tillich<\/a>.\u00a0 What I think he found in Barth was the vision of a spiritual otherness smashing through the limitations of human desires, human understanding, human words: \u00a0a transcendence whose revelation or kerygma shatters the mind-forg\u2019d manacles of the fallen world.\u00a0 When David Cayle<\/a>y asks Frye, \u201cWhy do you take it as given that God is transcendent?\u201d Frye responds, \u201cI don\u2019t know what else is transcendent.\u00a0 Otherwise, you\u2019re left with human nature and physical nature\u2026.Human nature is corrupt at the source, because it has grown out of physical nature.\u00a0 It has various ideals and hopes and wishes and concerns, but its attempts to realize these things are often abominable, cruel, and psychotic.\u00a0 I feel there must be something that transcends all this, or else.\u201d\u00a0 When Cayley asks, \u201cOr else what?\u201d Frye responds, \u201cOr else despair.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are delighted to post this response by Michael Dolzani on the question of Frye’s anti-supernaturalism. Michael, editor of several of the Collected Works, will be joining us as a byline correspondent. I think I understand why Clayton Chrusch refers to Frye\u2019s \u201canti-supernaturalism,\u201d and his entry puts its finger on one of those issues in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[27,75,80,82,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-guest-bloggers","category-imagination","category-intensified-consciousness","category-literary-criticism"],"yoast_head":"\n