Zack and I have spent that last month or so putting this together. Hope you find it somewhat helpful.
Ch. 5 1st Variation; The Mountain
I. Claims to understanding the Bible
A. Demands imaginative response equivalent to that of mythologies and literature
B. Divergences from "Historical facts" will and must arise.
C. "Myths to Live by"- concentration on the existentialism
1. Speculative mythopoeia- explaining or rationalizing the book in mythical terms.
2. Ex. 1- Gnostic writers with their catalogue of Demons and Angels
a. The comparison is made between the new testament and Gnosticism because Gnostic's wish to change to the "speculative mythopoeia" whereas the Bible doesn't want to be held to the mode of thought.
3. Ex. 2- Similar is the Old testament compared to the "pseudegraphic" or false inscription writing.
D. Why the Gospels impressed themselves as above myth on the Western World.
1. Christian attitude was principled as "no more myths" in concern of the biblical interpretation's of scripture.
2. Christian story cannot equal myth (Christian, not Hebrew)
a. We are still struggling with the verbal theory today
i. The verbal theory Fry is speaking of is the preconceived understanding that the GOSPELS cannot be interpreted mythically.
b. This pretentious truth leads to the violence involved in the transformation of stories into "fundamental life regulations".
i. Ex. 1 Myth turned into ascendant ideology
E. The Changing Influences and Relations of Classical Mythology and the Bible.
1. Begins with Biblical myths as True and Classical myths as False.
a. Result-claimed Classical myths were Demonic parodies of Biblical ones.
or
b. classical myths were confused memories after the fall (Adam and Eve, though perhaps The Tower of Babel)
2. Soon a liberal view establishes itself in spite; Classical myth as a supportive "proof" or "counterpoint" of the bible (yet not a full truth)(Perhaps comparative to the Hebrews view of the Talmud?)
a. For an example see 145 in Fry's Words with Power; Milton's poetic blend and Fry's analysis soon after.
b. "The final phrase is an example of the tradition[al] ingratitude of Christian poets who level such tribute on Classical writers while officially denouncing their story."
F. Avoiding the "dogmatic" barriers of Christianity through the classical myths.
1. (This is used purely literary or imaginatively)
2. Ex. 1 Dante's use in Paradiso of Marsayas (Marsayas being flayed alive by Apollo) as a Christian view of the loss of flesh and Glaucos (eats seaweed and becomes a Sea-God) as a metaphor for a transubstantive procedure comparative to taking of the blood and the host in Christianity.
3. This imaginative comparison becomes regular procedure in comparing the two sets of "myths".
4. It helps to understand allusions between the two by simply looking them up.
G. Milton's Avenue: His Critical Attitude towards the use of Classical Myth in relation to the GOSPELS.
1. Fry explains Milton's vision of why we can use classical myth as a support for the bible by taking the evasive passage of Paradise Regained in which Jesus is tempted by Satan to become a Greek philosopher.
2. Jesus' refuses to have anything to do with any culture outside the Old Testament and through this, Milton in his faith assesses, that Jesus, by keeping himself in the purity of the Old Testament Culture, and excluding Greek philosophy, Christ is able to disassociate himself from Satan's illusory (or demonic parts of the world) and thus begin his redemption of everything that is not inseparably evil. Thus we are able to read Plato and Aristotle because they were withheld, but if they, in their demonic parts, had been allowed in Christ's mindset, Jesus would have suffered the temptation by the tainted culture and thus the redemption wound never have come about.
Notes For Frye. Pgs 147-69
II. Blending of Christian And Classical Motif
A. Spenser Blending of Christian Lent in the temple of Venus (It has Christian Saints)
1. He later replaces Eros inspired poems with supplemental poems to God.
B. Milton’s Poetic inspiration: responsibilities of a major poet.
1. Examples come from his Nativity Ode
2. Life of a poet is put in completely pagan terms.
a. live like Pythagoras
b. live like the Prophet Tiresias
i. before his eyes are darkened
- he looks at things from two points of view
- Whole soul is devoted to Jupiter (highest)
3. Among the false gods abolished by the birth of Christ in the Nativity Ode is the pagan “Genius,” the Spirit of Nature.
4. The Question of Genius.
a. Nativity ode considers him abolished, yet
b. In Arcades, Lycidas and Comus, the Genius is a real and good character
c. Paradoxically Milton is dealing with one character in Two lights
i. The Christian
ii. The mythical
C. A New Type of Secularization: The implied mythology.
1. Affected Period between Dryden and Johnson (1700’s)
2. Period becomes increasingly realistic and
3. mythology become implicit and less explicit in literature
D. Further Digression_ The Romantic Period Poetry
1. Prose fiction: mythological affinities are neglected by or ignored by critics
2. Poetry- Christian and Classical mythologies, at least, gains imaginative parity with each other.
E. The Popular View of Poetry
1. Poetry cannot reach highest levels of meaning by itself.
2. Allegory is the main tool which poets “cope” with this ineptitude
3. Contrasts of Romantic Times
a. Critical Theory: Allegory vs. Symbol
b. Symbol wins; begins the seperative sense of literature living in its own cosmos and orbit/verbal modes (descriptive, conception, rhetoric, metaphor, kergymatic)
c. Realistic Fiction: its development during Romanticism
i. accompanied by implied assumption of realism
ii. Literature needs to “bond” with non literary world to avoid being:
- overly subjective
- self-indulgent
- ingrown
- snobbish
- elitist
- all other endemic diseases assumed of literature and criticism
iii. Current View- Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle
iv. Refuted by Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying”
F. Principles of Literature that follow; Condensation and Displacement
1. Displacement in a literary context;
a. The alteration of a mythical structure in the direction of greater plausibility
b. Ex. Exists in the Winter’s Tale where the statue that comes to life is exchanged for a girl who stood still for fifteen years in intervals
2. Condensation in a literary context;
a. (in Frye’s words)- the opposite movement (of displacement) where similarities and
associations of ordinary experience become metaphorical identities.
b. In our speculation- a convergence of the two perspectives of understanding into a metaphorical identity. We all have these different perspectives of the same metamorphosis so as to better give reality or explanation to ourselves- no difference exists in the transformation-merely what or how we see.
c. An ex. Exists in William Blake’s “Sick Rose” which condenses the metaphorical identities (1) of anyone seeing a jealous lover break the spirit of the person he thinks he loves and (2) a parasite destroying a flower.
d. An explicit allusion to Biblical or Classical mythology in an otherwise representative context is a condensing image.
e. This asserts our literary bedrock in the Bible and Classical Mythology
3. Principle displacement in its most extreme form:
a. The Socialist Realism movement promoted by Stalin in Russia.
b. An ideology (Principles in which you live your life) tried to make all literature into an allegory ((moral) of its own obsessions.
4. Principles of Condensation in its most extreme form:
a. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce- Ex- “ As the loin in our teargarten remembers the nenuphars of his Nile (shall Ariuz forget Arioun or Boghas the Baregams of the Maarmarazelles from Marmeniere?) it may be, tots wearsense full a naggin in twentyg have sigilposted
b. This is all spelled correctly- it is a condensing of stories by changing the words to represent more.
c. “The reader is compelled to find all its meaning within its interlocking structure.”
d. T.S. Eliot claims we never need do this again. (Sexson loves this book, try and convince him to restart his reading group)
III. Assumption that literature as a whole lies between Socialist Realism and Finnegans d Wake: The Cosmos of Human Phenomena.
A. (Some of these belong to the special category of the human that we call the world of the gods)
B. Western Worlds
1. Bible sits in the middle (SOCIALIST REALISM-BIBLE-FINNEGANS WAKE)
a. Used to show that the cosmos of myth and metaphor has an overall structure
b. And not as Postmodernism believes that it is simply a chaos of endlessly tantalizing echoes and resemblances.
C. The Next Logical Step; An area called literary cosmology.
1. Cosmology as associated with philosophy
a. reference to Whithead’s Process and Reality; subtitled “an essay on cosmology”
b. Philisophical systems usually conceal something much more simple and naïve behind them.
c. Bertrund Russel reaffirms Whitehead with his explicitly on the point.
i. formal systems is a philosophers way of an inner understanding of the self through
the outside world.
ii. In other words: every philosopher, every cosmologists seeks to explain his answers to how to perceive the world, but often cannot answer the simplest version of this through his system. BY SIMPLEST we do not mean the easiest to gain understanding of but the foundation of all things: in the words of T.S. Eliot in Dry Salvages:
d. “A condition of complete simplicity (costing no less than everything)
e. In the words of Bertrund Russell “Every philosopher, in addition to the formal system which he offers to the world, has another, much simpler, of which he may be quite unaware. If he is aware of it, he probably realizes that it won’t quite do; he therefore conceals it, and sets forth something more sophisticated, which he believes because it is like his crude system, but which he asks others to accept because he thinks he has made it such as cannot be disproved.”
2. The Definition of Cosmologies- it is constructed out of the metaphors that lift us up or bring us down, that oppose one hand to the other, look in or out, go forward or backward.
a. or in our words… attempt to show through a contradictory perception of what is “reality” the world unseen.
3. Example of Bafflingly vague metaphorical constructs that do not work:
a. Poe’s Eureka: Valery’s essay explains the cosmology of Eureka is a cyclical metaphor, though it is hard to see through its naïve systems in our day.
b. In olden days these metaphorical constructs would have been more easily projected in our cosmological environment.
c. Eureka is comparable to Plato’s Statesman or
d. Hindu myth of the days and night of Brahma
IV. Axis Mundi
A. The end of a mythos or narrative movement brings us to a
1. Thematic Stasis: or simultaneous apprehension of what we have been following up to that point.
2. In literary structures we generally use metaphors of vision to describe this simultaneity of response.
3. In addition, since there is no more narrative to keep us moving ahead, our perspective shifts to an up-down vertical pattern.
4. Out of these emerges the central metaphor of the axis mundi, a vertical line running from the top to the bottom of the Cosmos
B. Axis Mundi is related only to a verbal universe.
1. (During the days of Geocentricitism it had scientific standing)
2. Though it naturally uses illustrations suggesting climbing into the sky or descending into the depths of the earth or sea.
C. Axis Mundi to the Imagination.
1. Universe has always been presented in appearance as a middle world with a second above it and a third below it.
2. Images of Ascent are connected with the intensifying of consciousness
3. Images of Descent with the reinforcing of it by other forms of awareness, such as fantasy or dream.
4. Common Ascent Images- ladders, mountains, towers, and trees
5. Common Descent Images- Caves or dives into water.
V. Jacob’s Ladder (Gen 28)
A. Has infinite Symbolic Overtones
B. Jacob’s lies his head on a stone and has a dream inferring that whoever wrote the
passage also believed dreams happen in the brain.
C. Jacob has vision of Ladder
1. Stretching from earth to heaven w/
2. Angels ascending and descending it.
3. “How ‘dreadful’ is this place he shouts
a. Dread in the sense of awe, as in holy.
D. Jacob calls the place of his dream the House of God and The Gate of Heaven and
Vowed to build an altar there.
1. He also renamed Luz to Bethel which means House of God.
D. The Ladder.
1. Ladder from heaven rather than to it.
2. It was not a human construction but an image of the diving will to reach man.
3. And if angels are going both up and down it is really a spiral staircase.
4. finally, Jacob calls the place House of God,
a. But does not build a temple
b. Merely an altar
c. The altar is also an image of a connection between earth and heaven
d. But one that subordinates the human side of connection
VI. Demonic Parodies of “Jacob’s Ladder”
A. Mesopotamian temples centered in cities served as similar links between the world of the gods which is assumed to be in the sky, or above.
1. temples were ziggurats
2. different floors were connected by spiraling staircases
3. Ascent would be in a spiral
4. There were winding stairs in Solomon’s temple, even though it was only 3 stories high (I kings 6:8)
5. Temples in Babylon and Persia
a. 7 stories and 7 flights of steps.
b. Colored differently
c. Perhaps to symbolized the planets, and sun and moon.
d. Top was a chamber representing the place where the bride of the god awaits’ his descent
1. this aspect of symbolism Frye will return too later.
2. Bridal chamber indicates 2 groups of metaphor.
a. Ladder of cosmology: ladder of wisdom (our focus)
b. Other sexual: Ladder of Love (Frye in next chapter)
6. Egyptian Ascencion
a. God Osiris- Judge of the dead is at the top of a staircase
b. Indicates that in making a ladder (staircase) it is the last step which is the supremely important one.
c. (Greek word for ladder is Klimax)
d. In an Egyptian ritual where the raising of the ladder occupied a prominent place, the ladder is identified with the spine of a cosmological body.
B. Tower of Babel (Gen 11)
1. Man’s attempt to connect with God rather than God’s attempt to connect with man
2. Man attempts to create “his own gate of heaven” without having the subordinate link from God.
3. They do this through communication with each other instead of with God.
4. Trying to get to a place that isn’t.
5. Just now we are concerned only with the principle that every image of revelation in the Bible carries with it a demonic parody or counterpoint.
C. Arts representation of Babel and Bethel
1. Neither Babel nor Bethel are explicit spirals or winding structures, though Artists represent it so:
a. Brueghel’s painting of Babel
b. Blake’s of Jacob’s Dream
VII. Mountains: symbolize sense of connecting with a higher state of existence from the
Ordinary one.
A. The earth we live on seems connected with the sky by mountains.
B. It is clear mountains, towers, and spirals, are symbolic.
C. There appears to be a world wide practice of making pilgrimages up mountains usually on a spiral course:
1. I.e. Glastonbury Tor in England
2. Song of Degrees in Psalms
D. Jerusalem is symbolically the highest point in the world.
VIII. Other types of Axis Mundi Images
A. Tree of Life of Eden (Broken at the Fall)
B. We Owe Axis Mundi images to the fact that we can’t fly ( imagine if we could fly)
C. John Donne comments on restraint of angels walking on Jacob’s Ladder
D. 7-story tower in Persia
1. Explicitly Stairway to Heaven
2. Important element of Mithraism, Persian sun cult (a contemporary to Christianity
a. 7 degrees of Ascent after death
b. Stairway imagery is expanding in direction of a creation myth
IX. Creation Myth
A. It is not how the order of nature came into being, but
B. How we came to know (through sense) nature as it dawns on our imaginative conscious.
C. Traditional religion claims that creation is a product of the Word of God, the creation itself being a second Word of God, an infinite source of what is intelligible to man and can be responded to by him.
X. The creation myth of P (Genesis 1:1)
A. (Myth has acquired a strong Ideological content)
1. 7 days in the book
a. strong emphasis on hierarchy and on differentiation.
b. cosmos separated from chaos.
c. land from sea.
d. sky or firmament from waters above and below
e. man is supreme ruler of the animal and vegetable creation
f. Driving regulations still overshadowing him
B. P Account.
1. natura naturata- nature as a structure or system
2. (Nature of physics)
C. Significance of the Day of Rest (in part)
1. Creation becomes objective to God himself;
2. (in human terms) God withdraws from his creation sufficiently to enable man to
study it on his own and
3. To guarantee that while man and nature are finite the amount of knowledge and
wisdom available to man is inexhaustible.
D. The 2nd withdrawal (caused by the fall) is something else again (Frye will get to this
later.
XI. hierarchal Universe in J’s Creation Myth
A. the hierarchal universe is reflected in the progression of events
1. First the 4 elements
a. light
b. water
c. air
d. earth
2. 2nd; sequence of Created being
a. trees
b. birds and fish
c. land animals
3. 3rd; Man as the lord of creation
4. 7th day we glimpse God’s presence at the top
5. The vision seems to suggest authority and subordination
6. where the fulfillment of life consists in occupying one’s “natural place”
B. first theme: Hierarchal cosmology
1. Near Eastern or Classical Cultures would have produced a very similar ideology
XII. The set of images that form the metaphorical kernels of the vision
A. Frye notes that Jacob’s ladder and the Tower of Babel are not explicitly linked to creation myths, but the affinities emerge when we delve deeper.
B. British Colombian Indian Myth
1. An animal shoots an arrow into the moon and another shoots an arrow into its predecessor notch until the ladder completes itself from Earth to sky.
C. Frye is concerned with 2 points.
1. First, Ideal and Ironic aspects of the theme
a. outside and inside the bible
b. ironic ones are usually connected with folly or presumption of the underdogs
2. second, the image of the ladder is clearly being linked to a myth of an original connection between this and a higher world which is broken at some point.
a. Classical counterpoint of ironic verse is the revolt of the Titans, the sons of earth who piled mountains on top of each other to reach their enemy in the sky.
b. More present: Blake’s “The Gates of Paradise”
1. Caption I won’t! I won’t! as a young man climbs a ladder to the moon
2. Next caption shows him falling shouting “help! Help” like his prototype Icarus.
c. Christian aspect: Dante’s Divine Comedy.
1. Purgatory is the connecting link between earth and heaven
2. has the form of a mountain with seven main spiral turnings
3. ascent of Purgatory is followed by a second climb through the planetary spheres in the Paridiso
4. In the 7th of the spheres, that of Saturn, we see Jacob’s Ladder again, symbolizing the remainder of Dante’s journey from the manifest spheres of the redeemed into the heart of eternal light.
5. possibility of Mithraic ascent influence.
6. Also has lots of Arrows and could not be influenced by the British Colombian myth.
7. Dante’s poem being Christian, Dante’s ascent is not directed by his own will, but by the divine grace manifested in Beatrice.
d. Milton’s emphasis on divine initiative
1. 3 bk. Of Paradise Lost: “Paradise of Fools”
a. exists on the smooth surface of the primmum mobile (circumference of universe, Zack has a picture on his blog)
b. those who arrive have tried to take the kingdom of heaven by force or fraud
c. (tower of Babel is referenced)(Archetype)
d. Follows a vision of stairs descending from heaven and earth, which, Milton tells us were “such as where on Jacob saw”
e. These stairs are let down from heaven and drawn up again at the pleasure of God:
f. Satan, on his journey to Eden, arrives at a lower stair, from which he descends to earth by way of the planets.
e. Dante and Milton’s tradition
1. Both gentleman are following the religious tradition that starts from Jacob’s Ladder
2. where there can be no connection between heaven and earth without divine will.
3. Mystics also use ladders and staircases
a. always remember that they are not climbing on their own power.
b. (I. E. John Hilton’s “Ladder of Perfection”
XIII. The Four leading spiralists of the 1940’s: Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Joyce
A. T.S. Eliot
1. Early Poems- Curious urgent emphasis on the highest step of a staircase. I. E.:
a. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
b. Portrait of a Lady
c. La Figlia che Piange
2. Ash- Wednesday
a. Eliot joins the Christian tradition of Ladders
b. Follows Dante’s Purgatorio: has a turning stair at the center of his Poem.
c. Four Quartet’s (Great Variety)
1. Imagery derived partially from Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross.
a. Ascent of Mount Carmel
b. one of the best known mystical climbs
2. Burnt Norton (1st Quartet)
a. Fully developed vision of Axis Mundi
1. Its top among the circling stars
2. crossing the line of ordinary experience at “the
stillpoint of the turning world.”
3.Going below to a world associated with both
a. London’s Subway
b. Homer’s Hades
4. To a world of Death.
b. packed around the roots of this bedded axle tree is the
great variety of objects in the physical world
symbolized by the phrase “garlic and sapphires”
B. Yeats
1. “All ladders are planted in the ‘foul rag-and-bone shop’ of the human heart”
2. A Vision
a. his later poetry comes to revolve around a double spiral.
1. as in Heraclitus’ aphorisms
2. yin/yang duality
b. The image of the tower with a spiraling staircase is at the center of this.
c. Yeats even went to the length of buying one of the round towers that still survive in Ireland and living in it (awesome)
d. The double gyre extends to a vision in which human life from birth to death is supplemented by an after-life which is and
1. runs from birth to death again’
2. takes the form of a “dreaming back”
3. Imagine unwrapping an Egyptian mummy
4. Dante’s Purgatorial theme also has the image of moving from Death back to birth again as Dante is moving toward the place of his original birth as a child of an unfallen Adam.
C. James Joyce: Finnegan’s Wake
1. Joyce associates the fall of mankind with an Irish-Ballad of Finnegan who falls from a ladder, dies, and awakens at his own wake.
2. In Joyce’s telling, Finnegan is persuaded to go back to death by twelve mourners representing the cycle of the Zodiac.
3. Finnegan than modulates into the figure known chiefly by his initial’s HCE
a. who remains asleep and dreaming
b. his dreams become a cyclical shape that is the repetition of history as we know it.
4. Joyce’s awareness of ladder’s
a. Uses ladders and their conventions t show that human life is not linear
b. It is a sequence of cycles where we get “up” in the mourning and “fall” asleep at night.
D. Ezra Pound: The Cantos
1.1st Canto: An adaptation of the Odyssey in which Ulysses summons the
spirit of Elpenor from Hades.
a. Elpenor also fell from a ladder on which he fell asleep.
2. Pound takes his main body of imagery from Heroclitus
a. The account of the staircases in Ecbatana and Babylon.
3. Pisan Cantos
a. “To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.”
4. Failed attempt.
a. Pound mentions at the end of his canto the sense of failure he feels
in not being able to construct a “Paradiso terrestre” in comparison
of Dante’s.
E. Babel Theme
1. The confusion of language pervasive in Joyce.
2. Appears in Eliot’s The Waste Land, especially the end.
3. Various Parts in Pounds Cantos.
F. The Importance of Why these writers use the same Images (Axis Mundi)
1. Yeats: the confusion of modern times comes from the abandoning of
the old hierarchy ascending from man up to “the one”
2. Much the same as Eliot.
a. Eliot uses Christian references
b. Yeats uses Neoplatonic.
Here ends Ch.1 of Mtn. Variations
Section 2
XIV. Primacy of the Act: the closed cycle
A. (Pg. 34) In the beginning God did something, and words are descriptive servomechanisms telling us what he did. This imports into Western religion what post-structural critics call the “transcendental signified,” the view that what is true or real is something outside the words that the words are pointing to.” (Frye Disagrees with this viewpoint and uses the opening of John’s Gospel as his proof.
B. The Tower of Babel is a Demonic Parody that falls under Primacy of The Act.
C. The “Demonic” Tower represents Imperialism. And The King is a Parody of God
1. The Bible’s Tribal Culture constantly prophecies of the fall of surrounding Imperialist culture’s
2. They were never able to form one themselves because they keep fighting amongst themselves.
3. Ex of Parody; World Tree (Ezekiel 31)
4. Ex of Parody: World Mountain (Isaiah 14)
5. Ex. Of Parody: The Early Tribal Greek Culture attributes their defeat of Xerxes to the fact that the gods do not like big empires.
D. Rising Tower Turns to Falling Tower
1. Confusion of Tongues
2. Babel is cyclical symbol
3. it is an example of the rising and falling of great kingdoms that forms a kind of counterpoint to Biblical history.
E. Wheel of Fortune
1. Cyclical shape doesn’t take form tell the Book of Daniel
2. After Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy written in the 6th century the cyclical symbolism of the fall of empires takes on the image of a wheel
3. Becomes the central image of tragedy in medieval and renaissance times.
F. 20th Century poet awareness and use of image
1. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a kind of parody of resurrection or restoration to the original state using cyclical imagery, though not the adder (after the initial fall)
2. Yeats to has a Cyclical movement revolving around history that places importance on the two states of “Primary” and “antithetical” and one Democratic or heroic; in the tradition of The Primacy of Act, the two alternate sequences are used to show that in between the two words their exists an act which the words can’t describe outside themselves.
G. The Closed Cycle: The Difficulties of Frye
1. The Tower of Babel (the closed cycle) is traditionally symbolized by the ouroboros
- It supposed to be a symbolism of Eternity
- But since the snake is eating its tail it’s not eternity but the world feeding back into itself; What Frye says as a spiral into nothingness.
- While Frye has difficulties with the DNA Molecules and its Double Spiral, We believe that the Spiral descent into nothingness is part of the path of the double spiral; We have to go through a process of emptying out (metaphorically) of everything we have so as to exist at a point of nothingness where everything is completely, the world is as it really appears and it is from this point that the spiral of ascencion to the metaphorical mountain truly begins. “A condition of complete simplicity( costing not less than everything) and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well when the tongues of flame are enfolded into the crowned not of fire and the fire and the rose are one.”- T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding
2. The basis of this letter is that we only repeat metaphorically; never actually.
3. An obvious example of this Demonic Parody is Humpty Dumpty
4. Biblical examples would be rebuilding Solomon’s Temple (It never reaches what it once was; Bronze replaces the Gold, signifying a fall)
XV. Primacy of The Word
A. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (John 1:1-3)
1. Frye believes that it seems obvious that these lines prove the primacy of the act mentality inaccurate, and that John is explicitly saying this.
2. Frye also speculates that John is trying to identify logos and mythos.
B. The “tower of words”: The real/metaphorical tower
1. Frye justifies that the real tower is of words arguing that
a. Jacob’s vision is of Angels descending and ascending
b. Angels are messengers of God
c. Messengers are normally verbal
2. Jesus as a Messenger
a. John writes a prophecy of Jesus cast in the form of a vision of Jacob’s ladder:
b. And he saith unto him, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, here-after ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.’ (John 1:51)
c. A Messenger of God may be a fellow-creature of man
d. It shall not be worshipped (Colossians 2:18; Revelation 22:9)
1. “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind” (Colossians 2:18)
2. “Then saith he unto me, ‘See thou do it not: for I am thy fellow-servant, and of they brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: worship God’.” (Revelation 22:9)
e. The messenger, as we saw, may be symbolically an epiphany or manifestation of God himself
f. When Jesus speaks of his Father as “him that sent me” (John 4:34 he is in effect referring to himself as an angel.
g. The descending angels are messengers of revelation (Galatians 3:19), who brought the Scripture to man.
h. Incarnation
1. The Incarnation Theology: the doctrine that the second person of the trinity (God in 3 natures) assumed human form in the person of Jesus Christ and is completely both God and man.
1. or Word in flesh (Frye speculates that the Incarnation of Jesus, since he is the messenger of God’s new covenant and messages are verbal, that The Word is taking flesh)
2. the symbolic apparatus of ladders and the like becomes entirely verbal (Old testament sacrifices for sins become obsolete)
3. Ladders, temples, mountains, world-trees, are now all images of a verbal revelation in which descent is the only projected metaphor. (The Assencion synonyms are still used to describe the same thing, but they no longer are symbolic of an act (such as sacrificing) but by the word (Verbal means)
4. Verbal revelation: What this is saying is that the old Testament Covenant of connection between God and Man is transformed in the New Testament Covenant from a SYMBOLIC LADDER (ALTARS) TO A PURELY VERBAL REVELATION (WHY CHRISTIANITY NEED ONLY ASK FOR FORGIVENESS AND REPENT). No longer is consciousness of God (connection) made by symbolic acts but by verbal means, or through our words.
XVI. Modern Poets Interest in the Verbal Images
A. The interest in spirals and ladders is not nostalgia for outmoded images
B. Images stand for the intensifying of consciousness through words
C. This brings about the realization that the Images represent the concern of concerns, or
D. The consciousness of consciousness.
XVII. The Same Figures Outside Poets
A. Hegel’s Phenomenology
1. “we are obviously climbing spirally as well as following an argument.”
2. Hegel also drops the word “ladder” into his Preface.
B. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
1. We are told at the end that we have been climbing a ladder, and are urged to throw it away.
C. Donne
1. Gives us the spiral ascent form of the image in a context of words
2. “on a huge hill Cragg’d, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go; And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.”
3. The easiest way up a mountain is not straight up it. It’s spiraling up it.
XVIII. “SPIRIT”
A. mainly an ascending movement
B. the human response to the revealing of intelligibility in the natural and social orders.
XIX. Prayer
A. According to Paul the typical message to God is the prayer
B. It is formulated by the Spirit of out of ego-bound requests for special favors
1. “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” (Romans 8:26)
C. Frye explains the association between the conception of prayer with the articulate imaginative expression of literature,
1. this is due to the fact of how often literature takes shape independently of the conscious will
XX. The Reversal of Acts
A. the movement of descending Word and ascending Spirit is reversed in the first two chapter of Acts
B. Jesus ascending into the sky, then the Spirit descending on the Apostles
C. The ascension is a New Testament antitype of the objectifying of the creation on the seventh day (Sabbath); the withdrawal of the Word from the world it creates.
1. Antitype: The opposite of the type (symbol) in the Old Testament is the New Testament answer; the antitype (reality).
D. The descending Spirit brings the Gift of Tongues
1. Contrast with the demonic parody: the confusion of tongues at Babel
2. It also creates a community of response
E. This reversed movement comes in between the Incarnation and the final descent of a new heaven to a new earth
1. “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.” (Revelation 21:2-3)
F. The Physical Images are Gone
1. But the ascending and descending movements are still there,
2. A double movement that fulfills an aphorism of Heraclitus; one quoted by two early Christian writers (Frye doesn’t say who yet)
3. “Immortals become mortals, mortals become immortals: they live in each other’s death and die in each other’s life.” –Des Fragments
Ch.3
XXI. Hierarchy of Being suggested by the P creation Myth
A. Rising up from the elements
B. Through the plant and animal forms of life to man, the lord of creation, and from man to God
C. Extension of the Ladder to the scale
1. Latin word for ladder is scala
2. extends the image ladder to mean the measure of degrees
3. Fundamental in scientific work
4. Fundamental in most arts, notably music
5. “Chain of Being”
a. The scale forms the basis of one of the persistent conceptions in the history of thought
b. Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici (1643)
1.. “there is in this Universe a Stair, or manifest Scale of creatures, rising not disorderly, or in confusion, but with a comely method and proportion.”
c. This is the famous “Chain of Being” version of the Axis Mundi image.
d. It is a cosmology that sees the whole of creation as a ladder stretching from God to the chaos at the bottom of God’s creation.
e. It’s concern
a. This chain of being is that it represents the primary ideological adapting of
the ladder metaphor to a rationalizing of authority.
XXII. the 3 elementary categories of thought forming parts of the “chain of Being”
A. First is the Cosmological chain
1. Polarized b y the Aristotelian conceptions of form and matter, and extends from God, who is pure form without material substance, to chaos, which is the nearest we can get to matter without form.
2. Material principles of the cosmos: 4 elements
a. Hot
b. Cold
c. Moist
d. Dry
3. Chaos, According to Milton, is a world in which these principle combine and recombine at random, so that when Satan is traversing chaos he does not know whether his next movement is a step or a fight or a swim
a. Frye asks us to notice that the conception of an order of nature resting on a basis of controlled randomness is still with us.
4. Above the Elements: The Hierarchy of Creatures
a. First angels
b. human beings
c. animals
d. plants
e. minerals
5. The proportion of form to matter determines the rank in the hierarchy
6. Man being exactly in the middle,
a. halfway between matter and spirit
b. he is a “microcosm”
c. an epitome of the “macrocosm”
d. or total creation
B. 2nd Aspect; The parallel construct of the Ptolemaic universe
1. This gave the chain of being a quasi-scientific status
2. The universe in this construct extends from the prommim mobile (the circumference of an order of nature thought of as finite) down through the circle of fixed stars, through the sequence of seven planetary spheres, of which the lowest is the moon, then into the “sublunary” world of the four elements, in the order fire, air, water, earth
3. Since the Fall these elements have been subject to corruption and decay, but their separation was a major element in the creation out of chaos, and each element still seeks its natural place and tends to seek that place accounted for many of the phenomena that we now ascribe to gravitation
a. A solid object held in the air and let go will drop, because it is seeking the sphere of the solid earth.
C. 3rd Aspect: Theological- based on the conception of man as a fallen being.
1. Physical and Philosophical views of axis mundi partly reinforced, as well as collided with this theological view.
2. This theological view contradicts the conception of the natural place to the extent of regarding man as a being who does not occupy the place he was originally assigned in nature
3. Takes the form of a sequence of four levels that involves the Biblical story more directly in the world picture. (See Table on 169)
a. Heaven, in the sense of the place of the presence of God, usually symbolized by the physical heaven or sky.
b. The earthly paradise, the natural and original home of man, represented in the Biblica lstory by the Garden of Eden, which has disappeared as a place but is to a degree recoverable as a state of mind.
c. The Physical environment we are born in, theologically a fallen world of alienation
d. The demonic world of death and hell and sin below nature.
