Ideas

Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds

Bernie Lucht

• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780864925770
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

For four decades, Ideas has presented more than 400, 000 CBC Radio listeners in Canada and the United States with the most challenging contemporary thought of the day. Now, to mark the program's 40th anniversary, executive producer Bernie Lucht has selected the most striking interviews and lectures for Ideas: Brilliant Thinker Speak Their Minds. Featuring some the best thinkers from North America and around the world that have appeared on the program since its beginnings in 1965, Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds touches upon societal values, how we govern ourselves, and navigating in the international community. In this remarkable book, Bernie Lucht, winner of the John Drainie Award for broadcast journalism, introduces readers to the origins of the ground-breaking program and to "the best ideas you'll hear tonight." Since the beginning, geopolitics has been one of the significant concerns of the program, and issues such as democracy, dictatorships, the nature of the nation-state, the public good, ideology, religion, peace and violence keep returning to the fore. Although many of the topics have been around for decades, the questions remain startlingly topical today, even in a radically changed world. Exploring geopolitics writ large, Ideas features interviews, lectures and radio documentaries with such influential contemporary thinkers as Tariq Ali, Michael Bliss, Noam Chomsky, Ursula Franklin, Northrop Frye, Bernard Lewis, Margaret MacMillan, James Orbinski, and many, many others. While each thinker speaks from his or her specific experience in time, the themes and concerns resonate as much today as they did last week or forty years ago.

On Religion and Language

NORTHROP FRYE
Presented by DAVID CAYLEY

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters. His first book, Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947, transformed the study of the poet William Blake, and over the next forty years he transformed the study of literature itself. Among his most influential books are Anatomy of Criticism (1957), The Educated Imagination (1963), The Bush Garden (1971), and The Great Code (1982). Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986) won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. A professor at the University of Toronto, Frye gained an international reputation for his wide-reaching critical vision. He lectured at universities around the world and received many awards and honours, including thirty-six honorary degrees.

NORTHROP FRYE

I think my religious background really did shape almost everything, gave me the mythological framework that I was brought up inside of, and, as I know from experience, once you’re inside a mythological framework, you can’t break out of it. You can alter or adapt it to yourself, but it’s always there.

The Bible is, to me, the body of words through which I can see the world as a cosmos, as an order, and where I can see human nature as something redeemable, something with a right to survive. I think if I didn’t read the Bible and were confronted with all these dire prophecies about the possibility of the human race disappearing from the planet, I would be inclined to say, “Well, the sooner the better.”

A lot of people, some very unlikely people, say that they feel that it’s language that uses man rather than man that uses language, and I have a great deal of attraction to that view. It’s partly because central to my whole thinking is, “In the beginning is the Word.”

DAVID CAYLEY

In the early 1980s, Northrop Frye published a book on the Bible and literature called The Great Code. The title came from the English poet and painter, William Blake. “The Old and New Testaments,” Blake said, “are the great code of art.” Frye read Blake as a student in the early 1930s, and the encounter was formative. Blake taught Frye to see the Bible as the imaginative framework within which our entire civilization took shape, to see it as the source of the basic repertoire of images and stories out of which literature is made, to see it as the Great Code. This became the seminal idea in Frye’s literary criticism. In book after book, he insisted that literature, like the Bible, reveals the structure of the human imagination — what’s within us rather than what’s out there in the world. “In a sense,” Frye wrote in his introduction to The Great Code, “all my critical work has revolved around the Bible.”

Frye’s immersion in the Bible began in childhood. His family were Methodists, an evangelical Protestant church that had broken away from the Church of England in the eighteenth century and that in Canada eventually merged with the Presbyterians and Congregation-alists to form the United Church. Methodist teaching stressed the authority of scripture and the importance of personal conversion. Frye’s grandfather was a circuit-riding preacher, and Methodism permeated the milieu in which he grew up. He thinks today that it still colours his overall approach to things.

NORTHROP FRYE

I think Methodism is an approach to Christianity which puts a very heavy emphasis on the quality of experience. That is one reason why I have always tended to think in terms of, first, a myth which repeats itself over and over again through time, and then secondly the experience which is the response to it. Nothing that happens in history is unique. Everything is part of turning cycles and mythical repetitions. Everything in experience is unique, and I think it is because of the emphasis on the uniqueness of experience which I acquired so early that I realized that the other half of this was this mythological pattern.

DAVID CAYLEY

The emphasis on experience in Methodism — can you contrast that with other approaches to Christianity that might show its nature?

NORTHROP FRYE

Well, the Catholic approach, for example, is very much more doctrinal, and you learn a structure of doctrine and you step inside it, and that structure of doctrine performs instead of the myth. In Methodism, you listen to the stories of the Bible, and Presbyterians used to say that’s the reason why Methodist ministers moved every two years, because the structure of doctrine in Methodism was totally exhausted long before then.

DAVID CAYLEY

Frye always retained Methodism’s nondoctrinal approach to religion, but he quickly rejected the fundamentalist side of his family’s beliefs. It happened when he was walking to high school in Moncton one day, he told an interviewer years later. “And just suddenly,” he said, “that whole shitty and smelly garment of fundamentalist teaching I’d had all my life dropped off into the sewers and stayed there.” The punishing father God, the post-mortem hell, the unpardonable sins — all this, he concluded, was “a lot of junk.” But characteristically, he also realized that it would be a waste of time to get stuck in a rebellious reaction. Instead, he decided he’d accept from religion only what made sense to him as a human being. The rest he’d simply leave alone. This meant rejecting the sentiments of Cardinal Newman’s famous hymn, “Lead Kindly Light,” where God, says Newman, leads us, and deciding to steer by his own star.

NORTHROP FRYE

My attitude to freedom has always been the opposite of Newman’s “Lead Kindly Light,” where he says, “I love to choose and see my path” and calls that pride. Well, I always wanted to choose and see my path and was convinced that that was what God wanted too, and that if I went on with this “lead thou me on” routine I would run into spiritual gravitation and fall over a cliff.

DAVID CAYLEY

Frye’s path led him first to the University of Toronto. As a boy of seventeen, he enrolled at Victoria College, the university’s Methodist college. After his graduation, he went on to study theology at neighbouring Emmanuel College, Victoria’s theological faculty. This would prepare him for the ministry, and in the summer of 1934, he set off for Saskatchewan’s parched Palliser triangle as a student minister. For five months, he ministered to the congregations of Stone, Stonepile and Carnagh, travelling between them on a horse as old as he was called Katy.

NORTHROP FRYE

I remember something that I found later in a Canadian critic, I think it was Elizabeth Waterston, where she spoke of the prairies as the sense of immense space with no privacy. And I found that on top of Katy, who naturally stimulated one’s bladder very considerably, and realizing I couldn’t get off in that vast stretch of prairie, because everybody was out with opera glasses, you see, watching the preacher on top of Katy.

DAVID CAYLEY

You really were observed to that extent?

NORTHROP FRYE

Well, one was. I mean, that was what people did. They all had spyglasses. They weren’t doing it with any malicious sense. It was just that their lives were rather devoid of incident. Naturally, they liked to see who’s going along.

DAVID CAYLEY

That was just a summer, I think.

NORTHROP FRYE

That was a summer, yes. I thought the people were wonderful. Again, I realized that this wasn’t the thing I would be good at.

DAVID CAYLEY

Was it difficult to decide whether or not to seek ordination?

NORTHROP FRYE

Yes, it was difficult for me. And I consulted a friend whose judgment I had a great respect for, Hal Vaughan — he died recently — and he asked me what my difficulty was. And I said, “Well, various people, including Herbert Davis, a very civilized man, have pointed out that it might be embarrassing later on if I had a professional connection with the church.” And he said, “Well, isn’t that your answer?”

DAVID CAYLEY

You mean, if it’s embarrassing, then you should go ahead?

NORTHROP FRYE

Yes.

DAVID CAYLEY

Frye was ordained in 1936. He already knew that his vocation was teaching and writing, not the active ministry, and through the years he has appeared more often at a lectern than in a pulpit. But he still regards himself very much as a minister of the United Church.

NORTHROP FRYE

I used to describe myself as a United Church plainclothes man — that is, that I was in effect somebody who was attached to a church, but most undergraduates are instinctively agnostic and rather rebellious about churches and about religious institutions generally. And I have always used a very secular attitude in order to, in effect, win the confidence of people, not because I want to catch them in a trap later, but precisely because I want them to understand that there isn’t any trap.

DAVID CAYLEY

Frye’s secular attitude is evident in his writings. His perspective is the literary critic’s, never the theologian’s. Nevertheless, he has reacted hotly when people have misinterpreted his anti-doctrinaire approach. Once he was asked in public to comment on a reviewer’s claim that he’d written The Great Code as an ex-Christian. “I can’t express my opinion of those sentences in a language that I think is appropriate to them,” he responded. “The United Church of Canada, of which I am an ordained clergyman, would be surprised to hear that I am an ex-Christian.”

Frye’s relationship to the Bible is the foundation of all his work as a literary critic. It was hearing the echoes of the Bible in English poetry that made him aware that literature always belongs to a mythological universe that gives it its fundamental forms and images, and the Bible has given him his personal bearings as well.

NORTHROP FRYE

The Bible is, to me, the body of words through which I can see the world as a cosmos, as an order, and where I can see human nature as something redeemable, something with a right to survive. Otherwise you’re left with human nature and physical nature. Physical nature doesn’t seem to have very much conversation. It’s a totally inarticulate world. Human nature is corrupt at the source because it’s grown out of physical nature, and it has various ideals and hopes and wishes and concerns, but its attempt to realize these things is often abominably cruel and psychotic. And I feel there must be something that transcends all this, or else.

DAVID CAYLEY

Or else?

NORTHROP FRYE

Well, or else despair. Why keep this miserable object, humanity, alive on this planet when it’s doing nothing but pollute it?

DAVID CAYLEY

Frye learned to see the Bible as a cosmos from William Blake. As a boy, Frye had already rejected a fundamentalist reading of the Bible which made it a prop for authoritarianism and repression. Blake showed him another way, an imaginative reading which saw the Bible as the manifesto of human dignity and creative freedom, not the dictation of a tyrannical God. To Blake, God and the human imagination were ultimately identical. In his later writings, he spoke of “Jesus, the imagination.” What this imagination is, neither our senses nor our reason can tell us. They can only observe and compare. “None, by travelling over known lands, can find out the unknown,” Blake says. The imagination must be revealed by what he called “the poetic genius.” The Bible is this revelation. The alternative is the worship of nature and ourselves as natural beings, which Blake called “natural religion.”

NORTHROP FRYE

Natural religion, for him, was what the Bible calls “idolatry.” It means finding something numinous in nature, in the physical environment, and the Bible says that there are no gods in nature, that nature is a fellow creature of man, and that, while one should love nature, you actually get your spiritual vision through human society, and then you see nature as it is. But all the gods that people have pretended to find in nature are, in effect, devils — that is, they’re projections of the wrong side of man’s natural origin.

DAVID CAYLEY

Blake’s contemporaries sanctified nature. Blake asserted that mental things alone are real. Whether the sun appears to us as “a round disc of fire” or “an innumerable company of the heavenly host,” he says, depends on who’s looking, not on what’s objectively there. Reality is something that we make in perceiving it, and we can’t understand what we haven’t made. Our capacity to do this is what Blake called “vision.”

NORTHROP FRYE

He meant the capacity to live with one’s eyes and ears in what he called the spiritual world. It was not a world of ideas, it was not a Platonic world. It was the physical world in its organized form. He says spirits are organized man. He also says spirits are not cloudy vapours or anything fuzzy, they are organized and minutely articulated beyond anything the physical world can produce. In other words, it was his world of poetry and painting. Vision, for him, was, as I say, the ability to hear and see in that world.

DAVID CAYLEY

This was not a world that had an independent existence.

NORTHROP FRYE

Oh, no.

DAVID CAYLEY

Not a Platonic world.

NORTHROP FRYE

This is the world as it really is, not the world as our lazy minds and senses perceive it.

DAVID CAYLEY

The Bible, to Blake, was the source of this visionary seeing. “Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book?” he once asked, and answered, “Because it is addressed to the imaginations. The whole Bible,” he says, “is filled with imaginations and visions from end to end. It is within the figures of the Bible that the imagination awakens and expands. They become the reader’s chariots of fire. We build Jerusalem by recreating the divine forms of the imagination. The Bible is the model, the arts...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• “The Best Ideas You’ll Hear Tonight”
• Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages
• Anarchism in the Mid-Twentieth Century
• The Empty Society
• On Religion and Language
• The Secular Messiahs
• Dictatorships and Democracies
• Community and Its Counterfeits
• The Public Good in Canada
• Debating the Welfare State
• Common Culture, Multiculture
• The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention
• Remembering Rwanda
• The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act
• We the People: A Prescription for Ending the Arms Race
• A Polemicist’s Journey
• How the World Has Changed
• The American Stake in Europe and the European Stake in the United States
• What Has Changed: The Impact of 9/11 on the Middle East
• The Next Ideology
• Global Interdependence
• Acknowledgements