Summary outline of Frye's "Creation and Recreation", 3

An outline and summary of Chapter 3 of Creation and Recreation by Northrup Frye. University of Toronto Press. 1980. Web. 2016.  See previous posts for outlines of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. The numbering used below corresponds to paragraph placement within the chapter in the original text.

Three

1.  Two views of the world: perfect or humanized.
   The first chapter discussed two approaches to creation:
   1. God creates a perfect world and then man, through his own actions, eventually falls into an "alienating nature."
   2. Man has a vision of nature recreated in humanized form in which he creatively participates, recognizing that participation as "the true aim and goal of human creative effort."
2. Artificial, perfect world, myth has an out for the imperfect world we live in: the Fall.
   The second  chapter discusses the "impoverishing qualities" of the traditional [artificial] creation myth. The myth contains an excuse for its own sterility -- our minds are too clouded by the fall to have a direct vision of divine creation.
3. Dante's  vision captures both worlds as higher and lower  natures.
   Dante's vision of "human recreation" takes the form of a "return to God." The close of the Paradiso sums up centuries of thought on the Bible's view of creation as the existence of two natures, a higher one which is man's original home and a lower physical nature that is his environment but not his home.
4. Church doctrine prevents man from achieving his higher nature by his efforts alone.
   Everything that raises man to his original state occurs within the Trinity -- man has little to do in his own recreation. The doctrine was devised primarily to keep man in the church.
5. Capitalism broke the authority of the church.
   The traditional authoritarian view began to collapse in the 18th century with the rise of capitalism. By the 19th century there was no place for a "divine creation myth at the beginning of things: there [was] only human culture." Unlike divine creation, human culture has no guarantees and is constantly under threat. All cultural constructs have much the same shape.
6. An objectified world is not a 'divine' world.
   The minute we objectify the world or "want to know" we are pushed away from biblical creation and towards the vision of a recreated future brought about through our own efforts.
7. In an objectified world we see only our paranoid selves. 
   In this view, man is the only creator and "at the end of human recreation" humanity will "find itself looking in a mirror" -- all he'll see is a "psychotic ape," the paranoia of the secular attitudes discussed in the first chapter. The "facts we attend to" determine what we see (create and recreate). "The older construct wore out as it repressed human autonomy" the secular one "may be pressing complementary things."
8. Blake was the first to recognize the divine creation myth had collapsed.
   William Blake was "the first person in the modern world who understood that the older mythological construct had collapsed." He also indirectly created the model for modern constructs of the world.  His Songs of Innocence reflect a child's view of a world "controlled by a benevolent providence," a world that "makes human sense." The child grows up, "enters the world of experience" and learns the world is not what he thought it was, at which point his personality splits in two -- the conscious adult struggles to adapt, the child "is driven underground."
9. In The Lamb, the child's question, "Little Lamb who made thee?", is answered [stable world]. In Songs of Experience, the corresponding poem, The Tyger, the adult's question "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" goes unanswered "because in the world of the tiger, the world our adult minds inhabit, the conception of a divine creator makes no sense." A vision of creation that can incorporate both the lamb and the tiger has to include "our own creative powers."
10. Blake sees "the creation of world, the fall of man," and the flood as one event that includes the fall of the divine. For him, what we traditionally call 'creative' is really ruin and "there is no creation except human recreation, which is the same humanized form of nature found in Biblical imagery." For Blake, "the human arts" transform nature; "[P]oetry, painting and music are the three forms of conversing with paradise which the flood did not sweep away."
11. There is only the humanized world and that exists only through our own efforts.
    "The vision of a created order is never an easily attained vision, but comes out of the depths of human anguish and effort."
12. Job suffers so he can see his original birthright.
    For Blake, the Book of Job is God telling Job not to worry about how he got into a mess but only about how he can get out of it, primarily by recognizing the "internal and external" elements in his life that have prevented him from "seeing his own original birthright."
13. Blake reads the Bible as metaphor.
    Blake's reading of the Bible is based on metaphor: "this is that" and "at least two figures of speech that exist in time:"
    1. this becomes that
    2. this results from that
    In the first, our thinking moves forward from cause to effect. In the second, our thinking moves backward from effect to cause.
14. Bible's typology is a particular form of metaphor.
    Another "figure of speech" based on time is typology. In the Bible every person and event in the Old Testament is a type or figure for which the New Testament provides an anti-type or "revealed meaning."
15. Biblical typology has to do with historical process.
    Typology is connected with "historical process," in the belief that events happen for a reason, unlike allegories, which have imaginary narratives that illustrate moral precepts, typology involves real people and events.
16. Evolution gave us a new way to think about types and processes.
    The concept of evolution gave us a new form of topological thinking: "everything we can do now is a type of what we shall be able to do in the future."
17. In the Bible, history does not repeat, the future produces new versions of old types.
    The "apocalyptic promise 'Behold, I make all things new.' is a promise that cannot be kept by paganism's "recurring cycles" but can be by the typology of the Bible, where history, rather than repeating itself, expresses itself in new versions of old types or patterns.
18. The Bible lost its vitality when Church doctrine became its realized future.
    For typology to "preserve its vitality" its anti-types need to stay in the future. The Bible has become, itself, a type with Church doctrine being its anti-type.
19. The Reformation, and Milton, tried to sever doctrine from the Bible.
    The Protestant Reformation tried to cut the Bible away from Church doctrine. Milton's Paradise Lost is one major work involved with that process.
20. Milton internalized paradise.
    In Milton, Eden disappears as an external environment and reappears as "a paradise within thee, happier for."
21. Milton tried to justify God to the reader of the Bible.
    In Milton's theology, the reader of the Bible "who understands and possesses ... the word of God in the heart" is the real authority on the Bible [and not the church?] The final aim of his poem is to "justify" the ways of God to the reader.
22. Historically, the main focus of literature has moved from the hero, to the character, to the author, and finally to the reader.
    For centuries 'the hero' was the main focus in literature. The hero evolved into 'the character' and during the Romantic period the focus switched to the poet himself -- his inner life became 'the real' subject of the poem. With the publication Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, the focus switched again, this time to the reader.
23. All readers recreate what they read.
    Critics are now faced with new questions: "What is a text, and what does a reader do to it when he reads it?", "Where is the text -- in the book, in the reader's mind, or lost somewhere in between?", and so on. Frye thinks we need a concept like 'recreation' to "make sense of such problems" as "To read is invariably to translate," all readers recreate what they read.
24. Translation is a form of reader recreation especially important to Bible translations.
    We can take translation between languages as "a special case of recreation," one that is of particular importance to the New Testament which was originally written in Koine Greek by people using the Hebrew Old Testament translated into Septuagent Greek and then, for over 1,000 years, was only available in Latin.
25. Every translation is effected by the translator's cultural conditioning (envelope).
    Every translation is in fact a replacement for the original and it is always affected by "the socially conditioned limits" within which the translator operates [Wilde's envelope].
26. The anxieties of the translator's world inevitably creep into the phrasing of the translated text.
27. As readers we must be aware of the text's original context as well as our own.
    What is really translated is the translator's (or reader's) "sense" of the text -- it is rendered into a form determined mainly by their own cultural context. But every work had meaning within its own cultural context and both these contexts must be kept in mind -- we "stabilize" a tradition and "engage in a process that includes ourselves and something bigger than ourselves" when we keep both poles in mind: creation (original context) and recreation (reader's context).
28. Recreation takes in the historical expansion of language.
    Another aspect of recreation is its expansion into language as "a form of communication and consciousness." Homer's language was concrete, concepts were "anchored in parts of the physical body" with little distinction made between objective and subjective thinking. Today, we separate "elements of personality," the subjective, from "elements of nature," the objective, and use metaphor to "express a sense of the identity between" the two. It is the function of literature to "keep reviving the metaphorical habit of mind."
29. Literature captures the full historical expansion of language in both its ordinary and metaphorical uses.
    Metaphors "take us back to a world of undifferentiated energy and continuous process." They may be our only means of "conveying the sense of a numinous presence in nature." Pagan gods are ready-made metaphors. The "metaphorical use of language leads to two principles, one specific, the other universal." First, it reveals the narrowness of our ordinary use of descriptive language: we can use words concretely as nouns or as verbs, expressions of existence or as verbs expressing a process."
30. Literature continually recreates the metaphors  that connect us to that which is bigger than ourselves.
    Divine creation, as the result of the Word, implies the "recreating of language attaches man to words" such that the "words become bigger than he is." There is a suggestion that "the human use of words" can lead to self-transcendence and not just "the ape in the mirror" which is the view of a narrow humanism.
31. The word 'spirit' in the Bible may be read as the word 'metaphor'.
    The word 'spirit' in the Bible may also mean metaphorically as in the the "insistence that scripture must be 'spiritually discerned'." It may be that the theists and atheists are arguing over a word [spirit] they do not understand as the atheist "is still left with personality as the highest category in his cosmos" after he has rejected theos.
32. The words 'Word' and 'Spirit' may be understood as divinities or self-transcendent human qualities.
    The terms 'Word' and 'Spirit' may be understood as divinities willing to "aid and redeem mankind" or as "qualities of self-transcendence" within us that can pull us out of our psychosis. The two modes of thinking are "dialectically identical" and the "goal of human recreation" regardless of how it is visualized always bears "a curious resemblance" to divine creation.
33. When 'word' and 'spirit' are understood as divinities, we enter the world of belief which has two forms: professed and actual.
    Extending 'word' and 'spirit' beyond the human seems to make them objects of belief. But there are two levels of belief:
    1. what we say/think/believe we believe
    2. what our actions show us to believe
    Professed belief is basically loyalty to a community and "any belief [that] cannot become an axiom of behaviour is not merely useless but dangerous." This is true for political as well as religious communities. Periods of "democratic tolerance" are useful in discovering those who don't "subscribe" to the professed beliefs of a particular community.
34. Ideologies prevent us from seeing the world we've created/recreated.
    People already know what they ought to be doing but "the voices of repression, made articulate by competing ideologies, keep shouting the knowledge down."
35. To reach our highest nature we need to pierce our envelopes and see the world our acts are continually creating/recreating and not the culturally constructed world we tell ourselves we live in.
    Religions of every kind [including science] define themselves as wholes in such a way as to prevent themselves from becoming a part of a larger whole. In our time, this has come to look like "pride and delusion" more than faith. If we could transcend professed beliefs we might become a "community of action and charity" and recreate "society and ourselves" with the original power of the Word and Spirit.