Northrop Frye's Religious Concern In His Bible Study

Northrop Frye was one of the most important thinkers in arts and humanities of the western world in the twentieth century. He was a literature professor of Toronto University, an ordained minister of the United Church in Canada, and a critic on both literature and the Bible. His religious concern underlay his life long writings. He is a phenomenon of western culture which has the Bible as one of its origins. To understand Frye's religious concern is in some senses to understand the spirituality of biblical culture.First, in chapter I, the author tries to prove that though Frye derived his fame mainly from Anatomy on Criticism, a book on literary principles, Frye was primarily concerned about religion. Then, in chapter II, the author traces Frye's Evangelical Methodist family's influence on Frye's thinking. Northrop Frye's religious family background is a miniature of the western culture which is permeated with religious concern. Chapter III is about Frye's discovery of the religious poet William Blake. Frye's religious thinking began with his Blake study, which decided his later years' academic directions. In section I the author tries to demonstrate the Bible's relation with western culture. Section II introduces what Deism is and explains Frye's introduction of Blake's worry that Deism, which conflicts with Biblical thinking, would bring a disastrous consequence to people, which is man's separation from God. Section III is about the solution to the problem that both Blake and Frye faced, which Frye depicted in Fearful Symmetry. Frye tells us that Blake's remedy against man's separation from God was 'creative imagination of the poet'. Chapter IV analyzes Frye's description of Bible's language in his Bible study book, The Great Code. The language of the Bible is poetic language, which is in fact the accentuation of Blake's 'imagination'. Frye tells us that there are three modes of thought that dominates the Bible, which are mythical, metaphorical and typological thinking and thus he forcefully proves that the language of the Bible is poetic. All of them are ways of arranging words, referring only to the Bible itself. Words of the Bible constitute a world of themselves, a world of spirit and freedom, and the Bible's language is the language of spirit and freedom. Then in the last chapter, the author points out Frye's position in western Bible studies. Frye's Bible study is a convergence of literary studies and religion studies, a tendency that began to emerge in Western Bible studies at the end of the twentieth century. Frye's Bible study tells us that to obtain a true religion we need to understand correctly the language of the Bible.