Broadcast 7 April 1966
From Media 1 (Toronto: CBC Publications, 1966). This is a discussion with Gregory Baum, who was then professor of theology and religious studies at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Like Frye, Baum was somewhat unorthodox. A convert from Judaism, he was a Catholic priest with radical views and a concern for social justice, much involved in the ’60s’ realignment of religion. He asked to be laicized in 1976, got married, and joined McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies in 1986. The talk, part of a series called The Human Condition, was originally broadcast by the CBC on 7 April 1966. Reprinted with the subtitle “A Dialogue on Man’s Search for Salvation” in University of Toronto Graduate, 13 (December 1966): 75–6, 78–91, and in WGS, 23–40.
BAUM: Dr. Frye, we have been invited to have a conversation on the attempts of men to reach out for salvation, and on whether this means a withdrawal from or an involvement in the world. I must say that I don’t find this subject an easy one, because the very meaning of salvation is not something that is always very clear to me. At the moment, in the Catholic Church, and it seems to me in all the Christian churches, there seems to be a tendency to re-interpret the meaning of salvation. At one time we thought that salvation meant to be with God, to be reconciled with God, and that the effects were, above all, in the life hereafter. Salvation was really meaningful and powerful, not now, but after death. It would seem that in most Christian churches there has been a shift of emphasis. We seem to say that if salvation has any meaning at all, it must have meaning right now; that it is a new condition, a liberation, a healing that takes place in us in many ways. Therefore, if one asks Christians today what they mean by salvation, I think one will get many different answers.
FRYE: My own background is evangelical and my first encounter with the word would be associated with, say, going to revival meetings and having people with the glitter of pure hysteria in their eyes say, “Are you saved, brother?” Whatever I mean by salvation, it is not that. In that context, it seems to me to be really a state of unanswerable self-satisfaction, and I would imagine that anything which is worth making the centre of one’s life ought to be something very much more ambiguous. I would say that salvation has something to do with finding one’s identity, that we’re always finding ourselves in situations that are morally neutral, but every so often you can be in a situation where you feel that by a certain act, you would essentially betray yourself, and by another act you would be standing by yourself; that second one is where the conception would begin, to my mind.
BAUM: I would like to add that our idea of salvation depends very much on our understanding of what we want to be saved from. Do we feel the need of redemption, of liberation? Are we conscious of our isolation, of the wounds in us? Are we conscious of the ambiguity of life; that not only our evil deeds but even our good ones are somehow tainted by self-seeking, that there is much in our lives that is somehow determined by psychological mechanism, by little compulsions? Are we conscious that we cannot really do or be what or who we want to be, and that it is precisely from these forces, which draw us away from our true selves, that we want to be redeemed?
FRYE: The dilemma of right and wrong, good and bad, is something that one never escapes from in any action. Every action is involved in a situation which is both good and bad, both right and wrong. I would find the search for salvation to have something to do with a kind of awareness of freedom which is also an awareness that one has somehow or other come alive, moved from ordinary life into the same life repeated more intensely.
BAUM: Dr. Frye, could you explain a little further what you mean by living life more intensely, or reliving life more intensely?
FRYE: I mean that we face situations in ordinary life with a kind of reserved emotional charge. We don’t see things with the maximum intensity of vision or of emotion—we’d destroy ourselves if we did—but every so often we become engaged in significant acts, and realize that although we’re in this same life, in this same world, we’re suddenly seeing the significance of what we’re doing in more dimensions and with a greater intensity and awareness. That to me is the repetition on a more intense plane of the acts which we carry on in ordinary experience.
BAUM: The religious person would say that this kind of freedom, the freedom to live more deeply and to experience the ordinary things of life with a greater meaning, is communicated through faith in Jesus Christ. I think the religious person would say that through the forgiveness of sins and through the trust that one has been accepted by the Lord and lives as a son of God, suddenly so many threats and fears which normally might surround us are removed and we are enabled to enter into a greater personal freedom and to live with many less reservations about the questions and the meaning of life.
FRYE: I understand that, but couldn’t the same kind of awareness occur without any kind of religious context in it at all?
BAUM: I firmly believe that this is possible and yet, as a Christian, I would say that wherever this happens, it is indeed God who is at work transforming men according to the image of His Son, making them into deeper human beings through the action of the Spirit, in some mysterious way.
FRYE: Let me put that in my own terms, which are different and may or may not be contradictory. I would say that I can imagine situations, such as the Nazi terror in the last war was very fruitful in producing, where people die as martyrs, not so much for something as against the evil thing that kills them. Many of these people who died as martyrs were martyrs in the classical traditional sense; that is they are witnesses to the existence, here and now, of a community which will be here after the Nazis have been swept into the ashcan of history. I can see that that kind of martyrdom has within it another dimension (at least for me) into what I would call the infinite, the eternal. But for them it might not have, and in fact the renunciation of religious faith might be for martyrs an essential part of their act of freedom.
BAUM: Could you explain a little more how the renunciation of one’s faith or of one’s religious practice could be a sign of greater freedom?
FRYE: Well, suppose, for example, in Canada there was set up a particularly abominable tyranny and that all men of good will, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic, atheist, everybody who had any kind of sense of normal human decency, had to unite in opposition to this tyranny. There would be many martyrs to such a tyranny, if it were strong enough. Many of these martyrs would be people who would be, say, liberal humanists; they would be people without any religious commitments at all. They would fight this tyranny with the same courage and the same intelligence as religious people, and if they died, it would be absolutely essential for them to shut out of their minds the religious dimension, or significance, of what they were doing.
BAUM: Oh, yes. I would like to introduce, at this point, the distinction between religion and faith. I think that in many parts of the world, even in Canada, there are many families and whole sections of society where religion is traditional, where people grow up into religious surroundings and where it is natural and normal to go to church and to accept the teachings of the church. This, I think, is religion. It is something that can be observed from the outside. Yet it seems to me that this is really different from faith, because it is possible to be religious and perform religious acts and not really believe that God is good and that all people are brothers. These inner acts, or these inner gifts, are communicated through the practice of religion, but not automatically and not necessarily. One can therefore distinguish between religion and faith, and sometimes we meet people who do not practise any religion, and yet, somehow, are touched and, even without putting it into such words, believe that the substance of life is love.
FRYE: Couldn’t this awareness of freedom, this consciousness of what we would mean by salvation, not be attained by somebody for whom God did not, in any practical sense, exist or who had examined the conception of God and decided that it didn’t belong in his life?
BAUM: Certainly. I might mention here that at the Second Vatican Council there has taken place an interesting doctrinal development. In antiquity, we had a formula called “no salvation outside the Church.”1 This was interpreted at that time as meaning that salvation, that is, God’s mercy, was available only to those who were baptised, and to those who remained in the Christian community. Since those days, a tremendous doctrinal development has taken place. Little by little, reflecting on the gospel, on the message of Christ, the Christian community (the church) became aware that the mercy of God is active everywhere, that a long time before the call of Abraham and the coming of Jesus the mercy of God was at work among men, and even today, beyond the Christian church, God is at work transforming men. The church firmly believes that the God who has revealed Himself in Jesus is the God of mercy, and that He is always more wonderful than we expect Him to be and that he is surely at work among men who, on one level, say “no” to Him.
FRYE: So that the will of God can be achieved by the denying of God, if it is done from the premises which would be necessary to certain kinds of attitudes.
BAUM: It seems to me that this follows from what I have said. There is an old tradition among Catholics, and among Christians generally, that Christian life, and therefore the life of the saved, means basically the avoidance of sin, the avoidance of evil. The idea here is that the best way in which we can be faithful to the call of God would be by avoiding contact with an evil world as much as we can, and therefore by some sort of withdrawal to save our souls. * * * I think that what is happening at the moment in the Christian churches, at least as I see it, is that this attitude is changing. We now feel that in order to be saved, to be liberated, to be redeemed, we have to die to ourselves many times and we can only die to ourselves if we become involved in the lives of others and in the world of men. We feel that by concentrating on ourselves we reinforce our basic egotism, while by becoming involved we experience the kind of liberation and freedom you have spoken about.
FRYE: Yes. I imagine we probably agree that trying to retreat from situations in which there is evil is like trying to run away from our own backbones, that we’ll always take that kind of situation with us into whatever situations we enter. It seems to me that every significant involvement with the world and any significant action in the world is at the same time, to some degree, a withdrawal from that world. That is, most of us are creatures of social ritual, we carry out habits imposed on us by our profession, our age group, and so on, and the current movements of protest, let us say, in connection with civil rights for Negroes, Vietnam, and so on (whether they are right or wrong is not my concern now) are attempts to involve oneself in society, which are at the same time a questioning of the assumptions of that society, and to that extent, a standing back from society. It seems to me that unless you have this double focus, the action is not wholly a free action.
BAUM: I agree that to go out from oneself and be involved in the lives of others, or in political life, is possible only if this is accompanied, or guided by, a certain critical sense. There is never any total surrender to other men or to other movements, because this would be unfaithful to the recognition that human life is ambiguous. While we want to bear the burden with others, we do not want to become ill with society. We want to acknowledge the illness in others as well as in ourselves. By involvement with the world, we don’t want to be conformed to a neurotic environment, but to become healthy. Therefore, I think that every involvement in this sense also means a greater recognition of the illness of society, and therefore of detachment.
FRYE: I think of the remark of Socrates in The Republic [592b], that the wise man will always live under the laws of the just society, no matter what society he is actually in, and I suppose every man who does find his identity, who does perform an act which he feels is a free act in the sense of having stood by himself, is really living under two cities—the actual, Canadian middle-class twentieth-century society around him and another city which is also here and now and which won’t go away.
BAUM: What do you mean by this “other city which won’t go away”? Would you amplify on this, Dr. Frye.
FRYE: Well, take a social worker, for example, working with underprivileged people in Toronto. She would have in her mind, however unconsciously, a vision of a better, a more just, a more equal city, and it’s in the light of that vision that she does her work. I should think that anybody whose work is an expression of his own freedom also has within him some kind of vision, conscious or unconscious, of a society towards which he is working.
BAUM: So we live in two cities, in the sense that one is the actual situation in which we find ourselves and the other one is our ideal which we discover, or in a sense initiate, but towards the realization of which we ourselves must be totally engaged.
FRYE: Yes. And the moment of salvation or of the awareness of freedom that I spoke of is to me the moment of suddenly realizing that you are, in fact, a citizen of a different city from the one you’re actually in.
BAUM: Yes. And this would give a meaning to withdrawal. This would be the kind of withdrawal, therefore, which is required in order to discover the real dimensions of one’s engagement in transforming the world. Do I understand you correctly?
FRYE: I would prefer the word “detachment” to the word “withdrawal,” because I’m not thinking of moving from one place into another, but of being in two aspects of the same place.
BAUM: Yes, I agree with you that the word “detachment” is much clearer. We were speaking of the two cities and this recalls to my mind two other cities—those of which St. Augustine spoke and wrote: the City of God and the City of Men. This was a kind of division which ultimately proved to be somewhat dangerous, because it created the impression that the City of Men is somehow doomed and cannot be totally redeemed, and that it was the City of God which really counted—a city that was never totally incarnate here among us. It was a reaching out and away from this world, to be achieved in some sense by withdrawal from this world. Of course, St. Augustine could cherish the dream of the two cities because he lived in the Roman Empire, and it really did not occur to him that the structures of society could be altered. He felt that this had been the structure of society for centuries, and that the few Christians couldn’t really change it because this was somehow the eternal structure of the world. Therefore, salvation, to him, did consist in living faithfully to that invisible City of God. This subject is also of great importance in our dialogue with Marxists. It is not at all clear whether the Marxists, the classical Communists, are opposed to religion because God does not fit into their philosophical vision of the world, or whether they oppose religion on account of the social consequences as they were observed by Marx in the last century. It could just be that the opposition of Marxists to religion is founded on the social consequences of a religion which emphasizes that salvation is in the life to come; that life in this world is a valley of tears; that we must try to help our neighbour, but ultimately cannot change society; that we can only suffer here and look forward to a happier future in the life to come. It seems to me that the discussion about salvation, therefore, is of the greatest importance in our dialogue with Marxists. At the Second Vatican Council, the bishops were conscious of this and in the document called “The Church in the Modern World” (in the first part, chapter 3), they wanted to stress and emphasize that the Christian who believes in the age to come is by this very belief of faith obliged to take this world seriously.
FRYE: Of course, for Marxism, God is a symbol of man’s alienation, his tendency to give away his energies and his powers, either to the ascendant political class, or in exchange for an imaginary life afterwards. The question of life after death, certainly, would have to give place to the question of life before death; not whether you live after death, but whether there’s any proof that you’ve ever come alive. That would be the central issue that the church would have to face, I imagine.
BAUM: This problem is very important in places like South America. I think that if, in Marxist terms, religion would actually be revolutionary, would make people more profoundly engaged in changing society, then their attitude toward religion would change. It would seem that the kind of dialogue between Marxists and Catholics which has been carried on recently has brought this out as one of the remarkable results. I think that the reason we do not follow St. Augustine any more is that we have a different understanding of human and political life than he had, that we are convinced that the city here on earth can be changed, and that we are, in some real sense, responsible for it. You introduced, for example, a division of two cities different from St. Augustine’s.
FRYE: Yes, I know that there is a traditional Christian view of two cities, where one is sacramentally related to the other and where you live by certain habits, certain disciplines, certain attitudes. Surely the thing which twentieth-century literature and twentieth-century theology have emphasized a great deal is that one has to discover this unchanging city for oneself in all sorts of unexpected ways and unexpected experiences, and that nobody except God (if one is working with the conception of God) knows who the people are who have discovered a more permanent dimension in their lives.
BAUM: Could you develop this?
FRYE: I’m thinking of the way in which it has become almost a literary convention to build a work of fiction, a short story, a play, or even an entire novel, around events leading up to a certain crucial decision on the part of the chief character in the course of which he decides either for his freedom or against it. The whole Existential movement in Sartre and Camus seems to have a great deal to do with building up towards this kind of crucial incident in a person’s life. That moment where one feels either that one has betrayed oneself or that one has stood by oneself, is the moment I started from when I was trying to think of a conception of salvation. With many of the writers who deal with this, who illustrate it in literature, there is, of course, no explicit background of faith at all. It’s simply an aspect of human experience.
BAUM: I don’t think that I totally understand what you mean by freedom, because as you describe it, the choice, the total engagement of being faithful to oneself, still remains ambiguous to me. We do know nowadays from psychology that there are alive in all of us some self-damaging tendencies, some masochism, if you like. I think it is possible for a man to desire his own destruction. I think it is possible for a man to desire his own failure, to provoke a relationship and crisis at his place of work, or even a crisis with his wife and children, in order to be defeated. I think that this kind of choice of one’s own misery has all the earmarks of freedom; it feels like freedom. Therefore, unless we have some norm or standard outside of ourselves, constantly calling us into question and making us respond to a norm which is above us (and when I say this, I think of course as a clergyman of the Word of God), I do not see how it will be easy for us not to be misled at times and find freedom in experiences which ultimately are destructive.
FRYE: Let me give you a deliberately trivial example of what I mean by this kind of theme in contemporary fiction: it’s a Canadian novel, a war novel, and in the course of it, a soldier gets into bed with a prostitute and the prostitute says, “I want you to say that you love me.” The soldier’s first impulse is to say, “Oh, go to hell,” and then suddenly he realizes what her life has been like, how tough and mean it’s been, how she’s been pushed around and how important it is for her to have this said to her, and so he says the words she wishes to hear.2 The statement itself is technically or formally a lie, but in human and existential terms the soldier knows that he’s done something rather important at that point.
BAUM: How does he know that he is not feeding some really destructive neurosis in this girl?
FRYE: He doesn’t know. The point is that he is choosing that as the resolution of the particular situation, in spite of its possible ambivalence, in spite of the risk that it may be nonsense. We began by using words like “salvation” and “involvement” and “alienation”—those are words connected with religion or with philosophy. It’s almost impossible to use these words without falling oneself into the more commonplace meanings of them; that is, it’s hard to speak of withdrawal from the world without suggesting, either to others or even to yourself, that you mean running away from the world, and it’s hard to speak of salvation without thinking of yourself as being hooked and landed by some other power and pulled out of the sea. The thing that interests me about the contemporary situation is that there seems to be in the world not a conviction of sin, which for most people is a question-begging term, but a conviction of alienation, a sense of being somehow cut off and left to live without the dimension of any kind of eternal community. That, of course, is related to the Marxist conception of alienation, as the result of man’s being cajoled into giving away his life to his masters, but it has entered the West very deeply, too, in the sense that man somehow has to come to terms with being. For many people, it amounts to saying that man has to come to terms with being abandoned by God, and this is a conviction, a kind of axiom of experience in the West, which I think makes communication on any kind of religious plane extraordinarily difficult. Do you see what I mean?
BAUM: I’m not so sure whether I completely understand you. Do you describe alienation as man’s estrangement from other people, his loneliness, his incapacity to enter into communion with others, or do you think that it must be, first of all, described in religious terms?
FRYE: No, I was thinking rather of alienation as a fact of contemporary consciousness whereby man accepts the fact that he is both an individual by himself and a member of a society, but doesn’t feel any essential link outside himself either as an individual or in relation to a society.
BAUM: You mean he has no access to his neighbour, to his brother, he regards other people somehow as a threat, or he is suspicious that they are somehow against him?
FRYE: He may feel that. As a member of society, he does not feel identified by or with society. He is a member of what is called “the lonely crowd.”3 But when he thinks of himself as an individual, he feels equally alone and equally bereft.
BAUM: But is this not precisely the mystery of human life—that we can only be ourselves to the extent that we enter into communion with others. In other words, we need the brethren to be ourselves, and therefore I wouldn’t even bring up the question of alienation from God. It seems to me that what one wants to say could very well be said in terms of the community, and it may well be that men can find God only if or when they have found the brother; that it is through the love of the brethren, through being drawn into communion with others, that suddenly talk about God which before was meaningless makes some sense.
FRYE: Yes, it would doubtless make sense, but if we think for example of the conception of salvation as the opposite of being abandoned, what strikes me in contemporary literature and a great deal of contemporary thought is that the consciousness of being abandoned seems to be almost primary in twentieth-century man, in some of the most deeply thoughtful and sincere and intelligent people. Unless one is willing to accept that and to come to terms with it, one cannot communicate with a very radical element in contemporary consciousness.
BAUM: What do you think this consciousness is due to?
FRYE: It’s partly a feeling that man has nothing outside himself with which he can identify as being an essential part of his personality. He knows that he is a member of a society, and that the social being that is a part of his individuality doesn’t permit him to draw a circle around himself and say that his individuality ends there. Yet society does not give him the values that he really needs and hungers for. There are so many people in this prosperous and apparently contented North American society who have simply been driven by superior sensitivity to reject the values of that society.
BAUM: But why should this happen in our age? Why was this not experienced in the same way by men of the nineteenth or early twentieth century? What do you think are some of the factors? Would it be our affluence? Our wealth …?
FRYE: Well, it has something to do with affluence and wealth. That is one reason, I suppose, why the Marxist challenge to middle-class values has never really taken root in our society. The whole business of alienation for the worker and waste for the member of a leisure class (who simply lives off the worker) has been replaced with us by the affluent society. But we discover that the conceptions of alienation and waste are just as lively as they ever were. There is a sense of loneliness or abandonment which is only relieved in certain crucial moments of conflict or tension, which are very often moments of rejection of society. I’m not putting this very well …
BAUM: I think I understand what you mean, and yet I find it difficult to agree with such a tragic understanding of human life. I find it difficult to accept that salvation, this experience of freedom in which the self becomes richer through the identification with another or with others, is such a rare experience. I find it difficult to accept that modern man, who is perhaps more threatened by alienation, is therefore further away from salvation, and that communion, sharing, friendship, and faith are so far away from him. Perhaps one reason why estrangement is so widespread today is that the old-fashioned kind of community, stable community, mother and father, the village and the unchanging town, have disappeared, and therefore the child from the very beginning is exposed to an ever-shifting community and can never really identify for long with any one system or set. I think that this is one of the reasons for the estrangement. And yet does this not perhaps point to the way in which salvation today must be offered to men and the way in which we ourselves must discover it: by finding communion (not by finding God I was almost going to say), by finding communion first, by entering into a friendship with others and discovering dimensions of sharing which we were close to in the past, and only after being saved in this way, listening to what God has to say about himself in the gospel?
FRYE: Yes, you may feel that this mood is excessively tragic, and yet I’m trying to define what seems to me to be almost the overwhelming feeling in contemporary literature, which is just as characteristic of deeply religious writers like Graham Greene or François Mauriac as it is of, say, Sartre.
BAUM: I think this is true, yet when you look at the extraordinary revival of religious concern you see another side of modern society. In the literature of the last century, religion and God were hardly ever mentioned. When Balzac wrote his novels about France, a priest might occasionally occur in them, but only as a kind of marginal figure, as a representative of the ancien régime, while in our modern contemporary literature, it seems to me that God, and even the church somehow, have moved into the centre of preoccupation; that deep down, modern man is concerned about the eternal questions, even when he says no to them.
FRYE: One could look at it another way—that the reason for that rather careless treatment of the priesthood in Balzac is that he thinks of the church as a normally functioning part of society, whereas in the twentieth century the church is a big question mark, something which is felt either to have no function, or to need its function accounted for in some way.
BAUM: And yet, isn’t it good and healthy and Christian if the church is a question mark? Must not the gospel and God always also be a question mark? There are so many people who believe that to have faith means to have convictions which never change, which are safely wrapped up in our pockets, and the less often we look at them the more certain we are that they will always be with us. In our modern day we have found that we cannot protect religious convictions by wrapping them up and putting them into our pockets. We can only preserve them, if that is the right word, by constantly questioning them.
FRYE: In other words, doubt is not the opposite of faith but the complement of faith?
BAUM: Yes.
FRYE: And the particular problem I’m posing is that while the vision of faith may or may not be true, the vision of doubt certainly is true. It’s the obvious physical fact in front of us. There is a sense in which salvation is a quest, the quest being the discovery of what gradually becomes more and more negative as you keep discovering it. First of all, you think of it as something sinful or as something wrong. Then eventually it becomes nothingness, just something that isn’t there. That experience seems to me [to be] primary and unanswerable, and because it’s unanswerable, there must be an answer. The quest of the twentieth-century sensibility seems to me to be a quest for what is being called the absurd, and the only thing which can complement or fill out the discovery of the absurd is something which is itself absurd, and which you must believe in because it is absurd. The point that I’ve been harping on as a kind of Devil’s advocate all along is that man lives most of his life on a relatively unreflective plane, that there are certain moments of awakened intensity in that life, and that in the twentieth century the majority of such moments are also moments of horror. These are moments of absurdity, moments of feeling abandoned and lost.
BAUM: Dr. Frye, I really have some difficulty following you here, because my own experience of literature and of modern theatre and films is really somewhat different. I agree that the people who are presented there perhaps do not find answers to their questions, but they all seem to have an inkling of the kind of answer they are looking for, and even when they find themselves condemned never to find anyone whom they can love, or by whom they are loved, they somehow know that what really counts is love. Even if they are incapable of believing in anyone and of being really trusting, they do seem to know, even in their despair, that this is exactly what they desire. I find, therefore, that modern literature and modern films, in addition to the message of despair, have in and behind them some very definite vision of what salvation is all about.
FRYE: There seems to be such a restless, incessant, and, for many people, morbid emphasis on the part of contemporary literature to discover what you might call the nature of man. One of the great classics of English literature, which students always have the greatest possible difficulty with, is the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, about the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms. These stinking, ferocious, nauseating creatures, the Yahoos, are the animals, and the horses have some education and common sense and some reason. Gulliver finds that his nature is Yahoo nature, that he is cleaner and more intelligent, but he is still the same kind of thing. Because Swift was working within the church establishment and within a set of social values that he assented to, he knew what to do with that conception: Gulliver goes back to England, not hating the human race (that would be silly) but hating pride. It seems to me that in contemporary literature you have this constant probing into the nature of man. You have it in, say, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where the characters are engaged in a dramatic action which is not an action at all; they are simply waiting around for something to happen. Nothing does happen, but in the meantime what has been revealed is what has always traditionally been called the natural man. And in a novel like Lord of the Flies you have almost the experimental-laboratory conception of natural man—put man on a desert island and what becomes of him? Well, what becomes of him, of course, immediately is that he sets up a most demonic tyranny. This is the same kind of ironic vision that you get in Gulliver’s Travels, but you get it without the sense that there is in Gulliver of bringing to bear the norms of a church and a society in judgment on it. It is left up to the reader to evaluate it, and the reader is just as lost and bewildered as the characters in the novel.
BAUM: Dr. Frye, if you think this is the image of man that is described in modern literature, it reminds me very much of the image of man that is described in certain Biblical passages. For instance, St. Paul talks about man without God.
FRYE: St. Paul had his answers. I’m not suggesting that this is a new problem. I’m suggesting that it’s the old problem in which the answers are no longer accepted.
BAUM: It seems to me that what you are leading up to, in a way, is the traditional Protestant position that salvation is really forgiveness of sins. If it is our hidden feeling of guilt that is the inner accuser which provokes us to regard other people as our enemies, then the remedy would indeed be some experience of the forgiveness of sins; that is, some experience that we are accepted and that despite our wounds and the fragile and miserable in us, we are nonetheless accepted because someone else loves us.
FRYE: That’s quite a jump to take. Of course, I know what you mean, but many modern men wouldn’t accept this remedy because they feel they’re going to die of the disease anyway. I think that the forgiveness of sins that you mention would certainly be a cure for alienation if it were an experience.
BAUM: I find that films and some modern novels which seem to betray the despair of man really lead not to despair, but rather help us to understand our own awful experiences of life. By understanding them more deeply, and seeing in them a deeper dimension, we are enabled to transcend them and to move ahead. If we do not move ahead from the important experiences of the past, we remain with them and regress; instead of having new experiences we simply relive the old ones. I think there is something therapeutic in modern literature and films, because by reliving something very deeply and by discovering deeper dimensions in it, we are free for new experiences, and therefore are led to salvation.
FRYE: Well, mind you, I’m not disagreeing with any of this—I think our assumptions are the same assumptions—but I’m merely stressing the fact that the language in which one puts this can be extremely misleading because the language sounds consoling, and the rejection of consolation seems to me to be very important as a characteristic of modern man.
BAUM: Yes, at least the rejection of words. I think people refuse to listen. They don’t want words. They have been disappointed. Language itself is no longer trusted. Only action is credible.
FRYE: And consequently if man experiences the absurdity and loneliness of existence for himself in his own mind, then he has to experience what we’ve been calling salvation in this way as well, and everybody concerned with what is called charity, with Christian love, has to respect this quality of the self-discovery of salvation in whatever form it comes.
BAUM: I don’t think there is really a difference between Christian love and other love. Whenever men forget themselves and reach out for one another, this is a mystery which is called in the Bible death and resurrection. This happens not only when Christians are led to love, but whenever people reach out for one another. Therefore I agree with you that a specifically religious language today no longer communicates the real mystery of the transformation of life, but only the kind of language which is real and describes and manifests the kinds of experiences which are available to us every day.
FRYE: Yes, so that when W.H. Auden says that we must love one another or die,4 I think I know what he means and I imagine you know what he means. Yet for many people this has overtones of trying to hypnotize oneself into thinking that people are amiable who are not amiable. And while I know what you mean when you say that there’s no difference between love and Christian love, still there is a difference between love and gregariousness. The kind of unanswerable vision of the community of man which we may or may not be fortunate enough to get in our lives is perhaps what we have been revolving around.