Conducted December 1969
From Acta Victoriana, 94 (February 1970): 39–50, where it is subtitled “An Interview on Religion with Northrop Frye.” The interviewer was John Ayre, then a student of anthropology at Victoria and editor of Acta Victoriana, the college literary magazine; he was later to become a writer and researcher and to write Frye’s biography. Reprinted in WGS, 95–107. Dated by information from Ayre.
AYRE: There is a passage in your The Modern Century which says:
The world we are in is the world of the tiger, and that world was never created or seen to be good. It is the subhuman world of nature, a world of law and of power but not of intelligence or design. Things “evolve” in it, whatever that means, but there is no creative power in it that we can see except that of man himself. And man is not very good at the creating business: he is much better at destroying, for most of him, like an iceberg, is submerged in a destructive element. [121; NFMC, 68]
This is rather pessimistic. I was wondering how you would expand on this.
FRYE: Well, I would say that the traditional Christian framework has been within the conception of God as the creator of the world back in 4004 B.C., and He looked at the world and saw that it was good.1 Now man broke that contract with God and fell out of the garden of Eden into the wilderness. That is where he is now, but still the conception in God’s mind is there and we can get back to it. That has been the traditional Christian myth, but we don’t have much confidence in that myth any more now. We really can’t think of God as a creator of the world. All we can see is a moon a quarter of a million miles away that you can get on with NASA hardware which is not worth landing on when you get there. And you have billions of years of evolution in which nothing ever happened that was at all cheerful. So there is just no use trying to think of God as a big Santa Claus up in the sky that made the world six thousand years ago and will then tear it up in another thousand years.
AYRE: Well, what does “God” mean today, in our modern world?
FRYE: The only thing that God can possibly mean is what he really does mean in Christianity, that is to say a suffering man.
AYRE: Are you equating the suffering man with God?
FRYE: I’m saying that the only role that God can have in human life is that of a man who cares enough about society to go even to the extent of a hideous death for man’s salvation. I think it is the conception of God as the power that recreates man rather than God as the creator of the order of nature that is the really valid element in Christianity. I would differentiate between the divine and the human because the human contains many things that are not divine.
AYRE: What would you say, then, the suffering man was who represents God?
FRYE: The suffering man who represents God may be a martyr in the original sense of a witness. That is, he is a man whose vision of a better form of human life and society is so strong that he lives in the light of that vision and acts according to what it suggests.
AYRE: What is the source of this light?
FRYE: I am not sure what the source of it is. It is implanted in the human mind at a depth that makes one think there is some point in the destiny of man that we have perhaps never really grasped. The idea is, of course, pre-Christian. Socrates says in The Republic [592b] that once he has got his republic all built, it is something that will never exist but the wise man will always act according to its laws no matter what society he is actually living in. The moment Socrates said that he made himself a potential martyr.
AYRE: Is man completely alone in that he has no inspiration from outside himself?
FRYE: Man is alone in the objective environment around him which is what we call “nature.” Everything in nature is submoral, subintellectual, and subhuman, and man gets nothing from that at all in the way of inspiration.
AYRE: Would you say that man is part of that nature, or is he sublimated from it?
FRYE: Man is a part of the nature around him and, therefore, there is an element in man which is not divine.
AYRE: Who would you say are the modern-day religious martyrs and prophets?
FRYE: Somebody who was a martyr in the literal sense was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered by the Nazis. I think of the martyr as predominantly the witness, the person who does something significant whether it is a death or something in relation to the sense of a greater community that man knows.2 I should think that anyone who dedicates his whole life to the service of that kind of vision is uniting himself to the central redemptive act of mankind, whether he does it as a writer or social worker or in any other walk of life.
AYRE: Do you think that the pseudo-religions like Marxism are offering the solutions that religion once did?
FRYE: I think that they do for a great many people, but I wouldn’t call Marxism a pseudo-religion. I would call it a quite genuine religion. The thing that bothers me about Marxism is that it accepts the ordinary categories of time and space and life and death. If there is a question in your mind that death might not be all there is to be said about life, then Marxism says that is morbid, that you have to live for today and for society. I think that that gives the human race claustrophobia—when you have a religion founded on the ordinary categories of time and space and life and death. The thing which is to me so important about the other religions, particularly Christianity, is that they keep the words “eternal” and “infinite” right in the middle of experience, and as long as they are there you don’t get claustrophobia.
AYRE: So you think that man should have some sort of mechanism of escape from time and space, as in the Christian mythology, for example?
AYRE: What did religion mean to you and your fellow students in the 1930s when you were going through the crisis of the Depression?
FRYE: Well, I can’t answer for my fellow students. But there was a very strong feeling that Christianity was losing touch with the world by putting all its eggs in one middle-class basket. What is so obviously true now was just as obviously true then—that an institution with all its tax-free real estate is not going to take a very concerned interest in the problems of the world. So we had people trying to organize movements for Christian Socialism to show that a real concern for the human race and for social problems was Christian as well.
AYRE: Like the students of the 1930s, we are in search of some sort of answer out of the chaos that seems to be descending upon us. The hippies, for example, have turned inward and become very spiritual. The New Left have turned outward to criticize social forms. To what extent do the hippies and/or the New Left encompass the aspects of religious experience?
FRYE: They both seem to me to be religious heresies in the strict sense of the term. That is, their impulse is religious but their method of defining it is extreme. As soon as you say, “I will look within and not without,” you are copping out. As soon as you say, “I will look without but not within,” you are copping out, too. Religion, to me, means the achieving and the holding of a social vision which comes from inside and yet includes others as well.
AYRE: So you would like to see a full integration of both the spiritual and the social within one experience?
FRYE: Yes. Christ said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” [Luke 17:21], but a lot of people think that “within” also means among you. It seems to me that it has to be both.
AYRE: So you see the “new spiritualists,” as one might call them, as somewhat lacking in the ability to integrate these two aspects—the spiritual and social?
FRYE: I think in a time of troubled change you get people looking for simplistic solutions which attract because they are simple and extreme solutions. You get people saying, “Well, it’s all right to say that the medium is the message, but it is all the same medium and all the same message, and it’s a pretty stupid message, so you might as well take drugs to develop a real experience inside.” Then you get other people saying, “It’s morbid to think about what goes on in your mind,” and “You have work to do in society because you are a social being.” But both of those are simplistic solutions.
AYRE: Do you see the hippies, perhaps, as an extreme vanguard movement whose values may diffuse down through different layers of the younger generation and may improve the ways of perception in a more modern way?
FRYE: That is possible. I think that the hippies have a very limited social function, really. They were quite valuable in the challenge that they made to the work ethic. I don’t feel that the movement has any roots or has any real power or permanence or that it can really hold even individual loyalties beyond a very short time. For many people the hippie movement is something to drop into and out of.
AYRE: A way of spiritual cleansing?
FRYE: Something of that kind, yes.
AYRE: In order to, say, reorient your experience and maybe your perception to perhaps throw off, temporarily, all that you have learned and been educated into?
FRYE: Well, if it can do that it is very valuable. Of course that depends a great deal on the person himself.
AYRE: Do you think there are any real modern mythologies, and are they religious in nature?
FRYE: I think all mythologies are religious in nature, and I think that every new mythology is a modification of an old one.
AYRE: So you have the recurring archetypes? Now, one thing I am interested in is the function of the modern poet. Poets and artists, at one time, used to work for the church and the state. You can see that in the Renaissance almost all the art was religious—the Madonnas and so on. But since the hold of the church on society has been loosened, the artist seems to have gone off on his own into a very isolated cultural environment. Do you see the modern poet as a specialized mythmaker?
FRYE: The poet is certainly a mythmaker. That is his business, because all poetry is mythopoeic, and I would say that the poet is working for religion but, of course, not necessarily for a religion. That is, you get people like Ginsberg who go into Buddhism, and you have others like Brother Antoninus who become Roman Catholics.3 You also have others who are not committed to any institutional religion at all. It seems to me that the things they say and the kinds of protest they make in their social attitudes are all essentially religious, though you are quite right in saying that they tend to become individualized. I think they almost have to at a time when institutional religion has a somewhat limited hold.
AYRE: There seem to be somewhat the same processes working in modern art, in all art, as a matter of fact—the tapping of the subconscious, the emergence of the archetypes. Whereas these used to be used in an institutionalized religion, they do not seem to be so today. How does that leave organized religion, when it no longer has these creative individuals developing new mythologies? Do you think, in other words, modern religion is developing new mythologies that are vital and of interest to all people?
FRYE: I think that the poets are developing mythologies which religious people can use and can see the religious significance of. Now many poets may be what I just called “heretics.” That is, they may have intensely individualized and simplistic and extreme views, but they are not the less valuable for that. In an age like ours you can’t possibly do without the heretic. He is the person who really counts. A writer like Nietzsche or D.H. Lawrence can have tremendous religious significance, but it is up to the people who understand the importance of a religious perspective to see what that significance is.
AYRE: How do you think that organized religion can develop a mythology in our modern world that is applicable to people? For instance, young people just aren’t going to church any more. * * * How do you think the church can become more attractive to young people?
FRYE: If I had the answer to that I would be an awfully useful person! I simply don’t know. I think that organized religion has got itself caught in this middle-class bind which, as I say, is not just the fact that it is the well-dressed and the washed and the middle-class people that go to church. It is not only that, it is also all the real estate they have and the mortgages they have to meet and that kind of thing. They have got to be a kind of tax-free business. I think everybody with any penetration in the church knows that the church has to break clear of that, but the person who could tell them how would be the great prophet of our times. I am not sure that there is any “how.” I think that things just have to grow up in their own way in other places; the need is there. Young people, as I have said elsewhere, are desperately religious.4 They go to meetings and “encounter” sessions which, back in the 1930s, were associated only with the most extreme evangelical things such as the Oxford Group, as it was called then—Moral Rearmament and so on.5 The fact that these things appeal so intensely to young people today indicates how very strong the religious feeling is. It is bound to grow up, for the most part, outside the present institutional organized religion, though perhaps not entirely. And perhaps as it continues to grow it may work out some kind of modus vivendi with organized religion when it gets to be less afraid of it and less suspicious of it.
AYRE: So, in other words, the spiritual, inward impulses are there, but there is no institution right now that they can attach themselves to, other than the Marxist groups, etc.
FRYE: Yes, I think what we are in for today is a gigantic Methodist movement. In the eighteenth century the Church of England got frozen into its real estate and the local squire presented the living to a parson who, of course, had to keep in with him. The Methodists went out into the fields and the big cities that were developing, and I think that something like that is happening now.
AYRE: That is very interesting. That is the sort of thing that I myself have been looking for. Whether it will come or not remains to be seen. This whole century has been very, very black—no hope, no salvation. It just seems to be going down and down. You wonder sometimes whether it actually will revive and whether the optimistic point of view will materialize. Naturally, literature follows the patterns of the rise and fall of the spirit. We have had anti-literature. How do you think that literature will develop in future years?
FRYE: I think that literature, at the moment, is predominantly ironic literature. That is its general attitude and function. It will continue to be that until it has exhausted the possibilities of that convention, which will take quite a while. I think also that there has been, within the last ten years or so, a quite sudden revival of the oral tradition of literature, that is, of poetry recited to listening audiences with musical backgrounds. Then, again, there has been a strong movement to break down the distinction between art and life. It is the age of the “happening,” of the spontaneous improvised act, of that kind of theatre, and of events which you can’t say are either works of art or happenings in social life, because they are both at the same time. I think this indicates a kind of disseminating of the mythopoeic habit of mind among more and more groups of people.
AYRE: This would be the total or psychedelic experience where you have the bright lights on the wall and the simulated acid experience, the loud music that creates a womb-like atmosphere. I have always had the conception of the artist as an extremely individual person, off in his study, writing his verses. Do you think that this new tendency toward the breakdown of poetry and of the joining of the audience with the artist in one experience is a good thing?
FRYE: I think it is a thing that is happening and consequently it has potentialities either for good or for evil, depending on how it is used. I think that it has great possibilities for good. It does tend to break down that very unhealthy discrimination between the artist’s writing obscure and impenetrable poetry in the garret and the public’s not reading it. I think we are beginning to get the end of that kind of specialization in society.
AYRE: Would you consider this new art experience as valid as the older art forms and as qualitative?
FRYE: I think that art has a different relationship to society at different periods. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth there came to be something of a divorce between the production of art and the social response to it. That is, there was a cultural lag between the most important and serious writers and their popularity. People writing around 1918 to 1920 wouldn’t become widely read or bestselling writers until around 1940 or 1950. So the author tended to feel that he was writing for posterity and over the heads of most of his contemporaries. He wasn’t necessarily a snob in doing this. It was just part of the social effects of his situation. I think that that gap is narrowing down now, that there is less of a cleavage between serious and popular literature than there was, and consequently a more direct public response to it. It has its good elements and its disadvantages. It doesn’t necessarily mean that art will become better or worse. It means that it will be geared to a different kind of social response.
AYRE: Well, if we deal with this phenomenon of, say, the discotheque—the simulated acid experience where there is a total environment and the breakdown of the individual—is it not an abnegation of the individual and a sort of surrender to an almost chaotic totality?
FRYE: I think that the return to the womb, that is, this completely sealed-in or enclosed experience, is a rather passing vogue. It is a tendency which is a part of the drug cults and the general retreat psychology of the ’60s. I don’t think that that is going to last very long. I think it will give place to a much more simple and open-air response where the artist, the poet, the folk singer, whatever he is, is thought of in more normal terms as an entertainer.
AYRE: Is there not implicit in all this new art form a union of the social and the spiritual in that you get the spiritual from the social? Or that you get your experience from the social group rather than as a differentiated individual reading a book of poetry in isolation? Is it a good thing that there should be a surrender of individualism in the actual process of artistic relation and communication?
FRYE: It seems to me that in a spiritual response there has to be a continuous oscillation between the individual’s sense of himself as an individual and his sense of his place in a social body. If his responses are purely social and if, for example, he takes drugs in order to destroy the conception of the contours of his individuality, if he finds himself merging in with other people, then that society is going to turn into a mob, because a mob is a society without any individuals. Similarly, if he remains an individual and pulls away from his social context, then the kind of response he has is unhealthy in a different direction.
AYRE: Wouldn’t you consider the art forms that we are seeing now as a mob art experience?
FRYE: There are many tendencies toward the mob in contemporary society, yes. I think that there is a curious mixture of the two things. The more individualized or introverted a person’s reactions are the more he becomes, without realizing it, a typical example of a certain kind of social or class snobbery. Similarly, the more a person dissolves his responses into that of the group, the more his own sense of continuity, his own sense of identity, disintegrates.
AYRE: Do you consider this disintegration of the individual as essentially religious?
FRYE: Oh, no.
AYRE: How do you define the religious experience?
FRYE: Religion is a matter of finding one’s identity. I think you could almost define a man’s religion as that with which he is trying to identify himself.
AYRE: What do you think a man should be identifying with?
FRYE: I think he should be identifying with God, but of course that would involve one in a long discussion of what God is.
AYRE: In the religious experience, what is man communicating with?
FRYE: I think that religion is made possible by God’s communicating with man, and that the response that man makes to that, whether it is in prayer or worship or in other ways such as writing or painting or doing his own job, the sacramental life as it is called, is his communication.
AYRE: Is there any entity that he is communicating with, or is it an internal thing that he is relating himself to, or both?
FRYE: Well, I think it is both. I certainly don’t think it is a subjective thing, largely because I’m not quite sure that there is such a thing as a subject. It may well be that there is nothing to man except the experiences he has, and consequently what he responds to is something which includes himself or is essential in himself and infinitely more besides.
AYRE: So this is a very existential idea that man is relating to experience rather than to any particular thing.
FRYE: I suppose so, yes, or relating through his experience anyway.
AYRE: So you have no conception, then, of any entity beyond man that is acting upon man?
FRYE: Well, when you say “entity” you are implying something essential that you could put a finger on and define. The mystics, for example, always said that everything is to be related to God in two ways. One way is: this-also-is-thou, and the other is: neither-is-this-thou. That is, everything that exists both is and is not God.
AYRE: What is the church doing now to change old ideas of a God that is anthropomorphic—the Father in the sky? How is it going to be able to communicate to young people new concepts? How is it going to be able to relate existential philosophy, which certainly doesn’t filter down into the local parishes?
FRYE: I’m not sure that there is a “how.” I think that the churches have to cast around for different things to do. There has been a very strong tendency on the part of the church to get rid of the big classical ghost, that is, the creator of the order of nature that got stuck into Christianity at one stage of its development. People are beginning to realize that that figure isn’t there any more and never was there. So when they say that God is dead, they are talking about a God that was never alive. The centre of Christianity, the suffering servant Jesus, who descends from a line of persecuted outcasts and alienated prophets, is still the centre of the religion.
AYRE: Do you know of anything concrete that has been done in the church to bring young people back?
FRYE: I think different churches are doing things in different ways, depending on the particular environment they are in and the temperament of the clergyman in charge. In cities, they do various kinds of social work. There is a church near Yorkville that does a lot of work with the Yorkville colony. There are churches which do a great deal of work toward integrating new Canadians who have come into the country or into the community recently, and so on. It is a matter of looking around to see what has to be done in that particular neighbourhood.
AYRE: But isn’t social work essentially a civil function rather than a religious one? There does seem to be a tendency for civil functions to take over what used to be religious so that the church is being left out. If this is so, shouldn’t religion be defining man in the world and his relation to God, rather than trying to get into a field that they have already lost out on?
FRYE: It seems to me that the first thing that any religion does anywhere is to create a community, that what it sets up is a focus for a community, and that as soon as it stops being a community it stops being anything. It may be a philosophy, it may be a theology, it may be all kinds of things, but unless it is something with its roots in the society around it, it is no longer a religion.
AYRE: What you said before: the unity of the social and the spiritual.
FRYE: Yes.
AYRE: Finally, do you see religion as providing alternatives and answers in the future?
AYRE: To secular orientations. The materialistic American Dream.
FRYE: I think that the tendency is for society to feel that it doesn’t really need the religious dimension of experience as long as it is doing things for itself in a reasonably successful way. When religion comes in again as a social force it is really a product of disillusionment. It takes shape or seems to have the most persuasive powers when man begins to feel that the bottom of his world has dropped out and that his achievements don’t really amount to so much after all. I think that the particular kind of middle-class disaffection in our own time has very strong religious affinities for that reason. This is something likely to continue because it is not man’s failures, his wars, his imperialism, his conquests, or his moral failures that are being questioned now so much as his successes—whether the welfare state and the good and comfortable life and the chicken every Sunday and so forth have any substantiality. As soon as you begin to question the best social values of our time, then the religious dimension begins to creep in.
AYRE: But is established religion going to be able to provide answers to these doubts?
FRYE: When you say “established religion,” that perhaps begs the question. It is possible that there may be an answer there, but it perhaps doesn’t answer the particular person who is asking the question. That is, there are two kinds of answers. There is the general or universal answer and there is the specific and personal answer. Many people are trying to find their own answers in their own ways, and if they are genuine questions, I think they will find that there is a certain resemblance in the answers that different people get. This resemblance in their answers may create another community.
AYRE: Another religion?
FRYE: Perhaps.