Recorded 27 May 1971
From the CBC audiotape 693, released in the United States in 1975. Reprinted as “Tragedy, Heroism, and the Problem of Evil” in WGS, 85–94. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1971. This was part of a series on evil aired on the CBC’s Ideas; the CBC Times gives the broadcast date as 18 August 1971. The interviewer was Janet Somerville, at that time coordinating producer of Ideas. A prominent Catholic layperson and thinker, she later worked as associate editor of the Catholic New Times, served as general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches, 1997–2002, and was made a member of the Order of Canada in 2004.
SOMERVILLE: Professor Frye, I think most people identify the problem of evil with the problem of bad choices, the problem of reprehensible actions. But it seems to me that in much of your work the whole question of evil is seen in a larger or more ancient than moral context. I remember reading in your book on Shakespearean tragedy, Fools of Time, that the experience of the tragic can’t be moralized or contained in a conceptual world view, and that a tragic hero is a tragic hero whether he is a good or a bad man [4].
FRYE: I would start by saying that tragedy is really about disaster, and disaster is something which often does, in fact usually does, revolve around the question of evil or of wrong choice. Yet I think that the conception of wrongness in tragedy is rather more comprehensive. Any discussion of evil has to start with the fact that most of our conceptions of good are really conceptions of moral good, and moral good is something that is founded on moral evil and is derived from it. That is, when Blake says that the virtues of innocence are mercy, pity, peace, and love, mercy and pity mean that somebody has already been cruel.1 That means that moral good is never really good because it is founded on moral evil. Every once in a while there comes a tremendous upset in society when somebody looks at the whole structure of accepted moral values and says, “This is evil.”
SOMERVILLE: Was Milton that kind of visionary?
FRYE: Oh, Milton was that kind of visionary, very much. Yes. Milton, being a revolutionary, based his whole life on the conception of liberty. But for Milton liberty was not anything that man naturally wants. What he wants is mastery. When Milton’s Satan says, “Here at least we shall be free,”2 what he means is, “Here at least some people can be masters and others can be indolent and inert.”
SOMERVILLE: Milton was a revolutionary, you said, and yet you described Milton’s Satan as an “egocentric revolutionary” [RE, 28; M&B, 53]. That’s the archetype of evil in Milton, so how can we tell a satanic kind of revolutionary from the other kind?
FRYE: Milton himself draws a sharp distinction between what he calls liberty and licence. That is, liberty is something which implies the acceptance of moral responsibility, and consequently is never anything that man wants for himself. It’s simply something which God has determined he shall have and which those capable of responding to a divine revelation are ready to accept. But the egocentric revolutionary, the man who wants to do what he likes, is, of course, in an impossible situation, because what he likes to do is to obey a set of impulses inside him. In other words, he wants to be a slave to those impulses.
SOMERVILLE: In your own writing about Milton, I sometimes have the impression that what the genuine revolutionary does—and all he can really do as he strives toward liberty as you’ve just described it—is iconoclasm. He can tear away either the false assurances of liberty or the comforting enslavements that men build up for themselves. Do you think that’s a fair description of the kind of revolutionary that you recognize as being in the Miltonian tradition, and can you think of people doing that today, especially in literature?
FRYE: For Milton there’s nothing that man can do to achieve his own salvation apart from God except knock down his idols. That indicates a willingness to worship something better than idols. If he’s in that state, then God will move in with his conception of liberty, and this involves becoming one of what Milton would call the elect. In his play about Samson, Samson is being deliberately worked to death in a Philistine mill, and his father comes offering ransom so that he can go back to his own people and die in peace and comfort. Now as God understands liberty, according to Milton, Samson is actually closer to liberty being worked to death in a Philistine mill than he would be in his own country dying in peace and contentment.
SOMERVILLE: That reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and works in that tradition. Do you think they carry on that understanding of liberty?
FRYE: Since the American Revolution or the Romantic movement there has been much more of a tendency to think of liberty as man-centred, as something that man wants and struggles to achieve. The conception of the responsibilities that liberty brings, of course, remains one of the central problems of democracy. People are still struggling with it. I think that contemporary writers have the same general perspective on liberty as Milton, but they don’t want to think of liberty as coming fundamentally from outside man.
SOMERVILLE: There are other characters, other demons in Milton’s epic, which you comment on very interestingly in your book The Return of Eden—Moloch and Belial and Mammon and Nimrod and other companions of Satan or fallen angels. You remark that conventional heroism, as the Classic epics depict it or as the medieval or Renaissance romances depict it, is seen as demonic in Milton [28; M&B, 53], as attributed to these characters like Moloch and Belial. Why do you think they are there? And do you think that that link between the heroic and the demonic is more than just fleeting and more than just in Milton?
FRYE: I think that Milton is identifying the heroic and the demonic because by creating Hell he’s got a sort of laboratory where he can isolate evil. That is, you wouldn’t call the Duke of Wellington an evil man because he devotes himself to trying to defeat Napoleon. He is in that inextricable tangle of moral good and moral evil. Every once in a while when you run across somebody for whom war is an end in itself—somebody like Hitler or perhaps Henry V in Shakespeare’s play, somebody who deliberately starts a war for kicks—then you begin to realize that there is the association between the heroic and the demonic in that the demonic is the root of the heroic.
SOMERVILLE: You said “you begin to realize.” You didn’t attribute that to Milton. You really think that the demonic is the root of the heroic. What do you mean by that?
FRYE: The hero is the person who finds his fulfilment in what is essentially a destructive activity. Evil to me has something radically negative about it. It is something that really wants to tear down the whole structure of whatever it is that man is trying to build up.
SOMERVILLE: Is it only the military hero, though, whose essential activity is destructive?
FRYE: Oh, no. The military hero is only one form. But the danger of the military hero is that he becomes socially approved. I think that if you study the anatomy of guns you can see that there is a great deal in warfare which takes the form of sexual perversion. I suspect that war, along with violence and terror, is perhaps the only really evil form of sexual perversion. That’s partly because it’s the one socially approved form.
SOMERVILLE: What about other forms of socially approved heroism, like landing on the moon?
FRYE: The exploit is another matter. I don’t think that to identify the heroic and the demonic really needs to lead to denying that courage is a virtue. I think courage is a very great virtue, is very obviously a virtue. The Christian teaching, as I understand it, is that the greatest form of heroism expresses itself in endurance and in resisting evil rather than in engaging oneself in a destructive activity.
SOMERVILLE: You’ve mentioned the virtuousness of courage, and a little earlier you mentioned the inextricable tangle of good and evil in any concrete, historic life. In another place you remark just in passing that the Hebrews made their greatest contribution to history through one of their least amiable characteristics; that is to say, not because they believed that their God was the true God but because they asserted because all other gods were false gods [RE, 54; M&B, 71]—an entirely novel notion in history and an entirely intolerant notion, one that would have been meaningless to Greeks or Romans. You not only said that they made their greatest contribution through their least amiable characteristic, but you added “as is the wont of human nature” [ibid.]. How inextricable is good from evil in your vision of things?
FRYE: Well, there was perhaps a bit of irony in that parenthesis. I merely mean that there are no unmixed blessings in history. The thing that was so decisive about the Judaeo-Christian religion is the thing that is so decisive about Marxism now, that is, a revolutionary and dialectical movement which defines itself by attacking neighbouring heresies rather than actual opponents and which is anti-liberal and resists anything that we can call revisionism. The conception “false god” would hardly be intelligible to a cultivated Greek or Roman. You wouldn’t get a cultivated Greek saying, “I believe in Zeus, the Father Almighty, and in Dionysus, His only Son our Lord.” He just didn’t think in those terms. The greater tolerance goes with a conception of God as He who Is, that is, an essential God. But, of course, God introduces himself to Moses not as He Is but as I Am, as an existential God, which is an entirely different setup.
SOMERVILLE: I’m beginning to sense a very coherent thread in what you say that makes sense out of a remark of yours that I read in Fables of Identity in an essay where you were discussing Shakespeare’s sonnets. It was another aside. Asides always throw me because people reveal so much more through them than they do sometimes through the substance of their essay. What you said was this: “When the conventions of love poetry developed, the model of most of these patterns was the spiritual discipline of Christianity. In Christianity one may, with no apparent cause, become spiritually awakened, conscious of sin and being under the wrath of God, and bound to a life of unconditional service to God’s will” [92]. Then you go on to say that much courtly poetry was based on this analogue. * * * It was a shock to me that the first element in spiritual awakening, in your aside, was consciousness of sin and of being under the wrath of God. * * * It seems to me that that remark of yours is compatible with a very profound conviction that the human experience is to come to terms with evil, that there is nothing deeper, that until you have confronted the omnipresence of evil in your life and in the world’s life you simply haven’t woken up to a human life.
FRYE: Yes, what all this has stemmed from, I think, is my original postulate, that what Christianity calls the fall of man was the discovery of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, discovering that good and evil are interpenetrating and that moral good depends on moral evil, and that there is no moral good except what is salvaged from an antecedent and prior evil. This means, of course, that the great revolutionary movements that have really changed the course of human life have always begun in a mood of abhorrence, that is, the sense that idolatry or sin or exploitation or the wheel of death and birth were somehow all wrong. Those were the things that started off Judaism and Christianity and Marxism and Buddhism. The people who get into that state of consciousness are immediately regarded as more or less insane by their contemporaries. What they are discovering in their own way is a new faith. But the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is the attitude that says, “What’s all the fuss about?”
SOMERVILLE: Are there any such people writing today?
FRYE: I have a great respect for a good many contemporary writers and their sense of moral intensity and their desire to portray truth as they see it and portray it honestly. I think we have a great many such writers. It’s very easy of course for this sense of abhorrence to be kidnapped by some kind of social movement which really has its mind on other things. It’s also easy for it to become simply a set of cliché reactions or responses.
SOMERVILLE: You mean you think the sense of abhorrence is especially dangerous when it is turned against a finite evil, a particular time-bound evil that actually can be changed?
FRYE: Oh, yes. You can select certain things, like apartheid in South Africa, which almost everybody outside white South Africa would admit to be bad. But when tactical considerations come in and you think it’s better to soft-pedal the same situations happening elsewhere, then you’re back in the tangle again.
SOMERVILLE: In many ways, as you’ve often pointed out, tragedy in itself—not some particular tragedy but the form of tragedy in itself—and comedy in itself—not some comedies but simply comedy—are different ways of coming to terms with the mystery of evil. Would you like to say something about that?
FRYE: I suppose that tragedy, as I said at the beginning, really deals with the whole question of disaster. Consequently, it deals with a kind of flaw or fault in things, which is like a geological fault; that is, at any time an earthquake might occur and swallow up good and bad people alike. In the whole element of tragic form there is a vision of human life that tries to get away from what I’ve called the tangle of moral good and moral evil. You have melodrama, for example, when you’ve got a hero representing moral good and a villain representing moral evil. The audience is supposed to know which is which: it’s supposed to applaud the hero and hiss the villain. But tragedy somehow manages to avoid that oversimplified treatment of the problem. It points to a fundamental fissure in the whole human situation, which may mean that a tragic victim may be somebody bad, like Macbeth, or somebody good, like Desdemona. When Aristotle says that the function of tragedy is to raise pity and terror and then purge them by casting them out,3 I don’t think he means that you’re supposed to leave the theatre saying, “The poor thing—what a tough break she got,” or, “It’s a good thing to have got rid of him.” Those are the moralistic reactions. But the central reaction to tragedy is: “This happens. This is something extremely profound in human life. It does happen.” There’s something wrong about its happening, and yet as an event it has to be accepted. So there’s a mixture of the acceptance of the event and the repudiation of the ultimate necessity of the event. It’s rather like the conception of Christianity that although death seems the most natural and inevitable of all human events, yet from the Christian point of view it is really an unnatural event; it shouldn’t happen.
SOMERVILLE: How does this differ from the handling of evil in comedy?
FRYE: Comedy usually works up through complications to a potentially threatening tragic conclusion. I think one finds that the more profound the comedy the more it tends to contain a tragic action rather than simply avoid one. That is, in many comedies complications threaten, but then there is a gimmick produced at the last moment and everything ends happily. But then you also get comedies like The Winter’s Tale, where some of the characters are involved in a genuinely tragic action, and the comedy goes right through the middle of that. It seems to me that comedy constructed along those lines is closer to the sense in which Dante spoke of the Christian myth as a comedy, as a narrative action that goes through humiliation, death, torture, and hell to a final commedia.
SOMERVILLE: Where would a modern work, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? fit between the poles of tragedy and comedy?
FRYE: I think that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is neither tragic nor comic but is fundamentally an ironic play. It’s a product of an ironic age. The appeal of that kind of play is not unlike that of tragedy, except that it points up a contrast between the acceptance of the event and the repudiation of the necessity of the event, which is perhaps more moral than a tragedy is. I don’t think you can have an ironic play like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without an assumed moral standard in the audience’s mind: these people standing around bitching at each other all evening really represent something that you don’t want any part of. That’s really a moral judgment.
SOMERVILLE: Are we writing tragedies in the twentieth century? Or are we only writing irony?
FRYE: I don’t quite know what the answer to that is. I would say that the twentieth century was fundamentally an ironic age and that tragedy is a very rare development in literature that comes in certain historical periods. It seems to have come really in only two periods, Renaissance Europe and Periclean Athens, where you had an aristocracy that was on its way out although its prestige was still there. That particular development in society gives you the mixture of the ironic and the heroic, which I think is characteristic of tragedy. I wouldn’t say that people can’t write tragedy in the twentieth century. I would say merely that it’s not a central form of expression.
SOMERVILLE: Is that connected in your mind with what you mentioned before, that this is a time of the fundamental calling into question, whether comic, ironic, heroic, or anything else, of received moral values in our time? Has that something to do with the centrality of the ironic mode in our time, rather than the tragic?
FRYE: I think that that is true. The radical vision always has an ironic aspect on its negative side. To some extent it does retreat from tragedy: that is, tragedy was very central and very essential not only to Greek culture but to Greek religion. But in the whole Judaeo-Christian development, simply because it was a more socially radical or revolutionary view, the tendency was to get rather restive about tragedy. The same thing is true, I think, of Marxism today.
SOMERVILLE: Say more about that.
FRYE: Well, I think that when the radical vision comes into society, first of all, it tries to define itself dialectically as to the place where it’s going and to cut itself off from the rest of the world, which is an outer darkness. At any rate, if you try to reach the outer world you have to start with a recognition that it is, from your point of view, in darkness. That kind of vision, which leads to very intense programs of social action and development, seems to me to be moving really in the opposite direction from tragedy, which to my mind has a great deal to do with the sense of nature as an order. I don’t think it’s an accident that the two developments of tragedy coincide roughly with the two great developments of science, Renaissance science and Ionian science.
SOMERVILLE: When we’re into these waters, we’re up against the very mysterious question of the extent to which we are responsible for evil.
FRYE: Well, I certainly think that man has to act as though he alone were responsible for evil. I don’t think it would make sense in any other context.
SOMERVILLE: The individual man?
FRYE: I suppose the choice has to be an individual one—yes. But it may be a very difficult choice. The Nuremberg trials raised the question of whether a necessarily hopeless resistance to evil on the part of subordinates in the German army was not only morally but legally binding.4One has only to look at the repercussions of the Calley case to see what happens to that.5
SOMERVILLE: Is it an unbearable burden to think of man as fully responsible for evil and good in history?
FRYE: I don’t think it’s unbearable because it’s a condition of the human situation. Surely if religion says anything at all, it says that it’s no fair blaming the Devil for your own evil actions.
SOMERVILLE: For your own evil actions? That’s why I asked earlier about the individual. Evil is so rarely individual in history.
FRYE: That’s true. Evil is a part of the whole network, as I said before, of the interaction of moral evil and moral good in society. There is a certain pattern of choices where you feel that your own integrity as a human being is involved. I suppose if you chose the wrong way often enough, eventually the situation in which you could recognize that it was a choice would disappear. In other words, the penalty of losing a temptation is demonic possession.