This essay was written for presentation in Professor George A. McMullen’s course in public speaking, which Frye took during his first year at Emmanuel College (1933–34). Portions of the paper present in a condensed and early form some of the material in “The Relation of Religion to the Art Forms of Music and Drama” (no. 17). Frye received a grade of “A+” for the paper, the typescript of which, entitled “Public Speaking Essay” on the cover sheet, is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 9.
… Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean; so, over that art
Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.
Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale [4.4.89–97]
Nearly all the deeper questions dealt with by modern philosophers bring us at once to the epistemological problem, the question of the theory of knowledge. In an age which prides itself both on its use of scientific methods and on the success with which it has used them, the presentation of a general metaphysical structure has become steadily more difficult. A tendency is now to regard this approach as naive; and the feeling does not decrease with the greater impressiveness of any individual attempt. To the extent that philosophy coordinates the sciences, it is busied necessarily with the question of the origin of knowledge; and this seems the only use the modern world has for speculation.
Now it remains a deep-rooted conviction to many thinkers that the axis of the knowledge problem does not strike through the centre either of religion or of art. No better empiric proof of this is needed, on the one hand, than the way in which modern preachers and artists avoid it; nor, on the other, than the number of utterly unsatisfactory attempts to approach religion or art from this bias, if it be a bias. Which means, of course, bearing in mind our above conclusion, that the science of religion, or theology, has today become a dead language, with the disciplinary value which seems to be inseparable from dead languages, and that aesthetic theory is in abeyance. But it should be noted that the incomplete solutions referred to have a curious tendency to equate the two problems. Anyone whose epistemology is sufficiently inadequate to allow him to regard art as a sublimation of the sex instinct is likely to attribute the same origin to religion. Anyone who regards the religious approach as a valid if perhaps untried route to reality is apt to consider it more or less sentimentally as having a purely artistic function. This would seem to indicate a relationship most peculiarly apposite, even if common sense should prevent its lapsing into identity; for if knowledge is comparison of ideas, how could thinkers fail to differentiate between two problems if two problems were present? Religion and art together merge, with Eddington, into the shadow-replica of the scientist’s universe; with Freud, into the air-castle of the neurotic; with the materialist, into an indivisible enfant terrible. The problem of working out the relationship still remains, and while we do not propose to do this immediately, we might at least indicate the lines any future attempt could conceivably follow.
It is evident that the status of religion and art will have to be determined before twentieth-century thought presents anything like a coherent pattern, and I believe it to be a growing suspicion among contemporary thinkers that, for many reasons, this is actually the prerequisite of such a synthesis. In any case, it will surely be necessary to look behind their various systems to the large tendencies which underlie them. In other words, our approach must be a historical one, taking the traditional developments apart (if I am not mixing metaphors) and extracting from their components the great Zeitgeist characteristics which every age possesses. Our problem must be attacked from the standpoint of that profound constructive skepsis which views each individual philosophy, not as a thing isolated, but as a historical symbol. We begin to sense here the possibility of a historical approach to knowledge irreconcilably opposed to the scientific. For science is concerned with the fact in itself; history, with what it signifies by its appearance.
Going back to the enunciation of the knowledge problem, the Kantian distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself may suggest a further clue. All knowledge derives from sense, moulded by the mind with forms of perception and understanding. All knowledge is, therefore, phenomenal, concerned with the formal limiting of the thing-in-itself. Coherence is necessary to knowledge, form to coherence; and form means limitation. But what we must have abstracted from the thing-in-itself is its timeless, eternal quality, which alone we can apprehend. In other words, all knowledge is space-knowledge, and all phenomena spatial or pictorial. It seems reasonable to conclude that the residual noumenon is the time-existence which eludes knowledge, leading to the principle that time cannot be known, but inferred from the changes in space-forms.
As a man is a phenomenon, and as there is something in each one of us which we ourselves recognize but which escapes the knowledge of anyone else, it appears by analogy that our pure, peculiar ego, considered not in its negative but in its absolute time-existing aspect, is noumenal. Now if we inquire what element of the soul can be said to be the noumenal time-element, we shall find that we ordinarily call it the will; while the ego-effacing space side is even more clearly denominated the reason. But this disjunction is, of course, theoretical only; no one can live either in pure time or in pure space. The most complete life, then, would be the most complete merging of will and reason. But such a coincidence could take place only by finding a common factor and eliminating all actions which do not tend to be subsumed under it. That common factor, going back again to ordinary speech, is the good, the complete synthesis of will and reason, called by Kant the categorical imperative. It is obvious that to enter on a course of good action is to have each action implicated in a compulsion, and this gives us two more standard concepts, the system of compulsions affecting the will, or morality, and the system affecting reason, or logic.
Justice and truth irresistibly suggest the third member of the Platonic triad, beauty, as will and reason similarly suggest feeling. That beauty represents the good element in feeling, and that aesthetics is the system of compulsions controlling it, most would readily grant; but what is feeling? If it is not the same thing as will or reason, it cannot be purely temporal or purely spatial, and as it can hardly exist outside these forms of perception, the only thing left for it to be is a kind of interfusion of time in space. Now feeling is evidently the peculiar and differentiating element in the soul, the reaction of the ego considered as unique. It is, thus, a negative factor. Hence, it certainly cannot be the positive coincidence of will and reason: for reason transcends individuality and could hardly merge with will were the latter a thing essentially distinctive in each person. All wills, considered as pure time-elements, are the same in every man. Hence, feeling, being the negative expression of this synthesis, must be an interfusion of time and space in which the two elements are held together and reflected in the individuality. It is, thus, a reflection, or criticism, of the positive synthesis, which latter it is perhaps time we named. Obviously the will-reason coordination is simply the good life, and it must be all we can mean by any intelligible definition of religion. Religion is the imperative which brings together all souls around one concept, thus establishing the relationship of God to man. Now the individual criticism of this must be the same thing as the expression of it, for expression is a word meaningless apart from an individual. Art, then, is the expression of religion. It does not express either side of religion—that we shall deal with later—it expresses the central meaning of it. That is what so many thinkers mean when they claim that reality, in the last analysis, can be expressed only by a metaphor, myth, symbol, or work of art. For if art expresses religion, its whole appeal is symbolic. This will be later elaborated. We might note just here that while will and reason are democratic in equating personalities, feeling rests on an aristocracy of perceptiveness and sensitivity. This is the reason why the otherwise plausible Tolstoyan dictum, that great art must make an immediate appeal to the uncultivated,1 fails completely on application. Art is essentially esoteric; religion open to all.
Another point must be mentioned for the sake of completeness, though not altogether relevant. If the good life synthesizes will and reason, expressing itself in feeling, it would seem likely that the evil life would reverse the process, exalting the feeling man, the unique ego, above his fellows and bending will and reason to the force we call desire, which aims at the complete satisfaction of the aggressive, assertive personality in happiness, appealing, thus, to a static principle as a goal where the other is creative and dynamic.
It is not suggested, of course, that art presents solely the religious point of view, which would make it as inflexible as the categorical imperative itself. There is and must be a distinction between the art which is creative and moves from religion through the individual and the art which is egocentric and springs from a feeling impulse. This would have to be traced out historically, and it would probably be found that the latter approach could be approximately equated with the romantic. But it is insisted that the truly greatest art is that which most clearly presents a symbolic picture of the deepest religious impulses of the age. No one will imagine that such a view is easy to defend; and I am only too sorry that exigencies of space compel me to leave it in its controversial form of enunciation. The position would become clearer under historical treatment.
Goodness is the whole of beauty, for the two words can be used interchangeably when beauty alone is under discussion; but beauty is not the whole of goodness. The religious good itself, apart from its separate constituents of justice and truth, may be expressed in two other ways. For the synthesis can be attempted one-sidedly; either in overwhelming the will by the reason or the reason by the will. In the first instance the underlying idea is evidently to make the will, the pure time-element, a pure spatial entity: in other words to abnegate the will and immerse the individual (for this is expression of religion, and, consequently, relates to the personality) into a timeless absolute. This is the religious approach we ordinarily call mysticism. Its goal is obviously not so much self-expression, therefore, as self-impression, and its subjugation of personality is united to a withdrawal so complete that communication, the essence of art, becomes difficult if not impossible. There is a long-standing contradiction between the mystic and the artist, and the attempts of the former to express himself (his desire for expression being the result of the comparative inadequacy of the approach) in terms of the latter rests on a compromise. A mystic poet, for example, must sacrifice to the poet the mystic’s self-absorption to be able to become articulate, while he must surrender to the mystic the poet’s love for a deceptive nature and his rapturous acceptance of the sense world.
In the opposite case the attempt is to erect a purely logical structure on the basis of will: that is, proceeding a priori from certain premises necessary to make the synthesis. This is the approach to religion termed the theological. It, like the mystical, is, though an essential factor, inadequate for the central final truth of religion, for a synthesis in which one element has absorbed the other cannot very well be entirely satisfactory. Hence, as one can hardly expect the theologian to yield precedence to the artist of his own accord, there arises an opposition between the two—the more narrow-minded and pedantic the theologian, the deeper his distrust of the artist and the stronger his desire to censor and strangle art. Naturally the artist has to mirror the desiring side of life as well as the religious side, and the most powerful driving force in the former is, of course, the sex impulse. A fearless and open handling of this question is a mark of the great literary artist. It is, therefore, on this that the theologian’s attack is focused.
The root of this opposition lies in the difference between symbolic and explicit expression of religion. Just as art defeats its own ends as it approaches the mystical side and begins to lack communicative force so, too, it defeats its own ends by approaching the theological side and tending to explicit utterance of any teaching, no matter how lofty. It is, of course, very difficult for a great artist, who knows his business, to refrain from swinging over to didacticism. But even in the work of Dante, of Tasso, of Milton, of Spenser, that element is always recognized as antagonistic to true art. Shakespeare is the only figure of the first rank, perhaps, who has kept his own presentation symbolic, and even he, striving to penetrate the uttermost depths of the universe, drops from symbolism to allegory, the explicit statement of symbolism, in his last plays.
The relation that allegory bears to symbolism is paralleled by the relation borne by wit to humour, by pathos to tragedy. The first elements are recognized as less profound than the second, precisely because they suggest less and explain more. Wit is self-evident humour; pathos, self-evident tragedy. Therefore, they are brought into art to relieve the strain of pure suggestion.
Here we see again the necessity for esoteric appeal, the essential of arousing the interest of an adult mind. The appreciation of great art is a prerequisite—perhaps in the last analysis the only prerequisite—of maturity. Consequently, the transmitter of religion—the preacher— is faced with a purely artistic problem. He is most fully expressing religion, performing his greatest work, when his appeal is artistic. But if art is suggestive, it must suggest itself; hence, the explicit utterance leading to it is necessary. The sermon is brought in chiefly to ease the strain of artistic symbolism by establishing a common ground between religion and the worshipper, while music, prayer, architecture, and the rest of the arts subserve, in their turn, the awakening of aesthetic consciousness in the worshipper.
Thus, while the core of religious feeling is art, the whole of religion is not artistic; and a reasoned analysis of the other two approaches to the good, justice and truth, is necessary for completeness. It is the use of the word theologian in the thesis propounded that is unfortunate. For theology, based, necessarily, on the attempt of the will to enslave reason, can last only so long as the sources and derivations of the logic-structure are not examined. Whatever else the contemporary minister may do, he does not teach theology. If he be a philosopher, he has some idea of the systems of compulsions underlying justice and truth and can transmit those. If his appeal is largely theological, he soon ceases to be a vital force in a world which has gone through the investigation of the epistemological problem, which has arrived at a critical position for a century, and for which theology is, consequently, an anachronism. True, an anachronism necessary to culture, like all the contributions of the past, but not a creative force. More and more we are coming to realize that the evocation of response in a sympathetic soul is the primary appeal of religion, and it is to this end that the preaching of the Incarnation is directed.
It is evident that we cannot reach the “truth” of religion through art, because truth belongs to logic and to that alone. But the essential reality of religion is a different matter. If all art is creation, and if this creation is in its turn a criticism, a symbolization, of something else, would it not follow that the creative element was the essential factor in the religion it symbolized? So, at least, modern philosophy seems to believe in large measure. The parallels between the process of organic growth in the world and the rhythmic propulsion underlying art have never been satisfactorily investigated and never will be until a historical approach is made; one which will recognize a creative force in history as well as in biology. Aesthetics, like ethics, must come to realize that it is fundamentally history, not logic or biology. It is here alone that the possibilities for a new approach to religion lie.2