Northrop Frye (1912 – 1991)
Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit.
The real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come. (2:568)
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that is transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun. He is the sun.
It apparently takes social scientists much longer than poets or critics to realize that every mind is a primitive mind, whatever the varieties of social conditioning.
The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega. (21.190)
The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts...Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.
All texts are incarnational, and the climax of the entire Christian Bible, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," is the most logocentric sentence ever written.(1:154)
A community`s art is its spiritual vision.
The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Under the stimulation of a "great age" or certain period of clarity in art a wider diffusion of genius becomes actual suggests to me that it is always potential.
The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.
All verbal structures are mythical.
Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone.
I'm a Blakean, a visionary disciple...But I'm always torn between feeling that the cock crows because he has a vision of the dawn, or because he feels stimulated by standing on top of a pile horseshit. (1942, entry #24)
I don`t want the reduction of religion to aesthetics, but the abolition of aesthetics & incorporating of art with the Word of God.
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favour with its original audience as a new generation up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of "quaint" and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.