April 4, 2025
Most of the people I know who are not religious are in fact anti-religious, and this includes most of my friends. They may not express it in polite company, but what they feel about religion is an impatience capable of rising to disgusted anger. Back in the 1930’s, when Northrop Frye made the decision to become ordained as a Methodist minister, he had a Marxist friend who said to him, “Minister? You can’t be a minister. You’ve got brains.” However, my friends are not snobs of that sort, and the emotional quality of their rejection makes clear that it is not a form of intellectual elitism, condemning religion as a kind of superstitious ignorance. The visceral nature of much atheism suggests that it is not a conclusion based dispassionately on weighing the evidence, discarding religious belief as an intellectual error no longer tenable in an age of science. Instead, many people’s view is closer to Freud’s: religious belief is not an error but a collective neurosis at best, periodically collapsing into collective psychosis. Much if not most of human suffering throughout history has been perpetrated in its name. Religion is a form of madness, a bizarre irrationality that takes people over en masse and makes them violent, cruel, and intolerant. The best-selling books attacking religion argue from this point of view, including Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006) and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great (2007). Such books are in a tradition of satiric skepticism going back at least to Mark Twain in such late works as Letters from the Earth.
There have been attempts to overhaul Christianity and turn it into a rational belief system, notably Deism in the Enlightenment: many of the Founding Fathers were Deists. But Christianity, like most forms of religion, is originally based not on ideas but on a kind of experience, on what the 18th century called “enthusiasm,” and that experience is irrational, taking the form of a kind of seizure. Eliminating this element left Deism with what was really a form of philosophy with God inserted merely as a First Cause, more or less Aristotle with Christian trappings. This week’s newsletter is a complement to last week’s on love. It asks the question, “What do we talk about when we talk about religion?” There are rational forms of both love and religion, but it is the irrational forms that fascinate me, both negatively and positively. Negatively, I want to understand what is happening to us at this moment in history, as we suffer yet another outbreak of irrationality erupting out of the collective psyche of humankind. Jung understood correctly over a century ago: this keeps happening, leading to world wars and civil wars, and if we do not get a handle on it, it is going to destroy us.
Positively, I say about religion what I said about mythology in The Productions of Time, citing Sturgeon’s Law. The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, when told that 90% of science fiction is crap, responded, “90% of everything is crap.” I am interested in the 10% of religion that is not crap, interested not just intellectually but existentially. Northrop Frye titled his second book on “the Bible and literature” Words with Power. The question “What kind of power?” has to be answered very cautiously, because 90% of religion has been an abuse of power, resulting in authoritarian repression and persecution. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and what else is there to say? Simply that any hope for the human race must lie in the possibility of another kind of power, a creative power that liberates and transforms rather than oppresses. You can call it God—or not. In one of my personal touchstone passages of poetry, Wallace Stevens said, “We say that God and the imagination are one. / How high that highest candle lights the dark.” Stevens was no true believer: this is a man who wrote a famous poem, “Sunday Morning,” from the perspective of a woman who saw no reason to go to church and waste a beautiful sunny Sunday morning. Blake said that “All Religions Are One,” are forms of what he called the Everlasting Gospel, at least insofar as they express Stevens’ kind of sentiment. Others have spoken of a “perennial philosophy,” which is really a religious philosophy.
Such statements are always condemned by people whose term of dismissal is usually “non-Biblical,” which in practice means not how they interpret that mysterious document the Bible. Their view, while it deserves to be respectfully rebutted, is in the end part of the 90%. It would impose a certain type of authority upon the human race on the grounds that humanity is hopelessly corrupt and needs that authority, arguing that disobedience to it is heresy, is blasphemy, is pride, is ultimately a frightening sort of irrational evil. Towards an alternative to that “orthodoxy” is where we are going, with fair warning to those whose patience with religious hysteria has been exhausted. I sympathize with their impatience. Ironically, the most vehement secular humanists often do not seem to have suffered personally from the persecuting kind of religion. I have, having grown up Catholic before Vatican II. I got the whole hellfire and guilt thing shoved down my throat at a young age, and know how psychologically damaging religion can be even when it lacks temporal power to oppress. Somehow or other, though, I shrugged it off, and being terrorized as a teenager seems to have done no permanent damage. I suspect it is because I fairly quickly discovered reasons to have faith, or at least hope, in a more genuine vision. We say of many young men today that they are becoming misogynists because they have no better role model. Today, we lack a positive model of religion. The examples of religion in the news are deeply toxic, and the weakness of Dawkins’ The God Delusion is that he dismisses the genuine forms of religion, saying that they aren’t really what religion is and therefore don’t count. The majority of people, by their own admission, know almost nothing about religion in general and Christianity in particular. All they know are the simple set of beliefs taught by their family and church, as a form of social conventionality rather than anything actually spiritual.
But to recite the Creed is not adequate. If you believe something simply because your church and family believe it, without understanding, you are what Milton called “a heretic in the truth.” Christian doctrine was not delivered full blown in the teachings of Christ. Not only do the four gospels differ from one another but interpretations differ as to what Jesus’ words really meant and how the Church was to carry them out. A major altercation between Peter and Paul recorded in the Acts of the Apostles nearly ruptured the Church before it got out of the New Testament. What we call Christian doctrine was the final result of an internecine strife of individuals and factions, ultimately refereed by a series of acrimonious Church councils. Christian revelation was not handed down in final draft form from on high but was the outcome of a long-drawn-out and very human verbal agon. If we look at the questions that Church Fathers were arguing about for close to four centuries, it is tempting to dismiss them as hair-splitting pedantry over irrelevant abstractions. But bear with me. Strange as it may seem, I think that, buried within their abstruse vocabulary are insights about the deepest of all human problems.
Because of its familiarity and cultural dominance, we are used to thinking of it as religion’s default setting, so to speak, but in reality Christianity is an unusual form of Western religion. The other two Biblical religions, Judaism and Islam, are straightforward monotheisms (although this would have to be qualified if we included the mystical writings of Judaism known as the Kabballah). But Christianity, both Eastern and Western, defines God as a Trinity. This in turn derives from another unusual conception, the idea that God has a Son who descended to earth and incarnated himself, became human. The idea of a divinity descending to this lower world, usually for redemptive purposes, is not unique. Hinduism has the concept of the avatar, a form taken by a god, especially Vishnu, who descends in times of crisis to put the cosmic order aright. Buddhism has the figure of the Boddhisattva, who, out of compassion, vows not to leave the world of illusion until all have attained enlightenment. In some forms, this may involve not just incarnation but reincarnation, as with the Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism. However, for Christianity, Christ is not just a form of God, one of the “masks of God,” in Joseph Campbell’s phrase, but something more radical and paradoxical. He is God, and yet he is at the same time a second identity: “I and the Father are one,” Jesus declared.
As if that were not difficult enough, there is a third person of God, the mysterious Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, who is indeed as elusive as a ghost, precisely because he is not, well, personified like the Father and the Son. The Father is often portrayed, especially in versions of Christianity influenced by Neo-Platonism, as so transcendent as to be inconceivable, yet he is also personified as a loving, if unpredictable father, a personal deity. He is the bearded figure touching fingers with Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Yahweh of Jewish Scripture who had conversations with Adam and Eve in the cool of day before the Fall. But who is the Holy Spirit, and where did he come from? The relationship of the Father and the Son is the heart of the Christian myth: out of the sacrifice of Christ to the Father comes our redemption. Why was that not enough? What need was there to assume the existence of a third person? Especially one who is never personified, never portrayed by an anthropomorphic image.
In trying to answer these questions, Biblical scholarship tends to start with the word “spirit,” pneuma. People use the word “spiritual” in a popular sense to express a feeling. If you check the box “spiritual but not religious” on a dating site, it means you have a feeling for the sacred but are detached from churches. But to say what that sense of the sacred means is difficult. The fourth and most difficult chapter of Frye’s Words with Power on the Bible and literature begins, “But why is our present direction ‘spiritual’?” The word “spirit” appears throughout the New Testament in a shifting way. Sometimes it is a general term for a whole dimension of experience other than the ordinary material world. It can be projected as a supernatural heaven, but it is more profoundly understood as an aspect of this world to which we are normally oblivious, just as there are colors outside the spectrum of our vision and sounds outside the range of our hearing. It is not an alternative to the ordinary material world but a supplement to it, and the idea of a supplement brings with it all the paradoxes explored in the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Northrop Frye’s last book, a kind of sequel to Words with Power, tries to grapple with some of those paradoxes, and for that reason is, I think, his most difficult book. Significantly, it is called The Double Vision. So “spirit” often can be a general term. At other times, it is ambiguous: when Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born again “of water and the Spirit” (John 3:16), it is not clear that “the Spirit” means the agency of a definite being rather than a general power. This is still the case, traditional interpretations notwithstanding, when Matthew 3:16 says, “And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.” After that, 4:1 says, “Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”
The sense of an actual person rather than an impersonal power is signified by the capitalization of “Spirit,” yet it is possible to read the descent of the Spirit in these passages as referring to an inward energy or illumination rather than to an external being. Moreover, the New Testament never speaks of a 3-in-1 deity, which is an inference that depends on a personifying of “Spirit,” something that interpreters have been determined to do even when the sense of a passage would seem to indicate that “spirit” means something like “inner essence or energy of.” In 1 Corinthians 2:11, Paul says, "For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God." No one thinks that “the spirit of man” refers to a separate person rather than to the inward essence of man, and yet the clearly parallel phrase “the Spirit of God” is taken to be another person. Jesus says that he and the Father are one, but never that he and the Spirit are one. Quite the contrary: he consoles his disciples by saying that, although he is going to leave them, he will ask the Father to send the “Paraclete,” a word that can mean either “advocate” or “comforter,” as his replacement (John 14:16). This does sound like a separate being, but after Jesus ascends, the Spirit descends on the apostles at Pentecost not as a person but in the symbolic form of wind and tongues of fire.
As Frye points out in his first Bible book, The Great Code, the intangible elements of air and fire symbolize spirit throughout the Bible, in contrast to the material elements of water and earth. Jesus tells Nicodemus that the Spirit bloweth where it listeth. In short, if the Holy Spirit is a person, he differs from the Father and the Son in that he is never anthropomorphized. He appears instead in the symbolic form of elements that are intangible and, in the case of air, invisible, although the dove may represent the Holy Spirit’s aerial nature at times. But the ambiguous representation of the Holy Spirit is not confusion. The key to the puzzle is that the Trinity is a profound metaphor for the paradoxical triple nature of God as transcendent, embodied, and immanent. God the Father is transcendent, which means he is external and beyond us; Christ is God identified with humanity; but the Holy Spirit is God as indwelling, an inward presence. The inward presence is omnipresent: it is the inward spirit within God, humanity, nature, and the cosmos. Thus the Holy Spirit is the spirit of mediation, of connection.
I belabor this because the Holy Spirit may be the aspect of God most relevant to modern sensibility. The Father and Son are externalized representations, and externalized deities, beings who are supernatural, above nature, seem like mere projections from the modern rational and empirical point of view. All those gods who were out there, up there, are outworn and discarded. “The solar chariot is junk,” said Wallace Stevens. But we are not done, perhaps, with the idea of an inward spirit, a form of God that may not be a person but is nevertheless an interior presence. In modern mythology, the symbols of that internal God are those of the Holy Spirit: on the one hand, fire and light; on the other, air, wind, and breath. In Milton, we see modern mythmaking struggle to come into being. Milton tries to justify the ways of God to men in Paradise Lost by dramatizing the conflicts of the Father, the Son, and Satan, the latter being the symbolic elder son who is passed over in favor of the younger. “Dramatizing” is an apt term: Paradise Lost has, for an epic, a unique dramatic power, and in fact Milton’s earliest sketches for it were as a verse drama. Yet drama is a summoned-up illusion created by special effects. We speak of stage machinery, and such machinery used to be literal. The phrase deus ex machina, the god from the machine, survives from the time when a god appeared to descend onto the stage lowered by machinery. In Elizabethan drama, ghostly or demonic characters rose up from under the stage via a trapdoor, obscured by smoke. But dramas are called “plays,” and their illusions are in the spirit of play, of “let’s pretend.” Only small children or very naïve older ones take the illusions literally, like the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who worry that an actor in a lion costume might cause the ladies in the front row to faint.
The various fundamentalisms are expressions of an anxiety that, if the supernatural melodrama of divine heroes and demonic villains is not literally true, then religion is but a children’s tale or a lie, and there is no spiritual reality. That is because fundamentalism is looking in the wrong place. Milton’s Father and Son justify nothing. I am far from the only reader who finds them abstract and unconvincing, and that is because Milton’s real God was not an outward projection but an inward presence. Milton belonged to the far left wing of Puritanism, a member of the Inner Light group of Protestants that included the Quakers. It is in the four invocations that punctuate Paradise Lost, which are Milton’s Christian version of calling upon a Muse for inspiration, that we find the God whom Milton really believed in, an inward presence. His blindness forced him into himself, where he found a compensating spiritual light, “bright essence of bright effluence increate.” As for the spirit as pneuma, for him it took the form of those shapes made out of air that we call language. Out of his blind depths, words rose spontaneously, with a richness and power matched only by Shakespeare. Among the later Romantics, all profoundly influenced by Milton, Wordsworth senses “a motion and a spirit” in nature, and Coleridge asks,
And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
Christ speaks of the Holy Spirit as a “comforter,” but God can manifest himself as sublime power as well as love. Instead of the “harmonious numbers” that arise from the depths of Milton’s spirit, Shelley’s West wind is a fierce Muse whom he apostrophizes as “Destroyer and preserver.” But he is willing, even eager, to be torn apart like Dionysus as the price of inspiration:
Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth The trumpet of a prophecy…
It is no accident that the verse form Shelley chose for “Ode to the West Wind” is Dante’s terza rima, whose tercets, bound together by intricate rhyme, signify the Trinity.
The early Church Fathers meditated on the Trinity as Tibetan monks meditate upon the symbol of the mandala, a crossed circle signifying the union of opposites on all levels, from the psychological to the cosmic, a kind of symbolic shorthand. The mandala is an order symbol, and so is the Trinity, which indeed is a kind of Christian mandala. Popular Christianity likes to pray, for prayer is the individual connection with a personal God. Whereas the mandala and the Trinity are objects of meditation, and meditation is perhaps a counterbalance to prayer, a way of expanding one’s being beyond the confines of the personal.
The fierce arguments over the nature of the Trinity seem to us merely pedantic because we no longer have any idea of what was at stake. One such argument led, or at least strongly helped to lead, to the split between the Eastern and Western Churches in 1054. Christendom broke apart over the addition by the West of a single word to the Nicene Creed, the catalogue of what Christians believe, ratified by the Council of Nicea in 325. The word was filioque, which simply means “and the Son.” This seems like one of those marital arguments that seizes upon some ridiculously trivial issue which gets blown up into a shouting match, maybe even into a divorce. In this case, it was indeed a divorce. This comparison is far more than a joke. Once again, at the heart of what seems mere abstruse disputation is a question that matters to everyone, in this case the question of how human connection is possible. The marriage ceremony says that two people become one flesh, but how is that unity to be achieved? “Realism” says that somebody has to be the boss: one partner’s decision has to prevail, and of course traditionally that was the husband’s. We’re not buying that kind of unity these days. A unity bought at the price of individuality is wrong, in a marriage as in a government.
But many people feel that forced unity is the only possible solution. That is Hobbes’s argument for absolute monarchy: without it, we are left with “the war of all against all.” A fair number of thinkers on the left when I was younger actually agreed with Hobbes, minus his absolutist “solution.” Human life really is the war of all against all, but perpetual strife is better than coercive unity. There is a third solution, but it is a paradoxical one, and therefore often dismissed as “mystification.” It is the dream of a unity of opposites, an identity-in-difference that Blake spoke of in terms of unified Contraries. In the ordinary world, opposites cannot be unified: the “cloven fiction,” as Blake called it, says that ne’er the twain shall meet—any twain. The spiritual world could be defined as the world in which opposites are identified, and the language of the spirit is that of metaphor, which says that A is B. A metaphor looks twofold, with its two terms, A and B, but it is actually threefold, because there is also the uniting principle signified by the “and.” The structure of the Trinity is metaphorical: the Father and the Son are its A and B, different and yet “consubstantial,” of one substance. The Holy Spirit is the “and,” the mediating, unifying, yet also transforming principle.
Ironically, the Eastern and Western Churches agreed in the end about the principle of unity within the Trinity: three persons yet one God. Mind you, there was another head-of-a-pin style controversy, again over a single word, homoousion, meaning “same in being,” translated into Latin as “consubstantial,” of one substance with. There were Christians who did not believe in the common identity of Father and Son, but felt that the Son was a different and lesser creature. They preferred the term homoiousion, “of similar substance.” Thus, in the common joke, the battle was over a single iota of difference. However, the majority of early Fathers came to agree that the Trinity was three persons but one substance.
What they broke over was over what individuated each Person. The Father’s distinction is to be unbegotten, to be derived from no other Person. He is the Origin, the One, the Mystery. The Son differs from the Father in being “begotten, not made,” according to the Nicene Creed. Another way to put it is that he “proceeds from” the Father. The Son was not made or created as the earth and human beings were. To be created means to be fashioned out of pre-existing stuff of some sort. “Begotten” on the other hand means an emanation directly from the Father’s being. The fiioque controversy was over the Holy Spirit. Eastern Orthodoxy maintains to this day that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. But the Western Church added the word filioque: proceeded from the Father and the Son. To which our first impulse is to say, “Who cares? What difference does it make?”
I am not sure I know the answer to that question. The usual explanation is that the filioque denies the Father his unique role and identity. I gather this means a kind of division of labor: the Father emanates while the Son creates. This may surprise those who, whether out of popular tradition or the influence of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, think of the Father as the Creator in Genesis 1. But in fact the Son is the Logos, the Word, and it is the Word, which is a principle of order, that created everything by giving form to Chaos, although strictly speaking it is theologically correct to say that the Father created the world through the agency of his Word. But still, it is the Son as Logos who does the actual creating, as Milton shows in Book 7 of Paradise Lost. The Son is thus a Creator, not an emanator. The filioque was added only because certain Scriptural passages seemed to indicate that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son. We are still left with the question, “Who cares?” I would think that it would be more satisfying to think of the Trinity not just as a static structure but as a process, even a drama. This way of thinking would return to the narrative myth of Neo-Platonism out of which Trinitarian thinking evolved in the first place. In such a perspective, the Father is the One, the principle of unity. By emanating a Son, he moves from One to two, from unity to polarity. The Son, as the Logos, creates the ordered multiplicity we call the cosmos. But the Holy Spirit, whatever his origin, as the principle of connection and reunification, unites all things created, and in doing so creates a nostos, a homeward journey back to their origin in the One. In his book on Romantic mythology, Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams calls this the Great Circle. His thesis is that Romantic mythmaking returned to the idea of the Great Circle but revised it. Instead of all things being subsumed into the One again, the Romantic version of the Circle is progressive. Multiplicity and difference are not just melted back into the One again but united with the One on a new basis of identity-in-difference.
The emanation of the Son, who is secondary and derived, might seem to imply an inferiority on his part, as well as a power difference: Fathers rule and Sons obey, or they are supposed to. Or they may not. Freud taught us about the real-life relations of fathers and sons. His exemplary figure was Oedipus, who killed his father and cursed his sons. I am presently re-reading Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a modern version of the murderous relations between fathers and sons. Why the inveterate antagonism? Because, once again, in the fallen world unity is not possible, only strife born of the will to power. Fatherhood expands into patriarchy, and thus into kingship. Thus the Father is the king of kings and lord of lords, the lawgiver on the throne who seems so out of date in a democratic age. Kings may be benevolent tyrants, but they are tyrants, ruling by coercion.
Christ is a dream of the Christian unconscious of the possibility of transcending the Oedipal conflict. In ordinary life, the child wants to live according to the pleasure principle, but its desires are constantly restrained by the Law personified in the figure of the Father, not just the biological father but also the various father-substitutes of social authority figures. This Oedipal conflict is resolved by the child’s coming to identify with the father, who becomes a role model. But this process is imperfect. Buried within every one of us is a suppressed personification of desire like Milton’s rebellious Satan. That is one way of understanding “original sin”: Adam and Eve sided with Satan, choosing desire over obedience, and we bear that inclination within us from birth. That is why we are thrilled by Satan the titanic rebel in the first two books of Paradise Lost, and may even feel that he is the real hero. But the question is insistent and deserves to be answered. Why is Christ’s obedience to the Father not just subservience to power? Why is Christianity not what Nietzsche called it, slave morality? To an anti-Christian like Shelley, it was exactly that. He wrote Prometheus Unbound, the present subject of the Expanding Eyes podcast, to show the triumph of the fiery rebel and the deposing of the tyrant king of the gods. Blake, who invented his own mythology, showed the revolt of the fire-haired Orc, the spirit of the French and American revolutions but also of liberated sexual desire, rebelling against Urizen, the frozen tyrant on the throne insisting on “one law” for everything and everyone. Yet what can the result of such a revolutionary program be but complete anarchism? Isn’t that the lesson of the French Revolution, which devolved into a chaotic Reign of Terror highly comparable to what is happening in the United States right now? We can have unity, maintained by coercive force and the repression of desire, or we can have individualism that creates chaos by refusing to accept any restraints whatsoever.
The theology that won out in Western Christendom was a conservative structure that maintained a distance between Creator and creature, humanity and God. Because of the Fall, humanity is basically sinful and deserving of damnation. It is incapable of obeying the Law and must be saved by a higher power, in the form of Christ. Not everyone is saved, however, and, since all salvation depends on divine grace, the inescapable inference is that God has, for inscrutable reasons, predestined some people for salvation and some for damnation. It is possible to read the Jesus of the gospels as a rebel figure crucified by authorities who feared he might start a revolution. The Magnificat, the hymn that Mary bursts into at the Annunciation, speaks of social justice and the fall of princes. Jesus opposed a Jewish Law that had frozen into legalism, but refused the role of revolutionary, saying his kingdom was not of this earth. But he was a revolutionary by default, so to speak, because his entire message was that his kingdom was at hand, and the advent of his spiritual kingdom would spell the end of all the earthly kingdoms.
However, when Jesus left and his kingdom continued not to arrive, the Church began its process of becoming a temporal power. Its message was obedience to the Law, now embodied in an infallible Pope. The humane and potentially revolutionary Jesus of the first coming was eclipsed by the Christ of the Second Coming, a terrifying judge who would enforce and punish, casting people into an eternal hell from which there was no possibility of reprieve. Such a description emphasizes the negative side of Western theology, and is thus one-sided. But it is not inaccurate, so far as it goes, and explains why Western thinking was so preoccupied with theodicy, the problem of the existence of evil and innocent suffering. In the doctrine of the Atonement, Christ’s self-sacrifice pays off humanity’s debt to the Father which humanity cannot pay itself. Justice demands satisfaction for Adam and Eve’s disobedience, a demand that falls upon their descendants. Since the offence was infinite, only an infinite recompense will satisfy. The question is why Adam and Eve are guilty, since God not only made them and therefore made whatever character flaw led them to disobey, but in fact knew they would disobey even as he was making them. The usual answer is that he needed to preserve human free will, but that still does not explain why human free will chose evil over good. Only a flawed creature would knowingly choose evil, and God as their creator is responsible for any design flaws.
There is an alternative to this dismal perspective, however. I first encountered it in Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye’s landmark book on William Blake, 55 years ago. It begins with a different understanding of the Incarnation, in which Christ descended and became wholly human without ceasing to be divine. According to the usual understanding, this identification of God and man was unique to Christ. We remain poor miserable creatures who are redeemed by this condescension. But Blake’s is what he himself called a “fourfold vision.” Thus, Frye says, “If the highest state of man is fourfold in Blake’s symbolism, we should expect him to reject the doctrine of a threefold God” (52). And the fourth member of his quaternity is Man. The purpose of the Incarnation was not to pay a legal debt through offering up a human sacrifice, a repellent notion, but to return Man to his original identity as the fourth Person of God. And the crucial agent bringing this about is the Holy Spirit:
Yet the conception of God as a Holy Spirit, the giver and incubator of life, the indwelling person of God, the eternal Self, is, once again, the unity in which the reality of the other two consists. It was the Holy Spirit that spoke by the prophets, which means that it continues to speak by the artists who have prophetic imaginations. The “inspiration” which artists have is therefore the breath or spirit of God which dwells in the artist and is the artist. Such inspiration is the only proof we have of the existence of a spiritual power greater than ourselves. Art, then, is “the gift of God, the Holy Ghost.” | What did the Holy Spirit that spoke by the prophets speak about? It prophesied the Messiah; that is, it saw God as man and understood that “God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is”….The Son and the Holy Spirit are therefore the same thing. And this Son or Spirit is also the universal Man who is the unified form of our scattered imaginations, and which we visualize as a Father. The three persons of the Trinity are to be connected by ors rather than ands, and the real God is fourfold, power, love and wisdom contained within the unity of civilized human imagination. This God is a God-Man… (52-53)
Many years later, a review by Herbert J. Levine [“How Many Bibles?” Georgia Review 36 (Winter 1982): 900-04] of Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature expressed a conventionally negative reaction to such an understanding of Christianity:
In Frye, creator and creature are simply projections of the master-slave duality; for him, true freedom lies in smashing the anxiety-structures we build around our social and religious institutions. The Christian notion of original sin, claiming that man cannot fulfill his destiny without divine help, simply expresses (in Frye’s liberated view) man’s fear of his own freedom. The ex-Christian Frye, who has apparently passed beyond good and evil, imagines us as self-delighting, self-enlightening beings capable of our own redemption. (904)
What is obviously irritation causes Levine to caricature what The Great Code actually says. During the question period after a paper, some mischievous listener had the nerve to quote this passage and ask Frye, “Did you write The Great Code as an ex-Christian” (267). Frye responded:
Well, I don’t know this audience very well, so I can’t express my opinion of those sentences in a language that I think is appropriate to them. The United Church of Canada, of which I am an ordained clergyman, would be surprised to hear that I am an ex-Christian. I think that the answer to the reviewer’s puzzlement is simply that all my life I have learned my views of Christianity more or less from Blake, who would never split the efforts of man from the efforts of God. He would say that God works only through man, and that only when the divine and the human become identified is man himself created and genuinely alive. And certainly mere man, or natural man, can do nothing about it by himself—and to that extent the conception of original sin is quite valid. The reviewer has accepted it and so have I. It doesn’t mean, however, that you are going to call an objective God down out of the sky to help man in his state of original sin. That God that will help not only works through man but is the man. (267-68)
Well, but Blake was a marginal eccentric, wasn’t he, so isn’t Frye’s interpretation of the Christianity also eccentric? Blake has an early engraved work called “There is No Natural Religion,” which exists in two versions. The second version ends with the aphorism, “Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.” But, as at least one Blake critic (S. Foster Damon) has noticed, Blake is actually quoting here a famous saying of one of the great Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Athanasius of Alexandria. It comes from an essay called “On the Incarnation,” one of the most important sources for the Orthodox doctrine of theosis, or deification. According to all the scholars included in the volume Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, deification lies at the center of Orthodox theology, and is not an outlier view of a few mystics. In the Orthodox interpretation, deification and not atonement was the purpose of the Incarnation. It was part of God’s original plan, before the Fall made redemption necessary. This idea cannot be dismissed as “non-Biblical.” Rather, it was derived from certain Scriptural passages that are usually interpreted according to the rule that, if it sounds radical, the authors of Scripture must not really have meant what they said; also from certain passages that are usually ignored altogether. Among the former is the source text 2 Peter 1:4, which says that believers will become “partakers of the divine nature.” Michael J. Christensen observes that this happens as a result of the Incarnation: “’being united with Christ’ was the means of deification” (24).
The Incarnation was, then, not just a damage-control response to the Fall but part of a cosmic plan that antedated it. That plan was that humanity should be, not just redeemed, but what Dante called “transhumanized,” although we have to be careful about wording. This does not mean something like post-humanism, the idea that we will leave our humanity behind and become something else. Rather, the promise is that we may ascend into our full humanity: what we are now, the fallen “natural man,” is less than human. Christensen quotes a battery of the major Eastern Church Fathers who unanimously endorse the vision of deification:
According to Gregory of Nyssa (335-99), there are no limits to the degree of perfection, knowledge of God, or Godlikeness that can be progressively achieved….Cyril of Alexandria (370-444) spoke of deification as the supreme goal of created beings. By progressive participation and interpenetration, God and humanity are unified….In the sixth century, Maximus the Confessor (580-662) also understood the process of theosis as perichoresis—an “interpenetration” of God and humanity. (26-27)
Readers of Frye know that “interpenetration” is one of his central terms, and perichoresis is sometimes also called “co-inherence,” the central term of the third great Inkling after Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: Charles Williams. Where did Williams get the term from? An early classic about Orthodox theology, God in Patristic Thought by G. L. Prestige (1936, 2nd edition 1952). Williams constructed his own version of Christian theology based on the idea that all things are co-inherent—God, humanity, the cosmos—and that we are co-inherent in one another. A Scriptural source for this is one of those passages either ignored or read reductively, Jesus’ prayer to his Father about his apostles in John 18: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us…I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one” (verses 21, 23). When Paul speaks of the “mystical body of Christ,” the safe, reductionist reading is that he is only saying, “Well, we all belong to the same church.” But Paul also said, in I Corinthians 15:28, that after the end of time (and space), God will be “all in all,” a phrase that Milton quotes repeatedly. And he means it non-reductively: in a great speech in Book 4 of Paradise Lost, Raphael unfolds a vision that is deification in all but the name. If they remain obedient, he says, human beings will be spiritualized until they may rise to heaven at will.
There is no doubt that such a theology entails a risk of what Jung called “inflation,” which is what Herbert Levine was accusing Frye of. After all, the snake tempted Eve with the promise “Ye shall be as gods” interpreted, as the natural man interprets everything, as an expression of the will to power. Christensen adds a footnote conceding that “The idea of deification sounds blasphemous or too pretentious to some and totally absurd and non-Christian to others” (31). Andrew Louth writes that “Negatively it has often been claimed that deification stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the biblical doctrine of justification and represents most clearly the way in which Greek and Orthodox theology has strayed from authentic Christianity” (32). Positively, on the other hand, it may be that it is in the doctrine of theosis “that Western Christians will find what they are most in need of from the Orthodox tradition” (32).
What is it that the West needs? A way out of the dead-end problem of theodicy, the impossible task of trying to justify the ways of an all-powerful, all-knowing God punishing his creatures for sins he has predestined them to commit, the task of trying to say that the unspeakable suffering of billions of people is somehow part of God’s plan. These spin-control apologetics are exactly what cause so many good people to despise religion. In the last decade of his life, Jung became darkly obsessed with this issue, attacking the doctrine of the privatio boni, which says that evil is not an essence in itself but is only the absence of good. He had an appalling vision of evil as the dark side of God, God’s shadow, denying that God was all-good. It is that shadow which is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born in our time. His long and enormously complicated essay “A Psychological Approach to the Trinity” (1948) views God as a quaternity in which the devil is the fourth person.
But if we honestly admit the darkness, how are the opposites of dark and light to be united? Jung seems to have a rather sketchy answer, and at times sounds almost like a Manichean dualist. There seems to be something only partly developed in his argument here. He speaks of a “transcendent function” that unites opposites, but the very abstractness of the name from a man who said he preferred concrete terms may indicate an absence. It is comparable to the situation in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, where Demogorgon comes and sweeps Jupiter off his throne, and the reader asks, “Who in the hell are you?” and gets no answer. Something like Blake’s theory of the imagination lies in the area of the transcendent function, and Jung’s essay on the Trinity is especially interested in the Holy Spirit as a unifier of opposites, and therefore as the Comforter. In Blake, evil is not an essence but an error. The imagination’s job is the casting out of error by means of “expanding eyes.” To the extent that it succeeds in doing so, the world is transformed into something like the vision of Orthodox theology, a vision of God, humanity, nature, and the cosmos as co-inherent, interpenetrating, all in all. To a few of the bolder Fathers, notably Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, a vision of God as “all in all” implied the possibility of apokatastasis or universal salvation, not only of all humanity but possibly even of the devil himself, although, expectably enough, the idea was condemned as heretical. As an individual experience, it resembles that of Yeats in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.” When he casts out remorse—the sense of guilt and sin—“So great a sweetness flows into the breast / That we are blessed by everything, / And everything we look upon is blessed.”
Note:
I first learned about deification from a book recommended by my friend Samantha Hill: Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr. Wiley & Sons, 2024. My thanks to Samantha for the recommendation and for our long and deep friendship.
References
Christensen, Michael J. and Jeffery A. Wittung. Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Tradition. Baker Publishing Group, 2008.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, 1947. Also published as volume 14 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Frye, Northrop. “The Survival of Eros in Poetry.” In ‘The Secular Scripture’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991. Edited by Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Volume 18 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006. Originally published in Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Edited by Robert D. Denham. University Press of Virginia, 1990. The question-and-answer session is included only at the end of the Collected Works version.
Jung. C. G. “A Psychological Approach to the Trinity.” In Psychology and Religion: West and East. 2nd edition. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 11 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, 1958, 1969. 107-200.