In a meeting with the Unitarian Universalist minister who will be marrying us exactly one year and one day after this newsletter appears, my fiancée and I were asked about our spiritual beliefs. I groaned, though I had known it was coming. How can someone teach and write about religion and mythology for an entire lifetime and not be able to answer such a simple question? But I am terrible at it, every time, and this newsletter is, if nothing else, an attempt to explain why. The minister had to ask because, alphabetically speaking, UU is DIY. There is no required theology or creed. Although Lori and I are no longer official church members (I’m done with organized religion, I have to say), this kind of openness appeals to both of us. It may appear eccentric, especially to religious conservatives who would regard it as the kind of pathetic reductio ad absurdum that a confused, weak-minded, relativistic liberalism always ends up with in its attempt to please everyone. No, they would say: you must believe This, like it or not. You don’t get to pick and choose from a religious smorgasbord: that is just warm and fuzzy narcissism. Of course, what This consists of varies according to the particular brand of “orthodoxy.” Well, the first tenet of my religious beliefs is that I reject all denominations of orthodoxy, and in fact define my perspective as its antithesis.
Not everyone subscribes to the monolithic exclusivism of orthodoxy. In the conclusion to his monumental four-volume study of world mythology, The Masks of God, Joseph Campbell says that the necessity of creating or discovering your own version of religion, your own mythology, is in fact the modern condition. Far from being a delusion of a few spoiled, privileged people used to having the choice of anything they want in life, it is in fact the universal situation of which “orthodoxy” is only a hysterical denial. As he says, “today all norms are in flux, so that the individual is thrown, willy-nilly, back upon himself, into the inward sphere of his own becoming…There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism—the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity—are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself” (677). That is why the last volume of The Masks of God is titled Creative Mythology. The condescending contempt with which Campbell is with some frequency dismissed by other scholars is in part a reaction to this creative individualism. The conservatives hate the “creative,” the radicals hate the “individualism.” But the dirty secret is that the orthodoxies themselves are constructs, creative mythology in sheep’s clothing.
How does one construct one’s own mythological vision, especially if one is not, like Campbell, an erudite scholar? A possible answer, respectful but firm, is that we might throw off the all-too-common attitude of passive acceptance and start learning a thing or two—an exhortation applicable in the political context as well. Much of the crisis in American democracy is occurring because the total political “knowledge” of the average American can be summed up as “Biden’s too old, because I’ve read a dozen media sources saying so, and coffee doesn’t cost what it did in 2019, so he’s a failure.” Bob Dylan said that “Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” He said it a long time ago, and Jones still doesn’t know. In a passage I have quoted elsewhere, Blake said, “I do not care if a man is good or evil. I care if he is a wise man or a fool. Go, put off holiness and put on intellect.” Those who dismiss such an attitude as “elitism” may prefer that people remain ignorant and passive because people are more suggestible and obedient when they are in the condition of sheep.
What if one does set about constructing one’s own vision, one’s own myth? On what foundation should it be founded, mindful of the Biblical warning about the house built on sand? Admittedly, it is a formidable task. When I laid my own foundation, not satisfied with a mere doorstop, I wrote a book that could be used literally as a foundation: The Productions of Time ended up being 450 pages long. Like all imaginative constructs, it is a bricolage, an assemblage of what I managed to stumble upon in a lifetime of reading, and my reading was so wide-ranging because I wanted to construct a house of many mansions. For all that, the consensus of contemporary thought in the humanities is resolutely “anti-foundationalist,” a term whose meaning was expounded by the philosopher Richard Rorty in a famous book called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Briefly, Rorty argues that there is no foundation because there is no truth. Truth is what he called “truth of correspondence”: a statement or a text is true if it corresponds to something outside itself in external reality. A century of philosophy and literary theory have, he argues, shown that no such correspondence is possible. Hence we are without a foundation, in free fall. Below our feet, the abyss. Rorty’s argument voiced the prevailing skepticism throughout the humanities when I was young. A good deal of it was, in my view, merely radical chic nihilism, but the best of it mounted a powerful challenge.
For many in the modern period, science replaced religion as the truth-language of authority. A lot of people, scientists and non-scientists alike, trusted science because it was materialist: it postulated a reality with a solid foundation of physical “stuff” underneath all surface phenomena, a foundation implicit in the word “sub-stance.” Samuel Johnson kicked a stone and said that the pain in his foot refuted the philosopher Berkeley’s Idealism, which maintained that reality was a mental creation. The reduction of science to this kind of materialism was called “positivism,” and it had a great appeal to the no-nonsense anti-intellectualism of a great number of people. It was a tough-minded posture that claimed to be “objective” because it reduced all phenomena, including living things, to objects.
True science, however, as opposed to the reductionist ideology of such “scientism,” developed increasingly in the 20th century towards a dematerializing of reality. James Jeans in The Mysterious Universe (1930) and Gaston Bachelard in a series of books on the philosophy of science, exposed materialism as an instance of the emperor’s new clothes. What was supposed to be reliably solid “stuff” was first deconstructed into atomic particles, which were in turn shown to be manifestations of sub-atomic particles, which were ultimately more like fields of energy, which increasingly were “proved” less with physical tests than with mathematical equations. And mathematical equations are not transcendent realities like Plato’s Forms: they are mental constructs. A century and a half later, Berkeley has the last laugh. It was no accident that Bachelard went on to write a series of books on poetics, about the imaginative constructs of the arts, corresponding to the mathematical constructs of science.
Hamlet wished that his too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew. Careful what you wish for: in our time, the dissolving of reality, the deconstruction of any kind of foundation, has gone far beyond dew. Even the disappearance of matter into mathematics is not the end point. Mathematical proof is sometimes said to be superior to empirical truth because it is based on logical conclusions that are inescapably true. But attempt of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in Principia Mathematica to show that mathematics can be reduced to logic and is thus inescapably true failed because Kurt Gödel showed that all logical and mathematical systems depend on certain assumptions outside the system that cannot be proved within the system. They must merely be assumed on…faith. So mathematics is not necessarily coherent in itself. In addition, any attempt to apply mathematics to explain empirical phenomena is interpretive, and subject to errors of judgment and to ideological and emotional bias. As we learned the hard way during the pandemic: the public was lectured that it should "follow the science." But the interpretations of the scientists kept shifting—which is perfectly normal in science, where all conclusions are tentative and subject to revision in light of new evidence. But when a frightened and frustrated public wanted trustworthy answers and was only given tentative and shifting interpretations, it led to a doubting of scientific method that has developed into a widespread questioning of science in other contexts. Finally, we know that some scientists can be bought, like those who are paid by Big Oil to cast doubt on climate research, and that some scientists become cranks. Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but his unquestioning faith that vitamin C prevented colds and who knows what else was about as scientific as a rabbit’s foot.
Faith in some sort of foundational “reality principle” based on the conviction that there has to be some kind of stubborn foundation that will not budge, that resists the mind’s attempt to believe in any old kind of wish fulfilment fantasy, is often regarded as a kind of elevated common sense. It is the attitude of Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose famous speech on the imagination is actually a speech against the imagination. With complacent elitist condescension, Theseus puts down three kinds of people who are controlled by their imaginations and therefore see things that are not “there,” that are hallucinations. The lover sees a beautiful lady instead of Dulcinea the peasant girl. The lunatic is a religious fanatic who sees hells and demons everywhere, in contrast with the poet, an idealist who sees heavens and earthly paradises everywhere. All are delusional: they take the visions of the imagination literally, meaning factually. The lower class characters of the play, the rude mechanicals, are terribly worried that their audience is as naïve as they are, and might take a man in a lion costume to be a real lion.
The moral is that we should prove all things, and hold fast to those for which we have the evidence of our senses guided by our reason, not believing blindly in the images that may be generated by our desires and fears. Theseus admits that the events of the play have been strange and uncanny, but he refuses to entertain the notion that some unseen power has been directing the action behind the scenes. Only a naïve and gullible person would say, “Must have been fairies”—but Theseus is wrong: the fairies are real. There are more things in heaven and earth than are believed by Theseus’s philosophy. To add one more Shakespearean drama into the mix, Othello demands of Iago “ocular proof” that his wife is a whore. He is going to be a hardheaded empiricist rather than naively believing in his wife’s goodness just because he sees examples of it every day. But his toughminded “realism,” his demand for a secure foundation of factual proof of Desdemona’s goodness rather than just taking it on faith, leads him to destroy his wife, his world, and his own identity.
It might seem, then, that the desire for some kind of foundation of factual proof to ground faith is wrongheaded and sometimes potentially dangerous. That is quite true, as is illustrated in the Bible itself by Doubting Thomas, who demands to touch the wounds in the risen Christ’s hands and feet before he will believe in the Resurrection. Some scholars speculate that the story was inserted in John 20 in order to refute the claim of some Gnostics that the Christ of the Resurrection was merely an apparition. But the point of the story is quite the opposite, for Jesus tells Thomas that they are blessed who do not need such tangible proof. Those who do are nowadays called fundamentalists, a name more or less equivalent to foundationalist. Fundamentalists claim that they are literalists, that their faith is based on Scripture, the Word of God. But in their view, the words of Scripture are grounded upon and validated by a factual and historical truth. As Northrop Frye points out in a number of places, most extensively in the first chapter of The Double Vision, “The Double Vision of Language,” the fundamentalists are not really literalists at all. The Word to them is subordinate to the facts and events that guarantee its truth. It is the facts and events, of which Scripture is only a record, that they believe in. But they have to believe in them blindly, because Thomas was lucky: no one since his time has been a direct witness of the events of the Gospels. All anyone has had since that time are the stories. The problem with stories is that they are interpretable, a problem fundamentalism can only deal with by denial, insisting that the Bible has a plain sense obvious to anyone, not needing any fancy interpretation. But fundamentalist theologians do not agree on that plain and obvious sense.
That is because it does not exist, and, indeed, two centuries of modern scholarship has shown that “the Bible” itself in a sense does not exist. It is a construct, and it has been deconstructed in a way that strikingly resembles the dematerialization of the material world in modern science. First of all, the Bible consists of multiple books that have been selected to form a canon, a definitive and authoritative collection. There are other books, including other gospels, such as the Gnostic scriptures, that were excluded by a long and highly ideological process. The books of the Old Testament are composites, redactions of narratives by multiple, anonymous authors. The books of the New Testament have authors, but the names attached are often not the real authors. The scholarly consensus is that Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John did not write the gospels named after them. Moreover, the latter three, the so-called synoptic gospels, are composites, based on Mark combined with another source referred to as Q. A good number of Paul’s letters are not in fact by Paul himself. There is no evidence for the existence of Jesus outside the gospel accounts, and those accounts are contradictory in large ways and small. You can say that the narrative discrepancies do not matter; it is not essential to know what day the Crucifixion took place. But the teaching itself is disjunctive: if we only had the Gospel of John, we would have no parables, but instead a series of metaphors, such as the "I am" metaphors: I am the vine, the way, and so on. Can we not just combine them? But problems remain.
Some scholars doubt whether John believed in the Parousia, the Second Coming of Christ, while Matthew is obsessed with it. According to Understanding the New Testament, “John transformed the eschatological teachings of Jesus and of the early Christian community. For John, life in the Kingdom is presented primarily as a present reality rather than a future expectation….he no longer pictures an apocalyptic figure coming on the clouds of heaven to effect final judgment. The final judgment has already begun with the coming of the Son of Man: it is an event that is now occurring in history as a result of the coming of Jesus Christ” (350-51). As if there were not problems enough with Christ’s first coming, the central event of which is the Resurrection. There were no witnesses at all to the Resurrection. Mark ends with an empty tomb, and in the other gospels an already-risen Jesus begins appearing to his followers. In the early 20th century, the highly influential New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann rejected the search for the “Jesus of history,” for which there is no evidence outside the gospel accounts themselves. But at the same time, he suggested that the New Testament had been kidnapped by “myth,” by which he meant any kind of supernaturalism, and the central myth is that of the Resurrection. Christ has been turned into another of the “dying god” figures common to the contemporary Mystery religions of his time. Bultmann therefore advocated “demythologizing” Scripture. But if the historical Jesus is rejected on the one hand and a supernatural dying-god Jesus is rejected on the other, what is left? The answer is kerygma, often translated “proclamation,” a kind of rhetorical teaching whose content bore a distinct resemblance to the existentialist philosophy by which Bultmann was influenced. This is hardly a new idea: the idea that Jesus was not a supernatural Redeemer but a moral teacher was already more or less the view of Shelley a century before. The teaching has merely been updated.
My foundation early in life, long before I became an academic myself, was in the work of Northrop Frye. Eventually I became the editor of his second book on “the Bible and literature,” Words with Power, for the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. How could Frye continue to accept the Bible as a foundation while rejecting fundamentalism on the one hand and the type of secularization represented by “demythologization” on the other? To him, the Bible was not factual and historical, yet it was not just a work of literature either, a work of fiction whose stories were just illustrations of moral truths. How is this possible? In The Double Vision, Frye begins by rejecting what is inaccurately called literalism:
In the early Christian centuries it was widely assumed that the basis of Christian faith was the descriptive accuracy of the historical events recorded in the New Testament and the infallibility of the logical arguments that interconnected them. This pseudo-literalism was presented as assertion without the evidence of sense experience, and belief became a self-hypnotizing process designed to eke out the insufficiency of evidence. (177)
People often ask why we can’t accept the New Testament account “on faith” despite the lack of evidence. The answer is that the need for an absolute truth, for a foundation beyond doubt, makes such uncertainty intolerable for all but an exceptional minority:
So when words failed, as they usually did, recourse was had to anathematizing those who held divergent views, and from there it was an easy step to the psychosis of heresy-hunting, of regarding all deviation from approved doctrines as a malignant disease that had to be ruthlessly stamped out. | I am, of course, isolating only one element in Christianity, but cruelty, terror, intolerance, and hatred within any religion always mean that God has been replaced by the devil, and such things are always accompanied by a false kind of literalism. At present some other religions, notably Islam, are even less reassuring than our own. (177-78)
The reference in the last sentence is to the fatwa on Salmon Rushdie.
Frye’s two related examples of how a “literal” reading of the Bible breaks down are the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke and the story of the “Virgin Birth.” First, the two genealogies, designed to show that Jesus as Messiah descended from the house of David, do not agree. Second, what they trace is the line of Joseph—but according to the doctrine of the Virgin Birth Jesus was not actually the son of Joseph but of the Holy Spirit. So the genealogies are not only contradictory but pointless. Third, the Virgin Birth is one of those supernatural stories that Bultmann would demythologize. That the Messiah would be born of a virgin goes back to a translation of halma, young woman, as virgin, Greek parthenos, in Isaiah 7:14. So the Virgin Birth is a translation error, though not a simple error: it assimilates Jesus to the myth of the hero with a divine father and human mother. Thus, a “literalist” approach to the stories ends in contradiction and confusion. The genealogies try to make the Messiah into a historical ruler like Shakespeare’s Henry V; the story of the Virgin Birth tries to make him a supernatural dying-god figure. Neither works.
Instead, Frye suggests what he calls “metaphorical literalism” (222) as an alternative to the false literalism of fundamentalism. Literalism ought to mean looking at the actual language of the Bible, and if we do so, we find that the Bible, although not a work of literature, is written in the imaginative language of literature, which is myth and metaphor. What do we do with that language? We do not “believe in it,” yet neither do we dismiss it as a bedtime story left over from the childhood of the human race. To use my own lingo, the myths and metaphors of the Bible have to be, first, decreated, which means removed from their reference to some kind of reality outside themselves, whether historical or supernatural. But then they have to be recreated as referring to another kind of reality beyond the experience of the ordinary ego, a reality that they do not just point to but participate in and realize. Through this recreative process, they are transfigured from what Frye calls the merely “hypothetical” nature of myths and metaphors in literature to a higher level of language for which Frye borrows the term kerygma.
Metaphor then becomes, not a literary ornament, but what he calls “ecstatic metaphor,” a sense of identity with an Other that paradoxically preserves the unity of both self and Other, whether the other is God, another human being, or nature. Ecstatic metaphor expands, or rather explodes, into a unity of all things, a cosmic order that is also a cosmic love and the source of universal empathy, a cosmic Self not limited by the boundaries of time and space. Kerygmatic myth does not “run away from history,” as the Marxists are always accusing Frye of doing, but works progressively in fallen history to redeem it. Hegel spoke of an aufhebung or “lifting up,” by which mind evolves through history towards becoming Spirit, but Hegel identified this dialectic with ordinary history, so that historical progress became identified with the “progress” of the Prussian state, a mission that would later be the root of the demonic religion of Nazism. The Middle Ages spoke of an “anagogic” level of meaning above the literal one, but in practice the anagogic vision was postponed until the end of time, when the seven seals are finally broken and the book of revelation is opened. Any attempt to proclaim it in the here and now was persecuted as heresy, because it threatened the institutional power of the Church.
In short, the Bible offers a vision, through its myths and metaphors, of a transformed reality that is neither natural nor supernatural but what Carlyle called “natural supernaturalism.” The great scholar of Romanticism M.H. Abrams titled his book on the Romantic tradition Natural Supernaturalism because it was the Romantics who recognized the kerygmatic nature of the Biblical vision and identified it with the creative imagination. As Abrams shows, the Romantic theory of the imagination was influenced by the left-wing Inner Light movement of 17th century Protestantism, which produced some remarkable figures such as Gerard Winstanley, who, like Blake after him, read the Bible metaphorically rather than historically. Milton emerged from the Inner Light tradition, which is why he became the single greatest influence on all the Romantic poets. Blake’s struggle in his epic Milton is to refine Milton’s genuine vision of God as the Inner Light spoken of so beautifully and movingly in the invocations of Paradise Lost, to free it from its residual historicism and legalism, most notoriously evident in the pompous God the Father ruling from his throne on high in the third book.
And make no mistake, the Bible itself has to be refined, not just external readings of it. It is full of passages that justify, as the will of God, genocidal warfare, sexism, anti-Semitism, and so much that is abhorrent that I can readily understand those of my students who say that they are too repelled by it to be able to consider it a foundation, even though it has been a foundation for Western culture and literature for 2000 years. It is, after all, not the only kerygmatic text, and in fact kerygma is a way of reading and not an essential quality of a particular text. When he wrote his first book on the Bible, The Great Code, Frye rather firmly insisted that literature cannot be kerygmatic, only hypothetical, or, in a word, aesthetic. This seemed to be to confine literature to the kind of art-for-art’s-sake aestheticism that Marxists and other social activists rightly distrust. Only once while I was his assistant did I have the courage to question this position a little in his presence, saying timidly that Blake surely intended his Prophecies to be transformative and not “hypothetical.” When Words with Power finally appeared, I was delighted to see an entire discussion of literature as a spectrum that begins with the hypothetical but shades on one end towards the kerygmatic. I do not think for one moment that I influenced this, but I confess to the vanity of thinking smugly, “Well, I was right.” But it matters, beyond my silly ego. It matters when I teach, because I see my students transforming certain works of literature into kerygmatic texts, turning them into what Joseph Campbell called “myths to live by,” a phrase Frye liked to quote. The texts that speak to them are not usually the works that high-culture critics would approve of. So much the worse for high culture. The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, even Star Trek and the original Star Wars trilogy—academics may deplore it, but such works have been transformative, hugely important in the imaginative and emotional development of several generations of students.
Nevertheless, are we not still confronted with the conservative accusation that a non-literal, symbolic reading of Scripture is a kind of newfangled, postmodern, New Age, self-indulgent eccentricity? But this is an old ploy: the ploy that defines real religion as literal belief, and any departure from it as, at best, a contemptible modern evasion, at worst a kind of egotism and will to power. After all, the presumption that one can create one’s own myth, one’s own religion, rather than obeying the religion commanded of us by God! But anyone who knows a thing or two about world mythology, like Campbell, knows that it is this reductionism that is presumptuous. Since Gnosticism was suppressed and Neoplatonism co-opted in the first two centuries CE, every alternative to literalism has been subjected to a campaign of relentless negative propaganda and persecution. In the Renaissance, the alternatives began to emerge as an “esoteric tradition” composed of many crossbreeding individual movements, including Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, alchemy, the Kaballah, and Gnosticism, a labyrinthine tradition-of-traditions that influenced the Romantic theory of the imagination, as well as leading to what later would become depth psychology, especially that of Jung.
However, it would be another kind of presumption to say that reading myths symbolically rather than literally is an invention of Western intellectual sophistication. In Eastern traditions, a popular naïve literalism has existed alongside more sophisticated understandings from ancient times. As Campbell says,
On the popular side, in their popular cults, the Indians are, of course, as positivistic in their readings of their myths as any farmer in Tennessee, rabbi in the Bronx, or pope in Rome. Krishna actually danced in manifold rapture with the gopis, and the Buddha walked on water. However, as soon as one turns to the higher texts, such literalism disappears and all the imagery is interpreted symbolically, as of the psyche… (630)
He goes on to quote the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “But whoever worships another divinity than his Self, supposing ‘He is one, I am another,’ knows not” (631), the Self being of course the cosmic Self and not the ordinary ego self. More unexpectedly, the same idea occurs in the Pyramid Texts and Book of the Dead in ancient Egypt, “where the soul of him who has died is conceived of as reabsorbing the gods” (631). The Book of the Dead reads: “I am the divine hidden Soul who creates the gods….Hail, lord of the shrine that stands in the middle of the earth. He is I, and I am he, and Ptah has covered his sky with crystal” (631). A lovely phrase, that.
Isn’t it dangerous, though, this “creative mythology”? Doesn’t it bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the make-your-own-facts lunacy that we see all around us? It is indeed dangerous, as quests always are. We will grant Theseus that the imagination tempts people to live in a bubble world. Worse, it tempts people to what used to be called hubris and Jung called “inflation,” the swamping of ego consciousness by the powerful forces of the collective unconscious. The ego begins to think it is the Self, and megalomania ensues. Many of the sources of the esoteric visionary tradition are a mix of vision and psychosis. Their authors have been damaged by twin assaults: marginalization and persecution from without, powerful psychic energies from within. Their books are what Frye in his notebooks called “kook books.” He read a fair number of them, though, because the standard scholarship on religion usually doesn’t have a clue. Yes, if you seek the visionary, you will end up with strange bedfellows. But rather the kooks than the fanatics and authoritarians. Myself, I have always felt at home with eccentrics, going back to my hippie days. In a counterculture crowd, you kind of knew who was a genuine original, who was a poser, who was genially offbeat, and who was outright crazy. But rather hang out with Don Quixote than with the dress-for-success crowd.
You may begin to wonder if you are going crazy yourself, especially if you have experiences that do happen to people who risk traveling to the psychic borderland. “Well, it’s all just symbolic, really” is a defense of the ego. Things may happen, or seem to happen, that transgress the sterile but safe boundaries between ego and other, subject and object of the condition we call “normal.” After all, Doubting Thomas touched a real body with real wounds in it. At the end of his career, Shakespeare replayed the plot of Othello in The Winter’s Tale. The character Leontes is irrationally jealous of his perfectly innocent wife, thinks he has killed her, and spends 16 years in bitter regret and penance, although she has only been in hiding. In the scene in which he is reunited with her, she pretends to be a very realistic sculpture of herself, until she steps down and comes into his arms, warm and alive, like the sculpture created by Pygmalion in Ovid. I have never been able to read the scene without weeping. What “really” happened in the Resurrection? The body of the risen Jesus was not a simulacrum. But it was what Paul called a spiritual body, with all five senses, capable of eating and drinking, yet free of the body’s limitations in time and space, which is how Jesus could suddenly appear to the disciples behind closed walls. To say a story is not literally true may not mean that it is just a story. On the kerygmatic borderline what is real and what is not becomes ambiguous, as it does in Hamlet, and it raises the question that haunted Hamlet: am I sane, or am I mad? All I can say is that if you remain detached enough to doubt your own truths, even your own sanity, you are probably sane enough. It is the insane fanatics who are absolutely, dangerously certain.
All of those contradictions in Scripture mean that it does not have a single meaning. Christians have historically made fun of the supposed confusion of pagan polytheism. But the fact that the Bible is not unified as a work of literature is unified is what generates spiritual creativity through new interpretations. Christianity and Islam originated as recreations of Judaism; the Kaballah is a recreation of traditional Rabbinic Judaism from within the tradition itself. There is no single, definitive interpretation, no single truth. The truth is multiplex, one and yet many. That is not the problem—that is the hope. It is the only thing that will unite us, where all the murderous truths only divide. It is the only thing that will cover our sky with crystal.
References
Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology. Volume 4 of The Masks of God. Penguin, 1976. Originally published by Viking, 1968.
Frye, Northrop. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. In Northrop Frye on Religion, edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Volume 4 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2000. 166-235.
Kee, Howard Clark; Franklin W. Young; Karlfried Froehlich. Understanding the New Testament, 3rd edition. Prentice-Hall, 1973.
I like your reference to Frye's comments about biblical literalism. I used to tell students in Bible classes that I was a literalist. I wanted them to learn what the texts literally said. Then I could slip in the allegorical, tropologial, and anagogical, knowing that the analogical was beyond the reach of human reason and therefore imaginative -- imaginal, as the French have it. As Mariann Moore said of Blake, I think we are both literalists of the imagination.
Emerson is my idea of a good Unitarian. I was Christenend in the Unitarian Church, baptised in the Congregational Church, confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and married in the Anglican Church of Canada (St. Thomas, where Norrie gave his "Creation and Recreation" lectures). I'd like to think I retained something of each, even though I've had spiritual thoughts that none of them would fully accept.