CREATION AND RECREATION

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 NORTHROP FRYE

Creation and
Recreation

University of Toronto Press

Toronto Buffalo London
 © Northrop Frye 1980
Printed in Canada

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Frye, Northrop, 1912-

Creation and recreation
The Larkin-Stuart lectures, delivered under the
auspices of Trinity College, University of Toronto,
and St. Thomas Church, Jan. 30-31 and Feb. 1, 1980.
ISBN 0-8020-6422-1 pa.
1. Creation - Addresses, essays, lectures.
2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) - Addresses,
essays, lectures. 3. Semantics (Philosophy) -
Addresses, essays, lectures. 4. Theology -
Terminology - Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title.
BT695.F79 231.7'65 C80-094404-6

This book has been published with the assistance of the Canada
Council and the Ontario Arts Council under their block grant
programs
 Preface

HESE ARE THE LARKIN-STUART LECTURES, delivered

T under the auspices of Trinity College in the University of
Toronto and St Thomas Church, on 30, 31 January and 1
February 1980.1 am greatly obliged to Trinity College and St
Thomas Church for their hospitality and for the honour of
their invitation to give the lectures.
The lectures draw on earlier material of mine, some of it
now out of print, and, as the opening page suggests, they are
also connected with an ongoing project of greater length, a
study of the narrative and imagery of the Bible and its
influence on secular literature. They will doubtless be made
use of for the larger book, but form a unit which can be read
by itself.

NF
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CREATION AND RECREATION
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 1

AM A LITERARY CRITIC, mainly concerned with English

i literature, and I have recently developed a special interest
in the way that the Bible has affected the structure and imag-
ery of that literature. The first word to attract one's notice in
both fields is the word creation. Page one of the Bible says
that God created the world; page one of the critic's hand-
book, not yet written, tells him that what he is studying are
human creations. In this book I should like to look at cer-
tain aspects of the conception or metaphor of creation, as it
applies to both its divine and its human context, and, also, at
what effect the extending of the same word to cover these
two different areas has had on our habits of thought. I know
that many questions connected with the word 'creation' are
among the most hackneyed topics in both religious and
secular culture, and I shall try to keep clear of what seems to
me likely to have bored you already. On the other hand, I
chose the topic because it is hackneyed, and is therefore
easier to look at with a fresh eye. Through some closed-
circuiting mechanism in the human mind, certain themes
seem to get things said about them that are prescribed in
 4

advance, so that they are not really explored at all, but are
simply talked out, in a way familiar to members of parlia-
ment who introduce private bills. If there are students of
mine among my readers, they will often catch glimpses of
charted territory, but I am not offering a rehash of lecture
notes.
I want to begin with what is called 'creativity' as a feature
of human life, and move from there to some of the tradi-
tional religious ideas about a divine creation. It seems to me
that the whole complex of ideas and images surrounding the
word 'creation' is inescapably a part of the way that we see
things. We may emphasize either the divine or the human
aspect of creation to the point of denying the reality of the
other. For Karl Barth, God is a creator, and the first moral to
be drawn from this is that man is not one: man is for Barth a
creature, and his primary duty is to understand what it is to
be a creature of God. For others, the notion of a creating God
is a projection from the fact that man makes things, and for
them a divine creator has only the reality of a shadow
thrown by ourselves. But what we believe, or believe that we
believe, in such matters is of very little importance compared
to the fact that we go on using the conception anyway, what-
ever name we give it. We are free, up to a point, to shape our
beliefs; what we are clearly not free to do is to alter what is
really a part of our cultural genetic code. We can throw out
varieties of the idea of creation at random, and these, in Dar-
winian fashion, will doubtless descend through whatever
has the greatest survival value; but abolish the conception
itself we cannot.
A year or so ago, after agreeing to help teach an under-
graduate course in Shakespeare, I settled down to reread one
of my favourite pieces of Shakespearean criticism, Oscar
 5

Wilde's essay on 'The Truth of Masks/ The essay, however,

was one in a collected volume of Wilde's critical essays, and I
find it easy to get hooked on Wilde. His style often makes
him sound dated, and yet he is consistently writing from a
point of view at least half a century later than his actual time.
He is one of our few genuinely prophetic writers, and, as
with other prophets, everything he writes seems either to
lead up to his tragic confrontation with society or reflect
back on it. Partly because of this, he deliberately restricts his
audience. He sets up a palisade of self-conscious and rather
mechanical wit, which not merely infuriates those who have
no idea what he is talking about but often puts off those who
do. We may get so annoyed at his dandies waving their
hands languidly at thick volumes labelled 'Plato' or 'Aris-
totle' that we may forget that Wilde could, and did, read
Greek, and that his references to classical authors are usually
quite precise. So before long I was back in the world of the
essay called 'The Decay of Lying,' now widely recognized to
have said a great deal of what modern theories of criticism
have been annotating in more garbled language ever since.
The main thesis of this essay is that man does not live
directly and nakedly in nature like the animals, but within
an envelope that he has constructed out of nature, the enve-
lope usually called culture or civilization. When Words-
worth urges his reader to leave his books, go outdoors, and
let nature be his teacher, his 'nature' is a north temperate
zone nature which in nineteenth-century England had
become, even in the Lake District, largely a human artefact.
One can see the importance, for poets and others, of the
remoteness and otherness of nature: the feeling that the
eighteenth century expressed in the word 'sublime' conveys
to us that there is such a thing as creative alienation. The
 6

principle laid down by the Italian philosopher Vico of verum

factum, that we understand only what we have made our-
selves, needs to be refreshed sometimes by the contempla-
tion of something we did not make and do not understand.
The difficulty with Wordsworth's view is in the word
'teacher/ A nature which was not primarily a human arte-
fact could teach man nothing except that he was not it. We
are taught by our own cultural conditioning, and by that
alone.
We may see already that the word 'creation' involves us in
a state of mind that is closely parallel with certain types of
paranoia, which may give us a clue to what Wilde means by
'lying.' Our envelope, as I have called it, the cultural insula-
tion that separates us from nature, is rather like (to use a
figure that has haunted me from childhood) the window of a
lit-up railway carriage at night. Most of the time it is a mir-
ror of our own concerns, including our concern about
nature. As a mirror, it fills us with the sense that the world is
something which exists primarily in reference to us: it was
created for us; we are the centre of it and the whole point of
its existence. But occasionally the mirror turns into a real
window, through which we can see only the vision of an
indifferent nature that got along for untold aeons of time
without us, seems to have produced us only by accident,
and, if it were conscious, could only regret having done so.
This vision propels us instantly into the opposite pole of
paranoia, where we seem to be victims of a huge conspiracy,
finding ourselves, through no will of our own, arbitrarily
assigned to a dramatic role which we have been given no
script to learn, in a state of what Heidegger calls 'thrown-
ness.'
The cultural aura, or whatever it is, that insulates us from
nature consists among other things of words, and the verbal
 7

part of it is what I call a mythology, or the total structure of

human creation conveyed by words, with literature at its
centre. Such a mythology belongs to the mirror, not the win-
dow. It is designed to draw a circumference around human
society and reflect its concerns, not to look directly at the
nature outside. When man finally gets around to doing that,
he has to develop the special language of science, a language
which becomes increasingly mathematical in idiom. Many
things have to come together in a culture before science can
begin, and when it does begin it does not descend from or
grow out of mythology directly. Mythological statements
about nature are merely grotesque or silly if they are thought
of as pre-scientific explanations of it.
Early students of mythology, it is true, liked to think of it
as primitive science, because that view implied such a flatter-
ing contrast between primitive visions of nature and theirs.
Thus we have Frazer defining myth as mistaken notions of
natural phenomena, and Max Miiller speaking of mytho-
logy as a disease of language. If he had said that language
was a disease of mythology, the statement would have been
just as untrue, but considerably more interesting. However,
this attitude was mainly a by-product of a European ideo-
logy designed to rationalize the nineteenth-century treat-
ment of non-European peoples. Mythology is the embryo of
literature and the arts, not of science, and no form of art has
anything to do with making direct statements about nature,
mistaken or correct. Similarly, as science does not grow out
of mythology, so it can never replace mythology. Mythology
is recreated by the poets in each generation, while science
goes its own way.
There is a kind of painting known as trompe I'oeil, which
endeavours to render pictorial objects so accurately that the
 8

viewer might be deceived into thinking that he was looking

at the real thing. Trompe I'oeil is a quite legitimate form of
painting, but the word 'deceive' indicates the paradox in it.
Returning to our figure again, when it comes to representing
the outer world, no painting can compare with a window
pane. This principle applies much more forcibly to literature,
because there is no verbal equivalent of the window pane.
Words can describe things only approximately: all they do
with any real accuracy is hang together, in puns, metaphor,
assonances, and the self-contained fictions of grammar and
syntax.
All this is contained in Wilde's conception of the creative
arts as essentially forms of 'lying,' or turning away from the
external world. As long as we can keep telling one another
that we see the same things 'out there/ we feel that we have a
basis for what we call truth and reality. When a work of
literature is based on this kind of reality, however, it often
tells us only what we no longer want to know. For this
reason Wilde makes fun of the careful documentary realism
of Zola and others which had such a vogue in his time, of
Zola settling down to give us a definitive study of the Second
Empire at the moment when the Second Empire had gone
hopelessly out of date. But the attack on realism is a side-
issue of a far more insidious disease of writing: the morbid
lust for what Matthew Arnold calls seeing life steadily and
seeing it whole. Recently a collection of early reviews of
mine was published, and on looking over it I was amused to
see how preoccupied I had been then with two writers,
Spengler and Frazer, who haunted me constantly, though I
was well aware all the time I was studying them that they
were rather stupid men and often slovenly scholars. But I
found them, or rather their central visions, unforgettable,
 9

while there are hundreds of books by more intelligent and

scrupulous people which I have forgotten having read. Some
of them are people who have utterly refuted the claims of
Spengler and Frazer to be taken seriously. But the thinker
who was annihilated on Tuesday has to be annihilated all
over again on Wednesday: the fortress of thought is a Val-
halla, not an abattoir.
This is not merely my own perversity: we all find that it is
not only, perhaps not even primarily, the balanced and judi-
cious people that we turn to for insight. It is also such people
as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Holderlin, Kierkegaard, Dostoev-
sky, Nietzsche, all of them liars in Wilde's sense of the word,
as Wilde was himself. They were people whose lives got
smashed up in various ways, but rescued fragments from
the smash of an intensity that the steady-state people seldom
get to hear about. Their vision is penetrating because it is
partial and distorted: it is truthful because it is falsified. To
the Old Testament's question: 'Where shall wisdom be
found?' there is often only the New Testament's answer:
'Well, not among the wise, at any rate.'
What Wilde calls realism, the attempt to base the arts on
the recognizable, to find a common ground of reality with
the audience, is, he suggests, a search for some kind of emo-
tional reassurance. I hear an echo of this whenever I listen to
complaints about the difficulty or obscurity of contemporary
art, complaints which often take the form 'but I think a work
of art ought to communicate something.' The function of the
recognizable in the arts is not aesthetic but anaesthetic. A
painter of cows in a field is bound to be addressing some
people who want to be reminded of cows more than they
want to see pictures. The cows function as a tranquillizer, so
that the more genuinely attentive part of the viewer's mind
 10

is released for pictorial experience. A painter may, however,

get fed up with the compromise involved, as most painters
today in fact have done, and say: to hell with the cows; look
at the form and colour of the picture. If this is his attitude
he is not withdrawing from 'reality': he is seeing more
intensely by means of his medium. The recognizable as such
is, in human terms, the non-creative; it is the disturbing
insight into it that we associate with the word creation.
All this has become a commonplace in a time like ours
when we are so much more heavily insulated against 'nature'
than we were even in Wilde's time. A glance out of the win-
dow of an aeroplane, to the patterns of the landscape or city
lights below, will tell us why this is the century of Kandin-
sky and not that of Constable or Ruysdael; more important,
it will also tell us that space for us has become a set of co-
ordinated points: we do not live in a centred space any more,
but have to create our own centres. In 'The Decay of Lying'
Wilde is, verbally, defending the romantic against the realis-
tic, but these are only the terms of his age: the positive thing
he is defending is not the romantic but the unmediated. His
point is that what is called realism is not founded on nature
or reality at all. We never see these things directly; we see
them only through a prism of conventionalized common-
places, outworn formulas within the art itself, the fossilized
forms of earlier attempts to escape from nature and reality.
Only a distorted imagination that breaks away from all this
and sees reality as a strange, wonderful, terrible, fantastic
world is creative in the human sense of the term.
We are now perhaps beginning to glimpse something of
the complexity of the situation we are trying to look at in
this book. Traditionally, everything we associate with
nature, reality, settled order, the way things are, the data of
 11

existence that we have to accept, is supposed to go back to

the creation, the original divine act of making the world.
Now we find that if we apply the word creative to human
activities, the humanly creative is whatever profoundly dis-
turbs our sense of 'the' creation, a reversing or neutralizing
of it. The encounter of God and man in creation seems to be
rather like what some of the great poets of nuclear physics
have described as the encounter of matter with anti-matter:
each annihilates the other. What seems one of the few
admirable forms of human achievement, the creation of the
arts, turns out to be a kind of decreation: I might have called
my lectures 'Creation and Decreation' if I had not been
afraid of irritating you beyond the limits even of your toler-
ance.
I turn the pages of my Wilde book to the next essay, 'The
Critic as Artist,' and there I read near the beginning the
wonderful passage about music:

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins

that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that
were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that
effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant,
and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from
one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly common-
place life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and
suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious
of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful
joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.

First, of course, we cannot restrict the scope of this passage

to music; it applies to all the arts, though it may well be true
that music has some special mystery about its evocations.
 12

Second, we see that Wilde is postulating two levels of experi-

ence, in which one level is remembered and the other
repressed, though he gives repression a very different con-
text from Freud. Our sense experience, our memories, our
established habits and rituals, all act as filters: they screen
out or accommodate whatever in our lives is disturbing or
threatening. 'Had we the first intimation of the Definition of
Life/ said Emily Dickinson, 'the calmest of us would be
Lunatics!' It is only the arts that allow this screened-out
emotion and experience to return in some bearable form,
and make us realize that while we have been living our lives
as 'normally' as we can, we have also been, all the time, citi-
zens of the lunatic country of Don Quixote and Captain
Ahab and King Lear. That is why their moods and behav-
iour can be intelligible to us.
This principle of the arts evoking the real and repressed
past is familiar to us from Proust, whose narrator Marcel
perceives the pattern of his own real past through an acci-
dental glimpse of it, so that he comes to the beginning of the
imaginative vision of his life at the moment when his reader
comes to the end of it. The implication is that what Marcel
sees at the end of his experience is the possibility of looking
at it in the way that the reader should have been looking at it
all along. This opens up the issue of the creative reader and
his role in literature, which is Wilde's main concern in this
essay, and to which I shall return in the last chapter.
If we apply this principle to social and historical existence
we get some simpler and more familiar data. Out of the gen-
eral welter of human life, the great works of literature and
music and the plastic arts have been born. There is no
cultural development in the past which did not have in its
background all the cruelty and folly of which mankind is
 13

capable; yet the works of culture themselves seem to be in a

perpetual state of innocence. This is still true when the cru-
elty and folly are directly reflected from the art itself. The
pottery and textiles and metalwork that we see in museums,
when compared to the conditions of life that produced them,
seem to float up from those conditions as, in Apuleius' story
of The Golden Ass, the lovely fairy-tale of Cupid and Psyche
floats up like a soap bubble out of the sickening brutality of
its context. But, of course, we have to take the whole book,
brutality and all, as a cultural product of its time, and simi-
larly we cannot abstract some of the works of man from
others. It is a gross error in perspective either to detach the
cultural from the historical past or to confuse the two.
Our cultural heritage, then, is our real and repressed
social past, not the past of historical record but the great
dreams of the arts, which keep recurring to haunt us with a
sense of how little we know of the real dimensions of our
own experience. As I have insisted so often in different con-
texts, such words as 'classic' or 'masterpiece' mean very little
except that some recurring dreams from the past refuse to go
away, and remain staring at us silently until we confront
them. They are the reality behind all ancestor worship, and
the part of our own identity that extends into the past. It has
been said that those who do not learn history are con-
demned to repeat it: this means very little, because we are all
in the position of voters in a Canadian election, condemned
to repeat history anyway whether we learn it or not. But
those who refuse to confront their own real past, in what-
ever form, are condemning themselves to die without hav-
ing been born.
The contemplation of the ordinary historical past, how-
ever, suggests another kind of vision that seems to start with
 14

us and be independent of the arts. This is the vision of what

humanity might conceivably do, and what human life could
conceivably be, a vision that breaks with everything man
has done and is projected on the future. This social vision of
a future discontinuous with history as we have known it,
turning history, in Joyce's phrase, into a nightmare from
which we are trying to awake, is really a vision of human
redemption, though the redemptive power is not necessarily
one outside ourselves. Mary Shelley records with some
wonder, in her note on Prometheus Unbound, that 'Shelley
believed that mankind had only to will that there should be
no evil, and there would be none/ But surely this is the kind
of reflection that must occur to everybody at some time or
other. It is particularly in youth, I suppose, that one feels
most strongly the absurdity of ordinary human actions, and,
even more, the absurdity or wickedness of believing that
they are made necessary by fate or reason or nature or the
will of God. Here again, in a different context, is the sense of
the crucial importance of setting free something normally
repressed in ordinary human experience. And here again is
a sphere of creation, though social in reference rather than
individual, linked to the future rather than the past, and
with the imaginary rather than the imaginative.
Sometimes this feeling clashes with the claims of the past,
however impressive. Black students reading a white man's
literature, women bored by heroines presented as models of
virtue because they conform to male codes, radicals of all
persuasions, often develop an anti-cultural streak that wants
to scrap the past, including its greatest imaginative achieve-
ments, in order to start doing something else and something
better. A friend of mine travelling in China during the cul-
tural revolution wanted to see some ancient frescoes in
 15

Peking: her guide took her there, but said impatiently that if
she had her way she would cover them all up with posters
explaining how exploited the people of that day were. The
difference between the actual and the cultural past was of
little importance for this guide compared to the urgency of
changing the direction of life entirely.
It is true that our course of action in life is guided, to an
extent we seldom realize, by some underlying vision of what
society could be. Such a vision has to be projected on the
future, but it exists only in a metaphorical future. We do not
know the future at all except by analogy with the past, and
the future that will happen will not be much like anyone's
vision of it. This gives our social ideals the intensity and
purity of something that does not exist, yet they are born out
of analogy with what has come to us through tradition. So
all visions of a social future must be rooted in the past,
socially conditioned and historically placed. I note a com-
ment in Jacques Lacan, in an essay discussing the role of
language in psychoanalytic treatment: 'the effect of a full
Word is to reorder the past contingent events by conferring
on them the sense of necessities to come/
Some reactionaries deliberately model their visions of the
future on a return to the past, or what they imagine to have
been the past; radicals, as we generally understand the
word, have a vision of the future which is more of a break
with the past. But all changes of direction in society, pro-
gressive, revolutionary, reactionary, or whatever, come to a
point at which they have to establish continuity with what
has gone before. Some rationalizing historical construct usu-
ally appears at that point, showing how certain tactical
changes in the prospective future are outgrowths of certain
trends in the past. But if we are dealing with the fundamen-
 16

tal social vision which underlies all creative action, the only
element in the past deep enough to call to that deep is the
tradition of human creative achievement. It is on that level of
social insight that we realize why the vision of a new social
order cannot be disconnected from the forms of past creation
in the arts.
Wilde attempted to deal with this aspect of creation too, in
his essay 'The Soul of Man under Socialism/ He remarks
there that 'a map of the world that does not include Utopia is
not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country
at which Humanity is always landing/ By 'socialism/ how-
ever, Wilde means apparently only distributing wealth and
opportunity more evenly, so that all people can become pure
individualists, and hence, to some degree, artists. He says
that in his ideal world the state is to produce the useful, and
the individual or artist the beautiful. But beauty, like nature
and reality, is merely another of those reassuring words
indicating a good deal of ready-made social acceptance.
Wilde is preoccupied in this essay by his contempt for cen-
sorship, and is optimistic that what he calls socialism would
bring about the end of the tyranny of an ignorant and mis-
chievous public opinion. This has not been our experience of
socialism or any other system since Wilde's time, and his
prophetic vision in this essay seems to have gone out of
focus. But, as usual, his sense of context is very accurate: he
identifies the two aspects of our subject, the creation of a
future society and the continuing of the creativity of the past
in spite of the past. As he says: 'the past is what man should
not have been; the present is what man ought not to be; the
future is what artists are/
The issue of censorship, and other aspects of social resis-
tance to creation, is a very important one, if we are right in
 17

regarding the creative as expressing what ordinary experi-

ence represses. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn
that I have no use for the lame-brained hysterics who go
around snatching books by Margaret Laurence and Alice
Munro out of school libraries. I also resent the mindless
cliche that the best way to sell a book is to ban it, which
means that all its extra readers will be attracted to it for silly
reasons. But I sometimes wonder whether the work of cre-
ation in society is really effective if it meets with no social
resistance at all. The conventions of painting, for example,
have become so tolerated that it is difficult even to imagine
what kind of pictures today would go into the salon des
refuses to which the impressionists were exiled a century or
so ago. One applauds the tolerance, except that the public is
so seldom tolerant about anything unless it has become
indifferent to it as well. A world where the arts are totally
tolerated might easily become a world in which they were
merely decorative, and evoked no sense of challenge to
repression at all.
What we see continually in the world around us is a con-
stant and steady perversion of the vision of a free and equal
social future, as country after country makes a bid for free-
dom and accepts instead a tyranny far worse than the one it
endured before. There seems no escaping the inference that
the real desire for freedom and equality is not only repressed
too, but is in fact one of the most deeply repressed feelings
we have. And if the vision of a social future is connected
with the vision of the creativity of the past, which is our
main thesis here, then there must be different layers of
repression appealed to by art, some much deeper than others.
At the deepest layer, if we are right, the enjoyment of the arts
would be as strongly resisted as any other effort at freedom.
 18

Human life consists of leisure and work, and these pro-

vide the bases for, respectively, our visions of past art and
social future. To the extent that leisure and work have been
represented by different classes of society, each has been
fostered on a rather superficial level. The leisure class on
top was supposed to enjoy the world of culture as a special
privilege; the working class below was supposed to work
without a vision of any social future of which they could
form a part. It seems to me that this set-up is slowly re-
arranging itself: the phrase 'leisure class' no longer means
very much anywhere now, and the phrase 'working class'
would probably not mean very much either if it had not
become a pious cliche. Work and leisure are gradually
becoming different aspects of the same life, not two different
classes in society. But the old class habits keep persisting, at
least in our thinking. It has puzzled many people that it is
possible for someone, the commandant of a Nazi death
camp, for example, to have a cultivated taste for the arts and
still be what he is. It is possible because the response to the
arts can also exist on an aesthetic level, of the sort indicated
by Wilde's term 'beautiful,' where they are objects to be
admired or valued or possessed.
But the arts actually represent an immense imaginative
and transforming force in society, which is largely untapped
because so much of our approach to them is still possessive
and aesthetic. There is a much deeper level on which the arts
form part of our heritage of freedom, and where inner
repression by the individual and external repression in soci-
ety make themselves constantly felt. That is why totalitarian
societies, for example, find themselves unable either to toler-
ate the arts or to generate new forms of them. During the
Nazi occupation of France, the French discovered that one of
 19

the most effective things they could do was to put on classi-

cal plays like Antigone or The Trojan Women, in original or
adapted versions. The Nazis had no excuse for censoring
them, but because of the intense repression all around, the
plays began to mean something of what they really do mean.
As for the life of work, the more alienating and less
creative it becomes, the more completely it becomes an
observance of time, a clock-punching and clock-watching
servitude. Leisure begins in the breaking of the panic of time,
that unhurried commitment in which alone the study of the
arts, which take their own speeds, is possible. On the aes-
thetic or possessive level there is still a preoccupation with
time. We read at the end of Walter Pater's Renaissance:

We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite

reprieve ... we have an interval, and then our place knows us no
more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high pas-
sions, the wisest, at least among 'the children of this world/ in
art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval,
in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.

The panic of the phrase 'as many as possible' indicates that

for Pater the pursuit of experience has not yet broken free of
the tyranny of time, nor of the aesthetic level of response
which is really a collecting of impressions. In contrast, we
have Marcel Duchamp, the painter of the 'Nude Descending
the Staircase,' speaking of a picture as a 'delay':

Use 'delay' instead of 'picture' or 'painting'; 'picture on glass'

becomes 'delay in glass'... It's merely a way of succeeding in no
longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture - to make a
'delay' of it in the most general way possible ...
 20

This conception has been considerably expanded in our day

by Jacques Derrida and others, where distancing in both
time and space becomes central to the contact of text and
reader.
To the extent that work becomes creative, it tends to incor-
porate and be based on a vision of an ideal society projected
on the future. If we turn to biblical imagery, we can see that
the core of this vision is that of the humanized creation out
of nature that I spoke of at the beginning. So far, in speaking
of creation in the Bible, I have referred only to the somewhat
confusing activities of God at the beginning, who creates the
world in Genesis 1, creates paradise in Genesis 2, destroys
paradise in Genesis 3, and destroys the rest of the world in
the deluge of Genesis 6. As a creator, the deity seems to have
had other things on his infinite mind, or perhaps, as a poem
of Thomas Hardy suggests, he had no real talent for creation
at all. But there is also a partly human vision of creation in
the Bible, associated with a future restoration of Israel to its
Promised Land. Man lives, we said, isolated from nature by
his own culture, and this culture is partly a technical achieve-
ment and partly a visionary one. At the centre of the technical
achievement is his transformation of a part of his natural
environment into a nature with a human shape and a
human meaning. In biblical imagery we begin with the fruit
trees and fresh water of paradise, and then go through vari-
ous phases of social development: the pastoral phase of
flocks and herds, the agricultural phase of harvest and vin-
tage, and the urban phase of cities, buildings, streets, and
highways.
Similar imagery lies at the heart of every mythology and
every development of the arts, and indicates that what man
really wants is what his genuine work shows that he wants.
 21

When he is doing genuine work, that is, not making war or

feeding a parasitic class, he is making a human artefact out of
nature. Whatever the status of 'the' creation ascribed to God
at the beginning, there is another creation which involves
human effort, and the idealized forms of this creation are
again projected on the future. I call this 'recreation/ or the
counter-movement of creation set up by man. The destruc-
tive activities assigned to God in Genesis provide the moti-
vation for this, and his original creative activities, such as the
planting of the garden of Eden, provide the models.
But while all cultures reflect similar patterns of imagery in
regard to nature, the Bible is distinctive in its attitude to
nature. I shall be looking at this in more detail tomorrow
night, but the general principle is that for the Bible there is
nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within
nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man: to discover
divine presences in nature is superstition, and to worship
them is idolatry. Man, according to the Bible, has to look to
himself, his institutions, and more particularly his records of
verbal revelation, to find the structural principles of the cre-
ation he is entrusted with.
Further, and by the same principle, the solution of the
major human and social problems have to precede the real
recreation of nature. We are gradually beginning to realize
that the exploitation of man by man is evil, and not merely
evil but unnecessary. Human nature being what it is, the
transforming of some of the natural environment into a
humanized one has not been wholly a creative operation:
there has been an immense amount of spoiling, wasting,
destroying, and plundering as well. But only recently have
we come to feel much uneasiness of conscience about this:
our cultural traditions insist that nature was provided for
 22

the sake of man, and that the unlimited and uninhibited

exploitation of nature has nothing to be said against it,
except that we obviously have to call a halt after we have
used up everything there is.
This view of nature as an unlimited field of exploitation is
found in most human cultures, but with us is peculiarly a
legacy of our biblical and Christian inheritance. We notice
that the prophets in the Bible, when they speak of a final
restoration of Israel, also speak of a regenerating of nature
and a reconciliation with it, but they emphasize that this can
take place only after man has stopped the destructive activi-
ties within himself. Hosea says, for instance:

And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts
of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping
things of the ground: and I will break the bow and the sword
and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down
safely.

The implication is that the regenerating of human society

must precede, though it forms a part of, the regeneration of
nature.
The Bible has little or nothing to say about man's cultural
past, and to that extent is deficient as a guide to human cre-
ative perspectives. The traditions of the literary critic are of
classical origin, and for this aspect of our subject we have to
depend mainly on secular literature. I began by referring to a
course on Shakespeare that I had recently agreed to help
teach, and in looking over the texts of Shakespeare I found
myself once again absorbed, as I have been all my critical life,
by the immense profundity and complexity of social vision
in the final romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale,
 23

The Tempest. I noticed, as I had noticed before, that they

resemble the earlier comedies, but differ from them in that
they seem to contain a tragic action as well as a comic one,
instead of merely avoiding a tragic conflict as the earlier
comedies do. I had realized for a long time that the comic
vision in literature is one which is very close to what I have
been calling the vision of a future society. In comedy a cer-
tain drive to freedom, generally symbolized by the impulse
of two young people to marry, is being thwarted by some-
thing foolish and obstinate in the social order which never-
theless has control of that order temporarily. But normally,
at the end of a comedy, the drive towards freedom succeeds,
its opponents or blocking figures are baffled, and the action
ends with most of the characters together on the stage, sug-
gesting a new society being formed at the end of the play.
The ideals of this new society have to be left undefined,
because its activities are assumed to begin after the play itself
is over.
Sometimes, more particularly in The Winter's Tale, this
comic action is associated or identified with the fertility imag-
ery of a renewal of nature, as spring succeeds winter and new
life emerges from old. In The Winter's Tale the great sheep-
shearing festival scene in the fourth act depicts the determi-
nation of two young people, Florizel and Perdita, to marry
in the teeth of parental opposition, and in the background is
the triumphant renewing vitality of 'great creating nature/
as spring in Bohemia follows hard on winter in Sicilia. But at
the same time that Shakespeare gives us this vision of youth
and spring victorious over age and winter, he puts as much
or even more emphasis on the reintegrating of an older gen-
eration. It is the reunion of Leontes and Hermione, where
the past folly and obsession of Leontes is cast out, that forms
 24

the final scene, and this scene is as closely associated with art
as that of Florizel and Perdita is with nature. It takes place in
a chapel, an alleged work of painting and sculpture comes to
life, and the miracle is accomplished by music and poetry. It
seems as though two things must happen if either is to hap-
pen: there is a vision of a happy social future, but there is
also a vision of a reintegrated past in which dead things
come to life again under the spell of art.
All the romances seem to have something of this double
resolution, of young people forming the nucleus of a new
social order and a new outburst of fertility, and of older
people restored to their original lives through the arts, the
arts often being represented simply by music. In The Tempest
the young lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda, are shown by
Prospero the masque which symbolizes their future lives,
where the main characters are Ceres, Juno, and Iris, the
earth, the sky, and the rainbow, deities of fertility and pro-
mise. They are then ready to encounter what Miranda calls a
brave new world. At the same time Prospero, whose art is
symbolized by magic, though it consists very largely of
music and drama, is reintegrating his own past as Duke of
Milan, transforming the society of his former enemies into a
new shape.
In this play the reintegrating of the past through art and
the renewal of the future through the energy of youth and
nature are contrasted with the mere past and the mere
future. The mere past, where everything vanishes into dark-
ness and annihilation, is evoked by Prospero's great 'end of
the revels' speech; the mere future is what we see in Pro-
spero's return to Milan, to be as absent-minded and
ineffectual a Duke as he was before. The positive action of
the play, therefore, where reintegration and renewal both
 25

take place, is not in the past or future at all, but in an ex-

panded present where, as Eliot says, the past and the future
are gathered.
This present is a resurrection which is not the reviving of a
corpse, and a rebirth which is not an emerging of a new life
from a dying older body to die in its turn. It is rather a
transfiguration into a world we keep making even when we
deny it, as though a coral insect were suddenly endowed
with enough consciousness and vision to be able to see the
island it has been helping to create.
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 2

N THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER I spoke of human life as con-

I tained within a cultural envelope that insulates it from
nature, and said that the verbal part of this envelope is, or at
least starts out as, a mythology. A mythology is made up of
myths, and so I should first of all try to explain what the
word myth means in the sense, or senses, in which I shall be
using it. As a literary critic, I want to anchor the word myth
in its critical context. Myth to me, then, means first of all
mythos or narrative, words arranged in a sequential order.
Every structure in words designed for sequential reading,
which excludes practically no structures except telephone
books, has a narrative, a mythos, a sequential ordering that
begins, in our culture, on the top left-hand corner of page
one and ends at the bottom right-hand corner of the last
page. Naturally there is a great variety of myths or narra-
tives: some are stories, some arguments, some descriptions,
and so on.
However, the use of the term in so broad and general a
sense would entangle us in a discussion of the different
shapes that language and thought assume, which enable a
 28

myth in some contexts to take the form of an argument or a

description. We have no time for that, so I shall restrict the
word myth to its more familiar sense of culturally early nar-
ratives, which come from a time when concepts and argu-
ments and abstractions had not yet appeared in language.
Such myths are stories, or sequential acts of personified
beings. Every culture produces a mythology of this concrete
kind, and it is out of the story patterns contained in such a
mythology that literature develops.
My own interest in myth begins with its literary develop-
ment: to me a literary myth is not a contaminated myth but
a matured one. In my perspective as a literary critic the 'real
meaning' of a myth emerges slowly from a prolonged lite-
rary life, and then its meaning includes everything it has
effectively been made to mean during that life. What the
Song of Songs 'really means/ for example, is not confined to
the village wedding songs and late echoes of fertility ritual
out of which it may have originated, but includes what it has
been made to mean in Bernard of Clairvaux and St John of
the Cross, where it expresses the love of Christ for his
people. Theoretically, there is no analogy between a myth
and a species: a poet can do what he likes with his myth, and
can marry it to any other myth and still produce imaginative
offspring. But what is theoretically possible and what poets
actually do seem to be different: in practice, poets show a
great respect for the integrity of the myths they treat. Samuel
Butler remarked that a chicken was merely an egg's device
for producing more eggs; similarly, a poet often seems to be
merely a myth's device for reproducing itself again in a later
period.
Anthropologists, on the other hand, and others who are
interested primarily in the immediate social and cultural
 29

functions of myths, find myths most useful to them at the

earliest possible stage, before the free play of the creative
imagination has begun to turn them into what we think of as
literature. The distinction between myth and literature is
strictly speaking impossible, as no myth can exist except in
some sort of narrative formulation, but still it is possible to
isolate, in some cultures, what is essentially a pre-literary
mythology. In the highly developed cultures surrounding
the Bible the problem hardly exists. Myth and literature are
already indistinguishable in the Gilgamesh epic, which is
much older than any part of the Bible.
But the Bible is exceptional in having a strongly doctrinal
emphasis, in its story of creation, which is clearly not
intended to be primarily literary or imaginative. What it is
intended to be will, I hope, become clearer as we go on, but
we have to approach it first on the poetic level all the same.
The status of the opening of Genesis as a factual historical
record is no longer an issue for many of us, and to try to
accept it as one is merely running scared. To go back to the
argument of Oscar Wilde's essay on 'The Decay of Lying'
discussed in the previous chapter, it is only when the cre-
ation story is considered factually false that it can be of any
conceivable use to us. The hero of Eliot's Family Reunion
complains that his family understands 'only events, not
what has happened.' It is myth, and only myth, that tells us
what has happened.
It becomes clear in many modern studies of myth, such as
those of Mircea Eliade, that it is only when a myth is
accepted as an imaginative story that it is really believed in.
As a story, a myth becomes a model of human experience,
and its relation to that experience becomes a confronting and
present experience. The truth of the story of the fall of Adam
 30

and Eve does not depend on the possibility that an archaeo-

logist may eventually dig up their skeletons. It depends on
its power to convey the present sense of alienation in human
consciousness, the sense of being surrounded by a nature
not ours. Such a myth bears the same relation to the law in
the first five books of the Bible that a parable of Jesus bears to
the teaching of the gospel.
Milton's Paradise Lost is a poem about the creation of the
world and the fall of man written by a poet convinced of the
factual reliability of the Biblical story. Yet even Milton draws
a distinction between the kind of instruction that the unfal-
len Adam receives from Raphael and the instruction that the
fallen Adam receives from Michael. Raphael tells Adam the
story of the fall of Satan, which except for an allusion or two
in the Bible is entirely Milton's invention. The implication is
that teaching by means of parables is the only appropriate
kind of teaching for a free man. Michael summarizes for
Adam the story of the Bible, events which are future to
Adam but will certainly occur, implying that man's freedom
of will has been curtailed to the vanishing point. All Milton's
reverence for the Bible as a book of promise and a charter of
human freedom cannot conceal the fact that this kind of
knowledge is debased and sinister knowledge: that is, knowl-
edge of an already determined future is part of the forbidden
knowledge that Adam should never have had.
Our next task is to bring out the peculiar characteristics of
the story of creation in Genesis as a myth. The word mytho-
logy implies, by its very existence, that story-myths have a
tendency to stick together to form an interconnected series of
stories. It would be usual for such a mythology to begin with
a creation myth, and there are as many varieties of creation
myths as there are societies to produce them. In the early
 31

Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures that we are con-

cerned with, however, two types of creation myth seem to
dominate. Perhaps it will be easiest to explain this by a
creation myth of my own about creation myths. Let us
assume a primeval myth-maker, standing alone in the gar-
den of Eden, about to design a creation myth a priori, wholly
detached from his social context and conditioning. No such
person could exist, but we may learn something from postu-
lating him. The kind of creation myth he will come up with,
then, will depend on whether he is looking up or down at
the time he is constructing it.
If he looks down, he sees the earth with its progression of
seasons, the place from which all living things, animals and
plants, are born and to which they return when they die. A
creation myth based on these phenomena would be a sexual
creation myth, assuming that the world took shape origi-
nally in the same way that it still renews itself every spring,
or renews life in birth. In the beginning there was winter,
and then came the spring; or, in the beginning there was a
female body, and something got born from it. No feature is
invariable or without many exceptions in mythology, but
one very obvious figure for such a myth to focus on would
be that of an earth-mother, the womb and tomb of all life.
For such an earth-mother, from whom all living things
emerge and to whom all dying things return, would be the
direction of all death as well as the source of all life, and
would consequently have a sinister aspect as well as a cher-
ishing one. The cycle over which she would preside is what
Plato might call the cycle of the different. Newborn animals
are not the reborn forms of their parents; the flowers that
bloom in the spring are not the same as those that bloomed
last spring.
 32

One immensely simplifying principle in such a creation

myth is that death, along with the pain and solitude that go
with it, would not be a problem. Death is built in to a myth
which is primarily a myth about living things, all of which
die. Life is unintelligible without death: there may be a con-
tinuous force that propels the birth of new life, but such a
life-force merely uses the individual: it does not exist for his
sake.
If our myth-maker looks up, he sees the cycle of the sun
and the slower cycle of the moon. This suggests rather a
cycle of the same: it seems to be unmistakably the same sun
that comes up the next morning, the same moon that waxes
and wanes, and in the background, except for the five
planets that also have their appointed courses, there are, as it
seems, the cycling but unchanging stars. We hear of some
societies that 'believe' that a new sun is created each day:
anthropologists in particular are fond of reminding us that
some societies will believe anything, including no doubt
some societies of anthropologists. However, our assumed
myth-maker is not believing anything yet: he is merely con-
structing. Milton, speaking of pagan mythology, uses the
phrase 'they fabled/ instead of 'they believed': it sounds
more tendentious, and Milton meant it to be so, but it is also
more accurate, because fabling, unlike belief, is an activity
that we can get some evidence for. For this version of cre-
ation mythology, the periodic return of the sun, moon, and
stars sets the pattern for the cycle of the seasons, reflecting
the work of an intelligent being who, like the God of the Old
Testament, does not change, or, like the creating deity of
Plato's Timaeus, imitates such a being.
The sky-begotten creation myth, then, would suggest the
subordinating of becoming to being, of cyclical change to a
 33

power of stability that controls cyclical change and is not

subject to it. Such a creation myth would not start with birth
from sexual union but with some power assumed to be
superior to both. It would be, in short, an artificial creation
myth. The world must originally have been made, including
the world of living things, however universal the process of
birth and death may still be among living things. And just as
the sexual creation myth most readily suggests an earth-
mother, so the artificial myth would correspondingly sug-
gest a sky-father. Sky, because of the predominance of the
heavenly bodies in the materials of the myth, and father,
because this creator goes about his own mysterious business
without nursing his children.
An artificial creation myth suggests planning and intelli-
gence, and planning and intelligence suggest a creator who
could have originally produced only a perfect or model
world, a world with no death or disease or decay in it at all.
This model world is apparently the one described as being
made in the first chapter of Genesis, where every aspect of
creation calls for the comment 'and God saw that it was very
good/ so good that he spent the seventh day of creation con-
templating it. To account for the contrast between the model
world that such a God must have made and the actual world
that we find ourselves in now, a myth of a human 'fall' must
be added, an alienation myth which expresses the present
human condition but does not attach it directly to the work
of creation. Even in Plato's Timaeus, just mentioned, where
the world is made by a demiurge, an artificer working in
imitation of a model, whatever is wrong with our world is
presumably part of the great failure of all imitations to
reproduce their models accurately that, for Plato, recurs in
human art.
 34

The question 'when did it all begin?', however inevitable

it may seem, is a totally unanswerable question, because it is
impossible to conceive a beginning of time. One may of
course say that there was a creation which created time as
well as everything else, or that our perception and experi-
ence of time are a result of our fallen state, but these are only
verbal formulas concealing the fact that the beginning of
time is an unthinkable thought. The sexual creation myth is
no better off: to the problem of whether the chicken or the
egg came first there is no answer. St Augustine mentions
someone who, irritated by questions about what God was
doing 'before' he made the world, said he was preparing a
hell for those who ask such questions. This is really another
way of saying that the doctrine of divine creation is among
other things a linguistic device for shutting off the question
'what happened before anything else happened'? There is
nevertheless an essential imaginative issue bound up with
the word 'beginning/ which is the opening word of the
Bible. We derive our notions of beginnings and ends from
our own births and deaths, the two crucial events in which
we first join a moving belt of phenomena and finally drop
off it. The moving belt itself cannot really be thought of as
beginning or ending, but, because we begin and end, we
insist that beginning and ending must be somehow much
more important than merely continuing.
Hence the artificial creation myth, where the world was
made by an intelligent sky-father, the one that wins out in
the biblical tradition, is also a myth in which an absolute
beginning is postulated, as something superior to all the con-
tinuity which follows. In the complete form of the myth an
absolute beginning implies an absolute end. But such an end
would have to be the end of death, not of life, a death of
 35

death in which life has become assimilated to the unending.

Thus the biblical creation myth takes us back to one of the
most 'primitive' of all views: that death, the most natural of
all events, the one thing we know will always happen, is
nevertheless somehow wrong and unnatural, not part of the
original scheme of things. The author of the Book of Wisdom
gazes serenely at the facts of his experience, every one of
which confirms the law that there are no exceptions to
dying, and remarks: 'For God made not death; the genera-
tions of the world are healthful; and there is no poison of
destruction in them, nor is there a kingdom of death upon
the earth/
The sense of the importance of beginning and ending in
traditional Christianity has in it a thick streak of what last
night we called paranoia, and has produced some very
bizarre situations. In the seventeenth century, the age of
Galileo and Newton, biblical scholars were still gravely
explaining that the time of creation was probably the spring
equinox of 4004 BC, around two in the afternoon. And dur-
ing the past century there have been several assemblages of
faithful gathered to await an 'end of the world/ often on the
top of a mountain, the existence of which in itself indicates
many millions of years of both age and of life expectancy for
the earth.
For the artificial or sky-father myth, the metaphorical ker-
nel for this conception of a total 'beginning' would not be
birth, but the experience of waking up from sleep. It is in the
process of awakening to consciousness that we are most
clearly aware of the sense of a beginning in a world both
new and familiar, which we are quite sure is real, whatever
the world 'before' it was. The curious insistence in the bibli-
cal account on a sequence of 'days/ and the recurring refrain
 36

'and the evening and the morning were the first day/ etc.,
seem to be emphasizing the importance of this metaphor. In
Milton's Paradise Lost and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel the
sense of the creation of Adam as an awakening of conscious-
ness out of the sleep of matter is even stronger.
How there could be uncomplicated 'days' of creation
when the sun was created only on the fourth day is an old
puzzle, and even St Augustine felt that if God said 'days' he
must have had some mental reservation about the word. Yet
the institution of the Sabbath, and the importance given to
the calendar week, seem still to be based on the connection
of creation with the contrast of day and night, waking and
sleeping. The fact that even in contemporary English the
words 'sunlight' and 'daylight' are different words may sug-
gest a remote period in which daylight was not causally
associated with the sun, but it is doubtful if the original
'light' of Genesis can be reduced to this kind of confusion.
It is natural to think that the earth-mother myth is the
older of the two, being the myth more appropriate for an
agricultural society, as its rival was for the more urban, tool-
using, and patriarchal society that succeeded it. Certainly in
Hesiod, one of the fountain-heads of Greek mythology, the
sky-father Zeus is thought of as a relative late-comer, the
third at least of a series of sky-gods, who establishes his
supremacy by force over a much older earth-mother. The
latter retires sullenly below with her defeated titans, chtho-
nic powers who, either as titans or as giants, meet us many
times in many mythological guises. In the first chapter of
Genesis the artificial sky-father myth seems to have it all his
own way. But there are two creation myths in Genesis, and
the second or so-called Jahwist one, which begins in Genesis
2:4, is clearly much the older. In this account we start with
 37

the watering of a garden. The garden is a symbol of the

female body in the Bible, recurring in the Song of Songs,
where the body of the bride is described as 'a garden en-
closed, a fountain sealed/ In the same account, too, Adam is
formed (Genesis 2:7) from a feminine adamah or dust of the
ground. Not all the sexual myth has been excluded: enough
has been vestigially left in to suggest that some still earlier
creation myths are being incorporated.
However, both creation myths in the Bible seem at first
sight intolerably patriarchal. Deity is associated exclusively
with the male sex; man was created first and woman out of
his body, in contrast to the later 'fallen' cycle of birth from a
mother; the fall was precipitated by the female, and as a
result the male is to have dominance over her. There is no
question that the story has got mixed up with patriarchal
social ideology, and no question either that it has been con-
stantly invoked and ruthlessly exploited to rationalize doc-
trines of male supremacy. But within the myth itself, there is
an element in the symbolism of male and female which is
distinguishable from the social relations of men and women.
It would be useful if Western thought had developed some-
thing like the classical Chinese conceptions of yang and yin,
which would express something of the imaginative and
mythological relations of male and female without pervert-
ing them in this way. Aristotle, for example, remarked that
sex was an analogue to his distinction of form and matter,
without drawing morals about the social superiority of
males. But there is probably no such thing as an unperverted
myth, nor is there likely to be for a long time.
The myth of a fall, being as we said an alienation myth,
expresses the sense that the identity we are given at birth is,
somehow or other, not our real or our whole identity. Such a
 38

sense is readily connected with the conception of God as a

parent, because the parent stands for the whole of whatever
has existed before us that has made our own existence pos-
sible. As that, the parent is the handiest symbol to express
the feeling that we are born with an unknown identity
which is both ourselves and yet something other and greater
than ourselves. Of the two parental figures, the mother is the
less convincing for this purpose, because the mother is the
parent we must break from in order to get born. To come
into life is to be delivered from a mother, but the deliverance
is temporary, and the emphasis on the male in the Bible is
connected with its resistance to the cyclical fatality of all reli-
gions founded on Mother Nature.
The Genesis account of the fall speaks of two trees, the tree
of life and the tree of forbidden knowledge. The latter clearly
has something to do with the beginning of sexual experience
as we know it, and is symbolized by a limp serpent crawling
away on the ground. Metaphorically, the two trees would be
the same tree, which would imply a tree of life with a fully
erect serpent of wisdom climbing up its branches, as in the
version of Indian yoga known as Kundalini. The sexuality of
the tree of life would in that case have something about it of
what has been called the myth of the lost phallus, a power of
sexual experience where the relation of male to female has
got free from the sado-masochistic cycle that dominates so
much of our attitude to sex.
In the sexual creation myth with its earth-mother, the
earth-mother is in the early stages of symbol of natura natu-
rans, nature as a bursting forth of life and energy, its divine
personalities the animating spirits of trees, mountains,
rivers, and stones. This is the basis of what is called pagan-
ism, the instinctive faith of the paganus or peasant who is
 39

closest to the natural environment and furthest from the

centre of the insulating envelope of culture. In the later
stages of such 'paganism/ the preoccupation with cyclical
movement climbs up into the sky and annexes the sense of
natura naturata, nature as a structure or system which also
manifests itself in cycles. Here the earth-mother expands
into what Robert Graves calls the 'Triple Will/ the diva trifor-
mis or goddess of heaven, earth and hell, Luna, Diana, and
Hecate, who meets us in so many other female trinities, the
Fates, the Norns, the three goddesses confronting Paris. The
cosmological vision such a myth suggests is one of cyclical
fatality, where, as in the riddle of Oedipus, the three phases
of infancy, manhood, and old age succeed one another with-
out change.
At this point it becomes clear that the myth of creation is a
part of a larger mythological structure known as the social
contract. In paganism the contract which binds together the
gods, mankind, and nature in a common recognition of law
appears, for instance, at the end of Aeschylus' Oresteia,
where the gods ratify the order of nature and to some extent
are bound by it themselves. As paganism develops, it
becomes clear by imperial Roman times that, as the gods
grew out of nature-spirits, they are really expendable in this
contract, the only essential god being the divine Caesar. In
the biblical creation myth nature is not directly a party to the
social contract, which is a 'testament' between God and man,
nature having no law of its own except what God bestows
on it. Thus in New Testament times the two creation myths
had expanded into two contract myths focussed, one on
Christ, whose divinity is an incarnation of God in man, the
other on Caesar, who is Antichrist so far as he becomes a
god by incarnating the link between moral and natural law.
 40

As the longer and slower cycles complete themselves,

there may be a sense of hope and renewal before the begin-
ning of another cycle. At the time of Christ, when astrolo-
gers saw the sun moving into Pisces, many people talked
about the dawn of a new and greater age, just as there are
those who talk about an 'age of Aquarius' now. The most
famous expression of this was Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, which
predicts the arrival of a new golden or Saturnian age when
'the serpent shall die.' But although Christianity promptly
seized on this poem as an unconscious prophecy of the birth
of the Messiah, Christian writers also totally rejected all
cyclical theories of history, whether hopeful or cynical in
mood.
There are certain cultural disadvantages in an artificial
creation myth, especially when presented as a deductive
account of how the world and human life began. As what
Plato in the Timaeus calls a probable narrative, or, as one
translator has it, 'a likely story,' it reduces us to a passive
role, inheriting the results of ancestral mistakes but unable
to do anything about them. Thus the seventeenth-century
New England poet Michael Wigglesworth represents the
heathen at the Last Judgement objecting that it is hardly fair
to send them to hell for Adam's sin, considering that they
have never heard of Adam. They are told that Adam was
designed to be a 'common root' of mankind, so that Adam's
sin is their sin too, and they are compelled to agree, accord-
ing to the poet, that the argument is irrefutable.
Then again, the conception of an artificer God, who starts
everything off by making all things in more or less their pre-
sent form, is not very encouraging for the human artist. If it
is true that, as Sir Thomas Browne said, 'Nature is the Art of
God'; if the models of human creation, the city and the
 41

garden, were created by God before man existed, the human

artist seems to be in a hopeless position of competing with
God. This is particularly true of painters and sculptors, who
have often been regarded with suspicion as potentially
makers of idols, dead images set up in rivalry with the
maker of living ones. In Islamic culture this prejudice has
gone to the point of banning representational art altogether,
and similar tendencies have appeared in both Jewish and
Christian traditions. In an early Christian romance called the
'Clementine Recognitions/ where the apostle Peter is the
hero, some frescoes on a public building are referred to, and
it is noted with approval that Peter is impervious to their
artistic merit. There is no need to dwell on the iconoclastic
movements that have swept over both East and West por-
tions of the Christian world. As remarked in the first chap-
ter, human creativity and divine creation often seem to be at
loggerheads.
When painting and sculpture were tolerated, the religious
prejudice against them carried on in some forms of critical
theory, according to which artists in these areas were merely
second-hand copyists of nature. Thus the Elizabethan critic
George Puttenham, writing just before Shakespeare's time,
says: In another respect we say art is neither an aider nor a
surmounter but only a bare imitator of nature's works, fol-
lowing and counterfeiting her actions and effects, as the
marmoset doth many countenances and gestures of man; of
which sort are the arts of painting and carving.' Painting and
sculpture flourished because artists and their patrons had
the sense to ignore this kind of criticism; but there are other
hazards in the conception of a prefabricated created order.
One of these hazards derived from the slow but steady
advance of science. Whatever man creates is essentially a
 42

machine, an extension of his personality but with no life or

will or its own. The effect of physical science, from Coperni-
cus to Newton, was gradually to depersonalize the cosmos,
as the earth was displaced from the centre of the universe
and the angels from the guardianship of the planets. By the
eighteenth century there was a general tendency to think
even of the divine creation in terms of an ingenious and
complicated mechanism. At the end of the century a stan-
dard textbook on natural theology, Paley's Evidences of Chris-
tianity, used the analogy of a primitive man picking up a
watch on a seashore left by some passing mariner. The
primitive was supposed to infer that a watch meant a watch-
maker, and similarly we should infer that if a complex world
exists, somebody must have designed the complications.
Samuel Butler pointed out that this assumed primitive
would be much more likely to make a god of the watch, as
the Lilliputians thought Gulliver did with his watch when
he told them that he seldom did anything without consult-
ing it. But the analogy was regarded as a valid, even an
unanswerable argument for a long time, and doubtless still
is in some quarters.
The absurdities of the argument from design, more par-
ticularly of its illustrations, such as congratulating the Crea-
tor for his ingenuity in dividing the orange into sections for
convenience in eating, had brought it into discredit even
before Darwin's time. One cannot get very far with specula-
tion on the mental level of a small child who assumes that a
cat's tail is a specially designed handle for pulling it around.
Yet the Darwinian revolution, transferring the designing
power from God to a natural process, and showing that the
argument from design was a projecting on God of the fact
that man designs things, came as a profound shock to many
 43

intelligent people. Clearly the artificial myth of a creation

had intellectual resources that we have so far not given it
credit for.
The account of creation in Genesis is close to a group of
sardonic folk tales, some of them much older than the Bible,
that tell us how man had immortality nearly in his grasp,
but was cheated out of it by malicious or frightened deities. It
is hard to hear in its rather casual cadences what St Paul
heard in it, the iron clang of a gate shut forever on human
hopes. Neither is it easy to see in it the doctrine that man by
his fall opened up a second and lower level of nature. The
notion that nature fell with man is necessary to account for
all imperfections in nature, ranging from human sin to
thorns on the rosebush - an early Canadian Methodist cir-
cuit rider speaks of the clouds of mosquitoes he encountered
in the New Brunswick forests as 'mementoes of the fall/ But
the fall of nature has to be read into the Genesis account,
because it is not there: we are told only that God cursed the
ground, a curse he removed after the flood.
In many creation myths the creation starts off with an
event that comes much closer than Sophocles' Oedipus Rex
does to illustrating what Freud means by an Oedipus com-
plex. A sky-father and an earth-mother are locked in connu-
bial sleep until their son separates them, and creates an
intervening world of air and light. Similarly in Genesis, light
and air (the 'firmament') are created first: the firmament
separates the waters above from the waters below, and
according to the Book of Enoch the waters above are male
and the waters below female. In Christianity it is also a Son
who does the creating, though no female principle is in-
volved at this stage. The Son, however, is identified with the
Word that calls things into being: the Word says fiat lux, and
 44

light appears. According to Hegel, creation is the symbol of

absolute thought passing over into nature, nature being both
the contrary and the dialectical complement of thought.
Being a philosopher, Hegel assumed that the biblical Word
and the philosopher's thought were essentially the same
thing: poets, however, might see in the conception of a creat-
ing Word a more versatile power, capable of more things
than dialectic. We seem to catch a glimpse, in fact, of a divine
consciousness descending into experience. When man falls
to a lower level of nature, the divine consciousness follows
him there, until the process is completed by the Incarnation,
the Word then becoming flesh, identical with human con-
sciousness so far as it is human.
The assumption seems to be here that the term 'Word/
however metaphorical, has a very real connection with what
in ordinary speech we mean by words, the elements of
articulate consciousness. There are not many creation myths
which give 'Word' so central a creative function: one of
those that do is the Mayan Central American myth pre-
served in what is called the Popol Vuh. Here a primordial
silence is broken by 'the word' which begins the story of
creation: of all creatures, man is placed in authority because
he alone could use articulate language, in contrast to the
grunts and squeals of the beasts. But as man continued to
praise his gods, the gods grew restive, and began to wonder
if all this articulateness did not threaten their privileged
position. Hence, as in many Near Eastern myths, the gods
plot to destroy man by a deluge for fear he will become too
big for his breeches.
Naturally the Genesis account cannot explicitly present
God as jealous or frightened of man, but there is a curious
suggestion of it:
 45

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us,
to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and
take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore
the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the
ground from whence he was taken.

Here God seems to be speaking to a council of other gods or

angels, expressing a fear of some threat coming from man-
kind so great that he cannot even finish his sentence. It
seems clear that man is in possession of something formid-
able connected with knowledge, whatever the knowledge of
good and evil may imply. Even the Christian version of the
myth implies that as soon as God speaks and becomes the
Word of God, he has condemned himself to death; as soon as
man falls with the power of speech, he becomes the potential
murderer of God.
As further rationalized by Christian theology, this situa-
tion is explained as follows. Man is born into physical
nature, the world of animals and plants, at least as they live
at present, and this world is theologically 'fallen/ It was not
the home originally destined for man, and man cannot
adjust to it as the animals do. There is a higher order of
nature which God intended man to live in, and everything
that is good for man, such as law, morality, and religion,
helps to raise him towards his own proper level of human
nature. Many things are natural to man that are not nat-
ural to animals, such as consciousness, wearing clothes,
being in a state of social discipline, and the like. In fact on
this higher level of human nature there is really no dis-
tinction between nature and art. The complement of Sir
Thomas Browne's principle that nature is the art of God is
the principle that Edmund Burke was still insisting on at
 46

the end of the eighteenth century, that 'art is the nature of

man/
The agencies moving man upwards from his 'fallen' state
to something closer to his original one certainly include law,
religion, morality, and everything genuinely educational.
Milton even defines education as the process of repairing the
fall of Adam by regaining the true knowledge of God.
Whether the arts belong among those educational agencies
or not was much disputed. But a large body of opinion did
see in this situation a function for the arts, more particularly
the verbal arts. In Sidney's Defence of Poetry, for example,
published around the time of Shakespeare's earlier plays, we
are told that nature, meaning the lower or fallen physical
order, presents us with a brazen world and the poets with a
golden one; also that art develops a 'second nature,' being
natural to man but only to him. Sidney's principle means
that art, specifically poetry, can be tolerated in society only
so long as, and so far as, its function is essentially an idealiz-
ing one. The arts form a rhetorical echo or chorus to the
principles of morality and religion. They are there to per-
suade the more primitive and emotional side of man of the
truth of what religion and morality teach, using concrete
examples as a simpler analogy to the abstract precepts which
are addressed to more mature minds.
Man, therefore, in the traditional Christian myth, is also
born with a goal ahead of him, the raising of his state to the
human level which is closer to what God intended for him.
What is important about this for our present argument is
that this means moving closer to the original vision of cre-
ation, so that creation here appears as the end of the human
journey rather than the beginning of it. The central image of
this in our literature is Dante's Purgatorio, where Dante
 47

adopts one of the oldest and most widespread symbolic

images in the world, the spiral ascent up a mountain or
tower to heaven, and makes it the journey of Dante himself
as he climbs the mountain of purgatory, shedding one of the
seven original sins at each spiral turn. The garden of Eden is
at the summit: that is, Dante is moving backwards in time to
his own original state, as he would have been if there had
been no fall of Adam.
What we have now is a vision of two opposing move-
ments, related to each other in what Yeats would call a
double gyre. One is that of a divine consciousness being sur-
rounded by experience as it descends from creation to the
final identity of incarnation. The other is that of a human
consciousness surrounding experience, as it ascends from its
'fallen' state towards what it was once designed to be. The
ascending spiralling movement in Dante reminds us of
Donne's image in his Third Satire:

On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.

This human vision of recreation is heavily stressed in mod-

ern poetry, as in Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium/ where the
sacred city is a human structure of art and yet preserves a
vision of 'sages standing in God's holy fire/ Here creation
has finally become one with recreation, and the revelation at
the end of human effort is also a recognition of something at
the beginning.
In the previous chapter I spoke of the association of
human creative powers with two visions: the vision of the
 48

tradition of art in the past, and the vision of an idealized

society projected on the future. Both these visions, I sug-
gested, arise from a partial release of repression, a qualified
escape from the encumbrances of ordinary experience. Be-
yond the Purgatorio vision in Dante lies the vision of the
Paradiso. In the last canto of the Paradiso, after casually men-
tioning the story of the Sibyl who wrote her oracles on scat-
tered leaves, Dante suddenly sees, in the very presence of
God, the whole universe 'legato con amore in un volume/
bound into a single Word with love. As soon as Dante has
this vision, it sinks to the lowest depths of repression: he
forgot more of it, he says, than man has forgotten of his
history since the Argonaut voyage. The implication is that
immediately following the last vision of paradise, time
moves back again to the opening of the Inferno, with the poet
lost again in a tangled wood, where all the voices of repres-
sion, or what Dante calls letargo, 'lethargy/ start clamoring
that there can never be any way out. But we are expected to
see a bit more and forget less, and in particular to see that at
the summit of the human journey back to the creation
Dante's great poem merges into the vision of a God who is
Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all verbal pos-
sibilities.
Dante's journey is a journey back to the creation, the
journey of a creature returning to his creator, and the initia-
tive for the journey does not come from Dante himself. It is
the energy and grace of the descending movement of the
divine word, working through such intermediaries as Bea-
trice, which impel Dante and make what he does possible.
Even in the revolutionary Milton, writing over three centu-
ries later than Dante, man still has no real initiative: liberty,
for example, in Milton is nothing that man naturally wants,
 49

but is something God is determined he shall have. But

within another century or so we begin to move into the
intellectual climate we still live in now. Here the central
characteristic of traditional myth, the model or plan that
existed before the beginning of time which repeats itself con-
stantly in present human life, has totally disappeared. The
majority of poets and thinkers today see no model or plan,
no human essence or general human nature, established at
the beginning of things, only various mutations imposed by
cultural and social change. In the next chapter I should like
to look at this situation and at some of its results and effects.
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 3

N THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS I have tried to suggest that

i there are two ways of approaching the notion of
creation. There is a traditional myth of creation in which
God brings the world into being before man, who is himself
a later part of creation. The models of human civilization are
supplied by God, who plants a garden and places Adam in it,
and who created an angelic city before there were any
human cities. This creation was, we are told, perfect, or at
least 'very good/ whatever the source of this value-judge-
ment. Man lost touch with the divine creation through his
own sin and 'fall/ and now lives in an alienating nature in
consequence. The other approach to creation starts with the
vision that man has of a nature recreated in humanized
form, the vision recorded in various forms of the arts, rang-
ing from pastoral poetry to architecture. It culminates in a
vision of recreation in which man himself participates, and
which appears to be in fact the total aim and goal of human
creative effort.
I discussed in the second chapter some of the impoverish-
ing qualities of the myth of a special divine creation. In its
 52

more rigid form, at least, it assumes that the arts are only
feeble and pointless imitations of what God has done infi-
nitely better; it goes into bewildering verbal quibbles in
efforts to 'reconcile' God's goodness and the world's bad-
ness, and it becomes increasingly isolated from everything
that the sciences have to tell us about human origins. The
myth itself has a built-in explanation for its own sterility. It
contains the implication that our minds have been too
clouded over by the fall to respond directly to a vision of
divine creation, and can only learn something about it on a
level that we can fit into our existing mental categories. Thus
W.H. Auden makes his Simeon say, in his 'Christmas Orato-
rio' For the Time Being, that man's consciousness extends
only to the limit of what is traditionally called original sin, of
which 'it is impossible for him to become conscious because
it is itself what conditions his will to knowledge.' So, accept-
ing the myth on its own terms, we can never get back to the
vision of creation before the fall in our imaginations, how-
ever carefully we study the Genesis account. The myth
speaks of an angel who guards the tree of life, whose flaming
sword symbolizes the blinded mental conditions in which
we approach it.
In the previous chapter I tried to show how in Dante the
vision of the future goal of human recreation takes the form
essentially of a return to God, a return which is also a
response to God's initial effort to descend to man. The close
of the Paradiso is the summing up of centuries of thought in
which a view of creation derived from the Bible provided a
conception of two levels of nature, an upper level which is
man's original home, and is identical with the state of art,
and a lower level which is the physical nature of plants and
animals, and is not man's home but only his environment.
 53

Everything that raises man from his fallen level to his origi-
nally designed one involves some degree of returning to his
original creation. It is recreation only in the sense that man is
included in it: the actual process is God's redemption of
man, man doing very little for himself that is of any real use.
The whole process of human response, in Christian doctrine,
is contained within the Holy Spirit, so that man's redemp-
tion is a drama within the persons of the Trinity in which
man has a very limited actor's role. As the Holy Spirit guides
the church, the doctrine of the Trinity, which is so central to
Christian dogma in both Catholic and Protestant contexts,
seems to have been, in its historical setting, a doctrine
designed primarily to prevent man from slipping out of the
grip of the church.
This view is part of an authoritarian structure, and a great
deal of its power and influence collapsed under the hammer-
ing of the great capitalist revolutions of the eighteenth cen-
tury. In the nineteenth century we see that the mythological
picture which survived Dante for many centuries has finally
and totally changed. There is no longer any functional place
for a divine creation myth at the beginning of things: there is
only human culture, and therefore at most only the sense of
human recreation as a distant goal. But human culture and
its goals are not guaranteed by anything like a universe of
law rooted in the nature of God himself, much less by any
will on the part of a God to redeem. On the contrary, they
are guaranteed by nothing and are threatened by practically
everything. Everywhere we turn in the nineteenth century,
we find a construct reminding us of a Noah's ark bearing the
whole surviving life of a world struggling to keep afloat in a
universal storm. We have Schopenhauer's world of idea
threatened by a world of will, Marx's ascendant-class culture
 54

threatened by a dispossessed proletariat, Freud's ego cling-

ing to its precarious structure of sanity and threatened by
the forces of the libido, Nietzsche's morality threatened by
the will to power, Huxley's ethical values threatened by the
evolutionary drive. These various thinkers take various atti-
tudes of sympathy or hostility towards the threatening force,
but the mythical construct is of much the same shape in
every one.
Heidegger says that the first question of philosophy is
'why are there things rather than nothing?', but surely there
is an even prior question: why objectify the world at all? or,
more simply, why do we want to know? It sounds like a
psychological question, but it is only partly that. The
moment we ask it we are involved in the whole process of
what I have called recreation, the constructing of human cul-
ture and civilization, and the question turns into something
more like: 'why is simple existence in the world not good
enough for us?' Whatever the answer, the question itself
seems to push us away from the biblical story of a beginning
creation, and towards the vision of recreation as a future
goal in which our own efforts are involved.
This lands us in the antithesis of the traditional Christian
view, a secular attitude in which man as at present consti-
tuted has to be regarded as himself the only creator in ques-
tion. The end of human recreation, then, finds humanity
looking at itself in a mirror. This is a somewhat daunting
prospect: Narcissus at least had a beautiful face to look at,
but the face of humanity that would look out of such a mir-
ror is that of a psychotic ape. I discussed in the first chapter
the fact that paranoia is a part of the secular attitude, and the
two poles of paranoia are quite obviously present here, as
they are in all the Noah's ark constructs just mentioned. If
 55

we select certain facts and attend only to them, we are the

lords of creation and recreation alike, with an infinite
destiny before us: if we select others, we summon up a
vision of hideous and total eclipse in a hydrogen bomb
Armageddon. The gospels represent Jesus as continually
casting devils out of the mentally ill: we may regard this as
primitive psychology, and feel that is is unreasonable to
expect modern man, living in this advanced century of
Hitler and Idi Amin and Mr Jones of Guyana, to believe in
evil spirits. But in other moods we may recognize that the
mentally ill who know that they are possessed by devils are
in a sense the lucky ones, and that the rest of us are similarly
possessed but don't mind. The older construct wore out
because it repressed the sense of human autonomy, the
awareness that there are more things in man than any
church or government can recognize or accommodate. But a
purely secular construct, whether humanist or Communist,
may be repressing complementary things.
The first person in the modern world who understood
that the older mythological construct had collapsed was Wil-
liam Blake. He also, though without direct influence, set up
the model for all the nineteenth-century constructs just
mentioned, where cultural values float on a perilous sea. In
Blake we begin with the Songs of Innocence, which reflect a
child's view of the world, in which the world is controlled
by a benevolent providence, makes human sense and re-
sponds to the human need for love and peace, and was pro-
bably made in the first place for the child's own special
benefit. As the child grows older, he enters the world of
'experience/ and learns as an adult that the world is not in
the least like this. At that point his personality splits in two.
His conscious waking adult self, which Blake calls Urizen,
 56

struggles to adapt itself to what for it is the real world; his

childhood vision, which Blake calls Ore, is driven under-
ground into what we call the subconscious, where it forms a
boiling volcanic world of mainly sexual and largely frus-
trated desire.
A typical song of innocence is the poem called 'The Lamb/
where a child asks a lamb the first question of the catechism,
'Who made thee?' He knows the answer: Jesus made both
the lamb and the child himself, and Jesus is also a lamb and a
child, a creator whose creation is 'very good' because it is
identifiable with his nature. The counterpart to 'The Lamb'
in the Songs of Experience is 'The Tyger/ Here, instead of one
question promptly and confidently answered, we have a
long series of rhetorical questions without any answers, cul-
minating in the crucial question, 'Did he who made the lamb
make thee?' This question also has no answer, because in the
world of the tiger, the world our adult minds inhabit, the
conception of a divine creator makes no sense. The tiger, as
Blake sees him, is one of the forms of the angel guarding the
tree of life, or what Blake calls the Covering Cherub. Perhaps
we can eventually get past him to some vision of creation
which will include his glowing and sinister splendour. But
such a vision of creation would have to be at the end of a
long journey to somewhere on the far side of the tiger. There
can be no going back to square one and the child's vision of
the lamb. This long-range vision of creation would also have
to include and incorporate our own creative powers: we
cannot go back either to a ready-made order supplied us by
a pre-existing providence.
But Blake, though he destroys a mythology derived from
the Bible, is an intensely biblical poet himself. He reads the
Bible in what he calls its infernal or diabolical sense. Accord-
 57

ing to him the creation of the world, the fall of man, and the
deluge of Noah were all the same event, and the fall was a
fall in the divine as well as the human nature. Hence what
has traditionally been called the creation is actually a ruin,
and there is no creation except human recreation, which is
the same humanized form of nature that we find in the para-
disal, pastoral, agricultural, and urban imagery of the Bible.
Blake is far more interested than the Bible itself is, however,
in seeing the relevance of the human arts to this transforma-
tion of nature. He speaks of poetry, painting, and music as
the three forms of conversing with paradise which the flood
did not sweep away.
Blake's perspective on the theme of creation in the Bible
begins with the Book of Exodus, with Israel in Egypt and a
situation of injustice and exploitation already present. God
intervenes in this situation, telling Moses from the burning
bush that he is about to give himself a name and a highly
partisan role in history, taking the side of the oppressed
proletariat and holding out to them the goal of a 'Promised
Land' of their own, which they will have to work towards.
Man has to depend at least partly on his own imagination
and creative powers to lead him towards the goal symbo-
lized in the Bible by its last book, the Book of Revelation,
Blake's favourite biblical book, where the form of the world
that man should be living in is set out at the very end, fol-
lowing visions of appalling disasters before that end is
reached. The vision of a created order is never an easily
attained vision, but comes out of the depths of human
anguish and effort. One very clear example in the Bible is the
'Song of the Three Children' in the Apocrypha, meaning the
three Jews in Babylon who were flung into Nebuchad-
nezzar's fiery furnace because they would not abjure their
 58

faith. It was from the midst of the fire that they sang their
hymn of praise to God for his beautiful world, just as the
hymns of praise in the Psalms and elsewhere come out of
Israel's deliverance from the 'furnace of iron' which is what
Egypt is called by Solomon.
In Blake's illustrations to the Book of Job, made towards
the end of his life, the same attitude to the structure and
imagery of the Bible is equally clear. What the Book of Job
seems to be saying, as we follow its argument through the
deadlocks caused first by Job's three friends and then by
Elihu, is that God himself intervenes in the discussion to
convict Job of ignorance. He asks Job a series of rhetorical
questions about whether he was present at the original cre-
ation or could do any of the things then done. Job wasn't and
couldn't, and God seems to regard this as a triumphant
argument in favour of the wisdom of his ways and the folly
of Job's. For Blake, however, God is not indulging in crass
bullying: he is telling Job that how he got in his situation is
less important than how he is to get out of it again. Job is
being pushed away from the creation and all efforts to find
his way back to a first cause, and encouraged to look in the
opposite direction, where he can see the alienating forms of
nature, symbolized by the behemoth and leviathan who
appear at the end, as the sources of the repressions, internal
and external, which are preventing him from seeing his own
original birthright.
Blake's reading of the Bible is so deeply rooted in the
structure and imagery of the Bible that it is perhaps worth
asking what principle his reading is based on. We cannot
read far in the Bible, of course, without becoming aware of
the importance of all the standard figures of speech, of which
the most important is metaphor. In metaphor, we have two
 59

points of verbal reference existing together: 'this is that/ But

there are also at least two figures of speech that exist in time.
The more familiar of these is causality, which may be sug-
gested by some things that go on in nature, but as a way of
arranging words is a rhetorical figure of speech. The verbal
progression in causal writing is normally forward from
cause to effect: this becomes that, or, this results from that.
But the mental operations preceding the writing out of the
causal sequence move backwards. The causal thinker is
confronted by a mass of phenomena which he can under-
stand only by thinking of them as effects, after which he
searches for their preceding causes. The movement back-
wards reminds us of, and may even be connected with,
Plato's conception of knowledge as recollection. Present
things are understood by being related to past things in such
a way that cognition becomes the same thing as re-cognition,
awareness that a present effect is a past cause in another
form. Causality is, of course, an essential basis of both
scientific and metaphysical thinking, and its verbal expres-
sion is that of continuous prose, which seems to have been
developed mainly for the purpose of putting causality into
verbal structures.
The Bible is based mainly on another figure of speech
which also moves in time, but in the opposite direction from
causality. This is the figure traditionally called typology. In
the Christian view of the Bible, everything that happens in
the Old Testament is a 'type' or 'figure' of which the New
Testament provides the 'antitype' or revealed meaning. Thus
Paul (Romans 5:14) speaks of Adam as a typos of Christ, and
I Peter 3:21 speaks of Christian baptism as the antitypos of
the story of the flood. Such typology is not confined to the
Christian perspective: the Old Testament, from a Jewish
 60

point of view, is quite as typological without the New Testa-

ment as with it, and its antitypes are still the restoration of
Israel and the coming of the Messiah, though the context of
these events is different from that of Christianity.
Typology is clearly not, like causality, anything that can be
linked to a scientific or philosophical procedure. It belongs
in the area indicated by such words as faith, hope, and
vision. It has some affinities with allegory: the stories or
myths of the Old Testament become types or parables of
existential truths, and many parts of the Old Testament,
such as the ceremonial law, have usually been read allegori-
cally by Christians. But the normal structure of allegory, an
imaginary narrative paralleled with the moral precepts
which are its 'real meaning/ does not fit the Bible, where
both Testaments are concerned with actual people and
events. What typology really is is a vision of history, or more
accurately of historical process. It insists that for all the chaos
and waste in human effort, nevertheless historical events, or
some of them, are going somewhere and meaning some-
thing. Our modern belief in historical process, whether it
takes a democratic or a Marxist form, is an outgrowth of the
cultural legacy of the Bible.
In the nineteenth century the conception of evolution sug-
gested certain analogies in human life that gave us a new
form of typological thinking. This was because evolution
was interpreted purely from the human point of view. Evo-
lution, as we see it, did the best it possibly could when it
finally produced us, and whatever more it can do it can do
only through us. Hence the kind of typology symbolized by
science fiction and by all the forecasts of the future based on
present technology: everything we can do now is a type of
what we shall be able to do in the future. I spoke a moment
 61

ago of the manic-depressive insanity of these and similar

attitudes as they shuttle wildly from dreams of unqualified
progress to nightmares of unqualified disaster.
Kierkegaard wrote a small book on Repetition in which he
proposed to adopt this term as a characteristic of Christian
philosophy, one which is thrown forward to the future and
is at once a contrast and a complement to the Platonic view
of knowledge as recollection of the past. The Christian repe-
tition, Kierkegaard says, finds its final formulation in the
apocalyptic promise 'Behold, I make all things new/ It seems
to me that Kierkegaard's idea is derived from, as it is cer-
tainly connected with, the typological structure of the Bible.
In any case the typology of the Bible links it to history in a
way impossible for paganism, which remains based on the
recurring cycles of nature. To use fairly familiar terms in a
slightly different context, biblical mythology is diachronic,
pagan mythology synchronic. The diachronic dimension
makes it possible for personality to emerge in biblical
mythology. Jesus and Adonis are both dying gods, with very
similar cults and imagery attached to them, but Jesus is a
person and Adonis is not, however many human figures
may have represented him. Nietzsche drew from evolution a
diachronic vision of human self-transcendence which he
called the Superman. But his preference for the synchronic
Dionysus over the diachronic Christ forced him to enclose
his Superman in a framework of identical recurrence which
for me, and I should imagine for others too, totally destroys
the dynamic of the conception.
At the same time typology cannot preserve its vitality
indefinitely unless it keeps its antitypes in the future. By
making the Old Testament a historical process fulfilled in the
coming of Christ, Christianity was in danger of losing this
 62

vitality as that event receded into the past. A 'second com-

ing' or future transcendence of history had to grow up along
with the doctrine of the Incarnation, and is very prominent
in every part of the New Testament itself, but had to lead an
increasingly furtive existence as the authority of the Church
grew and history, like the Marxist state, continued to fail to
wither away. What happened, in practice if not in theory,
was that the entire Bible, including the New Testament,
became a type or parable of which the antitype or revealed
form was the structure of Christian doctrine as taught by the
church. The role of the doctrine of the Trinity in this process
has already been considered.
Some of the Protestant Reformers attempted to cut away
this superstructure of doctrine in favour of a more direct
dialogue with the Bible. The degree of their success does not
concern us here, except for one major work of literature
involved with it, Milton's Paradise Lost. We have suggested
that an artificial creation myth, with its implication that
everything man can do has already been done by God on an
infinitely superior plane of reality, is a somewhat hampering
one for the human creative impulse. Why, then, did the
instinct of so very great a poet lead him in precisely the
direction of retelling the story of creation in Genesis, and to
retell it expressly for the purpose of rationalizing it, or, as he
says, to justify the ways of God to men? It is an attempt to
answer this question that takes up the rest of what I have to
say, although the answer will take us a long way from Milton.
The basis of Milton's thinking is Paul's conception of the
gospel as the fulfilment, or what we are calling the antitype,
the revealed form, of the Old Testament law. The external
acts prescribed for the specific nation of Israel become what
Milton calls 'shadowy types' of an individual's inner state of
 63

mind. Again, the law is the myth, the type, the parable; the
gospel is the existential reality that the law symbolizes. Simi-
larly, the story of creation functions as a type or model of
that inner state of mind in which Adam, at the end of the
poem, begins the long climb up towards his original home
again. Eden as an external environment disappears, to
reappear as the 'paradise within thee, happier far/ which is
held out to Adam as a final hope. Once more, the creation
myth is a seed that comes to its own real fruition in a recre-
ative effort in which Adam is involved. Adam is, of course,
the representative human being, or, more precisely, the
representative reader of the Bible. The Bible is in effect being
read to him through the last two books of the poem.
It may sound fatuous to say that Paradise Lost was written
for the sake of its readers, but Milton's more discerning cri-
tics have always recognized that there is something very dis-
tinctive about the role of the reader in that poem. Many
critics have asked who the hero of Paradise Lost is, and have
given various answers: Satan, Adam, Christ. But there is a
lurking feeling that the question is somehow inappropriate.
In Milton's theology the supreme authority is not the Bible
but the reader of the Bible, the person who understands it
and possesses what Milton calls the word of God in the
heart. From one point of view we can say that this is not the
reader as human being, but the Holy Spirit within the reader,
so that Milton is keeping the whole operation wrapped up
inside God, as his orthodox contemporaries did. But there is
enough vagueness and indecision in Milton's view of the
Holy Spirit to make it clear that he is moving in the modern
direction of regarding the reader, simply as human being, as
the real focus of his poem and the final aim of all his 'justify-
ing' of the ways of God.
 64

In my first chapter I quoted a passage from Oscar Wilde's

essay 'The Critic as Artist/ This essay builds up an argument
that seems to make an exaggerated and quite unrealistic
importance out of the reader of literature, the critic being the
representative reader. He is paralleled with the artist in a
way that seems to give him an equal share at least in what
the artist is doing. Here again Wilde is writing from the
point of view of a later generation. For many centuries the
centre of gravity in literature was the hero, the man whose
deeds the poet celebrated. As society slowly changed its
shape, the hero modulated to the 'character/ and in Wilde's
day it was still the creation of character, as one sees it so
impressively in Shakespeare, Dickens, and Browning, that
was the primary mark of poetic power. At the same time the
Romantic movement had brought with it a shift of interest
from the hero to the poet himself, as not merely the creator
of the hero but as the person whose inner life was the real, as
distinct from the projected, subject of the poem. There
resulted an extraordinary mystique of creativity, in which
the artist became somehow a unique if not actually superior
species of human being, with qualities of prophet, genius,
wise man, and social leader. Wilde realized that in a short
time the centre of gravity in literature and critical theory
would shift again, this time from the poet to the reader. The
dividing line in English literature is probably Finnegans
Wake, where it is so obvious that the reader has a heroic role
to play.
The literary critic of 1980 finds himself in the midst of a
bewildering array of problems which seem to focus mainly
on the reader of a text. What is a text, and what does a reader
do to it when he reads it? Where is the text - in the book, in
the reader's mind, or lost somewhere between? If a work of
 65

literature is read and appreciated centuries later than it was

written, what is the social context of its meaning? Some of
these questions may be peripheral, or resolved only by some
kind of dead-end paradox, but the issue they relate to is still
a central one. It seems to me that, once again, some such
conception as that of 'recreation' is needed to make sense of
such problems. Every reader recreates what he reads: even if
he is reading a letter from a personal friend he is still recreat-
ing it into his own personal orbit. Recreation of this sort
always involves some kind of translation. To read is invari-
ably to translate to some degree, however well one knows
the language of what is read.
Let us take translation in its customary sense of changing
a structure from one language to another, as a special case of
recreation. The question of translation is peculiarly impor-
tant in the Christian tradition, which has had a close connec-
tion with translation from the beginning. Moslem and
Jewish scholarship are, inevitably, bound up with the lin-
guistic features of the Arabic of the Koran and the Hebrew of
the Old Testament respectively. But the New Testament was
written in a koine Greek unlikely to have been the native
language of its authors; and when those authors used the
Old Testament, whatever their knowledge of Hebrew, they
normally relied on the Septuagint Greek version. Then for
over a thousand years the only Bible available in Western
Europe was a Latin Bible, and modern movements from
Luther to the missionary work of the nineteenth century
brought with them a strong impulse to translate the Bible
into every known tongue.
Everyone concerned with the study of literature knows
how much of translation is a settling for the second best.
This is most obvious in major poetry, where a translation
 66

has to be a miracle of tact without claiming to be a replace-

ment for the original. The particular problem we are con-
cerned with, however, is of a different kind. The cynical
Italian proverb traditore traduttore, a translator is a traitor,
has two points of reference. Granted sufficient scholarship, a
translator does not necessarily betray his text: what he
always does and must betray is his own cultural orbit, the
socially conditioned limits within which he can operate. The
English reader looking for translations of Homer can find an
exuberant Elizabethan Homer in Chapman, a periwigged
Homer in Pope, a Gothic-revival Homer in the Loeb Clas-
sics, a colloquial modern Homer in the Penguins. What he
will never get in this world is simply Homer in English.
Similarly with the Bible. There may be something of Paul
in the 1611 translation: 'Charity suffereth long, and is kind;
charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed
up/ But we also hear the anxieties of 1611, when the clouds
of civil war were gathering and the British Empire was get-
ting started with settlements in America and the founding of
the East India Company, and where ambition and aggres-
sion seemed the most dangerous foes of charity. In fact
Shakespeare's Wolsey, denouncing ambition at roughly the
same time, employs a very similar figure to 'is not puffed up'
when he speaks of himself as having ventured beyond his
depth like little boys swimming on bladders. There may be
something of Paul too in the modern Phillips translation:
'This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience - it looks
for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive: it is
neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas
of its own importance.' But there are also the anxieties of
middle-class democracy in these cadences, of a world where
charity has a good deal to do with being a co-operative com-
mittee man.
 67

At this point, translation merges into the wider question

of recreation. What can be translated is what is loosely called
sense, the relation of many signifiers to a common signified.
Each reader, translator or recreator, renders his text into a
form determined largely by his own cultural context. To
return to the terms of our first lecture, the arts form an
extension of our own past, but find their meaning for us in
our present situation. That present situation contains ele-
ments of vision which we project on the future, and those
elements form the recreating aspect of our reading. Every
work of literature that we continue to read and study meant
something to its own time and something quite different to
us. Both poles of understanding have to be kept in mind. If
we disregard its original historical context, we are simply
kidnapping it into the orbit of our own concerns; if we dis-
regard its relevance to ourselves, we are leaving it unrevived
in the morgue of the past. But if we keep the two together
and in balance, we are stabilizing a tradition, and are
engaged in a process which includes ourselves and yet is
something bigger than ourselves. One end of this process is a
creation, and the other end a recreation.
There is another aspect of recreation, however, which
expands into the whole history of language itself as a form of
human communication and consciousness. We mentioned
Homer, who is one of the purest poets we have, because his
language comes from a time before abstract or conceptual
thinking had developed. Homer's vocabulary, as Onians'
monumental study of it, Origins of European Thought, shows
us at length, is astonishingly concrete. Such conceptions as
anger, cunning, thought, emotion, are all solidly anchored in
parts of the physical body, such as the diaphragm and lungs.
This means essentially that Homer's vocabulary was not
metaphorical to him, but must be to us. The metaphor is the
 68

figure of speech that expresses most clearly the sense of

an identity between subjective and objective worlds, and
Homer comes from a time when no very clear line was
drawn between them. Since then, there have been several
other developments in language, one of them the descriptive
language of our own day, which is based on a clear separa-
tion between subject and object, between element of person-
ality and element of nature. It is one of the functions of
literature in our day, more particularly of poetry, to keep
reviving the metaphorical habit of mind, the primitive sense
of identity between subject and object which is most clearly
expressed in the pagan 'god/ who is at once a personality
and a natural image.
This means that the cultural affinities of poetry are with
the primitive and archaic, a fact about poetry which has been
recognized from early times. The metaphors of poetry take
us back to a world of undifferentiated energy and continu-
ous presence. Take these lines from a well-known hymn:

His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,

And dark is his path on the wings of the storm.

We may not be deeply moved by these lines -1 am not pre-

senting them as major poetry-but we could be by other
lines as far removed from descriptive or objective meaning
as they are. If we took them 'literally/ whatever that means,
we should have an intolerably crude notion of the God they
attempt to describe. But, of course, we do not take them in
that way; we take them as poetic metaphor. Like other
hymns, this one draws on the Bible, and in one of the Psalms
it is said that God rode upon the back of a cherub, and did
fly. But there the statement is still poetic metaphor. Some
 69

mythical rationalizers might want to carry the image back to

a society so confused about nature that they would 'believe'
that thunder indicated a God riding around the sky in some
sort of private aeroplane. But it is not necessary to assume
that any such society ever existed: the statement is radically
metaphorical. It is a way, perhaps the only type of way, that
language has of conveying the sense of a numinous presence
in nature, and that is where we stop. We notice incidentally
that in these lines the Christian God is being represented by
a god. In spite of the achievement of Dante and Milton, poets
on the whole feel easier with pagan gods than with the
Christian God, because pagan gods are ready-made meta-
phors, and go into poetry with the minimum of adjustment.
We think of the creation story in Genesis as essentially a
poetic account. For Milton it was not a poetic account, yet he
deliberately poeticizes it. By doing so he turned it into an
intricate body of metaphors, conveying the sense of a spirit-
ual force that includes man but does not originate from him.
It is particularly in the account of creation itself, in Book
Seven, that we realize how the poetic paraphrase renders
our sense of creation, not in an ornamental or sophisticated
form, but in a far more primitive form than the original
does:

Forth flourished thick the clustering vine, forth crept

The smelling gourd, up stood the corny reed
Embattled in her field: add the humble shrub,
And bush with frizzled hair implicit: last
Rose, as in dance, the stately trees.

The recreation of poetry and its metaphorical use of

language leads to two principles, one specific, the other uni-
 70

versal. First, it reveals the narrowness of our ordinary

descriptive use of language. Nietzsche's statement 'God is
dead/ which has been so widely accepted, even in theologi-
cal circles, is primarily a linguistic statement, or, more pre-
cisely, a statement about the limitations of language. The
word God is a noun, which within our present descriptive
framework of language means that God has to belong to the
category of things and objects. We may agree that God is
dead as the subject or object of a human predicate. But per-
haps using the word God as a noun in this way is merely a
fallacy of the type that Whitehead calls misplaced concrete-
ness. We note that in the burning bush story in Exodus, God,
though he also gives himself a name, defines himself as 'I am
that I am/ which scholars say would be better rendered as 'I
will be what I will be/ Buckminster Fuller wrote a book
called I Seem to be a Verb, and perhaps God is a verb too, not
simply a verb of asserted existence but a verb expressing a
process fulfilling itself. Such a use of language revives an
archaic mode of language, and yet is oddly contemporary
with, for example, the language of the nuclear physicists,
who no longer think of their atoms and electrons as things
but as something more like traces of processes.
Then again, the traditional doctrine of divine creation, we
said, is creation with what we ordinarily mean by words.
We have tried to show how the recreating of language
attaches man to words in such a way that words become
something much bigger than he is, hence we can well under-
stand such thinkers as Heidegger and others when they sug-
gest that language is not a machine or invention that man
uses, but something that, in its full range, uses man, man
being ultimately the servant rather than the master of lan-
guage. There is a further suggestion that there may be some-
 71

thing linked to the human use of words which is a power of

human self-transcendence, a step away from the narrow
humanism that has to stop with the psychotic ape in the
mirror.
There is also the term 'spirit/ which is so emphasized in
the New Testament, with its insistence that the scriptures
have to be 'spiritually discerned/ One of the things that 'spi-
ritually' must mean in this context is 'metaphorically/ Thus
the Book of Revelation speaks of a 'great city, which spiritu-
ally is called Sodom and Egypt' and is also identified with
the earthly Jerusalem. And one wonders, in studying Hegel's
Phenomenology of the Spirit, which has become a text used by
Christians and Marxists alike, whether the antithesis of theist
and atheist in our day may not be a quarrel of Tweedledee
and Tweedledum over a word that neither really under-
stands. For the atheist is still left with personality as the
highest category in his cosmos after he has rejected the theos.
The terms 'Word' and 'Spirit/ then, may be understood in
their traditional context as divine persons able and willing to
redeem mankind. They may be also understood as qualities
of self-transcendence within man himself, capable of pulling
him out of the psychosis that every news bulletin brings us
so much evidence for. I am suggesting that these two modes
of understanding are not contradictory or mutually exclu-
sive, but dialectically identical. Certainly the goal of human
recreation, whenever we try to visualize it, bears a curious
resemblance to the traditional vision of divine creation at the
source. As the fully awakened beings in Blake's Four Zoas
say: 'How is it that all things are chang'd, even as in ancient
time?'
To extend the meanings of 'word' and 'spirit' into areas
beyond the human seems to make them into objects of belief.
 72

But it seems to me that there are two levels of belief. There is,
first, professed belief, what we say we believe, think we
believe, believe we believe. Professed belief is essentially a
statement of loyalty or adherence to a specific community:
what we say we believe defines us as Christians or Moslems
or Marxists or whatever. But then there is another level in
which our belief is what our actions show that we believe.
With some highly integrated people the two levels are con-
sistent. But professed belief, in our world, is pluralistic and
competitive. It is characteristic of believing communities,
anxious for their solidarity, to set up elaborate structures of
faith that ask too much from their adherents in the way of
professed belief, forgetting that any belief which cannot
become an axiom of behaviour is not merely useless but
dangerous. In some respects professed belief is a solid and
satisfying basis for a community, yet in our world it seems
that it is the worst possible basis for a secular community.
Whether the community is nominally Catholic or Protestant
or Jewish or Moslem or Hindu, every secular state guided by
religious principles seems to turn them into a form of devil-
worship. The same thing is true of Marxism, which when it
becomes socially established acquires a religious quality
based on the doctrine of the infallibility of the Holy Com-
munist Church. In the Soviet Union, as more recently in
China, periodic 'thaws/ or pretences at democratic tolerance,
take place for the purpose of discovering who the really dan-
gerous people are, ie, the people who do not subscribe to this
doctrine of infallibility.
If there is a creative force in the world which is greater
than the purely human one, we shall not find it on the level
of professed belief, but only on a level of common action and
social vision. At this level all beliefs become to some degree
 73

partial, not because they are untrue for those who hold
them, but because the human mind is finite and the human
will corrupt. To work within such a community no one
needs to surrender or even compromise with a professed
belief. But those whose professed belief is Christian, for
example, would be recognizing the supremacy of charity
over faith which is part of that faith itself, as well as the
gospel's insistence on 'fruits' as the only valid proof of belief.
This conception is close to what Blake, in a phrase taken
from the Book of Revelation, calls the 'everlasting gospel/ a
conception which implies that the human race already
knows what it ought to be thinking and doing, though the
voices of repression, made articulate by competing ideolo-
gies, keep shouting the knowledge down. They are all voices
of Antichrist, whose first act recorded in the Bible was to
build the Tower of Babel to the accompaniment of a confu-
sion of tongues.
Every unit is a whole to which various parts are subordi-
nate, and every unit is in turn a part of a larger whole. Reli-
gions, theistic or atheistic, are units which define themselves
in such a way as to cut off the possibility of their being parts
of larger wholes, even when they are compelled to act in that
way by expediency. We are perhaps now in a period of his-
tory at which this looks more like pride and delusion than
like faith. If we could transcend the level of professed belief,
and reach the level of a world-wide community of action
and charity, we should discover a new creative power in
man altogether. Except that it would not be new, but the
power of the genuine Word and Spirit, the power that has
created all our works of culture and imagination, and is still
ready to recreate both our society and ourselves.
This page intentionally left blank
 Notes

References sufficiently identified in the text are not given here.

p 5, line 24. 'Wordsworth/ The Tables Turned' 16

p 6, line 1. 'Vico/ The New Science of Giambattista Vico, tr. Bergin
and Fisch (1968), section 331
line 30. 'Heidegger/ An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr.
Manheim (1959)
p 7, line 17. 'Frazer/ Apollodorus, The Library (Loeb tr., 1921)
xxvii
p 11, line 12. 'Decreation/ Cf. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary
Angel (1951) 174
p 12, line 8. 'Emily Dickinson/ Letters (Belknap Press 1958) II,
576
p 14, line 6. 'Joyce's phrase/ Ulysses (Random House ed. 1934)
35
p 15, line 18. 'Jacques Lacan/ The Language of the Self, tr. Wilden
(1968) 18
p 19, line 24. 'Marcel Duchamp/ The Green Box, tr. Hamilton
(1957)
p 25, line 2. 'Eliot/ 'Burnt Norton' 65
p 28, line 26. 'Samuel Butler/ Life and Habit, Ch. 7
 76

p 32, line 21. 'Milton/ Paradise Lost, I, 741

p 34, line 10. 'St Augustine/ Confessions, Bk 12
p 37, line 25. 'Aristotle/ Metaphysics, section 988a
p 39, line 7. 'Robert Graves/ 'To Juan at the Winter Solstice' 9
p 40, line 21. 'Michael Wigglesworth/ The Day of Doom, sts
172-81
line 31. 'Sir Thomas Browne/ Religio Medici, The First Part
p 41, line 22. 'Puttenham/ Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory
Smith, II, 188
p 43, line 14. 'circuit-rider/ Literary History of Canada, ed. Klinck
(1965) 130 (actually Lower Canada)
line 28. 'Book of Enoch/ I Enoch, section 54
p 44, line 1. 'Hegel/ Phenomenology of the Spirit, section 774
line 20. 'Popol Vuh/ Popol Vuh, The Sacred Book of the
Ancient Quiche Maya, 1950, 82ff
p 45, line 31. 'Edmund Burke/ Appeal from New to Old Whigs
p 46, line 11. 'Sidney/ Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory
Smith, I, 156
p 48, line 8. 'Dante/ Paradiso xxxiii
p 58, line 5. 'Solomon/ I Kings 8:51
p 59, line 25. 'typology/ See Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of
European Literature (1973). The essay on 'Figura/ 11-76, is
practically indispensable.
p 66, line 22. 'Shakespeare's Wolsey/ Henry Vlll, III, ii, 359
p 68, line 28. 'one of the Psalms/ Psalm 18:10 (cf. II Samuel
22:11)
p 70, line 28. 'Heidegger/ Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Hofstadter
(1971) 198
p 83, line 10. 'everlasting gospel/ Revelation 14:6
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