Discovering the Bible

In The Great Code a major thinker of the century, who has deeply affected our understanding of literature and of language itself, proposes to show that, in some measure, traditional Christian reading of the Bible is unknowing, that the scholarship cultivated to remedy this is wrongheaded, and that our literary tradition and some major elemental currents of our thinking are conditioned by the Bible. So conditioned are they that to be unaware of this is to be denied a portion of that self-consciousness by which we are human. In each of these efforts I think Northrop Frye succeeds. He demonstrates that editorial continuity through the generations produced such a unity of narrative and metaphor in biblical literature that these texts should be read as one book. Beyond that, because of its dominantly metaphorical mode and its typological structure the book should be read centripetally; centrifugal referents to history and theology are secondary. The study of western literature and language either begins in the Bible or is consummated there. It was Frye's attention to the Bible that led him into 'the larger verbal context of which literature forms a part.' The polysemous meaning he finds in the Bible is 'a feature of all deeply serious writing.' Only in the sense that its meaning expands and deepens to an unparalleled extent will the Bible be considered by the critic as more than literature. It is a work of imagination, but its perspective is one that 'only God is assumed to be able to attain.' Its concern for human life 'goes far beyond the purely imaginative.' Yet, since it is not granted the status of a literary exception, its appropriateness as a focus and source of literary theory is vindicated.