Kauã Barreto’s Reviews > Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture > Status Update

«I think that probably every cycle is just a failed spiral, and that history and nature collapse into cycles because they are too lazy to start again at another level. Yet there is the level by which one starts at Genesis and ends in Revelation, and that is followed by what happens in the reader's mind after he does that, which is an experience at a different level, and so on up.»

«... anxiety, absurdity, and alienation. That is the primer of twentieth-century man: if a person knows the meaning of those three words, he knows all the wisdom that the twentieth century can teach him, which, God knows, is little enough.»

«All the languages relevant to the Bible distinguish between the soul and the spirit. In Hebrew, they are usually nephesh and ruach; in Greek, they are psyche and pneuma; in Latin, they are anima and spiritus; and you have similar distinctions in modern languages, as in English between soul and spirit, and German Seele and Geist, and so on.»

«... Babylon and the Rome of the persecuting Caesars are symbolically the same demonic city, where the power opposed to that of Christianity is established.»

Frye então separa o polo demoníaco em duas categorias: o demoníaco paródico e o demoníaco manifesto.

Frye enfatiza que toda imagem precisa estar em ambos os polos, e exemplifica com uma em específico que é totalmente negativa no imaginário popular: a serpente. A serpente que seduziu o Homem à sua queda está no polo demoníaco, mas Jesus também aconselhou a seus discípulos, «sede prudentes como as serpentes»; nesse contexto, a imagem da serpente está no polo apocalíptico.

Após explorar a tipologia, Frye escreve que toda imagem bíblica, ou signo, está presente em dois polos opostos: apocalíptico, ou ideal, e demoníaco. Para usar locais como exemplos, o primeiro está relacionado ao Jardim do Éden ou a Nova Jerusalém, e o segundo aos reinos pagãos perversos, como Babilônia ou Roma.

Frye apresente a tipologia como um princípio central de seu curso. São explicados o tipo e o antitipo; tudo que acontece no Velho Testamento é um tipo que prefigura algo que vai acontecer no Novo; tudo que acontece no Novo Testamente explica os acontecimentos do Velho, sendo então o antitipo do tipo.

«We are told in the New Testament by Paul and others that the Bible has to be understood spiritually—pneumatikos—and the word "spiritually" means a good many things in the New Testament. But one thing it always means, and always has to mean, is "metaphorically."»

«... that perverse tendency on the part of mankind to enslave himself to his own inventions and his own conceptions. Man invented the wheel, and so in no time at all he's talking about wheels of fate and wheels of fortune as something that are stronger than he is. That's the Frankenstein element in the human mind, an element which is part of original sin.»