The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Frye (1912-1991) was a leading Canadian philosopher and scholar, widely
published on literary criticism and related topics. This is his last
work, a summary of his most important thought boiled down to fewer than
ninety pages. Yet his mastery of the language was so complete that
nowhere does the prose seem condensed, nor do the ideas seem to lack
space.

Through two approaches to language—the literal and the
metaphorical—he explores not only language itself but also nature,
time, and God. While dealing with language, Frye differentiates between
the ways primitive and mature societies approach an understanding of the
world around them. He then demonstrates how the two outlooks affect
religion and philosophy.

Nature, too is treated in a dual way, either as forces to be
worshipped, or as an expression of something beyond those forces, which
may be deserving of worship. The reader is pulled along to view the most
paradoxical concept of them all, time. Frye shares a vision of time as
both something that flows from an unreal future into the more real
reservoir of history and experience, to another vision of all time as
now and all being forever.

The last chapter, “The Double Vision of God,” is firmly built on
the foundation erected by the double vision of language, nature, and
time. Frye is honest about his own training in theology and his own
biases, but something beyond these emerges—a view of man as an
intellect capable of expanding in its capacity to probe the
unfathomable. A must-read for philosophers, people who like to think
about their religious views, and those who love to understand our
language and see it used masterfully.