The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

Richard C. Smith is a professor in the Classics Department of the
University of Alberta.

Professor Northrop Frye of the University of Toronto has long been an international figure in the world of literary theory and criticism. In The Great Code he has combined the results of his study of biblical imagery and narrative to set forth his understanding of the Bible as a total literary structure. The book is, as he says, not a work of biblical scholarship of theology (though resting on Frye’s extensive reading in both subjects) but an attempt to provide students of literature with a perspective through which they will be able to relate the Bible to the vast realms of literature which it has influenced. The title The Great Code is not, therefore, an attempt to set forth an understanding of secret symbolism but an exposition of the unified system of thought found throughout the Bible which has made it such a potent force in the imaginative tradition of western civilization.

The book is divided into two parts: first, “The Order or Words,” in which Frye seeks to establish basic principles of interpretation in terms of literary analysis rather than belief or disbelief. Frye feels that language has changed from an early metaphorical stage (used by Plato and Christian theology) into our modern descriptive phase in which sense experience is the criterion of reality and God becomes a thing or object. Though Frye emphasizes that the Bible does not fit neatly into any of the various stages, but is more a fourth form of expression (i.e., exhortation of kerygma), it is also obvious that there is a major difference between modern language and biblical language.

At this point, Frye separates himself from modern theologians such as Bultman and insists that kerygma must be expressed in story-form which he calls myth and to “demythologize” the Bible would, in his opinion, be disastrous. He then shows how the biblical story or myth cannot be treated as if it were modern history (though it may be full of historical “facts”) any more than it can be taken as a poem. It has its own integrity as Heilsgeschichte or salvation history. Nevertheless, the Bible is full of metaphor which is quite different from modern descriptive language. This makes a “literal” understanding of the Bible misleading if one is using language in a scientific, descriptive sense.

At the end of the first part, Frye shows how typology was a basic pattern of thought for biblical (and especially New Testament) writers and flows naturally from biblical metaphor and metonymic language. In the second half of the book, typology, metaphor, myth, and language are then related to eight phases of revelation: creation, exodus or revolution, law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and two forms of apocalyptic vision. The first bodies of imagery in the Bible (paradisal, pastoral, agricultural, urban, and human life itself) are examined in detail and excellent contrasts between apocalyptic and demonic imagery are provided. The narrative rhythms of the Bible are demonstrated, with the Book of Job cited as the epitome of biblical narrative. Frye then concludes by noting that, while editorship has made the Bible a unity, each part has many levels of meaning out of which new discoveries of understanding can come to the serious reader.

This is a most interesting and perceptive work and should be read by anyone interested in the meaning of the Bible or its relationship to culture, life and thought.