Polytropy

I understand homicide to be the killing of a human being, be it in murder, warfare, punishment, accident, euthanasia, or suicide.

Some jurisdictions have recognized, or may recognize, a freedom

• to kill oneself,
• to get somebody else’s help in this, or
• to have that person do the job completely.

Freedom is good, but can be misunderstood and abused. For one thing, freedom of choice is not freedom of will. Some choices are made with an impaired will – as Plato has Socrates point out to Cephalus in Book I of the Republic.

It would be useful if everybody knew the example. If a friend has deposited weapons with you, but asks for them back when in an extremely agitated state, then maybe you should think twice before handing them over.

A couple of years ago, a student from a liberal-arts college in New England asked me what I thought about canons. I should have asked her what she thought. Maybe she had been hearing something from a professor of hers. I questioned whether there was a canon anyway. I may have observed that the reading list of “great books” at my own alma mater in Annapolis and Santa Fe was always subject to change.

Nonetheless, maybe there should be a canon of works that everybody reads.

If some young person reads Plato and figures, “He was no more than an ancient Hitler,” that’s great, if she can back it up. (I recalled such a young person, Kendall Hailey, when writing “On Dialectic.”) In the current American administration, we seem to have admirers of Hitler, who want a United States united by blood and soil. Union through a common liberal education is a more realistic fantasy, it seems to me.

For documentary evidence, I’ll use the paragraph below from the new National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Heather Cox Richardson has brought it to my attention; she quotes a part of it in her newsletter dated December 5, 2025.

Finally, we want the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry – with no one sitting on the sidelines – who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.

I don’t know the usual language of these documents. I also don’t expect anybody to cherish anything in particular, be it George Washington or Thomas Jefferson; the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States; the Bible, the Republic, or the Iliad. I would hope that people had the opportunity, from a young age, to find something worth cherishing. I think I had this in my own education (as I suggest in “Reading and Writing”). What oneself finds worth cherishing may turn out to have been among what others cherish; indeed, I’m not sure where else one would look.

Probably the writers of the new NSS have not spent quality time with the Republic, even if this work did inspire their fellow authoritarian, the Ayotollah Khomeini (as I wrote in “Why the Polity”).

The last sentence of the quoted paragraph – it may allude to the health of the survivors of Darwinian natural selection. If you need a vaccine to avoid getting sick, you are inherently unhealthy and should be allowed to die – this would seem to be the “thinking,” if it be so called, behind the discouragement of vaccination by the current US Secretary of Health and Human Services.

My surmise would seem to be corroborated by the remark about “a gainfully employed citizenry – with no one sitting on the sidelines.” This could mean that everybody ought to be able to work at what satisfies them. It could also mean that when people are disabled, as by disease, accident, or age, they ought to be discarded, as in the American past:

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, she became aware of the plight of the cancerous poor in New York and was stricken by it. Charity patients with incurable cancer were not kept in the city hospitals but were sent to Blackwell’s Island or left to find their own place to die. In either case, it was a matter of being left to rot.

“She” is Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, a.k.a. Mother Mary Alphonsa. The words are those of Flannery O’Connor in “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann,” which I have saved at the link.

People who are free to be euthanized may also be coerced into it.

The present blog post is based on 34 emails, written in the first half of this year, 2025. Many of the emails were at least nominally part of a discussion of

• Northrop Frye, The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (1991).

Frye explains in his Preface that the first three of his four chapters originated

as lectures at the Emmanuel College alumni reunion on 14, 15, and 16 May 1990 at Emmanuel College … addressed by a member of The United Church of Canada to a largely United Church audience.

It seems the United Church now tolerates and even supports euthanasia.

Frye’s Preface is preceded by “Northrop Frye: An Appreciation,” dated February, 1991. Johan L. Aitken says here,

With malice toward none, Frye defends his church against those who demand absolute certainties, replying simply that we do not pretend to know what nobody actually knows anyway.

Perhaps one can be too certain that certainty is impossible. Here is Ben Crosby in “Where Are the Churches in Canada’s Euthanasia Experiment?” (Plough, February 27, 2023):

The United Church, Canada’s largest Protestant denomination, produced a 2017 statement that “we are not opposed in principle to the legislation allowing assistance in dying” and that [Medical Assistence in Dying] “may be chosen as a faithful option in certain circumstances” …

… Perhaps the most vivid image of the mainline churches’ capitulation is a MAID death being carried out in the sanctuary of a United Church in Manitoba, complete with the minister telling journalists that there was a “sense of ‘rightness’” in this woman’s killing.

As I understand, Crosby is an Episcopal priest from America, now serving the Anglican Church of Canada – which, to his dismay, is also neutral on MAiD.

In my emails, as usual, I brought in other works, as I have now. In addition to the various articles found on line, and the dialogues or monologues of Plato (Republic, Phaedrus, and Apology), there were books that I happened to be reading at the same time:

• George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871);
• Dante: Divine Comedy;
• Aristotle: De Anima and Poetics.

My edited emails themselves are on a page of this blog called “Feeling of Learning Double Vision.” Later in this post are summaries and occasional amplications of the emails.

George Eliot created Middlemarch out of two separate works, concerning Tertius Lydgate and Dorothea Brooke respectively. The story of Mary Garth and Fred Vincy in Middlemarch could also have been told separately. So could that of Tantripp and Pratt, as I suggested in “Purity Obscurity.” Apparently Eliot thought it worthwhile to see how all of these stories fit together. I have thought it worthwhile to see how the ideas of my emails fit together.

I have removed explicit indications that things were being said by others too – particularly one other, who had actually initiated the discussion of The Double Vision, and who had previously led a discussion of Frye’s book The Great Code (1982) from June, 1998, to May, 1999. I was present for only the tail end of that discussion, and I never joined in. The leader knows that the discussion was put on line and is still available on the Internet Archive; however, as far as I know, he is not interested in revisiting what he wrote.

I have revisited what I wrote, in the more recent discussion, not particularly for what it says about Frye. I don’t know what I can say about him. He himself says, at the start of a paragraph (The Double Vision, page 17):

I am not trying to deny or belittle the validity of a credal, even a dogmatic approach to Christianity: I am saying that the literal basis of faith in Christianity is a mythical and metaphorical basis, not one founded on historical facts or logical propositions.

This makes little sense to me. “The literal basis … is a … metaphorical basis” – is this supposed to be informative? It sounds like a contradiction. The paragraph continues:

Once we accept an imaginative literalism, everything else falls into place: without that, creeds and dogmas quickly turn malignant.

I don’t know what it would mean for the Nicene Creed to turn malignant.

The Pope of Rome was recently here in Turkey, and one of the places he visited was the town whose modern name, İznik, apparently derives from its old name of Nicaea.

I spent a night there in the early aughts with my wife and her parents. Probably we stayed between the city wall and the lake. I remember visiting the remains of the Church of the Holy Wisdom, but apparently the church was built after the First Council of Nicaea.

That Council was held seventeen hundred years ago this year. It established the creed, the Nicene Creed, that concludes,

Greek	English
Ὁμολογῶ ἓν βάπτισμα	I acknowledge one baptism
εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν.	for the remission of sins.
Προσδοκῶ ἀνάστασιν	I look for the resurrection
νεκρῶν.	of the dead,
Καὶ ζωὴν	and the life
τοῦ μέλλοντος αἰῶνος.	of the world to come.
Ἀμήν.	Amen.

What malignancy can grow from this? I might suggest

• confusing forgiveness with amnesty;
• insisting on preserving corpses in tombs.

I have no idea whether Frye is thinking of such things. He could be alluding to wars fought between peoples of different creeds, but I don’t know that the creeds really explain the wars.

Frye concludes his paragraph thus:

The literary language of the New Testament is not intended, like literature itself, simply to suspend judgement, but to convey a vision of spiritual life that continues to transform and expand our own. That is, its myths become, as purely literary myths cannot, myths to live by; its metaphors become, as purely literary metaphors cannot, metaphors to live in. This transforming power is sometimes called kerygma or proclamation. Kerygma in this sense is again a rhetoric, but a rhetoric coming the other way and coming from the other side of mythical and metaphorical language.

Again this makes little sense to me. For one thing, I would expect any work of literature to be transformative; otherwise, it is just “little black marks on sheets of white paper.” (Those words are attributed to Kurt Vonnegut in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. I happened upon a copy of that book at İstanbul Kitapçısı Beyoğlu, December 2, 2025. Apparently, because of its power, Vonnegut called writing a “practical joke.” In “Sacrifice and Simulation,” I made use of another old annual, Best Spiritual Writing 2001, discovered in a different Istanbul bookshop in 2022.)

If the Gospel in particular has special power, I might expect it to be used against the practice of Medical Assistance in Dying (which became legal in some forms in 2016; Frye’s dates are 1912–91).

I mentioned Flannery O’Connor. Another source that I have ended up saving here is the chapter on Nicaea in The History of the Christian Church: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 461 (7th edition, 1924) by F. J. Foakes-Jackson.

Summaries

Here are summaries of the emails, with some supplementary remarks. (I have added links to other relevant posts, both here and in the edited email themselves.)

1. Friday, January 10

A paradox about truth is suggested. For Frye, apparently, the true reading of the Bible is not for the sake of historical truth. This puts him at odds with those who say the Bible is historically true and is therefore a justification for such things as

• founding the state of Israel, or
• removing the theory of evolution from biology textbooks, and even
• obeying Matthew 5:42:

---

τῷ αἰτοῦντί σε δός,	Give to him that asketh thee,
καὶ τὸν θέλοντα	and from him that would
ἀπὸ σοῦ δανίσασθαι	borrow of thee
μὴ ἀποστραφῇς.	turn not thou away.

---

Likewise, for Frye, different literary theories are not in competition, but this puts him in competition with those who say the theories are in competition.

I bring in two epics, the Iliad and Njal’s Saga, because the former suggests how the cruel world of the latter can be transformed.

2. Sunday, January 12

More on those epics, along with the epic of Mwindo.

The question arises of why people do things at all – or don’t do things, such as speak out against the new American regime. When we do mathematics, our ability comes from a “third factor,” beyond nature and nurture, according to David Bessis.

At the end, I allude to my embarrassment at using only a primitive mobile. I now figure that students should see the device. One student was recently impressed by it, although he is older than most other students. He is the only student to wear a respirator in class, as I do; he also still uses a paper notebook, like me, rather than an electronic tablet.

3. Monday, January 13

Distinctions made or noted by Frye:

• primary and secondary concerns;
• primitive and mature cultures;
• the natural man, who has a body, and the spiritual man, who is a body.

Frye says,

What I am expounding may be called a bourgeois liberal view … depriving religion of all secular or temporal power is one of the most genuinely emancipating movements of our time.

Naomi Klein distinguishes the liberal and the leftist.

Socrates distinguishes

• the unexamined life from the examined;
• the gentle, simple creature from the one more complicated and furious than Typhon.

4. Tuesday, January 14

Mary Midgley on how isolated quotations can distort.

More of Naomi Klein’s criticism of liberalism.

Frye:

in Israel and in much of the Moslem and Hindu world, as well as in Northern Ireland and South Africa, we can clearly see that these religious attitudes are the worst possible basis for a secular society.

Still, we may all sometimes need external authority (as Socrates suggests in the Republic).

Sonia Sodha points out the difficulty of liberalism with such issues such as assisted dying.

In Canada, it seems people seek euthanasia for such reasons as credit card debt.

5. Saturday, January 18

Frye’s reference to “the psychosis of heresy-hunting” sets me off. I look at

• Frankenstein, about things that could happen;
• The Razor’s Edge, based (more or less loosely) on things that did happen to the author;
• The Zimmerman Telegram, an analysis of things that happened in the world.

The Evangelists seem closer to Barbara Tuchman than to Mary Shelley or Somerset Maugham. As for Paul, he is dealing with practical problems when he says,

All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient.

When he distinguishes between the letter and the spirit, is he talking about

• the literal v. the metaphorical?
• Jewish law v. Christian morality?

I don’t know how one would argue that the Ten Commandments are metaphorical.

6. Monday, January 20

Docetism and Virgin Birth. C. S. Lewis believes in a “miraculous spermatozoon.” As I understand the Catholic Encyclopedia, the ultimate earthly authority for the Virgin Birth is Mary herself. I could have looked up the following creeds and doctrines, having grades of certainty as indicated, in Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (1955), “The Mother of the Redeemer,” pages 196–216:

• Mary is truly the Mother of God. (De fide.)
• Mary was conceived without stain of original sin. (De fide.)
• From her conception Mary was free from all motions of concupiscence. (Sent. communis.)
• In consequence of a Special Privilege of Grace from God, Mary was free from every personal sin during her whole life. (Sent. fidei proxima.)
• Mary conceived by the Holy Ghost without the co-operation of man. (De fide.)
• Mary bore her Son without any violation of her virginal integrity. (De fide on the ground of the general promulgation of doctrine.)
• Also after the Birth of Jesus Mary remained a Virgin. (De fide.)
• Mary suffered a temporal death. (Sent. communior.)
• Mary was assumed body and soul into Heaven. (De fide.)
• Mary is the Mediatrix of all graces by her co-operation in the Incarnation. (Mediatio in universali.)
• Mary is the Mediatrix of all graces by her intercession in Heaven. (Mediatio in speciali.)
• Mary, the Mother of God, is entitled to the Cult of Hyperdulia. (Sent. certa.)

In explanation of the grades, the Introduction says, for example:

Common Teaching (sententia communis) is doctrine, which in itself belongs to the field of the free opinions, but which is accepted by theologians generally.

7. Monday, January 20

Perception needs desire, as I understand from De Anima. To read, we must believe that we can read. Some possible distinctions in what we read are

• fact or fiction,
• history or poetry,
• theoretical or practical,
• honest or fraudulent.

Maybe the Gospels are frauds, the way stories of fraud in the 2020 US presidential election are themselves (as far as I know) frauds. I suppose the Athanasian Creed and the Letters of Paul are based on honest belief, though I myself once had an honest belief in flying saucers.

8. Wednesday, January 22

Free association:

• I took my Aristotle text from Mikros Apoplous.
• That site refers to Guistiniani, blamed for the loss of Constantinople in 1453.
• Likewise is Kamala Harris blamed for the 2020 Democratic loss of the US presidency.
• The B-52s asked whom to blame for parties gone out of bounds.
• That was in 1980, a beginning in Republican excess.
• Guistiniani’s tomb was destroyed by earthquake.
• I try to be prepared for earthquake.
• The Chronicles of Narnia end with a train wreck.

9. Thursday, January 23

The natural man has a body, while the spiritual man is a body – says Frye, alluding to Paul. I think of the fragmented souls described in the Republic. I look at Frye’s words on

the psychosis of heresy-hunting, of regarding all deviation from approved doctrine as a malignant disease … cruelty, terror, intolerance, and hatred within any religion always mean that God has been replaced by the devil …

I ask whether mathematics is intolerant for insisting on the truth. Toleration (by the account of Daniel Callcut) involves the co-existence of conflicting doctrines. This is not understood by certain activists.

10. Tuesday, January 28

The New Testament provides “myths to live by … metaphors to live in,” according to Frye. How does this explain the prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”? What was the Council of Nicaea trying to do?

Frye writes (The Double Vision, page 15; this is the middle of the paragraph whose beginning and end I quoted on January 18:

The rational arguments used were assumed to have a compulsive power: if we accept this, then that must follow, and so on. A compelling dialectic based on the excluding of opposites is a militant use of words; but where there is no genuine basis in sense experience, it is only verbally rational: it is really rhetoric, seeking not proof but conviction and conversion.

Apparently one might read that as condemning what Nicaea was about.

11. Saturday, February 1

I review Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, “Religion,” by sections:

1. The Transition from Art to Religion.
2. The Growth of Religion.
3. Religion and its Object.
4. Symbol and Meaning in Religion.
5. Convention.
6. The Task of Religion.
7. The Transition from Religion to the life of Thought.

12. Saturday, February 1

I look up The History of the Christian Church: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 461 (1924) by F. J. Foakes-Jackson, according to whom,

the Fathers of the fourth century were not engaged in a mere dispute about words. The principles of Arianism were a serious menace to the well-being of Christianity.

Frye asserts, dogmatically,

What ‘the’ truth is, is not available to human beings in spiritual matters … God … is a spiritual Other, not a spiritual object, much less a conceptual object.

Collingwood, somehow less so:

… God is a concept, an object of thought, the ultimate reality of philosophical analysis … is this identification of God with the absolute legitimate? All theology assumes that it is; but it cannot be.

I question how both of them talk about metaphor, which I would understand properly as a literary figure.

13. Thursday, February 6

History is not, or is not simply, the drawing of analogies. I could refer here to the comparisons made in “Prairie Life.” History is about the individual – as is the Bible, for Wendell Berry in Life Is a Miracle. I was led to that book by John Warner. For Claire Berlinski,

Hitler was Patient Zero, the platonic form of the malignant narcissist … Only Hitler has been Hitler … but all malignant narcissists are alike

– and the current US president is one of them.

14. Friday, February 7

According to Frye, the “organizing principles” of literature are myth and metaphor. He may be engaging in metaphor himself, by the definition of Aristotle:

application of a strange term … transferred … from the species and applied to the genus …

I wonder whether the title character of Jane Austen’s Emma is a metaphor.

I take up the notion of registers of speech.

Frye seems to talk a lot about mental illness – as does Claire Berlinski, for whom the US president suffers not only narcissism, but dementia.

The question is raised of the comparative status of God and the devil.

15. Sunday, February 9

The US president suffers solipsism, according to John R. MacArthur, in agreement with Robert J. Lifton.

As for the sidekick from South Africa, he is not just a white nationalist, but a white globalist, in the terminology of Elad Nehorai.

I have begun a reading of Middlemarch.

16. Friday, February 14

Dante’s Inferno seems to depict contemporary life: a descent into hell.

For Collingwood in “The Devil,” the title character is “purely immanent, that is … non-existent,” while God is also “transcendent … a real mind with a life of His own …”

17. Friday, February 14

From a series of essays in The Guardian in the fall of 2012 by Clare Carlisle on evil:

One of the basic purposes of our culture is to interpret suffering, to make it meaningful and therefore bearable. Myth, art and religion all do this job.

18. Wednesday, February 19

Frye says (The Double Vision, page 25),

When our remote ancestors were tree opossums or whatever, avoiding the carnivorous dinosaurs, they were animals totally preoccupied, as other animals still are for the most part, with the primary concerns of food, sex, territory, and free movement on a purely physical level. With the dawn of consciousness humanity feels separated from nature and looks at it as something objective to itself. This is the starting point of Blake’s single vision, where we no longer feel part of nature but are helplessly staring at it.

Thus we are not computers: for these, all is subjective. I am helped to see this by William Egginton and Shannon Vallor, as in “Subjective and Objective.”

Somebody like Marvin Minsky, for whom we are all “meat machines” (as noted in “Resurrection”) – does he or she prefer the immortality of mechanism to that of fame?

Fame takes work. By the account of Dante in Inferno, you may end up in hell for doing that work, perhaps because you have rejected the immortality that is already offered to everybody, free of charge.

The United Church of Canada tolerates and even supports Medical Assistance in Dying, even though what it purports to deliver, dignity and freedom of choice, are not the highest goods of Christianity. Sources:

• Ben Crosby, Episcopal priest, interaction with whom I noted in “Resurrection,” where I wondered about the relation between Christian doctrine and certain beliefs today about immortality; Crosby shared a poem by John Updike of which one stanza is,

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

• John Piper, Christian hedonist.
• Flannery O’Connor, whose “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann” I have now saved here.

19. Friday, February 21

According to Frye, but I can’t tell what he might be thinking about,

The arts, said Plato, are dreams for awakened minds: only a collective consciousness can perform their communicating tasks.

Frye tells us also,

Luther did not say at Worms, ‘Here I stand, because my conscience and private judgement tell me to.’ He said, ‘Here I stand, until I can be convinced otherwise by arguments drawn from the Word of God.’

This shouldn’t mean we can ignore what others actually think, or expect them to convince us of it.

On the seventh day, says Frye, God contemplated what he had done on the previous six. As far as I can tell, the Bible says not that, but that God was contemplating his work all along. Still, perhaps God on the seventh day was like Lydgate, after exercising his imagination, not on “Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of phosphorescence,” as George Eliot puts it in Middlemarch, but on

subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy …

20. Tuesday, March 18

Frye says (The Double Vision, pages 14 f.),

We cannot describe phenomena accurately in science before we have the apparatus to do so; there cannot be a progressive historical knowledge until we have a genuine historiography, with access to documents and, for the earlier periods at least, some help from archaeology. Literalism of this kind in the area of the spiritual instantly becomes what Paul calls the letter that kills. It sets up an imitation of descriptive language, a pseudo-objectivity related to something that isn’t there.

Maybe this answers my question of what is to be taken literally.

21. Friday, March 21

On the other hand, mathematics is not to be taken literally, when

• it talks as if its objects were not always there, but come into being (as Plato has Socrates point out), or
• a line is literally a linen thread, and a cone is the fruit of a conifer (as I point out).

22. Saturday, March 22

There seems to be an analogy:

literal : metaphorical :: real : illusory.

Not everything can be illusory, and not everything can be metaphorical. An illusion, or a metaphor, is an illusion of, or a metaphor for, something else.

Sometimes, at least, the possibility of a literal reading is only illusory. I refer to Aisling McCrea, “Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos” (Current Affairs, February, 2021). If, as Wikipedia says,

many linguists now deny that there is a valid way to distinguish between a “literal” and “figurative” mode of language

– they may be right.

23. Wednesday, March 26

Among all texts, we may distinguish some as being poetry, because others are not. Within a poem, we may distinguish some figures as being metaphorical, because others are not. Other examples of such distinctions come to mind:

• If a mirage should not be read as water, there must be things that should.
• If certain courses of bricks do not look parallel, there must be others that do.
• If some courage comes from a bottle, some other must come from the heart.
• If drinking impairs the will, then the sober will at least less impaired.
• If we sometimes sleep (as in a couple of tercets from Purgatorio XI), we are also able to awake up.

Comparisons depend on the observer too. For us, today,

• if a person is literally a Good Samaritan, that does not mean he or she belongs to a certain ethno-religious group claiming descent from Israelites who were not subject to the Assyrian Captivity;
• Jesus means what he says, even when speaking in parables – which the disciples themselves could not understand (as Rivka Galchen notes in “New Drama,” Harper’s, March 2016; see “Thinking & Feeling”).

As an adolescent who was fortunate enough to have drug-free talking therapy covered by insurance, I used to ridicule my psychiatrist for saying, “Literally speaking, it’s as if you …” People do regularly confuse the “literal” with the “virtual,” the analogical, the metaphorical.

Thus, if the Bible is not to be taken literally, what this means is not at all clear.

Northrop Frye writes in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), page 42:

Nothing said here will be new to Biblical scholars, who are well aware that the Bible will only confuse and exasperate a historian who tries to treat it as a history. One wonders why in that case their obsession with the Bible’s historicity does not relax, so that other and more promising hypotheses could be examined. Trying to extract a credible historical residue from a mass of “mythical accretions” is a futile procedure, if the end in view is Biblical criticism rather than history. It has been obvious for at least a century that “mythical accretions” are what the Bible is: it is the bits of credible history that are expendable, however many of them there may be. In Homeric criticism, scholars may have acquired a considerable and increasing respect for Homer’s sense of fact, in both history and geography; but no increasing respect for such matters will make Achilles’ fight with the river-god or the hurling of Hephaistos out of heaven historical. That is, Homer’s sense of history does not mean that he is writing history. Similarly with the Bible. If the historical element in the Bible were a conscientious, inaccurate, imperfect history like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, we could understand how important it would be to make a fuller reconstruction of that history. But when it shows such an exuberant repudiation of everything we are accustomed to think of as historical evidence, perhaps we should be looking for different categories and criteria altogether.

I have taken this out of a context that I have read little of. As it is, the passage is yet another one from Frye that makes little sense. For one thing, the incidents in the Iliad could have such historical, euhemeristic explanations as the one suggested by the title character of the Phaedrus for the abduction of Oreithyia by Boreas (see “Hypomnesis” and “On Knowing Ourselves”). Like Socrates, you may reject the pursuit of such explanations as a waste of time. This does not invalidate them on their own terms.

Also, among the Gospels, Matthew and Luke seem to build on Mark and perhaps another source, now lost. It would seem the Evangelists did such research as biographers do today. By the account of Collingwood reviewed in “Prairie Life,” biography is not history; however, it gets confused with history. A difference is that biography is intended merely to arouse feelings in audience. Perhaps the Bible is intended to induce action, as by the exhortation, Μὴ κρίνετε, ἵνα μὴ κριθῆτε” (Matthew 7:1). This is illustrated, not with a metaphor, I would say, but an example:

1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

24. Sunday, March 30

In a metaphor from Dante, we are worms, but such worms as become butterflies.

In Middlemarch, when trying to say something profound, Caleb Garth calls on the Bible, but inexactly.

In The Guardian a Canadian doctor who euthanizes patients says:

1. It is an incurable disease that is killing her patients.
2. She is only facilitating their free will.

At best, each point is inexactly expressed.

25. Tuesday, April 1

Wills are a theme of Middlemarch.

Dr Stefanie Green is facilitating not freedom of will, but freedom of choice. Such freedom may help children to grow up – to pass from being līberī in one sense to being līberī in another, as in the motto of St John’s College. Bad choices are possible, and one has to be allowed to make them, but perhaps not to the point of death – despite what is said by the “anti-psychiatry psychiatrist,” Thomas Szasz, according to Kathleen Stock.

In prison for murder, Antoine Davis finds freedom through the Gospel.

Drunken pleasure tonight, or a pleasant awakening tomorrow: it is such a conflict between desire and intellect as Aristotle describes in De Anima.

Contemplating how a critical mass of the American electorate seem to have abandoned their intellect, Claire Berlinski proposes to look at la longue durée.

26. Tuesday, April 1

So, in effect, does Dan Rather, who quotes John Adams as dating the American Revolution as far back as 1760. Adams likened the First Continental Congress, in 1774, to the Council of Nicaea.

27. Tuesday, April 1

Theoretically speaking, a person may be so free, so responsible, as to be justly allowed to commit suicide or be euthanized. Practically, I do not know how the assessment can be made.

28. Wednesday, April 2

When pets are euthanized, this is not their will, but the owners’.

A suffering husband has rights that a pet does not.

Do those rights include dying on his feet, rather than living on his knees?

Maybe so, but the metaphor of disease as invading army is misleading here.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does recognize our “inherent dignity.” According to an article by theologian Sigrid Müller, Thomas Aquinas thought a man could give up his dignity and deserve death. He may have been mistaken.

29. Thursday, April 3

Homicide is a technical term for any act of killing a person.

Having to go all the way to a Swiss clinic to kill yourself would seem to be a first-world problem.

Perhaps in the old days doctors could get away with mercy-killing. Abuse of this ability has apparently made it impossible.

I return to Ben Crosby, the Episcopal priest working in Canada, who argues that proper pastoral care may require being judgmental.

Northrop Frye perceives ugliness of environmental destruction around the towns and cities of Ontario. Death of a human being may happen in an ugly way too.

30. Tuesday, May 6

I have mentioned De Anima a couple of times. I have gone on to read the Poetics in a group. In Middlemarch, Dorothea may be a tragic hero.

31. Thursday, May 15

I recall that David Gerrold found the Poetics helpful. Collingwood reads it as the championing of poetry that Socrates calls for in the Republic.

One may believe that the purpose of life is to achieve a certain feeling. I would say that Glaucon considered this possibility in the Republic. Students at Yale University are taught it, by the account of Jennifer Frey that I look at also in “Gödel and AI.” However, a tennis player wants more than the feeling of winning; he or she wants to win.

32. Monday, May 19

“More than a feeling” was a 1976 song by Boston; “Double Vision,” a 1978 song by Foreigner.

Northrop Frye describes how we may “feel partly released from this tragic vision when we are acquiring skills, getting an education, or advancing in a religious life.” We feel partly released; are we not actually released?

Frye does acknowledge the work involved in “oriental techniques” such as Zen. On the other hand, a Zen master called Nan-in is supposed to have said, “Zen is not a difficult task. If you are a physician, treat your patients with kindness. That is Zen.” In Middlemarch, Lydgate does this, with financial and moral support from Dorothea.

The words of Nan-in are quoted from “Stingy in Teaching,” which is the 17th of the 101 Zen Stories, “transcribed by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps” (1939), included in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: “A collection of Zen and pre-Zen writings, compiled by Paul Reps” (Charles E. Tuttle, 1957; 21st printing, 1985). The Stories are said to come from a thirteenth-century book called Shaseki-shu, “Collection of Stone and Sand,” and “from anecdotes of Zen monks taken from various books published in Japan around the turn of the present century.” One of those anecdotes would seem to have ended up as the first of the 101 Zen Stories, namely “A Cup of Tea.” This story introduces Nan-in, “a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868–1912).” There is a lot of information about and analysis of the story and its reception in Lajos Brons, “Nan-in and the Professor – A Western Zen Parable” (two dates are given: Feb 13, 2022, and Nov 18, 2024).

33. Tuesday, May 27

Even to “the scum,” the US president wishes a “happy Memorial day.” However, memory may not be something to be happy about. Angels have or at least need no memory, by the account that Dante attributes to Beatrice in Paradiso XXIX.

This makes computers more like angels than like us.

Storing memories the way computers do only makes us liable to forget, at least as Socrates tells the story in the Phaedrus.

As I understand from Wilfrid Hodges, the commonplace book and Aristotle’s Topics are named for the trick of associating things to be memorized with topoi – places.

As an historian, Heather Cox Richardson can remind us that the anti-intellectualism reflected by the current US president goes back to the 1740s.

Again, learning gives us more than a feeling, since knowledge can be correct.

34. Tuesday, May 27

There is even a study called “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom.”