“The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.”

—  Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Seven, p. 169

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as …" by Northrop Frye?
Northrop Frye photo
Northrop Frye 137
Canadian literary critic and literary theorist 1912–1991

Related quotes

Philip Yancey photo

“In a nutshell, the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 tells the story of a God reckless with desire to get his family back.”

Philip Yancey book The Jesus I Never Knew

Source: The Jesus I Never Knew

“The Bible is different from all other books; other books are written by man, but the Bible not only contains the sayings and commandments of God, but was also written entirely under divine inspiration. So we might say that it is God's book, which he gave to man to lead him to everlasting life.”

Matta El Meskeen (1919–2006) Egyptian monk

Orthodox Prayer Life: The Interior Way

“the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story”

James Barr (1924–2006) British bible scholar
Hazrat Inayat Khan photo

“To a Sufi, revelation is the inherent property of every soul. There is an unceasing flow of the divine stream, which has neither beginning nor end.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

Vol. I, The Way of Illumination, Section I - The Way of Illumination, Part III : The Sufi.
The Spiritual Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Context: Is a Sufi a follower of Islam? The word Islam means 'peace'; this is the Arabic word. The Hebrew word is Salem (Jeru-salem). Peace and its attainment in all directions is the goal of the world.
But if the following of Islam is understood to mean the obligatory adherence to a certain rite; if being a Muslim means conforming to certain restrictions, how can the Sufi be placed in that category, seeing that the Sufi is beyond all limitations of this kind? So, far from not accepting the Quran, the Sufi recognizes scriptures which others disregard. But the Sufi does not follow any special book. The shining ones, such as 'Attar, Shams-i Tabriz, Rumi, Sadi, and Hafiz, have expressed their free thought with a complete liberty of language. To a Sufi, revelation is the inherent property of every soul. There is an unceasing flow of the divine stream, which has neither beginning nor end.

Graham Greene photo

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 1
Source: The End of the Affair (1951)

Oscar Wilde photo

“Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.
Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations.”

Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance

Act I
A Woman of No Importance (1893)

Joseph Campbell photo

“The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Campbell follows with a quote from Ovid's Metamorposes, "All things are changing; nothing dies..."
Chapter 2
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
Context: The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms... the two are the terms of a single mythological theme... the down-going and the up-coming (kathados and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis=purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form).

“Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be.”

Louis L'Amour book The Walking Drum

The Walking Drum (1984)
Context: Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.

Ch. 46

Related topics