Notebook 3
The entries in the notebook come from two different periods. Paragraphs 1 through 171 were written during 1946—48. In Notebook 12 Frye calls these entries his "mystical" notebook (TBN, 162).1 The last thirteen paragraphs, where he changes to a different nib, were written ten or so years later. In this section he refers to Rose Macaulay's Trebizond novel, which was not published until 1956, and to Anatomy of Criticism (1957), so at least part of the final section is post-1957. The notebook, bound in brown cloth, measures 20.6 × 13.3 cm. and is in the NFF, 1991, box 22.
[1] If one translates the terms of conventional theologies into psychological terms, one gets some interesting results. Deism is psychologically the low water-mark of the religious life, with God sound asleep in the soul and the soul carrying on automatically. Two types of such Deism are theoretically possible: the Ijim or savage type, in which the organism works with automatic accuracy, as in Yeats's Phase 2,2 and the Victorian civilized type, in which God becomes an external compulsion or superego.
[2] The religious life, then, begins with a call to this sleeping God to awake. In Isaiah & most of the prophets the experience is national as well as individual, and in most Christian thought it is an invitation to Christ to enter from the outside. In either case the awakening results in a mental revolution in which God seizes control of the superego and life becomes self-directed (a paradox latent here will be expanded later), "directed" implying, of course, a direction or way. The situation in Milton is striking: God begins the action by begetting his son, i.e., transforming himself into a principle capable of taking on human form, & can be overthrown through unawareness.
[3] Such a God at the beginning is a foreign body, a largely impotent critic of creativity, and as he gains more power he takes over more and more of the actor until he becomes the actor's essential self, a self no longer individual but universal. This process is the liberation of the actor from his entanglement in a "fallen" world.
[4] The Christian Gospel and Indian Buddhist systems associated with the word yoga seem to me to make sense of this process, & perhaps the same sense. The advantage of using the latter is that Hindu Buddhist conceptions have for us fewer misleading associations of ideas left over from childhood, and the thunder of their false doctrines is less oppressive in our ears than the thunder of ours. The Christian conception of "sin" is heavy with moral significances that would be better away, especially when associated with ideas which defy Jesus' explicit statements about the certainty of acceptance. Again, I'm certain that Blake is right in interpreting forgiveness of sins as the release of divine energy in the soul, & not as a cancelling of a moral account.3 Orthodox Christian thought, too, seems to rest on a hazy duality of soul & body, even when teaching the resurrection of the latter: look at Dante's vision of the spiritual world as without bodies, waiting for a Last Judgment, yet substantially (if that is a good word) the orthodox vision of eternal realities. We seem so unwilling to believe that Jesus' "word" healed as well as taught, and pooh-pooh the relationship of physical exercises to mental & spiritual development—prayer and fasting were Jesus' instructions. The Catholics made an exception of ascetic and penitential practices, but only because they express an antipathy of soul & body. And the Christian God seems to persist in the spiritual life as an incubus or Isvara.4 The role of grace will doubtless become clearer to me later, but at present I feel sure that the abolition of Isvara is an essential preliminary step, that the Indians are right in subordinating the idea of God to the process of spiritual development. Finally, it's possible to get more precise words in Indian thought, to feel however dimly something of the genius of the language in which they occur. Owing to what I suppose is a series of accidents (perhaps it proves the necessity of private judgment) the Gospel is a chaos of vague words. When Jesus speaks of "righteousness" the word is an English word, per se with moral, ecclesiastical and Christianized Pharisee overtones, translating dikaiosPnh [justice], which is from Greek legalism and suggests the djkh [trial] of that dismal idiot Euthyphro,5 and which in turn translates an Aramaic word I don't know translating a concept with a Hebrew background.6 I have to recreate it into something more like "rightness," but think how clear such a word as Tathagata7 is!
