The Work
Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1982, representing the culmination of forty years of reflection that Frye described as a continuous meditation on the relationship between the Bible and the literary tradition of the West. It was followed by Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (1990), which was intended as a companion volume. Together the two books constitute Frye's mature literary theology - his account of how the Bible works as literature and why it has functioned as the structural code for the entire Western literary tradition.
Frye had been working toward this synthesis since his landmark Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947) and Anatomy of Criticism (1957), both of which treated the Bible as a unified literary structure whose archetypal patterns - the seasonal cycle, the quest romance, the Apocalypse - organized Western literature at the deepest level. The Great Code turns this critical method around to apply it to the Bible itself: instead of using the Bible to explain literature, it uses literary critical tools to explain the Bible.
The book is organized in two halves of four chapters each: the first half dealing with language, myth, metaphor, and typology; the second half tracing the Bible's structure from Creation through Exodus, Law, Wisdom, Prophecy, Gospel, Epistle, and Apocalypse. Frye reads the entire Bible as a single unified literary work with a beginning (Genesis 1), a middle (the story of Israel and Jesus), and an end (Revelation 21-22) that is also a return to the beginning.
Biblical Engagement
Revelation 22:2 ('In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations') is the culmination of the Bible's great narrative arc that Frye traces from Genesis 2:9's tree of life in Eden. The movement from the garden with the tree of life (Genesis 2-3) to the heavenly city with the tree of life (Revelation 21-22) is, for Frye, the fundamental structural principle of the Bible as a literary work: it is a story of loss and recovery, of exile and return, that constitutes the 'great code' of all Western literature's variations on this pattern.
Exodus 3:14 ('And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you') is the focus of one of Frye's most brilliant chapters on biblical language and metaphor. Frye argues that the divine name revealed to Moses is not a metaphysical statement about divine being but a verbal paradox: 'I am what I am,' or 'I will be what I will be' - a statement that refuses to be pinned down by any particular identity and instead identifies God with pure existence and pure futurity. This verbal theology - the identification of God with the 'I am' that exceeds all predication - is, Frye argues, the foundation of biblical language's characteristic mode: language that points beyond itself rather than pointing at a fixed content.
John 1:1 ('In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God') is the New Testament parallel to Exodus 3:14 and the text through which Frye develops his understanding of the Logos as the literary principle of the Bible's unity. The Johannine identification of Jesus with the creative Word of Genesis 1 makes Christology inseparable from cosmology and from the philosophy of language: Christ is not merely one figure in a narrative but the organizing principle of all narrative. For Frye, this means that the Bible's literary structure and its theological content are identical: the Word that was in the beginning is the same Word that gives the Bible its coherence as a literary work.
Genesis 22:1-14 (the sacrifice of Isaac) is Frye's primary example of typology - the interpretive method by which the Hebrew Bible's narrative is read as a 'type' or prefigurement of the New Testament's 'antitype.' Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac is the type; God's willingness to sacrifice his Son is the antitype. Frye treats typology not merely as a hermeneutical method but as a structural principle of the Bible's narrative: the pattern of sacrifice and redemption that Genesis 22 establishes is the pattern that the entire subsequent narrative repeats and develops.
Author and Context
Herman Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and educated at Victoria College, University of Toronto (B.A.), and Emmanuel College, Toronto (B.Theol.). He was ordained as a minister of the United Church of Canada in 1936, a fact that is often overlooked by critics who emphasize his literary critical work. His theological formation was as important as his literary education: he worked within the tradition of liberal Protestant biblical interpretation that treated the Bible as a literary and theological document rather than a supernatural text immune to critical analysis.
Frye spent his entire academic career at Victoria College, University of Toronto, becoming one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century. His Anatomy of Criticism (1957) proposed a comprehensive theory of literary genres, modes, symbols, and myths that drew on Aristotle, Blake, and the Bible to create a system that defined the terms of literary criticism for a generation. His work on Blake (Fearful Symmetry) demonstrated that the apparently eccentric mythological system of Blake's prophetic books was in fact a systematic transformation of the biblical myth of creation, fall, and redemption.
The Great Code was the culmination of this lifelong project: the direct confrontation with the biblical source of the mythological patterns that Frye had been tracing through the literary tradition since the beginning of his career.
The 'Great Code' Concept
The title comes from a phrase by William Blake: 'The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.' Blake meant that the Bible provides the fundamental stories, characters, symbols, and patterns that all Western art (including literature, painting, and music) draws on. Frye develops this claim into a comprehensive theory of how the Bible works: as a single literary work whose unity is not primarily doctrinal or historical but mythological - whose unity consists in the recurrence of certain fundamental patterns (the quest, the sacrifice, the resurrection, the return) across the entire sequence of its books.
Frye's most important theoretical contribution in The Great Code is his analysis of biblical typology as a form of literary structure. He argues that the typological relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is not primarily a hermeneutical method imposed by Christian interpreters but is built into the Bible's own narrative logic: the Hebrew Bible tells a story that explicitly remains unfinished - a story of promises not yet fulfilled, of types not yet actualized - and the New Testament presents itself as the fulfillment of that story. This is literary structure as theology.
Critical Reception
The book was received with enormous respect across literary and theological disciplines. Literary critics recognized in it the most systematic account of the Bible's literary structure available in English. Biblical scholars were more cautious: the canonical reading of the Bible that Frye proposed - reading Genesis through Revelation as a unified literary work - was unusual in academic biblical scholarship of the 1980s, which was deeply committed to historical-critical methods that read each book in its original context rather than as part of a unified whole.
Postmodern critics have challenged Frye's universalism: his claim that the archetypal patterns of the Bible are universal human patterns is contested by critics who argue that they are culturally specific Western patterns that have been imposed on the rest of the world through colonialism and cultural hegemony.
Theological Significance
The book's theological significance lies in its demonstration that the Bible's unity as a literary work is inseparable from its theological claim. For Frye, the Bible is not a collection of diverse historical documents that happen to have been assembled into a single canon; it is a single literary work whose narrative unity expresses a coherent theological vision: the story of creation, fall, redemption, and apocalyptic restoration of creation to its original perfection.
Legacy
Frye's influence on literary criticism, biblical studies, and religious studies has been enormous. His method - reading the Bible as a unified literary work using the tools of literary criticism - anticipated and helped create the 'literary approaches to the Bible' movement that became prominent in biblical studies in the 1980s and 1990s (Robert Alter, Frank Kermode, Meir Sternberg). His broader influence on the understanding of the relationship between literature and religion has been felt in virtually every subsequent attempt to theorize that relationship.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should work with Genesis 1-3 (creation and fall), Genesis 22 (sacrifice of Isaac as type), Exodus 3:1-15 (the divine name), Psalm 78 (the typological reading of Israel's history), Isaiah 65:17-25 (new creation), John 1:1-18 (the Logos), and Revelation 21-22 (the restored garden-city). Reading these texts in sequence as Frye describes - beginning, exile, return - makes the 'great code' pattern viscerally clear.
Further Reading
- Northrop Frye, Words with Power (1990) - the companion volume that develops the analysis of biblical imagery begun in The Great Code. - Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) - the most important parallel literary reading of the Bible, more focused on specific texts and less systematically theoretical than Frye. - Ian Balfour, Northrop Frye (1988) - the best concise introduction to Frye's thought in its full range.