Word: mundy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHEN NORTHROP FRYE began drawing his circles, representing the cycle of nature, on the blackboard of Burr B two years ago, he immediately created a devoted and evangelical following among Harvard faculty and students. Frye himself, in Spiritus Mundi, insists that he neither wants nor trusts disciples, but it's not difficult to understand why he attracts them. In many ways, Frye is the consummate humanist. A vigorous exponent of the autonomy of art, he has brought to its study a quasi-scientific rigor. A devotee of the imagination, he exemplifies the critic as creator, combining a vast erudition with...
Frye's faith in the imagination and his rejection of a priori beliefs suggest his liberal bias towards processes over ends. That bias is strikingly in evidence in two of the essays in Spiritus Mundi, both of which condemn student radicals of the 1960s for their attack on educational processes. In "The University and the Personal Life," Frye places student unrest in the tradition of American anarchism, categorizing it primarily as a religious quest rather than a social movement. What he objects to most is the anti-intellectualism of the protesters, their refusal to appeal to "reason or experience...
...world. Suicide is the last act to make life comprehensible. It is purified of self-contempt and vain resignation by the capture, through the suffering of shame, of that internal fire which burns the will clear. It is exonerated from the deeper vanity of despair, or storic contemptus mundi, by the perfect fusion of hand and heart. Decretas dispels all ambiguity...