Frye part 1

revelation |ˌrevəˈlā sh ən|
noun
1 a surprising and previously unknown fact, esp. one that is made known in a dramatic way : revelations about his personal life.
• the making known of something that was previously secret or unknown : the revelation of an alleged plot to assassinate the king.
• used to emphasize the surprising or remarkable quality of someone or something : seeing them play at international level was a revelation.
2 the divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to human existence or the world : an attempt to reconcile Darwinian theories with biblical revelation | a divine revelation.
• ( Revelation or informal Revelations) (in full the Revelation of St. John the Divine) the last book of the New Testament, recounting a divine revelation of the future to St. John.
DERIVATIVES
revelational |- sh ənl| adjective
ORIGIN Middle English (in the theological sense): from Old French, or from late Latin revelatio(n-), from revelare ‘lay bare’ (see reveal 1 ). Sense 1 dates from the mid 19th cent.
-New Oxford American Dictionary

CREATION
"In Genesis, however, the forms of life are spoken into existence, so that while they are made or created, they are not made out of something else" (106). Again, the power of WORDS, and oral language.

Something that always has bothered me about Genesis: "We know only of a world in which every human and animal form is born from a female body; but the Bible insists, not only on the association of God with the male sex, but that at the beginning the roles of male and female were reversed in human life, the first woman having been made out of the body of the first man" (107). Aha! "God is male because that rationalizes the ethos of a patriarchal male-dominated society."

"But, because we begin and end, we insist that beginnings and endings must be much more deeply built into the reality of things than the universe around us suggests, and we shape our myths accordingly" (108). Even existing in this modern world, we have no actual concept of our universe. We may have the scientific facts: estimations on the age of the universe, the earth--its birth via explosion--and all sorts of physical information. But on a conceptual level, all these facts fail us. None of us is capable of fathoming any of these facts, they are too far beyond our little existence and experience. Again I wonder, how do we remove ourselves from ourselves to observe? I do not think it is possible beyond some ideal to strive toward (fantasy perhaps?).

Beginning, like waking up from sleep is a revelation in itself. I think this may be a point Frye is getting to...Therefore Genesis mimics the structure of the U-shape that is the entire Bible. Thinking of creation in this way makes sense to me if I think of my own experience. Experience itself did not begin with birth, at least it means nothing to me now as those early years are not a part of memory. Early memories are like thoughts upon first waking, until we emerge into the full experience of life.


"The world God made was so "good" that he spent his seventh day contemplating it--which means that his Creation, including man, was already objective to God, even if we assume that man acquired with his fall a new and more intense feeling of the "otherness" of both God and nature" (110).

Revolution

The contrast of light and dark is like the binary of life and not-life (after death). I think heaven, too, is a natural human creation: how can we imagine an end of our experience?


"The spoken words of Christ are recorded with great care, but his physical appearance, the fact that he was bound to resemble some people more closely than others, could never have been anything but an embarrassment" (116). Funny that today we have such a concrete image of Jesus's physical appearance.

I do not think I understand this section...