Words with Power
Toolan, David
viewed individuals who knew Underhill personally, exhaustively combed existing archives, and reviewed all known corre- spondence. This proves especially impres- sive when one considers the...
...Frye's thesis in The Great Code, that there is something more to the Bible than of Underhill's death and several indicators point to a contemporary acknowledgement of her place in the history of Christian spir- ituality...
...In 1988, the General Convention of the Episcopal church in the United States voted to add her to its liturgical calendar under the titles of "mystic and theologian...
...Once almost eclipsed by changing spiritual and theological trends, Evelyn Underhill is worth rediscovering...
...Several volumes of her works, many out of print for years, have recently been reis- sued...
...June 1991 marks the fiftieth anniversary in the beginnin9 was a story ave you ever wondered, as I have, why it is that dialectic and moral exhortation, however brilliant, don't measure up to works of literature when it comes to getting you to the threshold of a spiritual epiphany...
...Morehouse Publishers alone has rere- leased many of her volumes...
...Clearly she is writing of a close friend, affection- ately discovered and researched from many different perspectives...
...In the spring of 1990, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., hosted a week-long prayer and study session on Underhill, her life and writings...
...In that process she acknowledges the cultural limitations BOOKS which dimmed past enthusiasm for Underhill's writings at the same time she portrays the "persistence of her vision and the passion and single-mindedness with which she searched for the infinite life [that] speaks across generations...
...Greene's depiction of this search is a convincing invi- tation to recover Underhill's legacy...
...David Toolan sit inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage like the 'great Boyg' or sphinx in Peer Gynt, frustrating all our efforts to walk around it...
...Words with Power offers no retraction of the point that the Bible's metaphorical language is no mere ornament, but essential to whatever truth the Bible conveys...
...How is it that the moral crusader and those who are doctrinaire, the Ralph Naders and Cardinal Ratzingers of this world--even when their logic is impec- cable, their rhetoric urgent--somehow miss the point, summon our defenses rather than our consent...
...This proves especially impres- sive when one considers the collection of over thirty books and almost four hundred articles and reviews...
...Why, if Karl Rahner and the New Jerome Biblical Commentary are so good at explicating hell or heaven, do I prefer to turn to Cheever, Rilke, or Dylan Thomas for the guided tour...
...It does, 22 March 1991:199...
...If you have had questions such as these, you will want to read the late Northrop Frye's new book, the sequel to his earlier The Great Code (1982)--which took its title from William Blake's maxim that "The Old and New Testament are the great Code of Art...
...Why," asked Frye in that work, "does this huge, sprawling, tactless book WORDS WITH POWER Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature Northrop Frye Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $24.95,342 pp...
...The Bible is thus seen as the epitome of the unity of Western literature, the original fountain from which it draws its power and authority for our lives...
...After her death, the Times Literary Supplement of London hailed Underhill as having "an insight into the meaning of both the culture and the individual gropings of the soul, that was unmatched by any professional teacher of her day...
...Both new books on Underhill are being well received...
...Greene pursues the meaning of Underhill's life, not just the facts, by concentrating on the development of her mind and spirit...
...I finished the book with an acute sense of disappointment," wrote John Dominic Crossan, the Commonweal reviewer at the time...
...Many readers, in any case, found the author frus- tratingly obscure on whether the biblical stories were to be taken as essentially his- tories or fictions...
...T.S...
...L~ its purely aesthetic features--a genuinely kerygmatic or revelatory dimension--but that the Bible's mythic and metaphorical core is the launching pad for this "plus," was calculated to offend both secular critics (of the "Bible as literature" type) and reli- giously oriented Scripture scholars...
...Eliot, Thomas Merton, and Charles Williams, to mention some of the more prominent lit- erary figures, all acknowledged a debt to her influence in their lives...
...Although she follows a chronological unfolding of Underhill's development using precise documentation, Greene never resorts to the lugubrious voice of the so- c~led "objective historiographer...
...The latter in particular were annoyed that Frye's stress on myth ("The literal meaning of the Bible is the imaginative and poetic one") seemed to be either dismissing or severely downplaying the historicity of the biblical accounts--thus throwing into question, for instance, all the old and new quests for the "historical Jesus...
...The answer was that the Bible's mythic structures--beginning with creation stories, Exodus dramas, and run- ning up to the "new heaven and earth" of The Apocalypse--provide the basic themes and motifs to which Western lit- erature constantly returns as to its well- spring, and upon which it tings continual variations...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 6
