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One thing I don't get about Jung/Frye's reading of Christianity as "myth" &c is whether they realize how un-Christian or even anti-Christian this is. To read Jesus through the lens of cyclical time, birth death & resurrection, the four seasons, &c, is to re-paganize Christianity.
Of course there *are* pagan or un-Christian archetypes in Christianity, but if you focus on what X and Y have in common, you make Y superfluous. Which is always the problem with "archetypal literary criticism."
What's interesting about Christianity is how novel its view of Time is. When Jesus comes (heh) he splits Time in twain: "before Christ", & after Christ. The incarnation is NOT cyclical, but a one-time event; it changes everything before & after; the Wheel of Time crashes & burns.
Likewise, when one is converted to Christianity, they are not made to *remember* what they really are or were before falling into a world of shadows. Christianity proper is not Platonism or Gnosticism. You receive the Spirit not by "retvrning" to God, but by becoming a New Man.
If you see Time only as birth–death–rebirth, knowledge–oblivion–remembrance (anamnesis), &c, you don't understand Christianity. The (Judeo-)Christian triad is before–Event–after; the Event changes everything, including the very frame of reference, Time itself.
Similarly, "The Jewish religion emphasizes the unique, that which happened once only. There is only one God, and he created only one world, once. We live only once, and in most of the Old Testament there is no life after death. Buddhism denies the unique . . ." (Kaufmann)
Cyclical models like the Hero's Journey are pre-Christian, pre-modern. Becoming a Christian means severing all ties with un-Christian people. ("I came not to send peace, but a sword.") There is no going back to where you came from; no "homecoming." The circle does not close.
You can see why people like Jung and Frye and Campbell had to think in cycles. Writing mostly right after WW2, they needed a myth of rebirth, and turned Jesus into Proserpina. (They were men of their time – not of Jesus' time.) However, that is not what makes Christianity unique.
The truly Christian, truly radical reaction to WW2 would have been to read *WW2 itself* as the Christ-like Event; as a point of no retvrn. I don't think they were up to the task.
They had to re-interpret Christianity as an innocuous form of mysticism and self-cultivation, Jesus as a harmless hippy, and God as a comedian, in order to avoid the realization that Hitler, Lenin, Mussolini, and Stalin were quite Christ- &/or God-like figures indeed.
You think I'm kidding, eh? You have probably forgotten that when Frye tried reading the Bible in 1950, he found Jesus to be "most unpleasant"; dare I say: most Christian. https://twitter.com/Souchousama/status/1137378914358181889
"Objective" literary criticism is always a scam. As Nietzsche knew, you should always ask yourself, Why THIS interpretation? What is the interpreter USING the text for? What are they coping with? &c If one's approach is "mythic", they're distracting you from History; & viceversa.
