Myth


 * Myth** was a central idea to the Inklings. It was not the modern idea of myth as for example the third meaning in the American Heritage dictionary: 3. A fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology. That has become the popular view of myth, essentially a synonym for a falsehood. For Lewis and Tolkien and other members of the Inklings, a myth was something essentially true, but true at a level beyond mere consciousness. See Don Williams' [|Is Man a Myth?]

See an interesting treatment of Lewis by Duncan Sprague titled [|The Unfundamental Mr. Lewis] which touches on Lewis' view of myth but seems, I think unfairly, to view it as a functional evasion of fundamentalism. He summarizes Lewis' view of myth as "But, before we leave the issue of myth in revelation I sense the need to simplify, as best I can, Lewis's definition of myth. I would say that he views myth as a story that could be and might be true, but does not need to be historically or scientifically true because it is meant to communicate something bigger than history or science."

Lewis believed more than this. He believed that myth was powerful because it resonated deep in our psyche. In some way we recognize the myth as true at a deeper level than our mere consciousness. It is a sign of myth that it is powerful even if poorly told.

Miracles 6.6 "All over the world, until quite modern times, the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the philosophers percolated to the mass of the people by authority and tradition; they could be received by those who were no great reasoners themselves in the concrete form of **myth** and ritual and the whole pattern of life."

Our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modelling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture--light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they now call "demythologising" Christianity can easily be "re-mythologising" it--and substituting a poorer mythology for a richer. //Letters to Malcolm//, chapter 10, paragraph 2

Myths have been accepted as literally true, then as allegorically true (by the Stoics), as confused history (by Euhemerus), as priestly lies (by the philosophers of the enlightenment), as imitative agricultural ritual mistaken for propositions (in the days of Frazer). If you start from a naturalistic philosophy, then something like the view of Euhemerus or the view of Frazer is likely to result. But I am not a naturalist. I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed--true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in story telling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. //Religion without Dogma?// paragraph 5

My present view--which is tentative and liable to any amount of correction--would be that just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God's becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focussing finally becomes incarnate as History. This involves the belief that Myth in general is not merely misunderstood history (as Euhemerus thought) nor diabolical illusion (as some of the Fathers thought) nor priestly lying (as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought) but, at its best, a real though unfocussed gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination. The Hebrews, like other peoples, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology--the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical. Whether we can ever say with certainty where, in this process of crystalisation, any particular Old Testament story falls, is another matter. I take it that the memoirs of David's court come at one end of the scale and are scarcely less historical than St. Mark or Acts; and that the hook of Jonah is at the opposite end. It should be noted that on this view (a) Just as God, in becoming Man, is "emptied" of His glory, so the truth, when it comes down from the "heaven" of myth to the "earth" of history, undergoes a certain humiliation. Hence the New Testament is, and ought to be, more prosaic, in some ways less splendid, than the Old; just as the Old Testament is and ought to be less rich in many kinds of imaginative beauty than the Pagan mythologies. (b) Just as God is none the less God by being Man, so the Myth remains Myth even when it becomes Fact. The story of Christ demands from us, and repays, not only a religious and historical but also imaginative response. It is directed to the child, the poet, and the savage in as well as to the conscience and to the intellect. One of its functions is break down dividing walls. //Miracles//, chapter 15, paragraph 2, footnote

For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day //give// us the Morning Star and cause us to //put on// the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. //The Weight of Glory//, 3rd paragraph from the end