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Klawetter's Myth Paper
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A few weeks ago I began a thread entitled _Myth, Truth, and Fact_ that asked for thoughts about the following Lewis quote from _Perelandra_:
"Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial - was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall."
This post is the result of my attempts to grasp the meaning of this quote. After first reading _Perelandra_ (about 11 years ago), I
immediately declared it my favorite novel, though I know now that I did not understand some of it. This lack of comprehension became obvious as I read this quote a few months ago while trying to understand Lewis's conception of myth. I did not remember this quote from my previous reading: I suspect the "narrative lust" was upon me then and I just brushed aside any idea that required a thoughtful pause. Shame on me. To have grasped this quote would have heightened my appreciation for the writings of Lewis this past decade.
A serious study Lewis should not neglect his conception of the relation between myth, truth, and fact. It is a difficult subject full of vague, elusive, and transcendental ideas. I tread tentatively while hoping to add shape to my inchoate thoughts on this matter. I will not pick apart or challenge what I might consider weak or flawed ideas, unless they seriously impair my ability to understand Lewis or irreparably damage his case.
This work is not exhaustive; it quickly became apparent that this topic could evolve into a doctrinal dissertation, if someone has not done it already. Please feel free to criticize what I've written. I hope to learn from your comments.
The sources for this "paper" are these Lewis books: _The Pilgrim's Regress_; _God in the Dock_; _C.S. Lewis, A Biography_ (Green & Hooper); _Perelandra_; _Selected Literary Essays_; _Surprised By Joy_; _George MacDonald: 365 Readings_; _Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer_; and _The Great Divorce_.
MYTH
Lewis's understanding of the nature and function of myth influenced many of his writings and even his conversion to Christianity. His acceptance of the Christian "myth" is described in the fourth chapter of _C.S. Lewis, A Biography_ (Green & Hooper):
"What had been holding me back [from a conversion to Christianity] has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a
difficulty in knowing what the doctrine *meant*: you can't believe a thing while you are ignorant *what* the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense has the life and death of Christ 'saved' or 'opened salvation to' the world...
"Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me ... was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all:
again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose "what it meant". Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that *it really happened*: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the other are men's myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God
expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call "real things". Therefore, it is *true*, not in the sense of being a description of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear to our faculties. The "doctrines" we get *out of* the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our *concepts* and *ideas* of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."
Lewis expresses this same idea in his first Christian book, _The Pilgrim's Regress_, which is an allegory that describes Lewis's
conversion to Christianity. The protagonist, named John, journeys through basically the same philosophical progression that Lewis
experienced. In the chapter entitled _Across the Canyon_, John finally converts to Christianity, whereupon the voice of the character Wisdom tells John that he has converted to a belief in mere mythology. Wisdom, whom John met earlier in his journey, represents Absolute Idealism, a belief (as represented by Lewis) that the Absolute is impersonal. This belief is shown in an earlier chapter, entitled _More Wisdom_, where Wisdom says, "...for Spirit lives by dying perpetually into such things as we and we also attain our truest life by dying to our mortal nature and relapsing, as far as may be, into the impersonality of our source
..."
Wisdom's argument that John's conversion is to only a belief in mythology is met with this response from God:
"Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then it is My mythology. The words of
Wisdom are also myth and metaphor: but since they do not know themselves for what they are, in them the hidden myth is master, where it should be servant: and it is but of man's inventing. But this is My invention, this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live. What would you have? Have you not heard among the Pagans the story af Semele? Or was there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God?"
Lewis eventually regarded Christianity as the consummation of pagan myths. These myths were initially a hindrance to Lewis's conversion. They showed that the dying-and-rising God of Christianity was not a unique idea; it was written all over the world. Eventually, Dyson and Tolkien helped him leap the mythical barrier by convincing him that Christianity could be both myth and fact.
As Lewis most often used the term, a myth is a story that is an imaginative expression of the deepest meanings of life - meanings that are illusive when one attempts to express them. Myths are generally concerned with the same themes: creation, divinity, and the significance of life and death. The effect of myth is one of awe, enchantment, and inspiration. Some might say that they are stories from all over the world that convey a longing for the divine. Lewis explains the nature of myth in his essay _Myth Became Fact_, found in _God in the Dock_:
"Human intellect is incurable abstract...Yet the only realities we experience are concrete - this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this
man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or
Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma - either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste -or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, living, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot *study* Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, not analyse the nature of humour while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? 'If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain.' But once it
stops, what do I know about pain?"Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. At his moment, for example, I am trying to understand something very abstract indeed - the fading, vanishing of tasted reality as we try to grasp it with the discursive reason. Probably I have made heavy weather of it. But if I remind you, instead, of Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was suffered to
lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared, what was merely a principle becomes imaginable. You may reply that you never till this moment attached that 'meaning' to that myth. Of course not. You are not looking for an abstract 'meaning' at all. If that was what you were doing the myth would be for you not true myth but a mere allegory. You were not knowing, but tasting; but what your tasting turns out to be a universal principle. The moment we *state* this principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstraction. It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience the principle concretely."When we translate we get abstraction - or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always *about* something, but reality is that *about which* truth is), and , therefore, every myth become the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis ('In this valley of separation'). Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular."
So for Lewis, myth gives one a "taste" of reality. It is the "most adequate language" to express reality because it involves a story filled with particularities, and reality consists of particulars, not generalities. Lewis says that the "tasting" is of a "universal
principle" and if we try to express this principle we diminish it because we have left the concreteness of Myth behind and entered into an abstraction. So how do we talk about a particular Myth without mitigating it? We cannot, according to Lewis. This means we have to appeal to humanity's experience to judge whether Lewis is right about the power of myth.
My own experience with the myths of Lewis and also J.R.R. Tolkien suggests to me that Lewis analysis of myth may be correct. Let me share my experience of Tolkien's _The Lord of the Rings_. _The Lord of the Rings_ affected me deeply, though when I first read it I could not explain why. I knew nothing of Tolkien at the time, but I remember finishing TLOTR and wondering if Tolkien was a Christian. Though the TLOTR was never explicitly Christian, it seemed to me full of Christian themes and the presence of God's sovereignty. There are passages in it that disarm my cynicism as they powerfully ring with nobility and hope.
One of these passages is from the _The Two Towers_. In it, Frodo and Sam are standing at a crossroads, about to take the road into the evil land of Mordor:
"Standing there for a moment filled with dread Frodo became aware that a light was shining; he saw it glowing on Sam's face beside him. Turning towards it, he saw, beyond an arch of boughs, the road to Osgiliath running almost as straight as a stretched ribbon down, down, into the West. There, far away, beyond sad Gondor now overwhelmed in shade, the Sun was sinking, finding at last the hem of the great slow-rolling pall of cloud, and falling in an ominous fire towards the yet unsullied Sea. The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about
the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.
"Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king's head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. 'Look, Sam!' he cried, startled into speech. 'Look! The king has got a crown again!'
"The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of this stony hair, yellow stonecrop gleamed.
"'They cannot conquer for ever!' said Frodo. An then suddenly the brief glimpse was gone. The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell."
I cannot read, "Look! The king has got a crown again!' without tingling and thinking about the eventually destruction of the evil in our world and the rule of righteousness. But this easily expressed hope of mine is not the sole source of my goosebumps; part of the source is the inexpressible effect of Tolkien's myth-making.
Later, I discovered that Tolkien was a Christian and, as mentioned earlier, influenced a merely theistic Lewis towards Christianity. On top of that, TLOTR, according to Tolkien's own words, was a myth. Tolkien accomplished what he and Lewis believed myth should accomplish: a "baptism" of the imagination. I know I'm struggling for words to express the power of TLOTR, but that is what Lewis believes should happen. We have to be satisfied by saying that we were "moved" or "filled with a desire for the numinous" by the myth. I knew one young man who had read TLOTR thirty-five times - THIRTY-FIVE times. Why? Was it simply because it was a good story? I doubt it. I suspect he was feeding on the myth.