a commentary on C. S. Lewis’ essay, Myth Became Fact
by Liz Reehle
Myth sits on a high pedestal in my heart. To me, no medium imparts a greater understanding of the Divine. Myth provides a way to understand the mystical in context of the ordinary. It shows us beauty in the mundane.
To fully understand and appreciate life and ones experiences, we must understand what myth is and how it affects our thinking, perceptions, and experiences.
To divulge my opinion on the matter, I will employ the words of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, as their thoughts have distinctly shaped the way I think and perceive life. Mainly, I will commentate on Lewis’s essay “Myth Became Fact,” though I find it fit to include excerpts from Tolkien’s poem, Mythopoeia, which he wrote in response to Lewis’s statement that “myths are lies, though breathed through silver.” Whether by Tolkien’s response or other means, Lewis revised his opinion, later writing the essay which I develop so many opinions from. I encourage you to read the essay and poem in their entirety, as my versions will be abridged for the sake of clarity and emphasis.
If you want to take a few moments to read Myth Became Fact before continuing, you can find it here. A new tab will open. When you are finished, just close the tab and you will find yourself back on this page.
To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless,
even though “breathed through silver”
PHILOMYTHUS TO MISOMYTHUS [J.R.R Tolkien to C.S. Lewis]
You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are `trees’, and growing is `to grow’);
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star’s a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, Inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.
Lewis writes “Myth Became Fact” as a response to his friend Corineus who seems to think that Christians have ceased to believe
C. S. Lewis in the doctrines of the faith, instead using traditions and embarrassing mythology to find comfort.
My friend Corineus has advanced the charge that none of us are in fact Christians at all. According to him historic Christianity is something so barbarous that no modern man can really believe it: the moderns who claim to do so are in fact believing a modern system of thought which retains the vocabulary of Christianity and exploits the emotions inherited from it while quietly dropping its essential doctrines…
Lewis states that he believes this to be mostly false, but entertains the notion for the sake of argument. However, he cannot see, under Corineus’s argument, why the rituals and metaphors would persist if the underlying thoughts have changed.
Why, on his view, do all these educated and enlightened pseudo-Christians insist on expressing their deepest thoughts in terms of an archaic mythology which must hamper and embarrass them at every turn? Why do they refuse to cut the umbilical cord which binds the living and flourishing child to its moribund mother? For, if Corineus is right, it should be a great relief to them to do so. Yet the odd thing is that even those who seem most embarrassed by the sediment of “barbaric” Christianity in their thought become suddenly obstinate when you ask them to get rid of it altogether. They will strain the cord almost to breaking point, but they refuse to cut it. Sometimes they will take every step except the last one.
This is where the real problem begins. Corineus proposes that the final step be taken and people rid themselves of this myth. Lewis’s presents a beautiful, if not a bit sassy, rebuttal.
…”Why not cut the cord?” asks Corineus. “Everything would be much easier if you would free your thought from this vestigial mythology.” To be sure: far easier. Life would be far easier for the mother of an invalid child if she put it into an institution and adopted someone else’s healthy baby instead. Life would be far easier to many a man if he abandoned the woman he has actually fallen in love with and married someone else because she is more suitable. The only defect of the healthy baby and the suitable woman is that they leave out the patient’s only reason for bothering about a child or wife at all. “Would not conversation be much more rational than dancing?” said Jane Austen’s Miss Bingley. “Much more rational,” replied Mr. Bingley, “but much less like a ball…”
This rebuttal is the perfect introduction in defense of myth. One of the biggest obstacles I have found when discussing fiction with people is the view of myth as frivolous, illogical, or unnecessary. But isn’t life all of those things? Life shouldn’t be purely rational. Everything should exist in balance, and any other methodology is a false consolation. Please exercise rationality, but not at the expense of the occasional ball–not at the expense of experiencing beauty.
He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath the ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.
Now, Lewis begins to present the true necessity and transcendence of myth.
…Even assuming (which I most constantly deny) that the doctrines of historic Christianity are merely mythical, it is the myth which is the vital and nourishing element in the whole concern. Corineus wants us to move with the times. Now, we know where times move. They move away. But in religion we find something that does not move away. It is what Corineus calls the myth that abides; it is what he calls the modern and living thought that moves away… The myth (to speak his language) has outlived the thoughts of all its defenders and of all its adversaries. It is the myth that gives life. Those elements even in modernist Christianity which Corineus regards as vestigial, are the substance: what he takes for the “real modern belief” is the shadow.
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends –
if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker’s art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.
Times and cultures change so much. Lewis would hardly recognize Christian culture today, merely a hundred years later. Yet, the Myth persists. The Story transcends whatever fluctuations coalesce due to modern concerns. Myth is the lifeblood of Christianity.
To explain this we must look a little closer at myth in general, and at this myth in particular. Human intellect is incurably abstract. Pure mathematics is the type of successful thought. 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 in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, 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, nor analyze the nature of humor 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?
That paragraph acts as the foundation of so much of my thought. It is a bit dense, so you may need to read it a few times to fully apprehend what he says. He describes a dilemma that seldom is identified as a problem. We cannot analyze while we experience. While we experience, we do not intellectually understand.
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.
Those two sentences are the whole reason why I write–why I fill my world with myth. But let us finish Lewis’s ingenious explanation of the concept before I talk more of that. He is about to display how myth creates these concrete understandings using a myth. He mentions the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. If you are unfamiliar with the story, Orpheus goes to the underworld to retrieve his betrothed after she was taken from him too soon. Hades grants that he may leave with her so long as he doesn’t look back to check that Eurydice follows him. At the last moment, he looks back and watches her fall back into Hades. Through that myth, we endure an experience similar to what it feels like to have reality fall away when we try to grasp it with reason.
At this 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 no true myth but a mere allegory. You were not knowing, but tasting; but what you were 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.
I read and write because experiencing and creating myth lends an understanding beyond all abstract thought. So much about life and God and eternity, I struggle to understand. But as I read and write stories, I come close to apprehending so much that my mere thought could never gain proximity to.
I would that I might with the minstrels sing
and stir the unseen with a throbbing string.
I would be with the mariners of the deep
that cut their slender planks on mountains steep
and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest,
for some have passed beyond the fabled West.
I would with the beleaguered fools be told,
that keep an inner fastness where their gold,
impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring
to mint in image blurred of distant king,
or in fantastic banners weave the sheen
heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.
I would rather stir the unseen and wander on vague quests, telling of blurred images of a distant king, than walk on clear, visible roads that show no vestige of a king–only government-subsidized grass. Truly, I understand nothing until I either experience it, or put it in a myth. I may know that ‘to sacrifice’ means to give something up valuable for the sake of something more valuable. But that definition means nothing compared to experiencing a story, connecting to a character, feeling a degree of his emotion. As he puts value on something, then develops a transcending love for something else worth sacrificing for, you gain understanding of the concept of sacrifice because that character tethered you to it. A myth lends more understanding than an abstract thought. It may not be truth, but, as Lewis argues, myth is reality which fathers truth.
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 becomes 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… 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.
The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship one he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.
I like to explain this with a man that walked past my window once. I didn’t know his name, his origin, or anything about his life story. But I supposed that his name was Arnold and he had two kids whom he was struggling to provide for in his daily job as a construction worker. He worked, of course, when he wasn’t at his parents’ house taking care of his father who was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. Nothing of the life story that I had invented for the man was true. But by attaching the story of Arnold to the man, I had at least created something real, rather than leaving the man as a story-less husk that walked past my window. At least the story fathered the truth that life is full of work and tragedy, and this man is in the middle of navigating it as the rest of us are.
In Paradise perchance the eye may stray
from gazing upon everlasting Day
to see the day-illumined, and renew
from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.
Now Lewis comes back to the connection of myth and Christianity–the necessity of mythical apprehension in the heart of the Christian.
Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.
Yes! `wish-fulfilment dreams’ we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem ?
All wishes are not idle, not in vain
fulfilment we devise – for pain is pain,
not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will
alike were graceless; and of Evil this
alone is dreadly certain: Evil is.
Here, again, we come back to balance. Both the historical fact and the myth have their necessity. The temptation often arises to lean on one or the other. Purely leaning on the historical fact allows the consolation of pure rationalism. It is often easy to justify doing or believing “what makes sense” instead of embracing faith. On the other end, it can be just as tempting to apprehend the truths of the myth of Jesus, without the practical surrender and allegience that comes with the aknowledgement that He was a real man. These are the extreme cases, but they exist on smaller scales, I fear, in the heart of every Christian. Though, any of these instances would seem preferable to flat belief without further thought.
A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it…
Those who do not know that this great myth became fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied. But Christians also need to be reminded—we may thank Corineus for reminding us—that what became fact was a myth, that it carries with it into the world of fact all the properties of a myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about “parallels” and “pagan Christs”: they ought to be there-it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic-and is not the sky itself a myth-shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.
Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate,
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;
that seek no parley, and in guarded room,
through small and bare, upon a clumsy loom
weave rissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.
Blessed are the men of Noah’s race that build
their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.
Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things nor found within record time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organised delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).
Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair,
and those that hear them yet may yet beware.
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have turned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.
