This essay is from a collection of C. S. Lewis essays and letters found in the book "
God in the Dock".
Myth Became Fact
C. S. Lewis
My friend Corineus has advanced the charge that none of us
are in fact Christins 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. Corineus compared modern
Christianity with the modern English monarchy: the forms of kingship have been
retained, but the reality has been abandoned.
All this I believe to be false, except of a few ‘modernist’
theologians who, by God’s grace, become fewer every day. But for the moment let
us assume that Corineus is right. Let us pretend, for purposes of argument,
that all who now call themselves
Christians have abandoned the historic doctrines. Let us suppose that modern
‘Christianity’ reveals a system of names, ritual, formulae and metaphors which
persists although the thoughts behind it have changed. Corineus ought to be
able to explain the persistence.
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.
If all who professed Christianity were clergymen, it would
be easy (though uncharitable) to reply that their livelihood depends on not taking that last step. Yet even if this were the
true cause of their behaviour, even if all the clergymen are intellectual
prostitutes who preach for pay—and usually starvation pay—what they secretly
believe to be false, surely so widespread a darkening of the conscience among
thousands of men not otherwise known to be criminal, itself demands
explanation? And of course the profession of Christianity is not confined to
the clergy. It is professed by millions of women and laymen who earn thereby
contempt, unpopularity, suspicion, and the hostility of their own families. How
does that come to happen?
Obstinacies of this sort are interesting. ‘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’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 a 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.’1
In the same way, it would be much more rational to abolish
the English monarchy. But how if, by doing so, you leave out the one element in
our State which matters most? How if the monarchy is the channel through which
all the vital elements of
citizenship—loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical
principle, splendour, ceremony, continuity—still trickle down to irrigate the
dust-bowl of modern economic Statecraft?
The real answer of even the most ‘modernist Christianity to
Corineus is the same. 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 the 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. Not only the thought of
theologians, but the thought of anti-theologians. Where are the predecessors of
Corineus? Where is the Epicureanism of Lucretius,2 the pagan revival
of Julian the Apostate?3 Where are the Gnostics, where is the monism
of Averoës,4 the deism of Voltaire, the dogmatic materialism of the
great Victorians? They have moved with the times. But the thing they were all
attacking remains: Corineus finds it still there to attack. 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.
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; 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 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 on
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 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 at 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.
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; in hac valle
abstractionis.5 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.
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 that 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 we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the
other.
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. The modernist—the extreme
modernist, infidel in all but name—need not be called a fool or hypocrite
because he obstinately retains, even in the midst of his intellectual atheism,
the language, rites, sacraments, and story of the Christians. The poor man may
be clinging (with wisdom he himself by no means understands) to that which is
his life. It would have been better that Loisy6 should have remained
a Christian: it would not necessarily have been better that he should have
purged his thought of vestigial Christianity.
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 a 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.
1 Pride and
Prejudice, ch. xi.
2 Titus Lucretius
Carus (c. 99-55), the Roman poet.
3 Roman emperor,
A.D. 361-3
4 Averroës
(1126-98), of Cordova, believed that only one intellect exists for the whole
human race in which every individual participates, to the exclusion of personal
immortality.
5 ‘In this valley
of separation.’
6 Alfred Loisy
(1857-1940), a French theologian and founder of the Modernist Movement.
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