Thoughts on Lewis' "Myth Became Fact" essay

Thoughts on Lewis’ “Myth became Fact” essay.

When I (and I think most modern thinkers) hear the word “myth” it automatically connotes the idea of something that is false—something closely akin to a lie, if not a lie out right. This is largely so because of the Cartesian Rationalism that has so thoroughly shaped our modern thinking. Because a “myth” is not something empirically verifiable or scientifically accessible, the Cartesian thinker instantly sees it as something that is of no substance and therefore of little, if any, value in connecting us to what’s real, because—according to the Cartesian way—only that in the empirical realm of rational calculations and scientific observations is real. Anything outside this realm or inaccessible to it is seen as dreamy, insubstantial, and false.

But all this is a product of Enlightenment thinking; those before the Enlightenment didn’t see things this way. The question of the empirical nature of a myth was immaterial (pardon the pun) to the pre-modern thinker. As Lewis explains, “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 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 ancient myths about the dying gods are true but not factual—which is a contradiction only within a Cartesian paradigm. The Incarnation is that point at which “myth became fact.” Of course, facts are reality; and truth is that which points to reality. The ideas (or “myths”) about a god dying and resurrecting as seen in many ancient pagan religions, are true. The fact that truth points to is the person and actions of Christ. Jesus is the point at which the truth-realm of myth and the truth-realm of empiricism intersect. In the story of Christ, we have the factual, historical occurrence of a myth that has been proposed by different pagan thinkers throughout the previous centuries. The Incarnation is the consummation of the myth:

“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.”

As for the objection that Christianity is only another version of ancient pagan myths (like that of Mithras and others), first of all, those myths all lack the historical grounding of the New Testament (See Luke 3:1 “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea…”). This is the case because those were only myth and not fact—Christianity is both. Also, it would have been ludicrous not only for anyone to have dated the death and resurrection of a mythical pagan god with the reign of particular, historical political figures, but even more so to have done this within the very generation in which those figures lived. But this is exactly what the New Testament writers did.

Lewis is right in his argument: “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,” largely because, as many Christians say, “All truth is God’s truth.” If the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob really is the Creator and Master of the universe, it makes a lot of sense that he would have implanted in the minds and hearts of the those he created the reality of his character and even his method—though, for pagans, in a very general way—for redeeming people, feeding it in though our imaginative mythologies, and then consummating it in our history in the person of Christ.

MM