Myth and Imaginal Theology

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Myth



“Art lies to tell the truth” - ‘V’ in V for Vendetta



Myth ≠ Untrue

• The word ‘myth’ carries a certain stigma: people assume they are simply ‘not true’. However, myths use symbolic language to divulge a universal truth.



Rudolf Bultmann’s de-mythology

Can the Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of a time now past which was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve, since it is already given with one’s historical situation.

• 1886-1978• Wanted to get rid of the mythology in the Bible to get to

the heart of the gospel (its kerygma)• Suggested that the Resurrection of Jesus was “an event in

the life of the disciples”, not Jesus.



Osiris – Egyptian god of underworld

- CS Lewis in a letter to Arthur Greaves, 1916



TRUE MYTH

“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us 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 others 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'.”- CS Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greaves, 1931



“All stories are true. But some of them never happened.” – James A Owen The Search for the Red Dragon

“We don’t know the truth about the past but we can invent a fiction as like it as may be.” – Plato, The Republic

What was myth in one world might always be fact in some other.

– CS Lewis, Perelandra



Imaginal Theology: a re-mythology

• Tolkien and CS Lewis are imaginal theologians – they re-mythologise philosophical and theological ideas within a secondary world. This is an act of rational imagination.

• CS Lewis’s Narnia re-presents the Christian myth in another universe, whereas his Cosmic trilogy re-mythologises it in our solar system.

• In re-mythologising, we use our imaginal faculties to alleviate some of the obscurities and difficulties in receiving the myth as fact.

JRR Tolkien wrote that human beings are sub-creators. Although we cannot create ex-nihilo, we can make things that do not exist in this ‘primary world’ by sub-creating a ‘secondary world’ – such as his Middle Earth



Example – The Eternal Son of God in CS Lewis

• At the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund asks Aslan if he is in our world too:

“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

• Karl Barth (1886-1968) noted that the term “Son of God” applied to Jesus is, “an accurate but inadequate and inadequate but accurate” term. We cannot but think of biological fathers and sons, for example.

• Rather than getting bogged down in debates about the historical Jesus, the notion of the Eternal Son and the language problems that arise, we meet the Eternal Son in the persons of Aslan (Narnia) and Maleldil (The Cosmic Trilogy)



Conclusions• Myths are useful because they speak to our imagination

(which is how we come to know anything – all words paint pictures for us.

• E.g. reading the word ‘tree’ will conjure certain images for you.

• If this happens with mundane language, how much more so with metaphysical concepts?

• Myths are not meant to be taken literally but symbolically.

• However, as Tillich points out, a symbol participates in that to which it also points.

• Thus a myth is not necessarily untrue.

Myth and Imaginal Theology

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