Inklings Forever Volume 4 A Collection of Essays Presented at the Fourth Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Article 26 Lewis & Friends 3-2004 Lewis on the Gospels as True Myth Bruce W. Young Brigham Young University Follow this and additional works at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Young, Bruce W. (2004) "Lewis on the Gospels as True Myth," Inklings Forever: Vol. 4 , Article 26. Available at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever/vol4/iss1/26 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Pillars at Taylor University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Inklings Forever by an authorized editor of Pillars at Taylor University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INKLINGS FOREVER, Volume IV A Collection of Essays Presented at The Fourth FRANCES WHITE EWBANK COLLOQUIUM ON C.S. LEWIS & FRIENDS Taylor University 2004 Upland, Indiana Lewis on the Gospels as True Myth Bruce W. Young Young, Bruce W. “Lewis on the Gospels as True Myth.”Inklings Forever 4 (2004) www.taylor.edu/cslewis Lewis on the Gospels as True Myth Bruce W. Young From an early age onward C.S. Lewis had a argued that Christians ought to be aware of and be profound love of myth. As he himself confessed, the nourished by the mythical element in the New great myths—especially the myths of “the dying and Testament. “It is the myth,” he wrote, “that gives life,” reviving god”—attracted and moved him “provided and therefore he rejected attempts to “demythologize” [he] met [them] anywhere except in the Gospels” the Gospels (“Myth Became Fact” 65). In reading the (Letters 56). Oddly, what he later came to identify as accounts of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, the mythic element in the New Testament initially Christians should “assent to the historical fact and also repelled him because he found it incomprehensible. receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the Possibly also it jarred him to find in a historical same imaginative embrace which we accord to all document, one coming from an anti-mythic culture, myths. The one is hardly less necessary than the other” glimpses of a mythic world that he had been (67). Besides considering what Lewis meant by myth accustomed to thinking of as being without historical or and what in the Gospels he identified as mythic, I hope any other kind of factual or rational basis. In a letter to to determine what it is about myth that Lewis his friend Arthur Greeves in which he reveals that he is considered nourishing, so much so that he held the “nearly certain that [the events recounted in the nourishment of myth to be virtually essential for Gospels] really happened,” Lewis explains the obstacle believers in Christ. that remains to his accepting Christianity. The main Lewis’s first genuine encounter with myth, as obstacle is that he “couldn’t see . how the life and described in Surprised by Joy, came as he read about death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years the Norse god Balder. From “an unrhymed translation ago could help us here and now—except in so far as his of Tegner’s Drapa” he read: example helped us.” But though Christ’s example is important, at the center of Christianity seemed to be I heard a voice that cried, something else, something about Christ’s violent and Balder the beautiful unjust death—a death portrayed as a sacrifice—that Is dead, is dead. (Surprised 17) Lewis found not only “very mysterious” but even “silly or shocking” (Letters 55-56). This encounter with myth was connected with a longing The solution to this problem would be a deepened for something transcendent, something which (though understanding of myth, which Lewis arrived at with the never fully accessible “in our present mode of help of J.R.R. Tolkien. He came to accept the Gospels subjective and spatio-temporal experience” [Pilgrim’s as, in a sense, myth—but true myth, myth that had Regress 204-05]) he imagined to be ultimately actually happened. But the effect of this insight on his fulfilling. Myth, along with nature and other earthly understanding of the Gospels was not quite as simple as phenomena, aroused this longing, a spiritual hunger he this formulation makes it sound. What I hope to do here described as “better than any other fullness” (Pilgrim’s is to explore what Lewis meant when he thought of the Regress 202).1 But, despite the value he placed on Gospels as “true myth,” how this idea affected his them, Lewis considered the mythic stories and figures reading of the Gospels, and how it might enrich the he loved to be wholly imaginary. “Nearly all that [he] experience of others in similar ways. Lewis himself loved [he] believed to be imaginary; nearly all that [he] Lewis on the Gospels as True Myth ● Bruce W. Young believed to be real [he] thought grim and meaningless”; argues for the importance of myth in understanding he “care[d] for nothing but the gods and heroes, the human language and perception—an importance that garden of the Hesperides, Launcelot and the Grail” but Lewis acknowledges though he still considers myths to “believe[d] in nothing but atoms and evolution and be “lies though breathed through silver.” “No,” Tolkien military service” (Surprised 170, 174). At one point he responds, “they are not lies” (see Carpenter 42-43). even tried abandoning or avoiding this longing he Since, according to Tolkien, the human mythmaking called Joy—which would have meant taking a more capacity is—along with reason and our moral sense—a detached view of myth—trying to convince himself that divine endowment, there is always an element of truth Joy was nothing but “aesthetic experience” or “romantic in myth. As Lewis later puts it, myths—especially delusion” (205, 201). But soon, after rereading a play “about a god who dies and comes to life again’—could by Euripides, he found himself once again be called “good dreams” sent by God into the minds of “overwhelmed . off once more into the land of the poets (Mere Christianity 50). This is something like longing, [his] heart at once broken and exalted” (217). what Ransom discovers in Perelandra: because “[t]he Later, as he continued to work his way through universe is one,” because all minds are linked, and philosophical idealism to something on the verge of because “in the very matter of our world, traces of the theism, he connected Joy with “the Absolute”—the celestial commonwealth are not quite lost,” the patterns ultimate but inaccessible reality of which the world we and realities that govern the cosmos are available, at know is a shadow. Joy, and thus the myths that arouse least in shadowy form, to all minds. Thus, “[o]ur the longing, would be our closest link to what otherwise mythology is based on a solider reality than we dream: cannot be known or experienced at all (221-22). but it is also at an almost infinite distance from that Finally, when he became a full-blown theist, he was base.” This helps explain both the value of myth and its aware mainly of God as the source of our moral sense— dangers, for in human myths, we find “gleams of and God, from this point of view, is “as hard as nails” celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth (Mere Christianity 30). Lewis had no confidence that and imbecility” (Perelandra 201). And indeed, much God would even allow him to experience Joy, though ancient myth has a disturbingly amoral, often violent he later saw that, since God is our “only comfort” as side, so much so that some students of myth have well as “the supreme terror,” to know God and be in his argued that the mythological mentality serves primarily presence might well be the fulfillment of this longing he to make violence sacred and cover over and justify named Joy (Mere Christianity 31; Surprised 230-32). scapegoating and persecution.2 But what of myth? For one thing, if he had found But, that night at Magdalen College, Tolkien the fulfillment of his longing why would he need the persisted: What if the Bible—especially the Gospels— pale substitutes that he thought he had loved through recounted myth but, instead of myth coming as much of his life? Part of the problem was that, though at fragments of truth through darkened minds, myth this point he saw God as a person, he did not yet presented by God himself? As Tolkien may have believe in the specifically biblical God and certainly not explained it then—certainly as Lewis himself came to in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. He was aware of two understand—this most assuredly did not mean the elements in the Christian understanding that he could Gospel writers were deliberately writing in the mythic not connect. One was that Jesus had actually lived, at a mode. In fact, that mode was alien to their way of specific time and place, had died and then (according to thinking. They were presenting straightforward reports he saw as probably reliable ones) returned to accounts of events they had experienced, so that we can life. The other was the role of Christ as redeemer, (in Lewis’s view) call much in the Gospels propitiation, “Lamb of God”—what seemed to him a “reportage—though it may no doubt contain errors— mythic and therefore non-historical role.