A few weeks ago I began a thread entitled “Myth, Truth, and Fact” that asked for thoughts about the following Lewis quote from Perelandra:

“Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial—was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall.”

This post is the result of my attempts to grasp the meaning of this quote. After first reading Perelandra (about 11 years ago), I immediately declared it my favorite novel, though I know now that I did not understand some of it. This lack of comprehension became obvious as I read this quote a few months ago while trying to understand Lewis’s conception of myth. I did not remember this quote from my previous reading: I suspect the “narrative lust” was upon me then and I just brushed aside any idea that required a thoughtful pause. Shame on me. To have grasped this quote would have heightened my appreciation for the writings of Lewis this past decade.

A serious study [of] Lewis should not neglect his conception of the relation between myth, truth, and fact. It is a difficult subject full of vague, elusive, and transcendental ideas. I tread tentatively while hoping to add shape to my inchoate thoughts on this matter. I will not pick apart or challenge what I might consider weak or flawed ideas, unless they seriously impair my ability to understand Lewis or irreparably damage his case.

This work is not exhaustive; it quickly became apparent that this topic could evolve into a doctrinal dissertation, if someone has not done it already. Please feel free to criticize what I’ve written. I hope to learn from your comments.

The sources for this “paper” are these Lewis books: The Pilgrim’s Regress; God in the Dock; C.S. Lewis, A Biography (Green & Hooper); Perelandra; Selected Literary Essays; Surprised by Joy; George MacDonald: 365 Readings; Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer; and The Great Divorce.

MYTH

Lewis’s understanding of the nature and function of myth influenced many of his writings and even his conversion to Christianity. His acceptance of the Christian “myth” is described in the fourth chapter of C.S. Lewis, A Biography (Green & Hooper):

“What had been holding me back [from a conversion to Christianity] has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense has the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world . . .

“Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me . . . was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.” Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in 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 other 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.” Therefore, it is true, not in the sense of being a description of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.”

Lewis expresses this same idea in his first Christian book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, which is an allegory that describes Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. The protagonist, named John, journeys through basically the same philosophical progression that Lewis experienced. In the chapter entitled “Across the Canyon,” John finally converts to Christianity, whereupon the voice of the character Wisdom tells John that he has converted to a belief in mere mythology. Wisdom, whom John met earlier in his journey, represents Absolute Idealism, a belief (as represented by Lewis) that the Absolute is impersonal. This belief is shown in an earlier chapter, entitled “More Wisdom,” where Wisdom says, “. . . for Spirit lives by dying perpetually into such things as we and we also attain our truest life by dying to our mortal nature and relapsing, as far as may be, into the impersonality of our source . . .”

Wisdom’s argument that John’s conversion is to only a belief in mythology is met with this response from God:

“Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then it is My mythology. The words of Wisdom are also myth and metaphor: but since they do not know themselves for what they are, in them the hidden myth is master, where it should be servant: and it is but of man’s inventing. But this is My invention, this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live. What would you have? Have you not heard among the Pagans the story of Semele? Or was there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God?”

Lewis eventually regarded Christianity as the consummation of pagan myths. These myths were initially a hindrance to Lewis’s conversion. They showed that the dying-and-rising God of Christianity was not a unique idea; it was written all over the world. Eventually, Dyson and Tolkien helped him leap the mythical barrier by convincing him that Christianity could be both myth and fact.

As Lewis most often used the term, a myth is a story that is an imaginative expression of the deepest meanings of life—meanings that are illusive when one attempts to express them. Myths are generally concerned with the same themes: creation, divinity, and the significance of life and death. The effect of myth is one of awe, enchantment, and inspiration. Some might say that they are stories from all over the world that convey a longing for the divine. Lewis explains the nature of myth in his essay “Myth Became Fact,” found in God in the Dock:

“Human intellect is incurable abstract . . . 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 outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, living, 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, not 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 about 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 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 not true myth but a mere allegory. You were not knowing, but tasting; but what your 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 (‘In this valley of separation’). 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.”

So for Lewis, myth gives one a “taste” of reality. It is the “most adequate language” to express reality because it involves a story filled with particularities, and reality consists of particulars, not generalities. Lewis says that the “tasting” is of a “universal principle” and if we try to express this principle we diminish it because we have left the concreteness of Myth behind and entered into an abstraction. So how do we talk about a particular Myth without mitigating it? We cannot, according to Lewis. This means we have to appeal to humanity’s experience to judge whether Lewis is right about the power of myth.

My own experience with the myths of Lewis and also J.R.R. Tolkien suggests to me that Lewis[’] analysis of myth may be correct. Let me share my experience of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings affected me deeply, though when I first read it I could not explain why. I knew nothing of Tolkien at the time, but I remember finishing TLOTR and wondering if Tolkien was a Christian. Though the TLOTR was never explicitly Christian, it seemed to me full of Christian themes and the presence of God’s sovereignty. There are passages in it that disarm my cynicism as they powerfully ring with nobility and hope. One of these passages is from the The Two Towers. In it, Frodo and Sam are standing at a crossroads, about to take the road into the evil land of Mordor:

“Standing there for a moment filled with dread Frodo became aware that a light was shining; he saw it glowing on Sam’s face beside him. Turning towards it, he saw, beyond an arch of boughs, the road to Osgiliath running almost as straight as a stretched ribbon down, down, into the West. There, far away, beyond sad Gondor now overwhelmed in shade, the Sun was sinking, finding at last the hem of the great slow-rolling pall of cloud, and falling in an ominous fire towards the yet unsullied Sea. The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.

“Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king’s head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. ‘Look, Sam!’ he cried, startled into speech. ‘Look! The king has got a crown again!’

“The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of this stony hair, yellow stonecrop gleamed.

“‘They cannot conquer for ever!’ said Frodo. And then suddenly the brief glimpse was gone. The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell.”

I cannot read, “Look! The king has got a crown again!” without tingling and thinking about the eventually destruction of the evil in our world and the rule of righteousness. But this easily expressed hope of mine is not the sole source of my goosebumps; part of the source is the inexpressible effect of Tolkien’s myth-making.

Later, I discovered that Tolkien was a Christian and, as mentioned earlier, influenced a merely theistic Lewis towards Christianity. On top of that, TLOTR, according to Tolkien’s own words, was a myth. Tolkien accomplished what he and Lewis believed myth should accomplish: a “baptism” of the imagination. I know I’m struggling for words to express the power of TLOTR, but that is what Lewis believes should happen. We have to be satisfied by saying that we were “moved” or “filled with a desire for the numinous” by the myth. I knew one young man who had read TLOTR thirty-five times—THIRTY-FIVE times. Why? Was it simply because it was a good story? I doubt it. I suspect he was feeding on the myth.

Perhaps some non-literary illustrations would sharpen the point. The first is the power of music. Most of us have been moved by pieces of music, but if we are asked why a certain arrangement of notes should inspire us so, our response will be inarticulate. Or consider a mountain landscape. What is it about large sections of land thrust into the air that inspire many of us? Is it too much to say that a desire for eternity awakes in us as we view the expanse of a mountain panorama? The raw “facts” of certain notes and granite are not inspiring, but the meaning of these things is.

Myth’s power lay in its appeal to the imagination, rather than to the reason. In Selected Literary Essays, Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A Semantic Nightmare, Lewis writes:

“It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself.”

Though this passage does not refer to myth, it implicitly reveals its effect. Lewis considers imagination as the organ of meaning and myth as food for the imagination; therefore, myth provides meaning.

Lewis credits writer and Eighteenth Century Scottish preacher George MacDonald as the man who “baptised” his imagination through the book, Phantastes. Lewis writes of his encounter with Phantastes in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy:

“The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me on without the perception of a change. It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense the new country was exactly like the old. I met there all that had already charmed me in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time the song of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse. Here were old wives’ tales; there was nothing to be proud of in enjoying them. It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world’s end was now speaking at my side . . . There was no temptation to confuse the scenes of the tale with the light that rested upon them, or to suppose that they were put forward as realities, or even to dream that if they had been realities and I could reach the woods where Anodos journeyed I should thereby come a step nearer to my desire. Yet, at the same time, never had the wind of Joy blowing through any story been less separable from the story itself . . . [The night I read this story] my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally , took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.”

In Lewis’s preface to George MacDonald: 365 Readings, he writes:

“What he does best is fantasy—fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem [for the literary critic] is whether this art—the art of myth-making—is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version—whose words—are we thinking when we say this.

“For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone’s words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told the story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all—say by a mime, or a film . . .

“In a myth—in a story where the mere pattern events is all that matters—this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, ‘done the trick.’ . . . In poetry the words are the body and the ‘theme’ or ‘content’ is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes—they are not much more than a telephone . . .”

In this same preface, Lewis describes the effect of the mythopoeia:

“It is in some ways more akin to music that to poetry—or at least to most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and ‘possessed joys not promised to our birth.’ It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives.”

Does everyone have these mythopoeic-induced raptures? Lewis was a strong, sensitive romantic; not everyone is. Nevertheless, probably most persons have had some sort of similar experience because myth is transmitted not only in literature, but also, for example, in music and film. Myth is not something that requires cultivation before it reveals itself. According to Lewis, myth lies behind all meaningful reality. One does not choose to experience myth; it points to the very ground of our being.

With this background of Lewis’s ideas about myth, we are ready to examine his conceptions of truth.

» Continue on to Part II. »