. . . 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.

TRUTH

How does Lewis use the words “truth” and “true”? Below are portions of the above quotes that include these words:

“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth . . . 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 out concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.”

“truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is”

“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.”

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

What the mind apprehends and labels “truth” is merely an abstraction, something removed from its subject. Truth is a description of a thing, not the thing itself. Notice how this harmonizes with Lewis’s essay “Meditation in a Tool Shed,” found in God in the Dock:

“I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The light was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dusts floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

“Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly, the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

“But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious that all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, “in love.” Now comes a scientist and describes this young man’s experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man’s genes and a recognized biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.

“When you have got into the habit of making this distinction you will find examples of it all day long. The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematicians head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there—only tiny movements of grey matter. The savage dances in ecstasy at midnight before Nyonga and feels with every muscle that his dance is helping to bring the new green crops and the spring rain and the babies. The anthropologist, observing that savage, records that he is performing a fertility ritual of the type so-and-so. The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.

“As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the ‘true’ or ‘valid’ experience? Which tells you most about the thing?

“The people who look at things have had it all their own way; the people who look along things have simply been brow-beaten. It has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow refutes or ‘debunks’ the account given from inside. ‘All these moral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from inside,’ says the wiseacre, ‘are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos.’ And no one plays the game the other way round by replying, ‘If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature.’

“That, in fact, is the whole basis of the specifically ‘modern’ type of thought. And is it not, you will ask, a very sensible basis? For, after all, we are often deceived by things from the inside. For example, the girl who looks so wonderful while we’re in love, may really be a very plain, stupid, and disagreeable person. The savage’s dance to Nyonga does not really cause the crops to grow. Having been so often deceived by looking along, are we not well advised to trust only to looking at?—in fact to discount all these inside experiences?

“Well, no. There are two fatal objections to discounting them all. And the first is this. You discount them in order to think more accurately. But you can’t think at all—if you have nothing to think about. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it ‘is’ (whatever is means) such and such neural events. But the word pain would have no meaning for him unless he had ‘been inside’ by actually suffering. If he never looked along pain he simply wouldn’t know what he was looking at. The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside.

“This case is not likely to occur, because every man has felt pain. But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go explaining what a thing is without knowing what it is . . .

“We must . . . deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better that looking along. One must look both along and at everything.”

To look at something and along it are both true, but in particular cases, one may be more true than the other. One truth may be full of meaning while the other is not. Elsewhere, Lewis gives an example of these degrees of truth by examining two truths about poetry. One can say that poetry is nothing more than marks made on a sheet of paper. One can also say that poetry conveys man’s deepest longings and desires with unrivaled poignancy. Are both true?—certainly. Is one more “true” than another? Well, one could say that the experience of reading poetry is more true because only there does it have meaning. Both conceptions of poetry partake of truth, though one is more rich and full, more descriptive—more true.

One of the quotes above does present a difficulty, though. It is found in the second sentence of The Pilgrim’s Regress passage: “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.”

This is puzzling: Lewis’s language about Christian myth is inconsistent if in this passage he is stating that Christian mythology is “but truth, not fact.” It is clear from his other writings that he believed that Christianity was myth and fact and that the myth is more than an “image”; it is a taste of the “very real.” Am I misintepreting this passage?

FACT

There is no need to belabor this definition. Lewis used the word in the popular sense; that is, that “fact” denotes something that has objective reality. In his essay “Myth Became Fact,” he regards fact as that which really happened—“at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences.”

TRIPLE DISTINCTION

Assuming the above Lewisian definitions of myth, truth, and fact, what is the triple distinction between them that Lewis refers to in the Perelandra quote? The difficulty of the distinction lies not between myth and the other terms but between these other terms themselves. Do not go to the dictionary for help; this is more or less what you will find:

truth—the state of being the case: fact; the body of real things, events, and facts: actuality

fact—the quality of being actual; something that has actual existence; a piece of information presented as having objective reality

Each definition basically refers to the other and I have always thought of these terms as near synonyms, until I read Lewis. As stated above, Lewis considered truth as an abstraction; that is, something removed from its subject. Again, truth is about something; not that something.” But even with this understanding of truth, how is it different from the facts? Couldn’t “fact” also be merely about something, and therefore an abstraction, just as is truth? He helps me a little by using the word “true” in different senses, as discussed above. But in no book can I find Lewis using the word “fact” in different senses; it always denotes that which has raw, objective reality. Nevertheless, I have not satisfactorily distinguished between these two terms. I wish Lewis supplied some examples to help me grasp the distinction, if there is one.

If one considers myth as merely a story, then it is easily distinguished from fact. A myth may or may not have historical reality. The elements of the story do not have to be factual for the story to still be regarded as a myth. Some great truth (or fact?) about the transcendental may be conveyed by an unhistorical myth. But does Lewis consider the term “myth” to denote a mere story? Remember that in “Myth Became Fact,” Lewis writes: “Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley . . .”

It seems to me that this “mountain” is ultimate reality, the source of all facthood or, if you prefer, truthhood. Might we say that Lewis believed that myth-as-story (even if unhistorical) supremely conveyed myth-as-meaning?

A DIMINISHING DISTINCTION

Now if the Fall produced a distinction between truth, myth, and fact, what will be our experience when God removes this curse? Lewis, as revealed in “Myth Became Fact,” believes Christianity has shown us a partial reconciliation:

“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.”

The pagans, and to a lesser degree, the ancient Israelites, groped as they created stories or performed rituals that bear the influence of universal patterns, such as sacrifice and death-and-rebirth. One need not look far to see these patterns in our quotidian existence. For example, we see the principle of sacrifice everyday, one frequently has to give up something to benefit someone else. Parents sacrifice time and energy to raise children; soldiers die so others might live. We also see the death-and-rebirth pattern in nature, such as when a seed falls to the earth to rise again. Lewis even went so far as to write that if we had not seen these patterns in the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, that Christianity itself would seem less convincing.

In Perelandra, immediately after the quote that motivated this paper, Lewis writes:

“Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance.” The first sentence should make most Protestants uneasy, as it seems to affirm that the sacraments are more than symbolism. And this is certainly consistent with Lewis ambiguous, “magical” view of the bread and wine. He may believe that the mystery of communion supper is a pointer to the crumbling wall between the merely physical and spiritual dimensions of life. In other words, it represents the disintegration of ontological compartments.

In the same chapter as the above Perelandra quotes, Lewis mentions another “terrestrial” distinction, which should inform the myth-truth-fact distinction: “The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our use, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops into the void, fluttering useless wings. [Ransom] had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern. He knew now why the old philosophers had said that there is no such thing as chance or fortune beyond the Moon. Before his mother had born him, before his ancestors had been called Ransoms, before ransom had been the name for a payment that delivers, before the world was made, all these things had so stood together in eternity that the very significance of the pattern at this point lay in their coming together in just this fashion. And he bowed his head and groaned and repined against his fate—to be still a man and yet to be forced up into the metaphysical world, to enact what philosophy only thinks.” Words such as “chance” and “accident” are artifacts of our limited perspective. Every fact, if seen with a comprehensive view, has significance. Every fact. God produces no incidentals. Lewis expresses this belief in Reflections on the Psalms:

“I suggest that the distinction between plan and by-product must vanish entirely on the level of omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness . . . Surely a man of genius composing a poem or symphony must be less unlike God than a ruler? But the man of genius has no mere by-products in his work. Every note or word will be more than a means, more than a consequence. Nothing will be present solely for the sake of other things. If each note or word were conscious it would say, ‘The maker had me myself in view and chose for me, with the whole force of his genius, exactly the context I required.’ And it would be right, provided it remembered that every other note or word could say no less.

“How should the true Creator work by ‘general laws’? ‘To generalise is to be an idiot,’ said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalise is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to make do. How should God sully the infinite lucidity of this vision with such makeshifts? One might as well think He had to consult books of reference, or that, if He ever considered me individually, He would begin by saying, “Gabriel, bring me Mr. Lewis’s file . . .”

“If there is Providence at all, everything is providential and every providence is a special providence.”

If one assumes that myth, through the imagination, supplies meaning; and if some day myth and fact become indistinguishable, then no facts will be seem accidental, they will even be inextricably part of the meaning.

CONCLUSION

If Lewis would have distinguished only between myth and fact, I would have no difficulty understanding him. But where does truth fit in to all of this? Is it a third thing. Of the three terms, perhaps truth is the only one that is purely abstract. Fact is simply itself—a pure particular, and myth is both abstract and particular. This is only my interpretation of Lewis; he never conveys (to me, anyway) a clear unambiguous difference between these terms.

By pointing out the distinction between myth, truth, and fact, I believe Lewis is saying that in our current fallen state we do not see all of life as flowing from the “mountain” of all facthood, and therefore, all meaning. The existence of “philosophy” is needed by creatures whose deepest truths are not experienced concretely. When God removes the curse, could it be that all thought will consist of particulars? Life will be so rich that there will be no room for the general or hypothetical. The words “accident” and “chance” are invented by the shortsighted. We will see all experience as harmonious, as purposeful, not full of unrelated meaningless incidentals. We will not have ontological compartments, such as nature and supernature, the spiritual and the physical.

God told Moses that He was “I AM WHO I AM.” Abstractions such as “good,” “merciful,” and “just” are useful to us when we talk of God, but they are not God Himself. Lewis believes that once the distinction between myth, truth, and fact is obliterated, we will no longer talk about God, we will “feed” on him. This is illustrated in the The Great Divorce; this begins with the words of the apostate “ghost,” who finds repugnant the idea of a final truth:

“But you must feel yourself that there is something stifling about the idea of finality? Stagnation, my dear boy, what is more soul-destroying than stagnation?”

“You think that, because hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom. Your thirst shall be quenched.”