Myth Became Fact

Understanding our love and need for stories

I have tried to think through what it really is about people like Lewis and Tolkien and their stories and writings that have sent me on a mad dash of joy and wonder these last 6 years. I can’t seem to read enough about and from them and kindred spirits of the like. There is something in the air that has seemed to shift since I was introduced to them in a more meaningful and personal way. And while I can plainly say that they are stirring up my imagination, I also think it is much deeper and wider in effect.

I want to share with you an excerpt from Lewis’ essay Myth Became Fact that I believe says what I am feeling in a potent way:

In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction …It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience the principle concretely.

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. …It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular. 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. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.

We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic — and is not the sky a myth — shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than the moralist, the scholar and the philosopher.

You might have to read that over again one more time. It is worth sitting with in slowness and sobriety. What Lewis is saying here puts color and flesh around what I have been thinking and feeling. It describes why I have grown increasingly passionate about the need for good stories and how they are essential for understanding God, this world and ourselves.

What strikes me is how much weight Lewis is putting on the idea of myth, particularly when it comes to Christianity. Did you notice this line: “To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths.”

I think this gets at the burning heart of what I am slowly peeling back and understanding. That myth and story is not some peripheral additive to the main elements of reality but rather the building blocks of it. It is how we, as humans created in the image of God, think, understand, communicate and relate to things. Every single person right now, whether they acknowledge it or not, is living within a story. And that story, whatever it may be, is the most formative force in their lives. It shapes their values, their vocation, their decisions, their motivations and what they see as the purpose of life.

What a thought. To receive the mythic force of the Gospel with “the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths.” It might sound unorthodox, but I believe it is necessary. Christianity is not a set of moral propositions to intellectually ascent to. It is a true story which we take into ourselves and, almost without noticing, find ourselves swept up into it! The story of the Gospel fits best with the reality of life because it shows with dazzling accuracy why things are broken, why there is beauty and how it can and will all be made right one day. It is the story in which every other story points and echoes. And to see it that way, with its mythic qualities, is not to strip away its claim of truth but to receive it for what it really is — the truest story that requires to be embraced with our full redemptive imaginations!

Myth became fact — and it is a wild miracle of good news.

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I would love to hear your reflections and thoughts. Share them in the comments below.