Myth and the Desire for the Transcendent

There is within our present society a profound and pervasive sensitivity that something is amiss,
a deep and desperate yearning for things higher than our modern materialistic society has within
its power to offer. Burrowed in the innermost secret place of every man and woman there is a
sense, an inherent knowledge that much of what we are led to believe to be right is, if we are
bold enough to be plainly honest with ourselves, precisely what is driving this profound sense of
disquiet within our souls. For some, this feeling is alive and active, for others it struggles against
formidable bonds, and for others still it lies in a dormant, comatose state, having consumed to
excess the cheap pleasures of this world.

Yet there can be little question that it resides in us all. Carl Jung referred to this as the collective
unconscious – the symbols, ideas, stories, and moral understandings that appear all throughout
history in all cultures, ignoring having no prior contact with any others. C.S. Lewis in his
prophetic masterpiece refers to this as the “Tao”, again pointing out that there is something real,
if intangible, contained within the heart of every man and woman which inherently knows
certain things; things not learned or transmitted from one generation to the next, but simply
understood. Something so primitive and fundamental must also possess great power, and to
ignore something so powerful carries fateful consequences.

In our time, sadly, a great many fall into the third category given above. Happy to sleep through
life, they consume what this world offers them until their souls have fallen into a stupor. Equally
sadly is how few fall into the first category. These are those who stand on the shore of the sea in
an attempt to rebuke the waves. This is exhausting work, but admirable and honorable even in its
seeming futility. Here, though, there is hope, if for no other reason than because there is a middle
category. It is the middle category, those who feel the dissonance but know not what to make of
it, where the battle is fought.

One sees very clearly this thirst for the transcendent when he reads of young people discussing a
popular series of novels intended for children and young adults as sacred. One does not search
for transcendence unless one experiences its lack in his own life. Many have derided this
generation, and not unjustly so, but let us not go down that road such that we drive them still
further away. Let us, for a moment, recall another former non-believer who, thanks to the moral
imagination of a close friend, became one of the great apologists of our time, or indeed any time.

C.S. Lewis was always an exceedingly brilliant man, and for much of his early life that brilliance
was directed, most paradoxically, both towards and away from God; to the former, he was ever
in search of the truth, and was never wildly opposed to the tenets of the Christian faith, save one
(which will be discussed presently). Seeking truth, then he sought God as well. To the latter,
Lewis felt exceedingly antagonistic towards the popular claim of many a Christian, then as now,
that their religion was absolutely true and all others were absolutely false. How could this be a
point of celebration, he wondered. If the truth means anything, then it must be too great by its
very nature to be contained in a single expression of an idea. Was it not possible that the pagans,
too, might have touched upon the truth even if they misinterpreted it? Or did God not reach out
to them? Is a God who ignores really a God befitting of the devotion of the Christian faith? It
was this line of questioning that drove the young Lewis away from his childhood faith. Lewis
took greater consolation in the ancient pagan myths, not because they were factual, but because
they were true, myth though they were.

It was only when Lewis’ good friends Tolkien and Dyson suggested that Christianity was itself a
myth, but that it was a true and factual myth that Lewis began to see with new sight. Lewis was
thus baptized into the body of believers who, like him, held that the good and true things found
outside the Christian worldview were in fact of God and so could be means of sanctification for
those who held to such ideas. So it was that Tolkien pointed out to Lewis that his deep interest in
pagan stories of dying and rising gods was precisely the Christian story, with a few very
important differences. Nonetheless, Tolkien suggested that the myths so captivating to Lewis
were perfected in the true myth of Christianity; perfected, if for no other reason than it was in the
case of Christianity, in fact, factual. Thought of as a true myth, Lewis began to see the meaning
behind the stories he knew so well but did not believe. Both Lewis and Tolkien knew that a myth
need not be factual in order to be true, for truth and fact are not one and the same.

Consider the words of St. Augustine, which echo through the centuries:

“If philosophers have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we
are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who
have unlawful possession of it.”

St. Augustine thus urges Christians not to dismiss out of hand every word that comes forth from
the mouth of the pagan, but rather to evaluate them all, and to focus on those that share even a
thread of the truth. Moreover, he says that we must take back possession of it, as it is being held
“unlawfully.” This notion bears out in his City of God, wherein Augustine spends much of his
work wrestling with the pagan beliefs of Roman culture as argued by Plato, Cicero, and men
lesser known to the modern mind such as Varro, in order to bolster his argument that a thriving
Christianity was compatible with a stable post-Roman world. The truth cannot be allowed to
reside with those who do not know, or else reject the Truth. We are not led to truth in order that
we might alter and manipulate it for our own worldly ends, but rather are receivers of truth that
we may plant it, cultivate it, and see that it grows as intended.

Much more recently, Romano Guardini expressed the same sentiments in this way:

“Deeply significant for the new religious outlook of medieval man was the influx
of the Germanic spirit. The religious bent of the Nordic myths, the restlessness of
the migrating peoples and the armed marches of Germanic tribes revealed a new
spirit which burst everywhere into history like a spear thrust into the infinite. This
mobile and nervous soul worked itself into the Christian affirmation. There it
grew mightily. In its fullness it produced that immense medieval drive which
aimed at cracking the boundaries of the world.”

Here, Guardini points out that even while particular beliefs may be out of line with Christian
doctrine, the motivations and drives – the will (today a dirty word, it seems) behind them may be
enough to build upon. The drive to explore and expand, to conquer and convert, was found to be
the sanctifying motivation, though certainly the means of the one were different from the means
of the other. Nonetheless, a missionary religion and a roving people share one thing in common
if nothing else – expansion of their tribe. Wide may be the chasm across which the bridge must
be built, but it must be built nonetheless.

But if truth can be found without the Church, what of the truth found within the Church? Indeed
for all of Lewis’ eloquence and apologetic fervor, he was still a devout Anglican and advocated,
at least popularly, for a minimalist or “mere” Christianity. Bradley Birzer, in his excellent study
on Tolkien titled J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, details the tension in Lewis’ friendship with
Tolkien, pointing out that Lewis’ deeply rooted prejudice against Catholicism was always a point
of conflict between the two men.

How, then, can a man whose religious beliefs tended towards an inherent institutional disunity
still be held as a banner man for sacramental Christianity? Here one may play with words in
order to dig deeper for the vein of truth. Prior to his conversion proper, Lewis held an analytical
view of religion, which is to say he held a very abstract view. The word “analytic” comes from
the Greek analusis, which means to loosen up of break apart. When one engages in analysis one
sets to the work of picking apart a given thing. Thus, for so long Lewis looked at religion, and
Christianity in particular, analytically, never the while succeeding in ascertaining the religion’s
meaning. It is exceedingly difficult to cultivate a faith built purely on complicated words ending
in –ation and –ism. These are abstract ideas, and not the stuff belief.

It was only after speaking with Tolkien and Dyson that Lewis began to see religion in a religious
light. Contra “analysis,” the word “religion,” which comes from the same root as the Latin
religare, means, “to bind fast.” Religion, then, is a re-ligamenting, or a finding of unity. Lewis
came to see that in paganism, or what we might consider in our time to be progressive ideology
or the prevailing secularism of the era, myths were men’s stories about God, perhaps inspired by
God, but delivered in an unfocused and mythological, if still true, way to tell stories about the
world; yet in the story of Christ we have received God’s myth, the story in which God directly
and clearly expresses Himself – through a particular man in a particular time doing particular
things.

Thus in Lewis we find two competing ideas. First, that God as creator is the author of truth, such
that wherever truth is found, God must be near at hand. Lewis understood this, and made much
of it. Yet this seems to contradict or perhaps distract from the fact that the fullest expression of
truth is found within the Church itself, as the Church is the body of Christ, and thus the place
where Creator and created meet. It is a tension, to be sure, yet God is not a God of
contradictions. Perhaps, then, one may surmise that the truth without should serve as an
enticement to find the truth within. Returning once again to Lewis, he once wrote that man
encounters the truth in many disparate places and begins to feel a winsome nostalgia for those
times and places, but the feeling is not the thing [truth] itself, but only a brief glimpse. It begs the
question, which is well beyond the scope of this essay, whether one can fully know any single
truth this side of eternity. But whether we can or not, our search for the fullest expression of truth
should not be deterred.
Concluding with Lewis will suffice. In a very important, though oft overlooked essay titled Myth
Became Fact, Lewis makes a claim that would be far too easy to misinterpret without a prior
understanding of the truth that informs myth. He writes:

“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. A man who disbelieves the
Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more
spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.”

Men have derived more sustenance from unbelievable myth than from professed religion. This is
why there are those who seek truth, goodness, beauty, and meaning in a series of books they
know are impossibly unbelievable while eschewing the religion of their fathers. These young
men and women are experiencing what Lewis experienced in his own time which drove him
from his childhood faith. The body of the faithful should not so quickly dismiss the inclinations
of those without, and should instead look for a means by which the truth, what or wherever it
may be found, can be sanctified.