Appendix C — Imagination and Myth
Imagination and Myth
If you devote any time to the further study of imagination, and I hope you will, sooner or later you’ll run across the concept of “myth” and the name of Joseph Campbell (1904–1987). Campbell’s interviews with Bill Moyers, “The Power of Myth,” were telecast in 1988 and became one of the most popular series in Public Broadcasting history, a series that brought Campbell posthumous fame. Though no longer among the living, Campbell still reigns as the high priest of a “mythology calt” whose ideas have become the philosophy, if not the religion, of thousands.[1]
The English word myth comes from the Greek muthos which means both “speech or conversation” and “a story, a narrative.” The Latin equivalent is fabula which also means “talk, conversation” as well as “a fable, a story.” In later Greek, however, muthos came to mean “a fictional narrative” as opposed to logos “a true narrative.” According to Tom McArthur, muthos eventually became identified with poetry and emotion, while logos was identified with “prose, reason and analytical thought.”[2] Even the ancient Greeks grasped the idea of left-brain and right-brain and saw the need for narratives that would satisfy the emotional needs of the people in a way logos could never do.
In the ancient Greek and Roman world, “myths” were tales about the gods and goddesses that explained where things came from and why things happened as they did.[3] Paul warned Timothy and Titus about the danger of myths (1 Tim. 1:4; 4:7; 2 Tim. 4:4; Titus 1:14), and Peter echoed the warning (2 Peter 1:16). Whether these dangerous myths that invaded the early church were the ancient Greek and Roman stories allegorized to give them “Christian” meanings, or simply Jewish and Gnostic fables, we have no way of knowing. Stahlin writes, “The firm rejection of myth is one of the decisions characteristic of the NT. Myth is a pagan category.”[4] In his Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, J.A. Cuddon defines a myth as “a fiction which conveys a psychological truth.”[5]
The human mind may be content with logos, but the inner person must have muthos. The heart and imagination must be fed. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung built his approach to therapy on a theory of “the racial unconscious” and the “archetypes” that are found in the ancient Greek and Roman myths.[6] Jung taught that in everybody’s “unconscious” lies the “collective unconscious” of the entire human race, as expressed in mythology. Our dreams, fantasies, and emotional problems can be identified with these “archetypical patterns” and thus understood and treated.[7]
Northrop Frye was perhaps the leading literary critic to espouse a “mythological” theory of literature.[8] In The Great Code: The Bible and Literature,[9] Frye discusses myth and metaphor and defends his theory that the basic symbols and metaphors found in the Bible parallel what we find in classical mythology. He maintains that because English literature is saturated with allusions to mythology, students would not understand what they were reading if they didn’t have a working knowledge of the Bible.
Malcolm Muggeridge writes, “Men can live without history, but not without myths. In this sense everything that happens is a parable rather than an event, or series of events; seen through, rather than with, the eye, the message is clear.”[10]
We write history to record what happened, but we devise myths to explain what happened and what the happening means to us. Perplexed people have to try to make sense out of their world or their world will destroy them. Says psychiatrist Rollo May, “Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it.”[11]
Nobody in his right mind would accept the classical myths as true, but they do illustrate basic instincts and conflicts of human life. Just as you can meet yourself in the Bible, you can meet yourself somewhere in mythology, because great literature has a way of mirroring human life and, if we’re honest, helping us discover ourselves.
The preacher will not want to invite the cast of Hesiod’s Theogeny into the pulpit with him, for at least two reasons. To begin with, if you want to illustrate a human characteristic, there are better examples in the Bible than in mythology. And, if you did use an example from mythology, chances are few people in your congregation would recognize it or understand it. You’d have to spend so much time explaining the illustration that the story would be out of steam by the time you got around to applying it.
The people who listen to us preach may not sit in the pews thinking about the image of Narcissus or the labors of Hercules or Arachne and her loom. But they bring with them myths of their own that they have inherited, invented, or borrowed. Some of these myths they can “support” from Scripture (“If you obey God, He’ll make you healthy and wealthy”), and others they defend from what they’ve seen or read (the Horatio Alger myth or the Cinderella myth). By clinging to these myths, people consciously or unconsciously reject or resist the truth; and the preaching of the Word does them no good.
Psychiatrists tell us that healing can begin when patients recognize the metaphor or metaphors that control their lives. There’s a sense in which a myth is a dramatized extended metaphor. It’s the story (muthos) that keeps people going when they feel like giving up. But if the story is a fable, then the climax will be a catastrophe instead of “and they lived happily ever after.” Biblical preaching involves replacing in the imaginations of our people the make-believe of muthos with the reality of logos, a reality that satisfies both the heart and the mind. “Once upon a time” must become “In the beginning God” before people can live authentic lives that are rooted in reality.
So, when we prepare our messages, we must discover how the text attacks and destroys the myths people live by, myths that are robbing them of reality. The weapons God has given us “have divine power to demolish strongholds. . . . arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:4-5). Because myths explain the past and give hope for the future, they enable people to face the present with all of its problems and perplexities. But the Word of God does it so much better!
Just like the Greeks and Romans, we North Americans have our myths, and we can defend them if necessary. The USA is “a city set on a hill,” commissioned by God to redeem the world. The “log cabin to White House” myth, the “Lone Ranger” rugged individualism myth, the “American dream” myth, and the “Horatio Alger” myth are all a part of the storybook called The American Way of Life. Some of these myths have even been canonized and made a part of the rubric of some churches, especially those associated with the Religious Right.
C.S. Lewis believed that the classic myths found their fulfillment in the Christian drama of redemption. If the gods came down to visit men and women, our God came down in the person of His Son and tabernacled among us. If the gods annually died and came to life again, our Redeemer died for us once and for all and rose again to take the throne. “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.”[12]
Whether Lewis is right or wrong in seeing “redemptive analogies” in classical mythology, this much is true: the truth of the message of the Gospel so transcends any other message, is so rooted in history and reality, and displays its power so evidently, that the preacher need not tremble before the gods of the heathen.
In a commencement address at Yale University on 11 June 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” When Paul contemplated his visit to Rome, he wrote, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile” (Rom. 1:16).