A look at the role of Myth within religious language, and CS Lewis and Tolkien as imaginal theologians whose re-mythology helps to solve some of the problems of metaphysical language

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Myth

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“Art lies to tell the
truth”
- ‘V’ in V for Vendetta

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Myth ≠ Untrue
• The word ‘myth’ carries a certain
stigma: people assume they are
simply ‘not true’. However, myths
use symbolic language to divulge a
universal truth.

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Rudolf Bultmann’s de-mythology
Can the Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge
the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and
impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically
Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of
a time now past which was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be
impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve,
since it is already given with one’s historical situation.
• 1886-1978
• Wanted to get rid of the mythology in the Bible to get to
the heart of the gospel (its kerygma)
• Suggested that the Resurrection of Jesus was “an event in
the life of the disciples”, not Jesus.

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Osiris – Egyptian god of underworld
- CS Lewis in a letter to Arthur Greaves, 1916

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TRUE MYTH
“Now the story of Christ is simply a true
myth: a myth working on us 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 others 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'.”

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“All stories are true. But some of
them never happened.”
– James A Owen The Search for
the Red Dragon
“We don’t know the truth about the past but we can
invent a fiction as like it as may be.” – Plato, The
Republic
What was myth in one world might
always be fact in some other.
– CS Lewis, Perelandra

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Imaginal Theology:
a re-mythology
• Tolkien and CS Lewis are imaginal theologians – they re-
mythologise philosophical and theological ideas within a secondary
world. This is an act of rational imagination.
• CS Lewis’s Narnia re-presents the Christian myth in another
universe, whereas his Cosmic trilogy re-mythologises it in our solar
system.
• In re-mythologising, we use our imaginal faculties to alleviate some
of the obscurities and difficulties in receiving the myth as fact.
JRR Tolkien wrote that human beings are sub-creators.
Although we cannot create ex-nihilo, we can make
things that do not exist in this ‘primary world’ by sub-
creating a ‘secondary world’ – such as his Middle Earth

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Example – The Eternal Son of God in CS
Lewis
• At the end of Voyage of the Dawn
Treader, Edmund asks Aslan if he is in
our world too:
“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have
another name. You must learn to know
me by that name. This was the very
reason why you were brought to Narnia,
that by knowing me here for a little, you
may know me better there.”
• Karl Barth (1886-1968) noted that the term “Son of God” applied to Jesus is, “an accurate but inadequate
and inadequate but accurate” term. We cannot but think of biological fathers and sons, for example.
• Rather than getting bogged down in debates about the historical Jesus, the notion of the Eternal Son and
the language problems that arise, we meet the Eternal Son in the persons of Aslan (Narnia) and Maleldil
(The Cosmic Trilogy)

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Conclusions
• Myths are useful because they speak to our imagination
(which is how we come to know anything – all words
paint pictures for us.
• E.g. reading the word ‘tree’ will conjure certain images for
you.
• If this happens with mundane language, how much more so
with metaphysical concepts?
• Myths are not meant to be taken literally but
symbolically.
• However, as Tillich points out, a symbol participates in that to
which it also points.
• Thus a myth is not necessarily untrue.