Klawetter's Myth Paper

DejaLewis Archive File

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A few weeks ago I began a thread entitled _Myth, Truth, and Fact_ that
asked for thoughts about the following Lewis quote from _Perelandra_:

"Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra,
Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth
from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial - was part
and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which
resulted from the Fall."

This post is the result of my attempts to grasp the meaning of this
quote. After first reading _Perelandra_ (about 11 years ago), I
immediately declared it my favorite novel, though I know now that I did
not understand some of it. This lack of comprehension became obvious as
I read this quote a few months ago while trying to understand Lewis's
conception of myth. I did not remember this quote from my previous
reading: I suspect the "narrative lust" was upon me then and I just
brushed aside any idea that required a thoughtful pause. Shame on me.
To have grasped this quote would have heightened my appreciation for the
writings of Lewis this past decade.

A serious study Lewis should not neglect his conception of the relation
between myth, truth, and fact. It is a difficult subject full of vague,
elusive, and transcendental ideas. I tread tentatively while hoping to
add shape to my inchoate thoughts on this matter. I will not pick apart
or challenge what I might consider weak or flawed ideas, unless they
seriously impair my ability to understand Lewis or irreparably damage
his case.

This work is not exhaustive; it quickly became apparent that this topic
could evolve into a doctrinal dissertation, if someone has not done it
already. Please feel free to criticize what I've written. I hope to
learn from your comments.

The sources for this "paper" are these Lewis books: _The Pilgrim's
Regress_; _God in the Dock_; _C.S. Lewis, A Biography_ (Green & Hooper);
_Perelandra_; _Selected Literary Essays_; _Surprised By Joy_; _George
MacDonald: 365 Readings_; _Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer_; and
_The Great Divorce_.

MYTH

Lewis's understanding of the nature and function of myth influenced many
of his writings and even his conversion to Christianity. His acceptance
of the Christian "myth" is described in the fourth chapter of _C.S.
Lewis, A Biography_ (Green & Hooper):

"What had been holding me back [from a conversion to
Christianity] has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a
difficulty in knowing what the doctrine *meant*: you can't believe a
thing while you are ignorant *what* the thing is. My puzzle was the
whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense has the life and death of
Christ 'saved' or 'opened salvation to' the world...
"Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me ... was this: that if I
met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all:
again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I
liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the
idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly
moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason
was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as
profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could
not say in cold prose "what it meant". Now the story of Christ is simply
a true myth: a myth working on us in 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 other 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". Therefore, 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 our *concepts* and *ideas* of that
which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the
actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."

Lewis expresses this same idea in his first Christian book, _The
Pilgrim's Regress_, which is an allegory that describes Lewis's
conversion to Christianity. The protagonist, named John, journeys
through basically the same philosophical progression that Lewis
experienced. In the chapter entitled _Across the Canyon_, John finally
converts to Christianity, whereupon the voice of the character Wisdom
tells John that he has converted to a belief in mere mythology. Wisdom,
whom John met earlier in his journey, represents Absolute Idealism, a
belief (as represented by Lewis) that the Absolute is impersonal. This
belief is shown in an earlier chapter, entitled _More Wisdom_, where
Wisdom says, "...for Spirit lives by dying perpetually into such things
as we and we also attain our truest life by dying to our mortal nature
and relapsing, as far as may be, into the impersonality of our source
..."

Wisdom's argument that John's conversion is to only a belief in
mythology is met with this response from God:

"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. The words of
Wisdom are also myth and metaphor: but since they do not know themselves
for what they are, in them the hidden myth is master, where it should be
servant: and it is but of man's inventing. But this is My invention,
this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first
until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your
imagination, that you might see My face and live. What would you have?
Have you not heard among the Pagans the story af Semele? Or was there
any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the
blood and body of a dying and yet living God?"

Lewis eventually regarded Christianity as the consummation of pagan
myths. These myths were initially a hindrance to Lewis's conversion.
They showed that the dying-and-rising God of Christianity was not a
unique idea; it was written all over the world. Eventually, Dyson and
Tolkien helped him leap the mythical barrier by convincing him that
Christianity could be both myth and fact.

As Lewis most often used the term, a myth is a story that is an
imaginative expression of the deepest meanings of life - meanings that
are illusive when one attempts to express them. Myths are generally
concerned with the same themes: creation, divinity, and the significance
of life and death. The effect of myth is one of awe, enchantment, and
inspiration. Some might say that they are stories from all over the
world that convey a longing for the divine. Lewis explains the nature of
myth in his essay _Myth Became Fact_, found in _God in the Dock_:

"Human intellect is incurable abstract...Yet the only realities
we experience are concrete - this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this
man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the
pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or
Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete
realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no
longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is
our dilemma - either to taste and not to know or to know and not to
taste -or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are
outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as
tasting, touching, willing, living, hating, we do not clearly
understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more
deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot *study*
Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while
repenting, not analyse the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.
But when else can you really know these things? 'If only my toothache
would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain.' But once it
stops, what do I know about pain?
"Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the
enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete
what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. At his moment,
for example, I am trying to understand something very abstract indeed -
the fading, vanishing of tasted reality as we try to grasp it with the
discursive reason. Probably I have made heavy weather of it. But if I
remind you, instead, of Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was suffered to
lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she
disappeared, what was merely a principle becomes imaginable. You may
reply that you never till this moment attached that 'meaning' to that
myth. Of course not. You are not looking for an abstract 'meaning' at
all. If that was what you were doing the myth would be for you not true
myth but a mere allegory. You were not knowing, but tasting; but what
your tasting turns out to be a universal principle. The moment we
*state* this principle, we are admittedly back in the world of
abstraction. It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you
experience the principle concretely.
"When we translate we get abstraction - or rather, dozens of
abstractions. 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 become 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; in
hac valle abstractionis ('In this valley of separation'). Or, if you
prefer, 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."

So for Lewis, myth gives one a "taste" of reality. It is the "most
adequate language" to express reality because it involves a story filled
with particularities, and reality consists of particulars, not
generalities. Lewis says that the "tasting" is of a "universal
principle" and if we try to express this principle we diminish it
because we have left the concreteness of Myth behind and entered into an
abstraction. So how do we talk about a particular Myth without
mitigating it? We cannot, according to Lewis. This means we have to
appeal to humanity's experience to judge whether Lewis is right about
the power of myth.

My own experience with the myths of Lewis and also J.R.R. Tolkien
suggests to me that Lewis analysis of myth may be correct. Let me share
my experience of Tolkien's _The Lord of the Rings_. _The Lord of the
Rings_ affected me deeply, though when I first read it I could not
explain why. I knew nothing of Tolkien at the time, but I remember
finishing TLOTR and wondering if Tolkien was a Christian. Though the
TLOTR was never explicitly Christian, it seemed to me full of Christian
themes and the presence of God's sovereignty. There are passages in it
that disarm my cynicism as they powerfully ring with nobility and hope.
One of these passages is from the _The Two Towers_. In it, Frodo and
Sam are standing at a crossroads, about to take the road into the evil
land of Mordor:

"Standing there for a moment filled with dread Frodo became
aware that a light was shining; he saw it glowing on Sam's face beside
him. Turning towards it, he saw, beyond an arch of boughs, the road to
Osgiliath running almost as straight as a stretched ribbon down, down,
into the West. There, far away, beyond sad Gondor now overwhelmed in
shade, the Sun was sinking, finding at last the hem of the great
slow-rolling pall of cloud, and falling in an ominous fire towards the
yet unsullied Sea. The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still
and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed
it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place
was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage
hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the
midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about
the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the
maggot-folk of Mordor used.
"Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king's
head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. 'Look, Sam!' he cried,
startled into speech. 'Look! The king has got a crown again!'
"The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, but about
the high stern forehead there was coronal of silver and gold. A trailing
plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the
brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of
this stony hair, yellow stonecrop gleamed.
"'They cannot conquer for ever!' said Frodo. An then suddenly
the brief glimpse was gone. The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at
the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell."

I cannot read, "Look! The king has got a crown again!' without tingling
and thinking about the eventually destruction of the evil in our world
and the rule of righteousness. But this easily expressed hope of mine is
not the sole source of my goosebumps; part of the source is the
inexpressible effect of Tolkien's myth-making.

Later, I discovered that Tolkien was a Christian and, as mentioned
earlier, influenced a merely theistic Lewis towards Christianity. On top
of that, TLOTR, according to Tolkien's own words, was a myth. Tolkien
accomplished what he and Lewis believed myth should accomplish: a
"baptism" of the imagination. I know I'm struggling for words to express
the power of TLOTR, but that is what Lewis believes should happen. We
have to be satisfied by saying that we were "moved" or "filled with a
desire for the numinous" by the myth. I knew one young man who had read
TLOTR thirty-five times - THIRTY-FIVE times. Why? Was it simply because
it was a good story? I doubt it. I suspect he was feeding on the myth.

Perhaps some non-literary illustrations would sharpen the point. The
first is the power of music. Most of us have been moved by pieces of
music, but if we are asked why a certain arrangement of notes should
inspire us so, our response will be inarticulate. Or
consider a mountain landscape. What is it about large sections of land
thrust into the air that inspire many of us? Is it too much to say that
a desire for eternity awakes in us as we view the expanse of a mountain
panorama? The raw "facts" of certain notes and granite are not
inspiring, but the meaning of these things is.

Myth's power lay in its appeal to the imagination, rather than to the
reason. In _Selected Literary Essays, Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A
Semantic Nightmare_, Lewis writes:

"It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the
imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of
meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition of both of truth and
falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a
rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but
imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new
metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its
condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly
implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself."

Though this passage does not refer to myth, it implicitly reveals its
effect. Lewis considers imagination as the organ of meaning and myth as
food for the imagination; therefore, myth provides meaning.

Lewis credits writer and Eighteenth Century Scottish preacher George
MacDonald as the man who "baptised" his imagination through the book,
_Phantastes_. Lewis writes of his encounter with _Phantastes_ in his
autobiography, _Surprised By Joy_:

"The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladies
both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me
on without the perception of a change. It is as if I were carried
sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and
could never remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense the
new country was exactly like the old. I met there all that had already
charmed me in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in another sense
all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the
name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels
of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time the song of the
sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse. Here were old
wives' tales; there was nothing to be proud of in enjoying them. It was
as though the voice which had called to me from the world's end was now
speaking at my side...There was no temptation to confuse the scenes of
the tale with the light that rested upon them, or to suppose that they
were put forward as realities, or even to dream that if they had been
realities and I could reach the woods where Anodos journeyed I should
thereby come a step nearer to my desire. Yet, at the same time, never
had the wind of Joy blowing through any story been less separable from
the story itself...[The night I read this story] my imagination was, in
a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally , took
longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by
buying _Phantastes_."

In Lewis's preface to _George MacDonald: 365 Readings_, he writes:

"What he does best is fantasy - fantasy that hovers between the
allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better
than any man. The critical problem [for the literary critic] is whether
this art - the art of myth-making - is a species of the literary art.
The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially
exist in *words* at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a
great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version - whose
words - are we thinking when we say this.
"For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of
anyone's words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told the
story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it.
If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident.
What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events,
which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some
medium which involved no words at all - say by a mime, or a film...
"In a myth - in a story where the mere pattern events is all
that matters - this is not so. Any means of communication whatever
which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we
say, 'done the trick.' ... In poetry the words are the body and the
'theme' or 'content' is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are
the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or
film, or pictorial series are not even clothes-they are not much more
than a telephone..."

In this same preface, Lewis describes the effect of the mythopoeia:

"It is in some ways more akin to music that to poetry-or at least to
most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things already felt. It
arouses in us sensations was have never had before, never anticipated
having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness
and 'possessed joys not promised to our birth.' It gets under our skin,
hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions,
troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in
general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives."

Does everyone have these mythopoeic-induced raptures? Lewis was a
strong, sensitive romantic; not everyone is. Nevertheless, probably most
persons have had some sort of similar experience because myth is
transmitted not only in literature, but also, for example, in music and
film. 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 Perelandran 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 stall 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."

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End of Klawetter's Myth Paper

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