Myth Became Fact

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. JOHN 1:14

The night walk with Tolkien and Dyson in September 1931 changed more than Lewis’s beliefs. It changed his understanding of how stories and truth are related. For years he had loved the old myths — the Norse gods, the Greek legends, the stories of a god who dies and comes back to life — and for years he had assumed that they were beautiful lies. What his friends showed him was that the story of Christ has all the shape of those myths, but with one difference: it happened. The dying and rising God is no longer a dream at the edge of history. He was born in Bethlehem, crucified under Pontius Pilate, and raised on the third day. Lewis later gave this idea a phrase of his own, in an essay with that title: myth became fact.

Hints among the nations

This led Lewis to a generous view of pagan mythology. He did not think the old myths were simply demonic or simply false. He thought that God had scattered among the nations a kind of longing and a set of pictures — sacrifice, death and rebirth, a god who suffers for his people — that prepared the human imagination for the gospel. The myths were, in a sense, hints and foreshadowings allowed by God before the reality came. When the reality did come, it fulfilled them as a sunrise fulfils the promise of the dawn.

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son. HEBREWS 1:1–2

He was careful to say that this did not make Christianity one myth among many. The Christian story is unique precisely because it is true; the others are echoes and anticipations of it. And he insisted that the believer must hold onto both sides: Christ is fact, and must be believed as historical fact; but the fact also has the power of myth, and must be received with the imagination as well as the reason.

Reason and imagination

This conviction shaped all of Lewis’s writing. He believed that reason is the faculty by which we judge whether something is true, but that imagination is the faculty by which we grasp what it means. We need both. An argument can convince the mind that God exists, but a story can make the heart feel what it would be like to meet Him. That is why Lewis wrote both apologetics and fiction, and why he saw no contradiction between them.

Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia grew from this conviction. Lewis said that they began not with a message but with pictures that had been in his mind for years, and that the stories grew out of the pictures. He was firm that Narnia was not an allegory, in which each character stands for something else. He described it instead as a supposal: suppose there were another world, and suppose that the Son of God chose to enter it as He entered ours, what might happen? Aslan, the great lion, is not a symbol of Christ but a picture of what Christ might be like in such a world.

The lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book. REVELATION 5:5

He also hoped that the stories might do something that sermons could not. Many people, he thought, had grown up with a sense that they ought to feel deeply about God and Christ, and that very sense of duty had made real feeling hard. By setting the gospel in a new world, under new names, he hoped to let readers meet it fresh, before the old associations could get in the way. Countless children, and many adults, have found that this is exactly what happened to them.

Other stories

Lewis wrote other fiction with the same aim. His space trilogy — Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength — imagines a universe in which the planets are inhabited by unfallen creatures and only Earth has rebelled against its Maker. It is a way of seeing our world from the outside, and of seeing how strange our sin is. Till We Have Faces, his last novel, retells an ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche from the point of view of an elder sister who loves possessively, and it is a profound study of how human love can become a form of selfishness and how the soul must be stripped bare before it can meet God.

Weighing it

Lewis’s understanding of myth and imagination has enriched Christian thinking and writing, and his stories have led many to faith. His insistence that the gospel is historical fact, and not merely a beautiful story, is exactly right.

Two points need weighing. The first is his generous view of pagan myths. Scripture does speak of God leaving a witness among the nations, but it also speaks of idolatry as darkness and of the gods of the nations as no gods. The good dreams of paganism, if that is what they were, were mixed with much that was false and degrading. Lewis knew this, but a reader of his fiction should remember it.

For all the gods of the nations are idols: but the Lord made the heavens. PSALM 96:5

The second, and more important, concerns Scripture itself. Lewis applied his literary understanding of myth not only to pagan stories but to parts of the Old Testament. In Reflections on the Psalms and in some of his letters, he suggested that certain Old Testament narratives might be myth gradually becoming history, and that books such as Job and Jonah need not be read as literal history. He also believed that the Scriptures, though truly the Word of God, carried that Word through human writers whose limitations sometimes showed, and that not every sentence of the Bible is free from error in matters of science or history. He believed firmly in the historicity of the Gospels, and he was scornful of attempts to dismiss the miraculous in the life of Christ. But on the Old Testament, and on the doctrine of inspiration, he stood apart from the evangelical conviction that Scripture is wholly true and trustworthy in all that it affirms. Evangelical readers will want to hold, with the Lord and His apostles, that the whole of Scripture is God-breathed.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. 2 TIMOTHY 3:16

For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. 2 PETER 1:21

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of a story that has helped you understand the gospel more deeply. What did it show you that an argument could not?

2. Read John 1:1–18 slowly. Give thanks that the Word became flesh in real history.

3. If you have children or grandchildren, consider reading them a good story that points to Christ, and talk with them about it.

4. Ask yourself whether your faith engages your imagination as well as your reason. How might you let it do so more fully?

5. Read 2 Timothy 3:14–17 and give thanks for the trustworthiness of the Scriptures.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You are the true story to which every good story points.

Thank You that You were born, died and rose again in real history, and that the gospel is not a dream but a fact.

Sanctify my imagination as well as my mind. Let me see Your glory in new ways, and love You more.

Keep me faithful to Your written Word, and let all my reading lead me back to You. Amen.