Mythopoeia

From The Inklings, by Humphrey Carpenter:

On this Saturday night in 1931, after they had dined, Lewis took his guests on a walk through the Magdalen grounds. They strolled along Addison’s Walk (the path which runs beside several streams of the River Cherwell) and here they began to discuss metaphor and myth. 

Lewis had never underestimated the power of myth. Far from it, for one of his earliest loves had been the Norse myth of the dying god Balder. … But he still did not believe in the myths that delighted him. Beautiful and moving though such stories might be, they were (he said) ultimately untrue. As he expressed it to Tolkien, myths are ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver’. 

No, said Tolkien. They are not lies. 

Just then (Lewis afterwards recalled) there was ‘a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We held our breath’. 

When Tolkien resumed, he took his argument from the very thing that they were watching. 

You look at trees, he said, and call them ‘trees’, and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star’, and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree’, ‘star’, were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jewelled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf-patterned’. 

This was not a new notion to Lewis. … Nor, said Lewis, did it effectively answer his point that myths are lies. 

But, replied Tolkien, man is not ultimately a liar. He may pervert his thoughts into lies, but he comes from God, and it is from God that he draws his ultimate ideals. Lewis agreed: he had, indeed, accepted something like this notion for many years. Therefore, Tolkien continued, not merely the abstract thoughts of man but also his imaginative inventions must originate with God, and must in consequence reflect something of eternal truth. In making a myth, in practising ‘mythopoeia’ and peopling the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a storyteller, or ‘sub-creator’ as Tolkien liked to call such a person, is actually fulfilling God’s purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light. Pagan myths are therefore never just ‘lies’: there is always something of the truth in them. 

They talked on, until Lewis was convinced by the force of Tolkien’s argument. But he had another question to put to his friends, and as it was late they decided to go indoors to Lewis’s rooms on Staircase III of New Buildings. There, he recorded, ‘we continued on Christianity’. 

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Lewis had a particular reason for holding back from Christianity. He did not think it was necessarily untrue: indeed he had examined the historicity of the Gospels, and had come to the conclusion that he was ‘nearly certain that it really happened’. What was still preventing him from becoming a Christian was the fact that he found it irrelevant. 

As he himself put it, he could not see ‘how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now — except in so far as his example could help us’. And he knew that Christ’s example as a man and a teacher was not the centre of the Christian story. ‘Right in the centre,’ he said, ‘in the Gospels and in St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious, expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed — “propitiation” — “sacrifice” — “the blood of the Lamb”.’ He had ridiculed them because they seemed not only silly and shocking but meaningless. What was the point of it all? How could the death and resurrection of Christ have ‘saved the world’? 

Tolkien answered him immediately. Indeed, he said, the solution was actually a development of what he had been saying earlier. Had he not shown how pagan myths were, in fact, God expressing himself through the minds of poets, and using the images of their ‘mythopoeia’ to express fragments of his eternal truth? Well then, Christianity (he said) is exactly the same thing — with the enormous difference that the poet who invented it was God Himself, and the images He used were real men and actual history.

Do you mean, asked Lewis, that the death and resurrection of Christ is the old ‘dying god’ story all over again? 

Yes, Tolkien answered, except that here is a real Dying God, with a precise location in history and definite historical consequences. The old myth has become a fact. But it still retains the character of a myth. So that in asking what it ‘meant’, Lewis was really being rather absurd. Did he ask what the story of Balder or Adonis or any of the other dying gods in pagan myth ‘meant’? No, of course not. He enjoyed these stories, ‘tasted’ them, and got something from them that he could not get from abstract argument. Could he not transfer that attitude, that appreciation of story, to the life and death of Christ? Could he not treat it as a story, be fully aware that he could draw nourishment from it which he could never find in a list of abstract truths? Could he not realise that it is a myth, and make himself receptive to it? For, Tolkien said, if God is mythopoetic, man must become mypthopathic. …