Parallel Myths (49 page)
Authors: J.F. Bierlein
My goal here is not to proselytize, but rather to demonstrate that there is myth—if
myth
is correctly defined—in our faiths. Still, the fact that there is myth in our faiths hardly makes them false or fictional.
The use of the terms
Christian myth
or
Jewish myth
immediately elicit a negative, defensive, even hostile response from those accustomed to the popular definition of
myth
as “fable,” “fiction,” or “a widely believed falsehood.” The use of
Christian
and
myth
in the same sentence would appear, to the average person, to be a denunciation of the truth or validity of that faith. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, all that might be termed “supernatural” or “transcendent” was deemed as fiction, or myth.
In our own times, the incorrect definition of
myth
is constantly reinforced by headlines such as
TEN MYTHS ABOUT AIDS, THE MYTH OF A MIDDLE-CLASS TAX CUT, THE MYTH OF INVINCIBLE JAPAN
, and many others. In each case, these headlines appear over stories that are intended to dispel a widely believed misconception.
But let’s return to the definition of
myth
by a historian of religion (and a professing Christian), Mircea Eliade. Eliade said that myth was a “sacred history” of breakthroughs of the sacred or supernatural into our world. Certainly Christianity, Judaism, and Islam fall under this definition. In this context, use of the word
myth
is hardly a judgment of falsehood passed on our faiths.
If we correctly look at what myth is and how it functions, the use of the word is no longer threatening or offensive, but rather a validation or affirmation of what we believe. Do Christianity, Islam, and Judaism myths provide meaning to our lives? Do they provide us with a “sacred history” of God acting in the affairs of human beings? Do they provide a code of morality? Of course they do. We live by these myths, and many people have given their lives for them. Were such myths a fiction, a falsehood, or even a mere psychological projection, it is unlikely that they would have endured and have persisted as a crucial force throughout human history.
The study of myth certainly gives the believer something to think about. The parallels between the myths of our traditions and those of vastly different cultures offer parallel myths of the Fall, virgin births, resurrections, and so on—often strikingly similar to our own cherished sacred stories. This may lead one to wonder whether our tradition is merely one of many valid choices on a cosmic menu of the transcendent. It may even “dent” our faith to think that “primitive” or “pagan” peoples have such stories in common with us. The following experience demonstrates the two opposite reactions of Christians, in particular, to the study of myth.
Some years ago, I attended a Christian conference and had occasion to speak to two women with dramatically different reactions to their experience in the study of myth.
The first woman had nothing whatsoever good to say about myth or mythology. The subject matter, she pointed out, exalted false gods. For her, the study of myth was merely a “tool of the devil” in the hands of “secular humanists” in a wholesale effort to devalue Christianity and excise its influence from society. The study of myth caused her to doubt her own faith. She did not want her children to study mythology in the public schools.
*
She had even gone so far as to throw out her books on the subject in order to make certain that her home, her children’s minds, and her own mind would never be contaminated by them.
The second woman drew the opposite conclusion from her studies. Lest you think that she was a “liberal” Christian, a New Age adherent, or anything but orthodox in her beliefs, think again. She was from Alabama, the heart of the American Bible Belt, and described herself as “born again” and “spirit-filled.”
†
She could not even remotely be construed as a “secular humanist.” She had just completed the third of three classes in comparative religion at her local university and was enthusiastic about the effects on her religious life. The parallels between the myths of distant cultures and the stories in
the Bible intrigued her and led her to see her faith as the satisfaction of universal human needs. She was fascinated, not threatened, by parallel virgin births and resurrections. For her, these motifs persisted in myth—and were expressed in Christianity—because they are true.
The Christian, Jew, and Muslim, and their nonbelieving cultural heirs, share a profound tradition of the value of the individual human being that is originally rooted in a humanism based on the belief that man was created in the image of God. Animals do not make myths; we have no indication that they have any sense of the transcendent or supernatural. The core elements of myth are a demonstration of the uniqueness of the human consciousness with regard to things beyond the reality of the senses. Only a human being has the innate need to figure out his or her place in the universe. As Joseph Campbell writes of myth: “The way to become truly human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God in all the wonderful modulations in the face of man.”
It is not only modern anthropology, history of religions, and psychology that recognize the constancy and power of myth. Rather, these are things that have been recognized since ancient times. The early Christian church fathers wrote that man is indelibly marked by the
Imago Dei
, the “image of God,” present in every human being, believer and unbeliever. In their thinking, the human being innately knows that there is a God; this is a fundamental part of human consciousness. As Saint Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Romans: “For since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and his divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Of course, Paul then went on to say that this knowledge led humans to make idols, and he delineated the difference between their idolatry and the Christian proclamation.
Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, Catholic theologians such as Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and the Protestant Martin Luther, all readily acknowledged their belief that man had some innate knowledge of God and the supernatural even before being exposed to revealed religion.
You will recall that Pierre Janet wrote that a society abandons its myths when its gods fail to speak. Any society that ignores the innate human need for myth, a myth-based system to live by, and a religion, or that attempts to concoct a myth-based system with gods that fail to speak, does so at its peril. An “artificial myth” such as the Religion of Reason of the French revolutionaries, or the Soviet myth, that does not respond to the innate human mythic demands, fails. For it is only the truly mythic that endures. Stalin might have been evil, but he was no fool—faced with an imminent German invasion, he appealed to the Tsarist civic myth of “Holy Russia” and opened the churches.
So then, if all the materials, the “truths” of revealed religion, are encoded in our genes, why then would we need revealed religion? Shouldn’t the study of the myths alone be sufficient for our spiritual understanding? Many people think so; I do not. Following the knowledge that the elements of myth are within each of us, shouldn’t our spiritual needs be met by a New Age vision quest for “the God within us,” á la Shirley MacLaine? As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, without the “benchmark” of revelation, our religious experience would not be communal, and would be subject to “caprice.”
First, myth is the “glue” that holds societies together; thus there is the collective dimension of a need for a civic myth and a shared sense of morality. In a pluralistic society such as ours, the shared traditions of the Judeo-Christian ethic, the sense of classical Greek values and aesthetics, are the heritage shared by Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, and atheist—and a “moral code” that is a point of agreement on right and wrong that is based on myth. We have a secular “sacred history” that binds us together in addition to the “sacred history” of our respective faiths.
But how does revealed religion work with the innate need for myth?
Let’s use an analogy. Consider the lawnmower. If your mower doesn’t start, chances are that it either isn’t getting a “spark” from the spark plug to ignite the gases in the engine, or else it isn’t getting enough fuel to feed the engine. Nine times out of ten, if you solve either problem, the grass gets cut.
So it is with the relationship between myth and revealed religions. Myth, by Eliade’s definition, is the breakthrough of the sacred into our world—a “revelation.” We all share the rich, possibly psychological or neurologically based “spark” of the collective unconscious or of “cells” of common mythic symbols and images. But it is our revealed religions that provide the fuel that makes our faiths work.
As the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana wrote nearly ninety years ago, “How should the gospel bring glad tidings, save by announcing that which is native to the heart?” Santayana continues, speaking of the time of Christ, “Feeling was ripe for a mythology loaded with pathos. The humble life, the sufferings of Jesus would be felt in all their incomparable beauty all the more when the tenderness and tragedy of them, otherwise too poignant, were relieved by the story of his miraculous birth, his glorious resurrection, and his restored divinity.”
Remembering Pierre Janet, our modern society was forged by the fact that the gods of Greece and Rome no longer spoke. Greece and Rome then turned to the Christian God, built upon the Jewish Scriptures. When the astrological idols of Arabia failed to speak, the revelation of Muhammad swept through the Near East and North Africa, from Spain to the Philippines. These faiths in One God spoke to the innate mythic structure of human consciousness.
The images of our faiths are the images of myth—they are truly “native to the heart.” Revelation has little value if it is not in mythic terms. If revelation is truth conveyed in the form of a story, then it is myth.
Is there myth in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? Most certainly. If myth is the truth conveyed by stories, and it is a “sacred history” of the breakthrough of the supernatural into our world, then it is no contradiction to say that the revelation to Moses on Sinai, for example, is a myth—
and
that it was a concrete, objective event that occurred in human history and that it contains a metaphor applicable to every human being. To say that it is a myth is merely to say that it is part of “sacred history.”
Saint Paul uses the Greek word
mythos
, or “myth,” five times in the New Testament. As was already noted, the term
mythos
once
meant an indisputable, universally agreed-upon “word,” in opposition to the other Greek word for “word,”
logos
, which was open to discussion and debate. Paul uses
mythos
in reference to the myths of the pagans to whom he was preaching, and thus
mythos
is used as “falsehood,” to clearly delineate the Christian proclamation from the “myths” of the Greeks and Romans.
Saint Bonaventure, writing in the thirteenth century, exhorted the faithful to the study of the Scriptures. In his
Journey of the Mind to God
, he wrote:
There is in Scripture a threefold meaning or significance: the metaphorical, by which men are purified and led to a more upright life; the allegorical, which illuminates the understanding; the analogical, which intoxicates the soul with deep drafts of wisdom.
In short, he wrote that the Scriptures convey truth in the form of a story as metaphor, allegory, and analogy.
The contemporary Swiss-German Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kiing writes in
On Being a Christian:
The Gospels were in fact written for people thinking mythologically at a time of mythological thinking, although in fact—as a result of its monotheistic faith being confronted with the pagan and polytheistic faith—the process of demythologizing and historicizing is further enhanced in the New Testament than in the Old. We cannot examine here the immense influence of myths—whether those of India, or those of Homer, those of ancient Rome, of the Middle Ages, or even the substitute myths of modern times—on the evolution of mankind and of individual nations. The comparative study of religions, anthropology, psychology and sociology have revealed in a variety of ways the power of myth to establish meaning and effect social integration: not only its function in a religious interpretation of the world in cult,
*
but also man’s individual and social development as a whole.Certainly at that time, when the redaction of the gospels was completed, a vivid, narrative form of proclamation, making use of
myths, legends and symbols, was absolutely necessary…. Even today, in the age of rational-causal and functional-technical thinking, might not a vivid, narrative form of proclamation still be necessary and certain ancient formulas—mythological in the widest sense—still be useful?… Can there be any doubt about man’s persistent need? Does not even modern man (and his mass media) live not only by arguments but also by stories, not only by concepts, but also by images—often very primitive images—and does he not always need valid images and stories that can be retold?
The Swiss Protestant theologian Emil Brunner defined myth in a way consistent with both Orthodox Christianity and the definitions given in this book. The following is taken from
The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology
, edited by Walter A. Elwell.
There is one further definition of myth to which attention must be drawn, one which in effect equates it with symbolism and relates it to the inherent inability of human language to express adequately the things of God. Thus [Emil] Brunner maintains that “the Christian kerygma [Greek for “proclamation”] cannot be separated from myth” since the Christian statement is necessarily anthropomorphic
*
in the sense that it does, and must do what Bultmannt
†
conceives to be characteristic of the mythical—“it speaks of God in a human way.” And in the same connection Bultmann explains that “mythology is the use of imagery to express the otherworldly in terms of this world and the divine in terms of human life, the other side would mean that it would become impossible for man to say anything about God, or for God to say anything to man, for we have no other medium of expression than in terms of this world.
