Featured
Why Myth Matters
And what makes a myth ‘true’.
You know, reader, I thought I had been rash when I suggested in a piece last year that a resurgence in religious faith was underway. Now I learn (from my fiery new parish priest) that in France, Holy Mother Church welcomed 17,000 people into her arms on Easter weekend. Even in my own, largely sceptical and atheistic country, a ‘quiet revival’ is supposedly taking place. Naturally, we should pause before chalking up a cause to something like this, but the signs were there: in the West’s much-debated ‘crisis of meaning’, in the general sense of cultural instability, in the growing ill feeling towards the hyper-liberal zeal for self-creation—something seen more and more as, at best, a distraction from real economic problems, and, at worst, just a touch narcissistic.
But let me be bold and suggest another reason: that Christianity is true. Here I hasten to add that I do not mean true in the sense that two plus two is four, or in the sense my highest goal in life is to live up to my shoe collection. I mean it rather in the sense of being true to life. For there are some myths, religious or otherwise, that are truer in this sense than others, and their truth is revealed through experience. I submit that part of the reason for the failure of myths—say, the confected myths of the Nazis or Soviets—is because they are exposed as untrue to life, however attractively they are packaged and sold. And the reason for why others persist for so long is because they speak to human nature and experience.
I learn from my fiery new parish priest that in France, 17,000 people were welcomed into the arms of Holy Mother Church over Easter weekend.
Now, myth is a slippery term. We tend to connect it to stories. But what I mean by myth is not of necessity a story, but a framework of meaning. This is how thinkers like Leszek Kołakowski have understood the term: as something that gives shape to our reality. So for Kołakowski, as for Taylor, MacIntyre, and me, concepts like free will or personhood are forms of meaning that exist within and depend on a broader framework, that is, a myth. A thinker like Sam Harris or Galen Strawson will deny that free will ‘exists’ because, at least in the case of the former, they understand, or claim to understand, the world in purely scientific terms. Since neither free will nor personhood can be proved by means of science, they do not exist. (Of course, science cannot prove its own truth by means of science, and depends on myth: that truth matters, that the universe is intelligible, that inquiry is good.)
Karen Armstrong has done more than most to rescue myth from its common usage as a byword for falsehood. In A Short History of Myth, which chiefly deals with mythical stories, she calls it ‘something that never happened but is always true’. The tales of Greek mythology do not tell us what in fact took place: Daedalus and Icarus did not escape their prison by making wings with feathers and wax, and Icarus did not fly too close to the sun, see the wax melt, and plunge to his death. The story of Icarus concerns pride and humility, ambition and realism, reason and emotion. Icarus ignores the warnings of his father and flies too close to the sun because he is seduced by the feeling of being in flight. The inventor Daedalus, who is prudent, survives.
Nor did the Cretan king Minos really hide his monstrous son, who is half-bull and half-man, in a labyrinth, where he was killed by Theseus with the help of Ariadne and her thread. This is a story about shame, and how we keep it out of sight in a mental maze of our own making. The Minotaur stands for darker parts of the self: for our hidden desires, our sources of disgrace or humiliation. Minos hides his shame and so it festers: and only through the sacrifice of young Athenians can the Minotaur be pacified. Reason and love, shown through Ariadne and her golden thread, help Theseus find a way through complexity and fear. Compassion, insight and guiding principle are the way to wholeness. (There is also a political, Girardian subtext to the myth: at the heart of the political order there is violence and concealment.)
The Minotaur stands for the monstrous part of the self: our hidden desires, our sources of disgrace and humiliation.
The themes that run through Greek mythology speak to abiding features of human life, and that is why they last. For the Greeks, as Iain McGilchrist writes in The Matter with Things, mythos (symbolic truth) was inclusive of logos (propositional truth, the truth of reason), not the other way around. Some myths appear again and again across cultures: the Great Flood turns up in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Hebrew Bible, and the Hindu tradition (the tale of ‘Manu and the Fish’). Myths about gods who die and rise again abound: Osiris (Ancient Egypt), Dionysus (Ancient Greece), Christ (Christianity), and Inanna (Sumeria). Order emerges from Chaos time and again, as in the Babylonian story of Marduk and Tiamat or the Norse account of Odin and Ymir. In Chinese mythology, Pangu separates heaven and earth; the God of Genesis divides the waters.
These stories describe, respectively, how human wrongdoing and error lead to chaos, but how a second chance may disclose itself; how pain leads to transformation, just as winter gives way to spring, and how the death of the false self precedes the coming of the real one; how creation is violent, how order is desirable, and how both entail sacrifice. This is not an exhaustive list of meanings, I should say: indeed, the most enduring myths are so charged with meaning that they resist simple analysis. Iain, cited above, claims the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a myth about myth. You will recall that the musician is allowed to go to the Underworld to fetch his wife but only if he does not look back to see if she is following him. He looks; she vanishes. On Iain’s view, this myth shows that to submit myth to the cold, harsh gaze of the intellect, to see if it is ‘real’, is to destroy it.
Anthony O’Hear, like Armstrong, Kołakowski and McGilchrist, as well as Claude Lévi-Strauss, argues that ‘not all truths are truths of science or propositions’. Myth is a kind of understanding that is constitutive of how we make sense of being human. He sees the truth of myth as existential truth, rooted in story, symbol, and ritual rather than logical inference. Myth allows us to inhabit the realms of love, death, duty, and transcendence metaphorically. It does not prove, as a mathematician might, but performs. Of course, we must indulge the notion that all of this is just a way of dignifying pure fiction, of lifting something that belonged to the ‘bawling infancy of our species’, as Christopher Hitchens put it, up to the plane of reason and science. Here, Anthony O’Hear comes in useful.
He describes the truth of myth as existential truth, embedded in narrative, picture, and ritual rather than logical inference.
O’Hear’s take is that not all myths are equal, or true, or equally true, and that the value of a myth lies in its coherence—coherence to itself (that is, internal consistency), but chiefly coherence to experience. For over 2,000 years, Christian mythology, with its vast repertoire of stories, symbols, characters, and rituals, has sustained people of vastly different life circumstances. Needless to say it hasn’t all been plain sailing; but that Christianity has endured the various periods of upheaval, persecution, attack, and disgrace speaks to the strength, that is, the truth, of its central myths, which find beauty, meaning and wholeness in suffering, affirms a metaphysical equality—we are all made in the image of God—and more besides.
John Gray and others have noted that liberalism is downstream of Christianity, and that, by seeking to do away with its Christian content, such as the notion that all people have intrinsic dignity, it is collapsing. Tom Holland, the historian of Christianity, says the political and social upheaval of the 1960s can to a great extent be boiled down to a rejection of the Christian ethos, and hence should be thought of as a ‘second Reformation’. Here is Gray:
‘Liberalism was a creation of Western monotheism and liberal freedoms part of the civilisation that monotheism engendered. Twenty-first-century liberals reject this civilisation, while continuing to assert the universal authority of a hollowed-out version of its values. In this hyper-liberal vision, all societies are destined to undergo the deconstruction that is under way in the West. Within Western societies, the hyper-liberal goal is to enable human beings to define their own identities. From one point of view this is the logical endpoint of individualism: each human being is sovereign in deciding who or what they want to be. From another, it is the project of forging new collectives, and the prelude to a state of chronic warfare among the identities they embody.’
Gray, a critic of Christianity, goes on to call hyper-liberalism, in its ‘woke’ form, ‘an ersatz faith’. If it is true that liberalism is coming apart, then it is perhaps because the myths of liberalism have turned out not to be true, or not true enough. We are not free-floating individuals but social beings; we plainly care about more than money, even if that is important; we will die and even kill for our values; and history is not the steady march of progress but merely change (and even if change entails gain, which is not guaranteed, it always involves loss). More still, liberalism fails to give a satisfying answer to the question who acts to bring peace in conditions of disorder: hence why so many young people say they would prefer an authoritarian leader to what they plainly see as a talking shop. That is not a thrilling prospect to me, but it is telling that the kids think it is better than what they have now.
We are not free-floating individuals but social beings; we plainly care about more than money, even if that is important; we will die and even kill for our values.
Ernst Cassirer, writing in the long shadow of fascism, saw myth as an immersive structure of meaning that was prior to conceptual thought. In other words, Cassirer thought myth is something like the air we breathe or the water in which we swim. If this is true, then the question, surely, connects to what myths shape and ought to shape our cultural and political life, and the extent to which it is possible to recover old myths or make new ones. There is no use telling ourselves we do not need them; and to fail to see the power of myth is to let others decide what you and everyone else should believe. You might not like how this or that myth plays out. Myth can bind us, but it can also blind us. The Germans voted for men selling crankish myths of racial greatness; many Western thinkers backed the Soviet attempt to create a new human. Myth-making in the 20th century did not go well. Nietszche called it.
R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, believes that because of this sanguinary period, postwar liberalism cast off ‘the strong gods’—truth, loyalty, honour, sacrifice—and replaced them with an openness and distrust of authority that has made the West socially and morally hollow. In getting rid of those older forms of loyalty, liberalism made a vacuum into which aggressive nationalism, identity politics, and ideological extremism rushed. Michael Shellenberger, in a recent talk on that book, said an upshot of this is that younger men reject the ‘feminised’ soft values of the old era and embrace a rawer form of masculinity—hence the appeal of people like Andrew Tate. (I do not think this desirable, and not just because I look fabulous in a dress and heels. I am also not sure that ‘raw’ is the first word I would reach for to describe Andrew Tate.) But Reno and Shellenberg do point to something crucial, and worth keeping in mind: when myth crumbles, something else, perhaps something worse, will rise out of the ruins in its stead.
