Understanding Christ Through Mythology

I totally stole this from C.S. Lewis, it is a great understanding of why myths exist and how they all point towards Christ.


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. Now, Barfield had shown him the crucial role that mythology had played in the history of language and literature. 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 express 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 leave 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 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 jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living thing have come. To them, the whole of creation was “myth-woven and elf-patterned.”
This was not a new notion to Lewis, for Tolkien was, in his own manner, expressing what Barfield had said in Poetic Diction. 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, and 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 practicing “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’ rooms on Staircase III of New Buildings (at Magdalen College). There, he recorded, “we continued on Christianity.”
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 center of the Christian story. “Right in the center,” 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 the he could draw nourishment from it, which he could never find in a list of abstract truths? Could he not realize that it is a myth, and make himself receptive into it? For, Tolkien said, if God is mythopoeic, man must become mythopathic.
It was now 3 a.m., and Tolkien had to go home. Lewis and Dyson came downstairs. They crossed the quadrangle and let him out by the little postern gate on Magdalen Bridge. Then, Lewis recorded, “Dyson and I found more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4.” Twelve days later Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves: “I have just passed on from believe in God to definitely believing in Christ – in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

A Lament to God

Soft night breeze reminds me You are there.
You presence is never as real as it is in that moment.
As the world turns Chaos expands and engulfs my everyday.
The softest breath from You cools my soul,
and causes serenity to befall my spirit.
You alone are able to penetrate the exterior of my being.
You have no desire to drive me mad,
nor do You delight in my worries.

Yet, each day brings anew the reminder of our depravity.
The distance between You and us is ever present in this place.
We once embraced in Your secret place walking side by side in authenticity.
There were no worries, no concerns only fulfillment.
When presented the chance we chose to know what we should not.
Now we long to remember even a glimpse of Your glory,
and forget the “truth” of this place.
From a distance we stand cowering in fear.
A fear renewed each day in the form of Chaos.

You told us that You once conquered Chaos.
In the beginning You did great things to silence it.
Yet, we now find ourselves engage once again with this Chaos.
Why must I struggle with an enemy You already defeated.
Why do You not intercede and stop this struggle.
The Chaos winds us up and sets us on a course unnatural.
Conflict and sin become our greatest opponents.
You, the one who has the ability to stop it, remain distance from us.
A reminder of our own inability to remain true in our deeds.
Why?

Then in the warmth of the night, Your breath encompasses us.
The chill of Your presence is felt upon our necks.
Your gift is delivered in a moment of certainty.
The world is returned for just that brief moment to the beginning.
For that fleeting moment Chaos loses control.
I am reminded that Your hands have never released me.
Your Strength, never should I question.
Soft night breeze reminds me You are there.