J.R.R. Tolkien precipitated C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity by persuading him that Christianity is “the true myth.” By “true,” Tolkien and Lewis meant, first, that the events in the Gospels seem really to have happened, in an ordinary historical sense: the evidence is convincing. By “myth,” they meant that stories about a dying and rising god are featured in the mythology of many cultures, so Christ was following, or rather fulfilling, a pattern that the human imagination seems perennially to have yearned for, groped towards, seen as desirable and necessary. Yet the phrase still needs unpacking. I want to try to explain what Lewis and Tolkien meant by calling Christianity “the true myth.”
In modern culture, the word “myth” has almost been reduced to meaning merely “error.” Almost, but not quite. If a scientist forms a false belief about natural laws due to an error in experimental design, but never publishes his results, that is not a myth. A stupid yet useful example of a contemporary myth is something I was told as a kid, namely: that if you put a human tooth in a glass of Coke for 24 hours, it will completely dissolve. Aside from not being true, this is something that (a) was spread by hearsay and widely believed, (b) appealed to the imagination—though not to anything like the degree that the great mythologies of classical civilization did—and (c) carries a moral message (don’t drink Coke). Even in the contemporary vernacular, myths are widely shared and imaginatively appealing, but false, stories with a moral meaning. If we drop the requirement that myths be false, it is no paradox to say that widely shared and imaginatively appealing stories with a moral message might be true. But there is more to the idea of the true myth than that.
It may be of some use here to explain why the pursuit of truth can lead men to write fictional stories, and in what sense fictional stories can have more truth in them than factually accurate accounts of real events. We all know that there is such a thing as a good story, and we have some idea of what that means, even if it’s hard to explain. It has something to do with displaying and rewarding virtue, and something to do with laying bare, and/or with satisfying, the deepest yearnings of the human heart. Reality is full of good stories, and we may hope, and sometimes we even perceive, that good stories are the very threads from which the tapestry of life is woven. But in telling them, we are censored and handicapped by the accidents of what data happens to be available to us, and confidentiality may require us to hide some of what we know, or charity and justice to conceal some of what we suspect. In particular, the interior states of the characters in real stories—their hopes, fears, motives, moods, thoughts, perceptions, intentions, plans—tend to be invisible to us. But as the springs of human action lie in the heart, any story that does not deal with these is incomplete. A fictional story, freed from the duty of factual accuracy, can be truer to the nature of real stories.
But myths differ greatly from modern realistic fiction. For one thing, while fiction is definitely disbelieved by its author—Tolstoy never supposed that Pierre Bezukhov was a real person, and could be sure that his readers would not do so either—myths seem usually to be the objects of a hopeful semi-belief. Homer had never seen Achilles and Agamemnon, or for that matter Zeus and Athena, and he must have appreciated the license with which poets like himself could adapt and embellish and reinvent stories long handed down. Yet he probably believed in the heroes and the gods in some sense. Moreover, myths paint on a larger canvas. In the novels of Jane Austen or Tolstoy, attention is focused on man and society in this world. The conventional faith of a Christian society lingers in the background. For the most part, it is neither affirmed nor challenged. By contrast, in The Iliad and The Odyssey, the gods are active participants in the story, and the characters never forget that they are doomed to the shadowlands of Hades.
Myths deal boldly with ultimate questions like the nature and destiny of the world, the meaning of life and the fate of the soul. G.K. Chesterton wrote that “mythology is a search,” and that the voice of the mythmaker is not that of the priest or the philosopher saying, “These things are,” but that of the dreamer and idealist crying, “Why cannot these things be?” If they deal with these ultimate things figuratively and metaphorically, how could they do otherwise? Language cannot transcend the mundane except on the wings of metaphor. Myths deal especially with contact between gods and men, usually representing the gods anthropomorphically. Myths are beautiful, and evoke yearning. Often, as in The Iliad, the stories in which these contacts take place are tragic and miserable, yet I think the Greeks nonetheless listened to The Iliad in a spirit of admiration and longing for a better age, an age when men were stronger and more heroic, and above all, when the gods dealt with men face-to-face. For men want to meet God, or—when their conceptions of divinity have been debased by irresponsible storytelling—the gods.
Mythology is a search, and that is why it disappears when Christianity arrives. Every pre-Christian civilization—Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Norse, for example—seems to have had its mythology, but medieval Christendom did not have mythology in the proper sense, because it was Christian. It would not seek to bridge the gap between gods and men through the imaginative glories of mythology, because it bridged them by the sacraments. To be sure, it had its legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, but these were human and Christian heroes, under God. Christianity is the myth to end all myths, because in the story of Jesus Christ, man’s hunger for contact with the divine, which the myths long teased and tantalized, is finally sated. Having tasted the Living Water of Christ, we shall never again thirst for the old myths. We can still enjoy them, but we no longer yearn to believe them.
The Christian story operates on the human soul in the fashion of a myth. We admire it and desire it, we love to build temples to it, write songs about it, organize festivals around it. It fills us with wonder. It has the beauty of the best myths, without the obscenity and immorality that pervades and mars the pagan mythologies. It reaches deep inside us and teaches us to know ourselves. It is a bottomless well of insight into ultimate things, into the nature and meaning of reality. It forms the central narrative of the community called the Christian church, which has led the moral progress of mankind ever since. At the same time, the Christian story has a claim to historical facthood that the old Greek myths could never have made. Who would claim to know where the pool is where Narcissus gazed forever into his own beautiful face? What eyewitness accounts have we of the life of Orpheus? But Jesus was executed under a Roman official known to history. Paul’s epistles were all written within two or three decades after Jesus’s death. Most of the New Testament very plausibly claims to have been written by eyewitnesses of the Resurrection. Many of these eyewitnesses sealed their testimony by their martyric deaths, which would make any suggestion that they could have been lying very odd.
The word gospel means “good news,” and it was good news to C.S. Lewis that a myth could be true. For he was always a lover of myths and legends. In his young materialist years, he was nearly in a state where everything he loved, he regarded as imaginary, while everything he accepted as real was drab and meaningless. Probably many today can sympathize. How many readers of fantasy novels, how many World of Warcraft addicts, prefer those magical storied worlds to the mechanistic and ultimately meaningless reality in which scientific materialism has taught them to believe? “Escapism” is often used as a term of abuse, and it is true that there is something cowardly about turning away from what one takes for reality to find solace in myths that one cannot believe in. But there is a myth one can believe in, a true myth, and through it, escape from this mortal coil is possible.