[DumbNelmcrece]

Dear Alvin,

I think the views of Tolkien on myth are quite consonant with Orthodoxy. The Orthodox attitude toward secular literature was mainly expounded by St. Basil the Great, who was in favor of studying it to find the "seeds of truth" scattered in it.

Sincerely,
Owen

[ulnanVti]

Fr Al, it's a great delight to see your citation of Carpenter's account of that conversation between Tolkien, Lewis, and Dyson. However, I find myself having reservations when Tolkien comments that, "only by myth-making, only by becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall."

While I deeply value and admire the ability to invent stories, specifically stories that provide deep glimpses into the truth, I wonder about the notion that Man is thereby ascribing "to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall." That seems to ascribe a bit too much (salvific?) power to the human imagination.

Does that strike anyone else as problematic?

Well, if you take into account where he is coming from, and add in the fact that, after all, he wasn't Orthodox, the mere fact that he is wrong is not necessarily problematic, its simply wrong. That doesn't make him all bad.

Remember that Tolkien was quite the creator. He created an entire universe, a whole mythos of his own. His imagination was a bit more emcompassing and creative, and even godlike (lowercase) than mine, certainly. Did his creativity and imagination "ascribe to" perfection? Perhaps. Did it "achieve" perfection? That is another thing entirely, at least to this bear of little brain.

Herman the Pooh

[NADALA]

I think there is a big difference in orthodoxy between the use of imagination in matters of prayer and spirituality, and the creation of art to glorify God. If we consider that part of man's role as priest and king of creation is rendering the creation eloquent in praise of God, then we can see that art has a special role. Fr. Michael Pomazansky, discussing iconography in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, says this: Among the various gifts of man which distinguish him from other creatures is the gift of art
or of depictions in line and color. This is a noble and high gift, and it is worthy to be used to glorify
God. With all the pure and high means available to us we must glorify God according to the call of the Psalmist: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name” (Ps. 102:1). “All that is within me” refers to all the capabilities of the soul. And truly, the capability of art is a gift from God. Fr. Michael is talking about visual arts here, but of course what he's saying applies to any of the arts. The most prominent non-visual art in the Orthodox Church is its hymnody, which includes sacred poetry and music. And in Orthodoxy there have been arts which are not ecclesiastical per se, but which nevertheless are part of the Church's heritage in some way, such as the novels of Dostoevsky or the Serbian epics about the Battle of Kosovo.

[Wymdqcvb]

I don't know what kind of 'myth'ology you are referring to, but I want to warn you about the current popular Zeitgeist movement that tries to accuse Christianity about borrowing from other ancient babylonian religions about a dying and rising god, these are nothing more than theosophic teachings of luciferian Helena P. Blavatsky and her luciferian disciple Alice Ann Bailey, to which the makers of Zeitgeist, Peter Joseph, Acharya S, and Jordan Maxwell, admittedly adhere to, Alice Ann Bailey wrote the "Externalization of the Hierarchy", which explains the steps needed to usher in this "new age of aquarius", based on the assumption that history rotates in 2,000-2500 cycles and that Christianity was an age of pisces, and this age is done with. Basically Satan's plan to build a One World Religion of the AntiChrist.

The first actual occurance of a non Christian dying and rising god doesn't come until the late 1st, and early 2nd century, so its obvious who borrowed from who, and these accusations have been debunked many times.

[Ervins Dervish]

I don't mean to diminish Gerard's contribution here. He is extremely helpful in enabling us to see the Gospel in much greater spiritual depth and power than just a recitation of historical facts. And yet, ironically, he seems to be committing a kind of rationalistic fallacy here. Can't quite put my finger on it.

Dear Owen,

I found the article Are the Gospels Mythical? by Rene Girard to be very interesting and insightful, however, he seems to never mention faith. Actually, he does. One time in the opening sentence: "From the earliest days of Christianity, the Gospels' resemblance to certain myths has been used as an argument against Christian faith." Seems like the word 'faith' should be used more than once when discussing such a question.

In Christ,
Antonios

[kertionderf]

Myth and Misunderstandings Part I:
The Nature of Myth in
Cosmological Civilizations

I especially want to draw your attention to the problem that the gods are intracosmic. There is no such thing as a world-transcendent God in any cosmological civilization; and for a very long time even in revelation and philosophy there is no world-transcendent God. That's a very peculiar problem, how that problem arises at all. But in the cosmological civilizations, the gods are intracosmic, part of the cosmos.

With that in mind, let me say a word about the expressive forms, the symbolizations, in which such an idea, such an experience, is expressed. It is usually called the myth.

And here practical science is still in a considerable methodological quandary. The comparative religionists and mythologists and archeologists usually subscribe to the older conceptions of myth, which are rooted in the general phenomenology of religion. That is to say that they are fundamentalists: One takes the phenomenon of a symbol and does not go back to the experience that produced it. Therefore, if you take the myth as the phenomenon of a symbol, you arrive at such a definition of the myth as you find in Eliade's Myth and Reality. Let me read that to you, because then you will most easily see what the new problem is. Eliade defines myth:

Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the "beginnings." In other words, myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality—an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a "creation"; it relates how something was produced, began to be. [Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (London: Alien & Unwin, 1964), 5-6.]

Against this very much accepted definition of myth, I would like to make the following exceptions: In the first place, when you go strictly empirically to the materials, the Babylonian literary documents of a cosmological civilization, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Assyrian, or even the Hindu, only a very small percentage of all the materials are stories of anything.

When you have to deal, for instance, with the tension between a Ruler and the Gods, or a Ruler and the People, or with the invasion, say, of the Hyksos, that complex example in Egypt, no stories of the gods will tell you anything. They are quite different forms of expression than stories. So the formulation "Myth is always an account of a creation" is wrong in the face of the empirical facts. There are quite a number of other types of myth.

The second point is that the gods are designated as "supernatural Beings." That, of course, is impermissible. The term supernatural, as opposed to natural, is Scholastic terminology very commonly used by Thomas Aquinas. From Scholasticism, as part of dogma, it entered into the dogmatism of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Eliade is rather an Enlightenment ideologue in this respect to the Scholastics.

In that connection we speak of supernatural as opposed to natural. As I have indicated, no man living in a cosmological civilization ever knew that the gods were a super nature against a nature; there were heaven and earth, the gods and men and the king, and all was part of this partnership. Nothing in it was more natural than anything else. So the terms natural and supernatural just make no sense when used anachronistically with regard to cosmological civilization. That makes sense in the thirteenth century of Scholasticism, that makes sense in the Enlightenment under the influence of the natural sciences, but it makes no sense when you deal with an ancient civilization.

For that reason one cannot accept these nominalist definitions. You have to take a realistic definition, which is very much simpler. You can simply say: Myth is that body of symbols that had in fact been found adequate by the members of such civilizations for expressing their experiences of the cosmos in which they lived. Nobody can object to that—you simply go back to empirical facts.
CW VOL 33,
The Drama of Humanity
and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1939-1985
The Drama of Humanity,
pp 188-189.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOEGELIN MAIN PAGE

[7HlBQS8j]

Myth and Misunderstandings Part II:
The Types of Mythical Content—
Rhythmical Renewel rather than Eternal Return

Now let me make good what I have said, that in the myth you have a lot of things that are not stories. For instance, I have listed nine different types. Let me just enumerate them; I shall deal with two of them as examples.

1. These are symbolizations of the established order of empire. The empire is an analogy of the cosmos; you might call it a small cosmos—a cosmion. Such formulations of the analogy between empire structure and cosmic structure are, for instance, found in the famous preamble to the Code of Hammurabi—no story at all; rather, parallel structures between the heavens and the earth. The empire, the small cosmion, is parallel to the heavens.

2. Then a case in which you have history, but a history of a very peculiar kind, a foundation myth of empire. In the case of establishment, the myth is symbolized by the parallel, the analogy, while the foundation myth must be symbolized by an action among the gods. The form is not strictly a history but a drama, such as the Theology of Memphis, of probably 3000 B.C., a drama that tells the story of the foundation of Egypt as a drama enacted among the gods.

3. Then in the crisis periods, for instance, in the First Intermediate Period—about 2200 to 2000 B.C. was the height of the crisis in Egypt—you find highly intricate discussions of the contemporary skeptical arguments, with the existential analysis of the two existences leading out of this mess. We'll come back to that.

4. Or you have literary lyrics expressing skepticism of the gods, not a story of the gods at all, but expressing skepticism of man with regard to the stories told about the gods; for instance the "song of the Harper"—songs of skepticism.

5. Then a vast body is roughly equivalent to what you would find on the ordinary level of common sense, in the eighteenth century meaning of that word, the Wisdom literature; nothing about the gods, only about man, but in this context of a cosmological civilization.

6. Then the great expressions of defeat, victory, and restoration of empire; no story at all, but the relation between the ruler and gods. That is the problem.

7. Then the ritual renewals of order in the New Year Festivals, what Eliade usually brings under the "éternel retour," the "eternal return." There is no "eternal return" in any ancient civilization; there is only a rhythmical renewal, and the rhythm is not an eternal renewal. Let me briefly explain that, because there is still a lot of misunderstanding about it. When you have a rhythmical renewal you have something like a sine wave, like the annual spring, summer, fall, and winter, time going on and on.

But then there is something like a return, an eternal return of the same, and that would be really a circle of events. [Aristotle touches upon this] problem, when he asks the question, "If I am living at this point here, that being my present, and then I have a historical event, like the war against Troy, I can ask myself the question, Which way am I nearer to the war against Troy, going backward, or going forward?" That would be eternal return. But such an eternal return in a historical conception is nowhere to be found before the seventh century B.C., in Hinduism and in Hellas. No ancient civilization had any conception of an eternal return, but only of rhythmic renewal. That was not a story either, but the question of ritual renewal.

8. Then something else, which does not properly come under the term myth in the sense of a story of the gods, is the construction of unilinear history, from the beginning of the creation of the world, down to the imperial present, to the empire. We have—that is also very easy to ascertain —unilinear history in ancient civilizations, but we have no cyclical history. There is no concept of cyclical history in the ancient civilizations of the cosmological empires, but there is unilinear history. I shall come back to that in the second lecture.

9. And here we have all sorts of symptoms of a breakthrough beyond cosmic experience in the direction of either a beginning in time, extrapolation into the past to the point of origin, or to the origin in the transcendent. We have speculations or extrapolations of a long past history, extrapolating one part of it back to the beginning—that is one way of putting it—or prayers directed, without benefit of other parts of reality, to an unknown God, beyond all the known gods. Thus, the problem of the unknown God is already a problem in Egyptian civilization. The main god of the later period is Amon, and the Egyptian word Amon means "the hidden one." So the hidden god, which becomes very relevant in gnosticism, is already present in the Amon Hymns, at the latest in the eighth century B.C.

Here we have all sorts of literature and symbolic expressions, which are always lumped together as myth and of which only a small part has the character of a story. As we have seen already from the enumeration, all human problems and situations with which we are familiar are also myths. The question of the loss of existence, questions of alienation, of crisis, of empire, of personal crisis, and so on, all are subject matter for expression in a peculiar medium, so there is not only one blocklike, peculiar conception of this or that.

CW VOL 33,
The Drama of Humanity
and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1939-1985
The Drama of Humanity,
pp 189-192.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOEGELIN MAIN PAGE

[animilius]

". . . Voegelin's theory of consciousness allows him to avoid the deforming confusion wrought by Christian thinkers who draw a distinction between "ontological statements" (which purportedly describe the real truth of things) and "symbolic statements" (which are allegedly "only" evocative and rhetorical). But Voegelin would have none of this. Instead he would say that the truth of Christianity is eminently symbolic and not "ontological," a conclusion made not to destroy Christianity but to free it from a literalist deformation, for in the end one cannot separate "revealed truth" from symbol and myth. Transcendence can only be articulated in an analogical language replete with inevitable ambiguity. Such is the nature of human knowing in the realm of transcendence. Within the orbit of faith one cannot move from mythos to logos pure and simple, for reason itself can not provide the ground for affirming transcendent reality. For example, to say "Jesus is the Son of God" is a symbolic, analogical statement whose truth is apprehended in faith; it is not an ontological statement of rational discourse (which often is based in an extrinsic objectivism that, as Lonergan puts it, is so objective as to get along without minds).This view of knowledge and language follows Thomas' analogia entis, a principle of theologizing which Voegelin adopts. Ultimately one cannot escape the form of symbol and myth in theology; certitude is simply not available. Faith must tell its story in the penultimate language of inescapably ambiguous symbols seeking ever-greater adequacy."

[lh88gFzI]

"As early as the 1940s Voegelin argued that this loss of spiritual substance was due in large measure to the destruction of the myth. When the symbols of Christianity met their rational, historical critique at the beginning of modernity, the integrity of Christian truth was doomed. At the heart of the matter was the fact that the symbolic language of Christianity, stemming from its Hebrew and Hellenistic origins, was mythical. The myth was the specific vehicle "for expressing the truth of transcendent reality, its incarnation and its operation in man." In the early Christian centuries this language was not a myth in the modern pejorative sense. It was the precise way to designate religious reality. It only became a "myth" after Christianity was penetrated by the rationalism and the historicizing sciences of the last three centuries. It was the stunning critique of these intellectual movements that debunked the "first naivete" (to use Paul Ricoeur's term) of popular symbols and dogmas and left the teaching authority of the Church with less and less credence. Voegelin's whole endeavor to reconstruct a Christian philosophy of history is rooted in the very urgent need to recover through a "second naivete" the original meaning of the ancient symbolisms, and thus to restore their authoritative status in a way that prevents their institutionalized perversion. This entails a reappraisal and recovery of the myth. The myth is the permanent guarantee for maintaining consciousness as luminosity. The loss of the myth has meant the loss of the consciousness of the It-reality. For Voegelin, the symbolic form of the myth can alone regenerate the transcending movement of the self toward mystery and the eternal, as well as restrain the immanentizing forces of modern gnosticism."

[ionitiesk]

What kind of Mythology is being asked for? The Greek Mythologies and their comparison to Christianity?

You could say that we have added traditions and myths to the faith. That is what the common people do. Superstitions and so forth arise all the time and they are linked to a tale of some sort. But there is also the perspective that Myths are exaggerations of the truth and nothing more than that, like the many legends of Alexander the Great and the Myths that sprouted about him. Then there are some cultures which have added to the biblical texts in the form of cultural traditions blended into Christianity and they have myths and legends mixed in with Christianity. On some islands like Sechels off the coast of Africa they mixed pagan rituals with Christian ones.

I have never looked for a book on the subject but then again i dont know what you wanted to know.

[nerkvcbtre]

Here is an excerpt from a Orthodox article that I was reading on the Goarch site. I love the way the Theologian incorporated they Mythology to pass a valuable message to the "Greek" Orthodox church ... the overall theme of the article was about "feminine Philanthropy", however, here it is:

"Come this unfortunate came here shipwrecked
and we must save him. Because Zeus
sends the poor and foreigners" shouted Nausica.
"Well come girls give him to eat water for the stranger
and wash him in the river, in a place sheltered from the wind."
And the girls stood and one pushed the other
and to a shady place they led the divine
Odysseus they placed clothing near him
a cup full of oil and they invited him
to wash in the river stream.," Homer adds:
"And Nausica emphasized: Cheerful must be
the little that you give."

~ Homer. Odysseus. VII, 206-216.

Nausica carried out a divine order in a spontaneous manner: natural, disinterested, and cheerful ... With "a cloud" of ministers and witnesses of Hellenistic Christian philanthropy, we the Greek Orthodox of the Diaspora, must intensify greater efforts for the implementation of the advice of the ancients:

"It is good for all, to honor but also preserve the best of our heritage."