Chapter 2

The Death and Resurrection of Myth

For 1500 years, more or less, the Roman Catholic Church was the arbiter of truth – natural, supernatural, and holy. But certain people found themselves compelled to follow their own thinking, even when it strained against the authority of the Church. One of the first, in Eastern Europe, was Jan Hus. He was tried and convicted of being a heretic and burned at the stake in 1415. (Hus is the Czech word for “goose.”)

The enormous change began with Gutenberg in the mid-1400s – moveable metal type could press out unlimited copies of text. And inevitably, thinking people began sharing their questions all over Europe.

The Church recognized the power of printing and used it to extend its reach. Indulgences, widely circulated, offered assurance about purgatory for a price. It was this – and perceived corruption throughout the church – that provoked Martin Luther. In 1521, he reacted – and insisted that anyone could turn to Scripture and find the truth without the authority of Rome.

Galileo Galilei looked through his telescope and saw undeniable evidence that the universe did not revolve around Earth. The Roman Inquisition in 1633 forced him to recant and desist his insistence that God’s Creation was its own authority.

And just four years later, René Descartes wrote Discourse on the Method, showing that radical doubt and personal cogito repositioned authority from received tradition to the thinking person.

Like a jeweler splitting a diamond, this separated knowledge from religion. And just as the Earth was moved from the center of the universe, myth was eased from the center of truth. Authority moved from the institution to the individual.

“Science” simply means “knowledge,” and after René Descartes, the authority of scientific knowledge comes from people who look, hypothesize, and test what is true. But myth – the common, often story-shaped understanding of how the world works – was reduced to something like a silly idea.

And that is an overstatement – just as the Enlightenment did not simply follow a hopeless “Dark Age.”

Let’s ask a person in ancient Greece, “Did the story of Persephone being taken to Hades for half of every year really happen?” That person might say, “Of course it is true. Everything green turns brown through the winter!”

The various and sundry gods of Greece and Rome inhabited a different kind of world – more like “once upon a time” than a point on a calendar. This was, in some sense, understood and accepted. These were stories that explained natural phenomena and the difficult-to-articulate relationships of human life. The universe was cyclical. Persephone obviously went to Hades every year.

But then came Christianity. This religious expression emerged from Jewish saga – but this saga unfolded along a timeline. History moved – through covenant, exile, return – toward fulfillment, the Messiah. The Christ.

So the arrival of Jesus, the Christ, was not “once upon a time.” It was located in history.

The “stories of old” were now treated as the history of old. And history itself began to take on scientific habits – where scholars could examine records, hypothesize, and test. As we moved into the 19th century, the search was on for the “historical Jesus.”

All the particulars, from Conception, the Star and Angels, to the miracles, to Death and Resurrection, are powerful expressions within a rich mythological structure. It is a structure too deep to be contained by mere fact.

When our son was five years old, he learned the truth about Santa Claus. We had played along with Santa, but now the myth was exposed on the playground. Sheri asked him, “What do you think?”

He replied, “I figured it was true. There is no Santa Claus.”

I said, “But there is. Santa is the spirit of giving. We’ve been Santa for you. Now you can be Santa, too.”

When my parents came for the holiday, Matt insisted they hang stockings on the fireplace. And when no one was looking, he put a small toy in each of them.

Santa is a myth. Learning the facts about Santa Claus is often a child’s first faith crisis. But the deeper truth makes the symbol personal.

You see, facts are objective. They exist “out there,” in the three directions and four walls of external reality, observed by the five senses. And that is a good thing, because when we observe, agree upon, and work with objective facts, we can create a marvelous material environment.

And yet, an objective outside world does not account for an important – perhaps the most important – factor of reality. I Am. You know that you are, in a first-person way that is uniquely different from the eight billion other humans on this planet – or the many billions who have ever lived. Without this subjective aspect, reality would never be experienced.

“Subjective” may be “just in your mind.” But I would dare say that subjectivity is where reality is actually lived. And the way we explore and understand this subjectivity is through myth.