I’d agree with that, even though i’m not religious.
The most important concept in the article in my opinion is this:
I wonder whether we are losing our collective ear for myth, such that we treat as a nice piece of artwork hanging on the wall what is really a window waiting to be looked through — from both sides
Since i’m engaged in that process, and although i balk at the idea of a “nice” piece of artwork, i understand what the writer is getting at in terms of “looked through – from both sides”
Art (if worth looking at) engages us if it asks us questions, therefore it really doesn’t have to be “nice” since the most important questions we can ask ourselves to consider are too profound for such a description. One of the reasons i’m not enamoured of CS Lewis is his attempt to mollify this incursion into real depth with recourse to childhood. Others might say that the untrammelled view of the world that children have is the only way to access profundity, but i disagree.
I’d say, the way to do so is to retain those aspects of childhood which are important whilst giving due perspective to lived experience. If that’s what CS Lewis (and this writer) are seeking to do, then i’ve misunderstood. I’m prepared to accept that possibility, but having looked into it, i don’t think i have.
Last edited 4 months ago by Steve Murray
Ian Jennings
4 months ago
Story, imagination, myth, image – Christianity works on this level as it does on the level of events witnessed – events happening to real people at real times in real places. Christianity can be rejected on this basis of reliability because witnessed testimony (shared as Good news) is at its core, not moral teaching or even meta-narrative. This is also why it is growing worldwide: testimony. Why not step into the wardrobe?
As to intellectuals guarding the faith – not necessarily so. ‘At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children”‘ Matthew 11:25 and 26.
I found this a timely article with which to begin Christmas Day.
I have been, and continue to be, guilty of getting ‘the intellect to do the heavy lifting’. But knowing that one is not intellectually bereft in acknowledging the possibility of an ‘otherness’ by consulting greater minds – scientific and philosophical etc. has been, for me, a way of opening the door to assent, if not outright belief. According to Professor John Lennox, quoting statistics taken from Baruch Shalev’s 100 Years of Nobel Prizes – Los Angeles, 2005, over 65% of Nobel prize winners between 1901 and 2000 believed in God.
Having granted oneself intellectual assent, as it were, one is then confronted with the problem of how to move this intellectual assent along so that it becomes something more than a mere idea. So that it becomes experiential, moving one forward to maybe get some hint of the ‘peace that passeth all understanding’. As I said, Christmas morning is an appropriate time to feel the nudge. And as the author acknowledges, religions have their various ways of nudging us forward. Getting us to explore not only ‘whether a religious myth is true, but whether it works: whether it channels some great truth beyond itself, preparing and opening us up to it’. This is a quote from Jung and he had his recommended ways of bringing this about – creative play, ie surrendered creativity, dream analysis etc. He was, like C.S Lewis, open to the effectiveness of ‘the imaginative embrace’. My personal interpretation of Jung’s methods is this : he believed that we should be brought, by a process of unconscious metaphysics, to a point where we begin to look at ourselves, or a situation, in a more illuminating way. We begin to feel our way towards a connection with something greater. And he further believed that we are not the only energy, the only power, complicit in this process. We do not produce the change, we allow a change – we merely create the space in which the change can happen. By various means, some of them child-like, as you say, we grant the unconscious freedom of expression, and that which is beyond any of us to really understand does the rest. Merry Christmas.
To answer your question of how to move to a different place of experience: Try reading the new testament and praying in your own words (not someone else’s). Truth is there for the finding and knowing, if you can believe it is. Try journalling too, recording questions, yearnings and things that strike you. Look for people and church congregations full of life and love perhaps ones that are growing. See where that takes you! I believe you are on an adventure. I hope this is not to presume! I fear I have made many guesses, and could be getting it and you wrong. But you did pose a question. ( I can’t comment on Carl Yung. People I like quote him so I am sure there is wisdom there).
Thank you for your kind response. Yes, it is an adventure. In Whitehead’s opinion it was ‘an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. A remote possibility that offered the greatest of present facts. A thing that gave meaning to everything and yet could elude all apprehension. It was both the ultimate ideal and the hopeless quest.’ Yet one keeps hoping. Reading the New Testament in an open hearted/open minded way is certainly a way to create the space in which an awareness of the ‘other’ (which we also call the divine) can enter. Jung, as a psychiatrist, was just trying to explain how he thought this ‘entering’ actually happened via the unconscious mind. I found it a viable and encouraging viewpoint. Of course, his views on the ‘shadow’ and various other things were not always welcomed by rigorous Christians.
Simon S
4 months ago
Thank you for this lovely and important piece.
We are indeed still in the grip of that same taboo, that same notion that knowledge must depend exclusively on objectivity with our selves and our emotions removed from the picture – in spite of modern physics making a nonsense of the very idea of the separation of the subjective and the objective at an ontological level.
Materialism has indeed immiserated us. Mythical story telling facilitates and revives our connection to the Divine in which, in spite of the best efforts of mainstream Western science and academia, we intuitively sense we are all a part.
David Morley
4 months ago
the modern West is somewhat unusual in relying on forms of religion that expect the intellect to do all the heavy lifting
I’m not sure about religion, but in the west it seems to me the intellect is doing less heavy lifting than ever before. Indeed it has become atrophied as a result. We are led by emotion, and shallow emotion at that, and if intellect arrives at the party uninvited she is quickly shown the door.
Denis Stone
4 months ago
Good to read someone who understands Lewis. I’ve just finished Of This and Other Worlds, which is worth delving into for Lewis fans.
Brendan Ross
4 months ago
The challenge is epistemic, I think. We lack a broad epistemics in the West — we have a narrow, focused epistemic of “truth”, and everything outside of that epistemic is in the realm of “personal opinion”.
Until that is changed, I doubt many will make much progress along the lines described. Not that people won’t embrace various practices — that has already happened, and continues. But it stays in the realm of personal opinion rather than “truth”, due to how the latter is defined culturally.
I’m not quite sure what you are saying. Are you saying that everyone’s subjective truth is the same? If not, then there are multiple subjective truths – and that’s relativism.
I’m suggesting that not all truth can be apprehended objectively. For example, in aesthetics. There is an excellent book by Patrick Doorly called The Truth About Art. In it – and in his lectures which I have attended – he demonstrates IMO convincingly that some art is of a higher quality than other art. This cannot be proved objectively but can be demonstrated subjectively. By extension, my suggestion is that it is true that some art is greater than other art. And this is true whether I personally can see the quality in the work of art or not. So I don’t think this is relative truth.
The harsh reign of the left brain and the b*****d child Scientism are passing and I’m glad of it.
Some Times Up Some Times Down
4 months ago
Good article. My family are great admirers and avid readers of C.S. Lewis. Personally, as an obsessive brainy person, the Divine had to break down my exclusive reliance on my intellect and teach me that my trust should be in Him, expressed in daily prayer. Thank God nowadays I can only (logically and existentially) understand myself, and my salvation, in the context of Genesis 1:27: “And God [Elohim; plural] said: ‘Let Us [plural] create Man in Our [plural] Image.'” God’s Image and being is an eternal Trinitarian, perfectly loving relationship between the God the Father and God the Son, in communion of God the Holy Spirit. That’s the Image Man was created in, that the Image that we lost (the Fall), that’s the Image that Christ had China to restore. And that’s History, at C.S. Lewis came to acknowledge.
Denis Stone
4 months ago
If Christopher Harding reads this, please could he add a reference for the Fingarette quotation. Thank you.
jane baker
4 months ago
Well put. Can I just comment on what that writer C.S Lewis said,I paraphrase…everything I liked was imaginary,but the real world was dull and boring. My paraphrase. Only it takes me back to my Secondary Modern Education in the late 1960s that ended when I left school in 1970.
The world as presented to me in school lessons and even in the teachers world view they presented to us (maybe not their personal world view) was extremely narrow and suburban and a world of no past and a dull sterile future of technology (that,lol,we’ve now got!).The world as reflected by school was like that writer said,sensible,practical,factual,one.dimensional. But the REAL WORLD as I knew it outside of school was rich,deep,full of colour and sensual pleasure and full of the past,family stories of things that happened to people whose names I did not then know,things that happened in the London Dickens wrote about and the Wessex Hardy wrote about. In some ways our world is better now. Even tv wildlife shows have animals with names, relationships and foibles,it’s daft but much better than when animals were just living automatons and any resemblance in them to emotions or affections was a mistake and the camera crew couldn’t rescue the fluffy kits because it would interfere with the coldly calculatingly and predetermined order of nature.
M Harries
4 months ago
Blimey.
So…. As long as we subvert the intellect, which is a … good … thing’? then despite it being a myth… Christianity … works through enriching our spirit, in the same way that watching a Marvel movie might do. So let’s do this!
Is that the takeaway?
C S Lewis said that he originally approached Christianity as ‘just’ another myth – until he met J R R Tolkien. After he came to believe in Christianity, he then said that the difference between the Christian myth and other myths was that Christianity is true. From my reading of CSL I believe he was saying that the core message of Christianity, regarding Jesus, salvation, etc., was true.
T Doyle
4 months ago
A lovely well written piece. Thank you. I adored the Chronicles of Narnia as a child. I didn’t at the time get the Christian link. I love it now I am old that I do now.
Ian Jennings
4 months ago
Entered twice. My haste.
Last edited 4 months ago by Ian Jennings
Hendrik Mentz
4 months ago
Personally, an important post as it’s helped me bridge or mediate Christian pundits who claim and insist on the acceptance of the physical resurrection of Christ as the cornerstone of Christianity with a more mystical (for want of a better word) sense of religion and, particularly, Christianity. Thank you.
Nicholas Taylor
4 months ago
In his book Black Mass John Gray insists that everything that has welled up in the West, including the Enlightenment, Fascism and explicitly atheistic Communism, and the idea of progress generally, has derived from Christianity, which has so saturated the Western mind and culture that it is impossible to escape it. So I’d be a bit sceptical about it being supplanted by magical tales of the Buddha or the ancient pagan gods. That’s not to say Christianity is entirely original, but it does have the advantage that being an invention from the beginning, it lends itself to endless reinvention.
The author’s highlighting the equal popularity of Light of Asia (the description of which I have to accept as I haven’t read it) with Huckleberry Finn, not forgetting Whistle down the wind, maybe shows that myth and rewilding (linked article) can coexist, indeed must coexist as they spring from the same root. Again citing Gray, who distinguishes a Western or at least American tendency to see things in black and white with an Eastern tendency to believe there can be ‘some truth’ in an idea.
The UnHerd writers keep putting out well argued, beautifully written, inspiring and encouraging pieces on religion. Thank you so much.
I’d agree with that, even though i’m not religious.
The most important concept in the article in my opinion is this:
Since i’m engaged in that process, and although i balk at the idea of a “nice” piece of artwork, i understand what the writer is getting at in terms of “looked through – from both sides”
Art (if worth looking at) engages us if it asks us questions, therefore it really doesn’t have to be “nice” since the most important questions we can ask ourselves to consider are too profound for such a description. One of the reasons i’m not enamoured of CS Lewis is his attempt to mollify this incursion into real depth with recourse to childhood. Others might say that the untrammelled view of the world that children have is the only way to access profundity, but i disagree.
I’d say, the way to do so is to retain those aspects of childhood which are important whilst giving due perspective to lived experience. If that’s what CS Lewis (and this writer) are seeking to do, then i’ve misunderstood. I’m prepared to accept that possibility, but having looked into it, i don’t think i have.
Story, imagination, myth, image – Christianity works on this level as it does on the level of events witnessed – events happening to real people at real times in real places. Christianity can be rejected on this basis of reliability because witnessed testimony (shared as Good news) is at its core, not moral teaching or even meta-narrative. This is also why it is growing worldwide: testimony. Why not step into the wardrobe?
As to intellectuals guarding the faith – not necessarily so. ‘At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children”‘ Matthew 11:25 and 26.
I found this a timely article with which to begin Christmas Day.
I have been, and continue to be, guilty of getting ‘the intellect to do the heavy lifting’. But knowing that one is not intellectually bereft in acknowledging the possibility of an ‘otherness’ by consulting greater minds – scientific and philosophical etc. has been, for me, a way of opening the door to assent, if not outright belief. According to Professor John Lennox, quoting statistics taken from Baruch Shalev’s 100 Years of Nobel Prizes – Los Angeles, 2005, over 65% of Nobel prize winners between 1901 and 2000 believed in God.
Having granted oneself intellectual assent, as it were, one is then confronted with the problem of how to move this intellectual assent along so that it becomes something more than a mere idea. So that it becomes experiential, moving one forward to maybe get some hint of the ‘peace that passeth all understanding’. As I said, Christmas morning is an appropriate time to feel the nudge. And as the author acknowledges, religions have their various ways of nudging us forward. Getting us to explore not only ‘whether a religious myth is true, but whether it works: whether it channels some great truth beyond itself, preparing and opening us up to it’. This is a quote from Jung and he had his recommended ways of bringing this about – creative play, ie surrendered creativity, dream analysis etc. He was, like C.S Lewis, open to the effectiveness of ‘the imaginative embrace’. My personal interpretation of Jung’s methods is this : he believed that we should be brought, by a process of unconscious metaphysics, to a point where we begin to look at ourselves, or a situation, in a more illuminating way. We begin to feel our way towards a connection with something greater. And he further believed that we are not the only energy, the only power, complicit in this process. We do not produce the change, we allow a change – we merely create the space in which the change can happen. By various means, some of them child-like, as you say, we grant the unconscious freedom of expression, and that which is beyond any of us to really understand does the rest. Merry Christmas.
To answer your question of how to move to a different place of experience: Try reading the new testament and praying in your own words (not someone else’s). Truth is there for the finding and knowing, if you can believe it is. Try journalling too, recording questions, yearnings and things that strike you. Look for people and church congregations full of life and love perhaps ones that are growing. See where that takes you! I believe you are on an adventure. I hope this is not to presume! I fear I have made many guesses, and could be getting it and you wrong. But you did pose a question. ( I can’t comment on Carl Yung. People I like quote him so I am sure there is wisdom there).
Thank you for your kind response. Yes, it is an adventure. In Whitehead’s opinion it was ‘an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. A remote possibility that offered the greatest of present facts. A thing that gave meaning to everything and yet could elude all apprehension. It was both the ultimate ideal and the hopeless quest.’ Yet one keeps hoping. Reading the New Testament in an open hearted/open minded way is certainly a way to create the space in which an awareness of the ‘other’ (which we also call the divine) can enter. Jung, as a psychiatrist, was just trying to explain how he thought this ‘entering’ actually happened via the unconscious mind. I found it a viable and encouraging viewpoint. Of course, his views on the ‘shadow’ and various other things were not always welcomed by rigorous Christians.
Thank you for this lovely and important piece.
We are indeed still in the grip of that same taboo, that same notion that knowledge must depend exclusively on objectivity with our selves and our emotions removed from the picture – in spite of modern physics making a nonsense of the very idea of the separation of the subjective and the objective at an ontological level.
Materialism has indeed immiserated us. Mythical story telling facilitates and revives our connection to the Divine in which, in spite of the best efforts of mainstream Western science and academia, we intuitively sense we are all a part.
I’m not sure about religion, but in the west it seems to me the intellect is doing less heavy lifting than ever before. Indeed it has become atrophied as a result. We are led by emotion, and shallow emotion at that, and if intellect arrives at the party uninvited she is quickly shown the door.
Good to read someone who understands Lewis. I’ve just finished Of This and Other Worlds, which is worth delving into for Lewis fans.
The challenge is epistemic, I think. We lack a broad epistemics in the West — we have a narrow, focused epistemic of “truth”, and everything outside of that epistemic is in the realm of “personal opinion”.
Until that is changed, I doubt many will make much progress along the lines described. Not that people won’t embrace various practices — that has already happened, and continues. But it stays in the realm of personal opinion rather than “truth”, due to how the latter is defined culturally.
Yes, agreed. Subjective truth is not relativism, and is equally true as objective truth just arrived at along a different path.
I’m not quite sure what you are saying. Are you saying that everyone’s subjective truth is the same? If not, then there are multiple subjective truths – and that’s relativism.
I’m suggesting that not all truth can be apprehended objectively. For example, in aesthetics. There is an excellent book by Patrick Doorly called The Truth About Art. In it – and in his lectures which I have attended – he demonstrates IMO convincingly that some art is of a higher quality than other art. This cannot be proved objectively but can be demonstrated subjectively. By extension, my suggestion is that it is true that some art is greater than other art. And this is true whether I personally can see the quality in the work of art or not. So I don’t think this is relative truth.
The harsh reign of the left brain and the b*****d child Scientism are passing and I’m glad of it.
Good article. My family are great admirers and avid readers of C.S. Lewis. Personally, as an obsessive brainy person, the Divine had to break down my exclusive reliance on my intellect and teach me that my trust should be in Him, expressed in daily prayer. Thank God nowadays I can only (logically and existentially) understand myself, and my salvation, in the context of Genesis 1:27: “And God [Elohim; plural] said: ‘Let Us [plural] create Man in Our [plural] Image.'” God’s Image and being is an eternal Trinitarian, perfectly loving relationship between the God the Father and God the Son, in communion of God the Holy Spirit. That’s the Image Man was created in, that the Image that we lost (the Fall), that’s the Image that Christ had China to restore. And that’s History, at C.S. Lewis came to acknowledge.
If Christopher Harding reads this, please could he add a reference for the Fingarette quotation. Thank you.
Well put. Can I just comment on what that writer C.S Lewis said,I paraphrase…everything I liked was imaginary,but the real world was dull and boring. My paraphrase. Only it takes me back to my Secondary Modern Education in the late 1960s that ended when I left school in 1970.
The world as presented to me in school lessons and even in the teachers world view they presented to us (maybe not their personal world view) was extremely narrow and suburban and a world of no past and a dull sterile future of technology (that,lol,we’ve now got!).The world as reflected by school was like that writer said,sensible,practical,factual,one.dimensional. But the REAL WORLD as I knew it outside of school was rich,deep,full of colour and sensual pleasure and full of the past,family stories of things that happened to people whose names I did not then know,things that happened in the London Dickens wrote about and the Wessex Hardy wrote about. In some ways our world is better now. Even tv wildlife shows have animals with names, relationships and foibles,it’s daft but much better than when animals were just living automatons and any resemblance in them to emotions or affections was a mistake and the camera crew couldn’t rescue the fluffy kits because it would interfere with the coldly calculatingly and predetermined order of nature.
Blimey.
So…. As long as we subvert the intellect, which is a … good … thing’? then despite it being a myth… Christianity … works through enriching our spirit, in the same way that watching a Marvel movie might do. So let’s do this!
Is that the takeaway?
There was something bathetic about the move to marvel at the end – even if it’s for the kids.
So if we accept myth, are we allowed to evaluate such myth critically – or would that spoil everything?
C S Lewis said that he originally approached Christianity as ‘just’ another myth – until he met J R R Tolkien. After he came to believe in Christianity, he then said that the difference between the Christian myth and other myths was that Christianity is true. From my reading of CSL I believe he was saying that the core message of Christianity, regarding Jesus, salvation, etc., was true.
A lovely well written piece. Thank you. I adored the Chronicles of Narnia as a child. I didn’t at the time get the Christian link. I love it now I am old that I do now.
Entered twice. My haste.
Personally, an important post as it’s helped me bridge or mediate Christian pundits who claim and insist on the acceptance of the physical resurrection of Christ as the cornerstone of Christianity with a more mystical (for want of a better word) sense of religion and, particularly, Christianity. Thank you.
In his book Black Mass John Gray insists that everything that has welled up in the West, including the Enlightenment, Fascism and explicitly atheistic Communism, and the idea of progress generally, has derived from Christianity, which has so saturated the Western mind and culture that it is impossible to escape it. So I’d be a bit sceptical about it being supplanted by magical tales of the Buddha or the ancient pagan gods. That’s not to say Christianity is entirely original, but it does have the advantage that being an invention from the beginning, it lends itself to endless reinvention.
The author’s highlighting the equal popularity of Light of Asia (the description of which I have to accept as I haven’t read it) with Huckleberry Finn, not forgetting Whistle down the wind, maybe shows that myth and rewilding (linked article) can coexist, indeed must coexist as they spring from the same root. Again citing Gray, who distinguishes a Western or at least American tendency to see things in black and white with an Eastern tendency to believe there can be ‘some truth’ in an idea.
Zzzzzz.
Merry Christmas, everybody.