One of my favorite theologians, C.S. Lewis claimed that his own journey to Christianity was most deeply influenced by G. K Chesterton. Lewis said ““The case for Christianity in general is well given by Chesterton; and I tried to do something in my Broadcast Talks.”” Later, in a private letter, Lewis said ““Have you tried Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man? The best popular apologetic I know.”
I’ve read Chesterton, and even composed my song “Dear Sir” with part of the impetus coming from Chesterton’s work The Man Who Was Thursday. I hadn’t however read the book that so deeply influenced Lewis, so I started reading. I see what Lewis meant!!
So, the rest of today’s blow post will be Chesterton on the difference between mythology and the Christian faith. It’s excerpts and obviously not the entire chapter from the book, but these salient parts are powerful. I think it salient to about where our culture is right now. Many wish to distance themselves from Christianity, and really most other religions, and instead find some solace in a more mythological pursuit of “gods” or just “spiritual ideas.”
Read Chesterton’s take on that from The Everlasting Man, chapter V “Man and Mythologies” published in 1925.
What are called the gods [mentioned in the previous chapter] might almost alternatively be called day-dreams….All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it.
Now the first fact [about understanding myths] is that the most simple people have the most subtle ideas. Everyone ought to know that, for everyone has been a child. Ignorant as a child is, he knows more than he can say and feels not only atmospheres but fine shades. And in this matter there are several fine shades. Nobody understand it who has not had what can only be called the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the beautiful things he sees.
Two facts follow from this psychology of day-dreams, which must be kept in mind throughout their development in mythologies and even religions. First, these imaginative impressions [myths] are often strictly local….The second consequence is this; that in these pagan cults there is every shade of sincerity…and insincerity….They are not really much more serious for being taken seriously. They have the sort of sincerity that they always had; the sincerity of art as a symbol that expresses very real spiritualities under the surface of life.
As already noted, this does not mean that there was no reality or even religious sentiment in such a mood….There is all the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really frightening ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things in the soul.
These are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men [humans]. But he who has most sympathy with myths will most fully realize that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion….A man did not stand up and say ‘I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,’ etc, as he stands up and says ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty,’ and all the rest of the Apostles Creed….Polytheism fades away at its fringes into fairy-tales…[but] it did satisfy, or rather it partially satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers.
The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone….But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him for ever. Henceforth being merely secular would be a servitude and an inhibition.
In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found….That is where all these things differed from religion or the reality in which these different dimensions met in a sort of solid. They differed from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were. A picture may look like a landscape; it may look in every detail exactly like a landscape. The only detail in which it differs is that it is NOT a landscape [but merely a picture]….But anybody who has felt and fed on the atmosphere of these myths will know that I mean, when I say that in one sense they did not really profess to be realities….The dreams do indeed tend to be very vivid dreams when they touch on those tender or tragic things, which can really make a sleeper awaken with the sense that his heart has been broken in his sleep….We may truly call these foreshadowing; so long as we remember that foreshadowings are shadows. And the metaphor of shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were LIKE IT is to say that they were different.
Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism than with Christianity. Those who call these cults ‘religions’ and ‘compare’ them with the certitude and challenge of the Church have less appreciation than we have of what made heathenism human, or of why classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song….And it is utterly unreal to argue that these images in the mind, admired entirely in the abstract, were even in the same world with a living man and a living polity that were worshipped because they were concrete….I do not mean merely that I myself believe that one is true and the other is not. I mean that one was never meant to be true in the same sense as the other….We know the meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet saying ‘These things are.’ It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying, ‘Why cannot these things be?’