Myths, Pagan

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Michael J. Christensen:

Myths are only shadows of the light of God. We walk in the light by faith, not by sight or exhaustive understanding.

(Michael J. Christensen, C. S. Lewis on Scripture: His Thoughts on the Nature of Biblical Inspiration, the Role of Revelation, and the Question of Inerrancy, [Waco: Word Books, 1979], p. 63.)

Michael J. Christensen:

     Myth, it must be remembered, does not mean lie, error, illusion or misunderstood history. The term has little to do with fact or history but transcends both. Properly understood, myth is a medium of divine revelation bringing a level of understanding superseding that which can be known through facts and history.

(Michael J. Christensen, C. S. Lewis on Scripture: His Thoughts on the Nature of Biblical Inspiration, the Role of Revelation, and the Question of Inerrancy, [Waco: Word Books, 1979], pp. 76-77.)

Michael J. Christensen:

    Good Dreams: Pagan Premonitions of Christ

     Pagan myths or “good dreams,” as Lewis refers to them in Mere Christianity, comprise yet another medium of divine revelation. Scattered throughout human history are archetypal patterns, stories, rituals, and religious motifs “about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”

     In Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis cites a passage from the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.), who wrote in one of his Eclogues: “The great procession of the ages begins anew. Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns, and the new child is sent down from heaven.” The “reign of Saturn,” Lewis reminds us, is the great Roman age that roughly corresponds to the Garden of Eden before the Fall in Hebrew mythology. Virgil’s poem describes the new paradisal age which would emerge with this nativity. Apparently, Lewis surmises, some dim prophetic knowledge of Christ’s birth impressed the mind of the famous pagan poet.

     Plato was another, perhaps the greatest of all myth-makers. In his Republic, we are asked to imagine a perfectly righteous man, who “will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned, his eyes will be put out, and after enduring every humiliation he will be crucified. . . .” Although Plato was clearly inspired by the death of Socrates, he is really depicting, according to Lewis, “the fate of goodness in a wicked and misunderstanding world.” The obvious similarity between Plato’s vision and the Passion of Christ was not one of coincidence but insight. “It is the very same thing of which that Passion is the supreme illustration.”

     “And what are we to say of those gods in various Pagan mythologies who are killed and rise again and who thereby renew or transform the life of their worshippers or of nature?” Lewis asks in Reflections on the Psalms, referring to the corn-kings in the nature religions who personify the annual death and resurrection of corn. He asks again, “Can one believe there was just nothing in that persistent motif of blood, death, and resurrection, which runs like a black and scarlet cord through all the greater myths—through Balder and Dionysus and Adonis and the Grail too?”

     How are Christians to understand the obvious similarities between pagan myths and Christianity? Either pagan mythology is essentially demonic and functions as counterfeit revelation for the purpose of confusing mankind, or else it is the dim foreshadowing of God’s supreme revelation in Christ. Lewis identifies with the latter view: “Surely the history of the human mind hangs together better if you suppose that all this was the first shadowy approach of something whose reality came with Christ.”

     The difference between pagan myths of redemption and the Divine Incarnation in history “is not the difference between falsehood and truth. It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other.” As Lewis explains in Miracles, Christ is like the corn-kings of pagan mythology “because the Corn-King is a portrait of Him. The similarity is not in the least unreal or accidental. For the Corn-King is derived (through human imagination) from the facts of Nature, and the facts of Nature from her Creator; the Death and Re-birth pattern is in her because it was first in Him.”

     This archetypal pattern of redemption—birth, death, new life—is “a thing written all over the world.” Embedded in the natural processes of the sun rising and setting, the cycles of the seasons, the cycle of life, or a seed being planted in the ground and dying only to live again is the mythological truth that man must die to live: “In the sequence of night and day, in the annual death and rebirth of the crops, in the myths which these processes gave rise to, in the strong, if half-articulate, feeling . . . that man himself must undergo some sort of death if he would truly live, there is already a likeness permitted by God to that truth on which all depends.” One of the functions of the natural world, it seems, is to furnish symbols that point to spiritual reality. Nature supplies the substance for myth; God supplies the meaning.

(Michael J. Christensen, C. S. Lewis on Scripture: His Thoughts on the Nature of Biblical Inspiration, the Role of Revelation, and the Question of Inerrancy, [Waco: Word Books, 1979], pp. 73-75.)

Note: See further: Cosmology (As a Literary Genre—Myths/History).

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria