Myth and Fact - What's the Story?
A recent email discussion has prompted this article, in which I try again
to make a point which I have tried to make previously but without much success.
The discussion centred around an extract from a book by Richard Smoley, Inner
Christianity (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2002). Its content is not
particularly important except inasmuch as it touched off the discussion,
which was broadly speaking about "myth" versus "fact" in Christianity.
There are a number of different positions on this - in fact, almost as many
as there are people who think about the issue - but they cluster, and I want
to briefly and simplistically summarise my view of the main clusters.
Firstly, what might be characterised as the "fundamentalist" view is that
there is no myth, it's all fact. This leaves fundamentalists with a significant
problem of fitting the "mythic" elements into a factual framework, and gives
us such things as "creation science". A lot of energy is spent on this.
Moving through the spectrum, the "evangelical" view is probably some variation
on that expressed by C.S. Lewis as "myth become fact". The reason that Christianity
has so many elements which are like the myths of other religions, this says,
is that other religions are, in a way, pre-echoes of the great Facts of Christianity.
Furthermore, the mythic way in which these facts are sometimes expressed
does not diminish their factuality. It's just a different way of speaking,
perhaps required by the subject matter.
The "liberal" view tends to be that there is myth, and there is fact, and
much of Christianity is the former rather than the latter. There should be
no confusion between the two - the mythic should not be treated as if it
is somehow factual. It has its own significance on another level, one which
we have largely transcended intellectually but which still has its emotional
appeal. While the fundamentalist problem is explaining all the mythic elements
as "really" fact, the liberal problem tends to be the opposite - explaining
all the factual elements as "really" myth. Again, this takes a lot of energy.
Finally, the "post-Christian" view is similar to the liberal view except
that the myths hold no power any more - they may have living significance
to others but have little significance beyond the historical and cultural
to the post-Christian. It would probably be fair to summarise this position
as "It's all myth, and the facts are otherwise." (Substitute "mostly" instead
of "all" if you like.)
Now, all of these are modernist positions, based around one of the key modernist
obsessions, which is exactly this absolute separation between myth and fact,
the devaluing of the former, and the valuing of the latter. In premodern
times things were not so; much less distinction was made between myth and
fact. It would not be fair to say "no distinction", but it was much less
clear-cut, which is why the literary form of the novel did not arise until
early modern times. Only when there is a clear category of "fiction," which
has lost some of its mythic quality, can you have self-conscious fiction
of the modern type.
Not that the premodern consciousness, the rather naive blending of myth and
fact, is gone from among us. Pick up any of thousands of New Age books (and
many charismatic and pentecostal books, which are similar in style). Not
the best of them, but the average. You are likely to find thinking which
is irresistably reminiscent of medieval and ancient authors. Not that most
New Age writers have read medieval and ancient authors; despite their emphasis
on "ancient wisdom" they tend mainly to quote from living authors or those
who died no earlier than the second half of the twentieth century. But their
approach to such quotations is similar to that of ancient and medieval writers.
In the Middle Ages, it was enough to insert the phrase "an auctour sayes"
to give legitimacy to your point, and this covered a wide spectrum. It could
be a quote from an author, and a work, so well-known that it was part of
the common consciousness and didn't have to be cited explicitly. It could
be a paraphrase of such a passage. It could be from an author whose name
the writer had forgotten but whom he knew he had read and whose point he
remembered (more or less accurately). I suspect that it could be, in some
cases, out of the writer's own head. And the context of the point in the
original author's work was not important; he might have got it from hearsay,
personal observation, speculation, or personal opinion. It was enough that
a respected authority had said it, and that it supported the writer's point.
It was not unknown for disputes to be settled by a process of counting the
authorities in the disputants' presentations and awarding the victory to
the one who had more "auctoures".
Now, in New Age books it is often enough that anyone has said a thing and
that it supports the writer's point. And the approach to citation is even
less rigorous, if possible, than that of the medievals. Many "common notions"
recur regularly in New Age writing without ever being attributed to anyone,
and often not even in quote marks. One of the commonest is "When the student
is ready, the teacher will appear." I must have read this in at least a dozen
New Age books (including some novels), and I have yet to see it attributed
to anyone. But someone must have said it originally. Who? It appears that
New Age writers neither know nor care. It is enough that it makes their point.
Hearsay, personal observation, personal opinion, fiction retold as fact,
urban myth, parable, metaphor, analogy, half-remembered remarks from writers
or speakers, anecdotes told at many removes from the original incident, "common
notions" like the above, popular history, rumours, speculations - all of
these can and do turn up in New Age (and some charismatic and pentecostal)
writing asserted as facts, just as they turn up on the Internet among people
who are not New Age in their thinking. The main influence of modernism apparent
in them is a reverence for "scientific fact" and "scientific proof" (when
it supports, or can be taken in a way that supports, the writer's point,
although "reductionist science" which denies New Age beliefs is villainised).
It is very seldom that there is any citation or reference that would allow
one to check these facts - if it is a scientific study the journal where
it was published is not named, for example. Again, this is because the writers
do not care about the facts being checkable and verifiable - that is a modernist
obsession.
In some cases, there are enough specifics that the facts can be checked,
and found to be in error. Some of the favourite New Age stories, like the
Hundredth Monkey, fall into this category. This has no impact on the popularity
or circulation of the stories, because there is a strong sense in which the
factuality of the story isn't the point. It is only inasmuch as New
Agers are modernists that they care about the fact/myth distinction at all.
All of which is leading up to saying that whatever I am - you might as well
say postmodernist although like all labels that can be misleading - doesn't
care too much either. Having been a modernist, I can no longer have the premodern
naivite in which the fact/myth distinction has never been made at all. Once
we have made the distinction we cannot unmake it. However, what I and others
groping in the same bit of fog as me seem to be doing is to say: Yes, sometimes,
in clear-cut cases, there is a distinction. But there are so few clear-cut
cases in real human life that, for practical purposes, fact and myth are
completely intertwingled. To a modernist it's like a grafted fruit tree,
the rootstock of fact with the fruit of myth. Or it's like a rata vine which
grows around another tree and eventually replaces it with a rata tree. But
to a postmodernist it's actually more like two liquids - say wine and water
- mixed in a container. They're both in there, but you can't distinguish them
any more. Why spend a lot of effort building a molecular sieve which will
only ever separate most of the two? Why not just call the new mixture something
else?
Why not say, "The Bible contains stories"? Anyone will agree to this. Stories.
We tell each other, and ourselves, stories all the time. They shape our identity
and our attitudes and our actions and our past and our future. Because the
Bible was written by humans, it's full of stories which are like all stories
told by humans: they have mythic dimensions and factual dimensions. So what?
I'm afraid I can't get interested, excited or hung up about the exact dimensions
of these dimensions. It just doesn't matter very much to me, because it isn't
the point. I'm no more interested in an answer to "Is this story myth
or fact?" than a modernist is in "How many angels can dance on the head of
a pin?", and for similar reasons - the question makes assumptions which I'm
not prepared to grant.
The point is, what do these stories tell me? Am I in the stories? (Egotistically
we are tempted to say, "Are the stories about me?". But part of the point
is that they are not about me. They are about the Other.) Do I want to be
in the stories? If I do, which character do I want to be like? Do the stories
apply to me? Do they tell me about myself - do they read me as I read them?
Do they tell me how my life is, was, can be?
Of course, questions like this also open up the possibility of other stories
from other sources being significant in some of the same ways, which is why
I am a lot more relaxed than I used to be about drawing from other religious
traditions. They're stories too.
I hope I have made my point. Whether the stories are mythical or factual
is something that modernists care deeply about. But premoderns and their
contemporary descendents don't make the distinction very clearly; and postmoderns,
while aware of the distinction, see it as a theoretical distinction with
not much practical value in many cases. And we don't know (and you don't
know, and Scofield didn't know, and the Jesus Seminar doesn't know, though
they may think they do) which side of the arbitrary line any given story
falls on. We think that drawing the line is a bit simplistic, to be honest.