Christianity as creative myth

approach to Christianity becomes clearer, for it is thereby established that human feelings and desires are more real than intellectual thinking and scientific observation. There is in the Greek word muthos, from which myth is derived, a clue to the problem of religious belief. At first it meant in its widest sense word or speech, and thence a tale, story or narrative—but without any distinction of truth or falsehood. The meaning fable, as an invented story which is not really true, was a later development. The word myth should now be re-instated in its most reputable sense as imaginative conception which speaks to the whole human being. It both can and should have an ethical content, which relates to the will, a rational content, which relates to thought, and an artistic content, which relates to feeling. The ancient myths, and also many of the older fairy tales, were the means by which mankind first expressed the truths of their spiritual and psychic life, as Ellen Mayne pointed out in her Foundation Lecture on Otto Weininger. But myths differ from fairy tales in that in fairy tales it is not supposed that the persons ever existed. In myths there is often a large element of historical truth which later research has uncovered. So to call a person or a story mythical does not exclude its also being historical. It implies, however, that the persons or events which have been recorded had, or have been given, a spiritual or psychological significance which goes beyond simple historical actuality.

Since mythology speaks directly to the human emotions it can be significant to children and primitive people, and yet at the same time it has a rational content which they may not yet understand. “When I was a child’ wrote St. Paul (I Cor. 13.11), ‘I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ This expresses what many people think about religious myths, but they are looking at only half the truth. With the development of reason the naive belief in myths is dissolved, but it is possible to return to myth in full consciousness: not with the naive belief that children and primitive persons have, but at the same time without the superior disdain of raw youths in the first flush of discovering their rational faculties. It was the psycho-analytical school of psychologists—and among these particularly C. G. Jung—who were largely responsible for showing the relevance of much old