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18 September 2007
Baldur in Reykjavik (An Evangelical Defense of Myth.)
I’ve heard it said that to someone with a hammer, pretty much everything looks like a nail. I believe the point of the illustration was something along the lines of ‘use the right tool for the job.’ But what if there isn’t a right tool for the job? What if you need to pound in a nail, and all you have is a wrench? I promise that if you hit a nail hard enough with a wrench, it will get the job done (I’ve tried.) Its not optimal, but it works if it’s all you’ve got… all you’ve got to do is stretch your concept of wrench a bit beyond its original conception.
Language is a tool we use in order to interact with our environment. It shapes and molds our experiences as is it shaped and molded by our experience. In that tension we find both the elegance and the limitations of language: it evolves along with our experience, yet it requires our experiences in order to evolve. As we change our worlds, we make new words and forget old ones, our language constantly keeping pace with the changes. Yet for that very same reason, we have a very difficult time describing things outside of our experience. The Sahel-dwelling Twareg, faced with a glacier, is forced to either borrow a word or create a clumsy composite word. The Norseman must do the same when he encounters a rainforest. Yet chunks of humanity live each of these environments, and each of these chunks have successfully fashioned words for their environment.
There are stranger things in this universe than deserts and jungles, things for which humanity as a whole has to borrow or stretch words in order to grasp. For instance, a black hole is something far stranger than the color black or the idea of a hole. Some things we can only describe using the language of mathematics, one far more frugal and precise than our daily speech. There are even concepts beyond our senses that we try to wrap in words. Yet there are things even deeper, higher and thicker for any of our words. Our words are vibrations carried by the wind or smudges of pigment smeared across paper. The Word of God transcends the crude mechanics of human language: His Word becomes flesh. The words of creation fall somewhere in between. We then find ourselves in something of a hermeneutical dilemma.
The Mechanics of Myth: High, Middle and Low Hermeneutics.
Speaking to the Corinthians, Paul uses infallible and inspired yet human and finite words to explain the things of God. Man speaking to man falls into the realm of traditional hermeneutics. Along the lines of C.S.L.’s brilliant counterpoint to the form critics, if the book of Job reads like an Eastern epic poem, it should be read as such. And if the epistles read like letters (hence the name epistles,) then they should be read as such. And if the Gospels look like documentary factual accounts, then they should be read as such. Let’s call this ’low hermeneutics:’ the study of inspired words between men. Prophecy pushes the bounds of low hermeneutics, for the words of the prophets are rawer, deeper and thicker than the words of men. Theirs are the unfiltered words of God to men about the events of men. Yet most of the things they describe are still within the bounds of human experience (if the upper bounds,) so they are still somewhat within the bounds of low hermeneutics.
And then there is ‘High Hermeneutics.’ Really, it has a shorter name: Jesus. The Word of God is beyond our imagination, beyond our comprehension, beyond the whole of human experience and knowledge and power and strength. There is no paper thick enough to bear the Word, no sound deep enough to carry Him, so He came to us wrapped in flesh. He came to us in humility, endured our slowness of speech, our unwillingness to learn, and became the Word to us. That is the only way we could ever speak of Him and the only way we could ever speak to Him. The only way a mind of flesh can wrap itself around God is for God to wrap Himself in flesh. Accordingly, the study of High Hermeneutics is the study by a man of his wife, the study of a dearest friend, the study of a lover. The study of Jesus is in and through relationship with Him, for only He can teach us of His words.
But there is a category in between. I know that I can speak in the tongues of men, that given enough study and time I can understand any of the words of man. I know that I cannot ascend to the mountain of the Most High, that I cannot play Hephaestus and wrench His Words from His hands. But I know that I can climb the foothills of the of mountain of Creation, even if I cannot ascend all the way to the lightning-covered peak. There, I may find words that come close, words that point at meaning even if they cannot encompass it, words that are useful if incomplete. Once again, words are tied to experience. There was not a word in English for the inside of a cloud (excluding fog, which isn‘t really the same) until the advent of aviation. There simply was no need for such a word, for the inside of clouds was not a normal part of human experience until then. As human artifice continues to advance and allow us access to more and more unexplored realms, we will undoubtedly think of more and more words to describe our growing environment. But just because we can go infinitely forward does not mean that we can go forever back. I can imagine a world before my own existence. I just take the world I know, and set it spinning without me. I can even imagine a universe without the earth. I take the universe I know, and set it spinning without this world. But when I start to push back through the laws of physics to the what-ever-it-was before linear time, I start running out of words. And when I try to rewind past the advent of energy, I have nothing at all with which to describe whatever is left of reality (if that is even a useful concept at that point.) My thoughts are constrained to words, and my words are constrained to my environment. So while I may be able to climb the foothills of Creation, I must still wait for God to come down from the summit and give my own words to me. This is ‘middle hermeneutics,’ the study of language describing things just beyond its fingertips. The hallmark of middle hermeneutics must be humility. The temptation is to make excuses for the pre-scientific language of the Bible, yet in reality the language of the Bible is making allowances for our minds of clumsy neurons and messy serotonin.
The idea of middle hermeneutics is not confined to the first chapter of Genesis. Ezekiel sees things beyond his imagination, beyond human events. He tries to wrap words around his experiences, and God gives him words as well. (What else would you expect from the throne room of the Most High? I’m pretty sure you can’t find His bathroom fixtures in the Ikea catalog.) Neither is it confined to the Bible, though it is most perfect and complete there. The Word calls to all mankind, for He is revealed in His creation. In the absence of the fullness of His Revelation in Christ, cultures find different ways to wrap ideas around these deep truths that lay just beyond their fingertips. So to the Norsemen, the god Baldur dies and is reborn. And in the East, the corn god dies and is reborn. So the Greeks and the Romans and the Mayans and a hundred other cultures all find themselves in agreement about the absolutely insane concept of a god who dies and is resurrected. And they are all right. God died on a tree outside Jerusalem and three days later He returned from death.
There are then two uses of middle hermeneutics. Within Scripture, middle hermeneutics teaches us to read passages that describe things well outside the bounds of human experience with humility. Outside of Scripture, middle hermeneutics allows us to connect extant myths with the One True Myth of Jesus Christ. In effect, we exalt the epics and myths of a culture into High Hermeneutics with Christ by way of the low hermeneutics of the Gospels. In this, we are both exalted and humbled, for it is the unreached culture who stands on the foothills pointing at the lightning-shrouded summit, and us who must descend from the summit to fill their words with the meanings they were grasping at. Exalted, for we are the light bearers descending from the mountain, and this is a great and high calling. Humbled, for we must abandon our own words to learn theirs, lest we precondition a relationship with Jesus upon learning our words.
Therefore the heart of middle hermeneutics is epic and myth. The error of many New Testament scholars (think Jesus Seminar) is the hermeneutic of distrust with which they approach the Scriptures. Lest we make the same error, let us reframe our concept of Myth with Lewis and Tolkien’s One True Myth (ref. On Faeirie Stories, JRRT.) The deepest things in this universe are the things of Christ. If something is moving, deep or powerful, then it is in some way drawing from the deep streams of God. In a fallen world, it may be horrifically twisted almost beyond recognition, but as long as it exists at all, it is drawing from God’s deep magic of Creation. Trace the stream through the rapids, past the pollution, and it will take you to His oceans.
With that said, let us look to the mechanics of myth and the failures of language. Let us explore this idea of middle hermeneutics. There are two complimentary formulations of this line of thought. The top-down view looks to the purpose of language within context. The bottom-up view looks to the assumptions that go into a given word, examining how the word changes when the predicate assumptions start changing.
Failures of Language: Words and their Forms (Top-Down View.)
(Note: this is not in any way an endorsement of form criticism. Form criticism assumes to know a great deal about the purposes of the author, often placing them within Chomsky-esque conspiracy theories (and evil shenanigans. Movie reference, sorry.) The text explains the text by way of the Spirit, certainly, but we should find the humility to allow Him to do so.)
Language does not exist in a vacuum. People develop language in the context of their environment. Hence, languages are as different as people groups. Yet, even within one language, there are many different forms of language. The language that one uses within a context of intimacy is hardly appropriate for a board-room. The grace-tempered words that may encourage the cook of an overdone casserole are not the words that one would use in a scientific context that demands precision. Truth is not situational, but different aspects of the same truth may be more appropriate for a given situation. The casserole may simultaneously be ‘great’ and ‘charred to a crisp.’ For instance, if the casserole exists in the context of the intimacy between a husband and a wife, and the casserole is an expression of one spouse’s love for another, then it is ‘great.’ But if the casserole exists in the context of a cooking competition between strangers, then the ‘charred to a crisp’ aspect should probably take precedence.
Even beyond social tact, beyond language in the context of relationship, there is a place for different forms of linguistic expression. In a heavily scientific society, we often place a premium on precision in language, viewing imprecise language as inferior. Let’s follow this to its logical conclusion. Take all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and constrict them to fit within the confines of scientifically precise language. They don’t quite keep the same ring, do they? There is a twofold tradeoff for precision within a language. First, precision squeezes out the non-quantifiable, which may be much of the richness of a thing. Second, precision confines you to topics which you already know nearly exhaustively. It does not give you room to flirt with ideas just beyond your grasp. Precision takes and holds ground, subjecting it to strict, linear confines. This is appropriate in certain contexts, but greatly inappropriate in others… imagine Solomon trying to write Song of Songs in the historically precise terms of Luke. Because of the tension between precision and metaphor, we have different literary forms. Applying a greatly simplified view, let us discuss documentary, poetical, and mythical forms of literature.
Documentary is our most familiar form, perhaps. ’I says what I means, and I means what I says.’ Documentary form assigns concrete terms to concrete events, attempting to recreate the facts of an event as precisely as possible, even if sacrificing some of the subjective experience in the process. It is concerned with objectivity, and not particularly concerned with the impact of the events upon the author. Accordingly, the reader can transport himself into the situation quite effectively by hijacking the authors five senses, but can hardly transport himself inside the emotions of the author. Hence, it is appropriate for events in which the situation is primary… consider the contrast between a history text on the First World War vs. ’All Quiet on the Western Front.’ Yet history texts have not superseded fiction or biography, and in many ways the forms complement each other.
Notice that we have not approached a discussion of truthiness or falsehood. Multiple forms can be equally true, though it may be difficult to transpose between forms. Imagine someone audio taping a car wreck and another photographing the same wreck. The tape and the photos are both accurate depictions of the event. Even so, a sketch artist would have quite a difficult time drawing the accident with only the audio tapes to draw from. This links to a much deeper discussion of postmodernity, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, which I am going to skip because I am lazy.
Consider the Gospel of Luke as an example of the documentary form (or for that matter, any of the other Gospels.) Luke places a premium on precision. Details such as specific names for specific people at specific times and places, random statements coherent to the account yet unrelated to the main themes, individual episodes such as the blood and water from the spear, all of these are the hallmarks of a factual documentary account. There is an intention behind the writing, surely, but the belief of the author is that if you can vicariously experience the same things he experienced, you will arrive at the same conclusions that he did. Hence he accounts his experiences. We should then read it as such. Starting with the assumption that he means the words in the exact same way that we mean the words, we should allow his words to transport us to the events he is describing and experience them through his eyes.
Now consider the poetical. Poetry is the difference between Ansel Adams and a passport photo. He could have photographed one of a hundred waterfalls, for it wasn’t the waterfall itself, but the experience of being there that he captured so effectively. In the same way, the words themselves are not the point of poetry, rather a means toward an experience. Therefore, precision in definition takes a back seat to a totality of feeling. Rather than attempt to transport the reader within the situation, the words and situation serve as a means to carry the reader into the heart of the author. Poetry is an expression of the author, not the situation, even if the situation causes that expression of the author. And this is the difference between poetry and documentary. In documentary, the author gives the reader his eyes. In poetry, he gives the reader his heart.
The exact name of the Shulammite is relatively unimportant to the Song of Solomon. What is important is the experience of being in love, and that experience is communicated quite effectively with very few specific details. This does not in any way mean that it is less true. I would wager a great deal that there was in fact a Shulammite woman that married Solomon. I would also wager that the two consummated that marriage. That said, we don’t need an exact play-by-play accounting of their marital bliss, as the physical dynamics of that interaction are generally figured out pretty quickly by newlyweds (hopefully… I‘ve never been a newlywed.) We are far better off with an experiential accounting of an ideal love affair between a husband and a wife. Poetry makes room for that experience.
Our last category is the mythical. If documentary and poetry exists along a spectrum between precision and metaphor, then imagine myth as the pinnacle of a triangle with that spectrum as the base. Both poetry and documentary are concerned with the accounting of our experiences, be it the experience of ourselves within the situation (documentary) or the situation within ourselves (poetry.) Myth is concerned with the description of things that are beyond our experiences. It is the link that connects the deep, the magical and the ethereal to our daily lives. Accordingly, elements of documentary fail, for precise words cannot transcend the environment which shapes them. And elements of poetry fail, for experience cannot transcend the self which shapes it. Therefore, myth incorporates elements of both, stretching precise words to hold ideas beyond their original intent, and stretching the bounds of human experience to take us to places we have never been. Once again, mythical does not mean false. Something becomes false by being mythical no more than it does by being historical or poetical or literal. It is simply another set of conventions for communicating ideas, and certain things are more appropriate to myth than to any other style.
Consider Job (pun half-intended.) I cannot imagine that God speaks in Iambic Pentameter when He addresses the adversary in Heaven’s throne room, interspersed with rhyming quartets from Job‘s councilors. The problem is that I cannot imagine at all what God says when He is in His throne room, nor can I imagine what it is like to hear it. So I’m pretty much stuck with Job’s accounting as the closest approximation to that experience that I can find. Therefore, I need to find the humility to accept Job’s accounting, realizing that I am not infinite and neither are my words. It may be that in Job’s culture, history and stories were retold in a certain format, and describing Job’s very real personal encounter with God mythically may have happened as readily as Luke describing his experience in documentary form. Job doesn’t read like Matthew or Chronicles, but it is not intended to be read like Matthew or Chronicles. (Note that no major theology is introduced in Job, though, rather a demonstration of the power of God and the benefits of faith.)
Which brings us back to Genesis. ‘In the beginning’ is not ‘in the third year of Herod the Great.’ Neither is it ‘once upon a time.’ I’ve never seen an unconstrained beginning. I can’t even imagine it. I mean, I can do the logic on it, and figure out that there is some sort of Unmoved Mover and all, but I can’t really wrap my mind around a beginning before time. ‘Beginning’ is the closest I can get to what happened, even if the word beginning, made by finite people to describe finite events, has to be widened a bit to capture the infinite. So this is True Myth: great events require great words. So great that existing words may have to be stretched beyond their traditional definitions for lack of better words. And this is the nature of myth itself: God describes things greater than us by taking our words and exalting them, as a parent would to a child. He humbles Himself to make our words great, in order to encompass the greatness of His creation. We must find the humility to allow Him to reteach us the exalted forms of our own words.
Failures of Language: Words and their Assumptions (Bottom-Up View.)
Each word is built on the shoulders of other words and ideas. Words are often composites or developments of root words, placed in orders with modifiers to form thoughts. Yet even the most basic words of a language incorporate significant basic assumptions about the nature of things. (The naming of anything at all incorporates an assumption of differentiation that complete monism would not allow for.) So we have general human assumptions that go into words, and culture-specific assumptions that go into words. For cultural words, we should look to variations in environment and economy to explain the root words’ assumptions. But there are other assumptions that are more universal. These may be rooted in human biology and astronomical cycles, or other unavoidable aspects of the human experience. We see the evolution of words within a culture as that culture modifies those basic assumptions through development or interaction with other cultures. It is far more rare to see the universal assumptions change. (Perhaps one example is the near universal adaptation of nautical terms to aviation.) Still, in either case, modifying the basic assumptions of a root word can shake a language to its core, as root words in turn modify composite words, and together the root and composite words reshape the culture’s experience and interaction with their environment.
Consider the Russian root word ‘Mir.’ It means both ‘world’ and ‘peace.’ The development of the word can be traced to the ancient word for village. It incorporates several cultural assumptions, rooted in the Russian experience of nature and history. It implies totality, and consequently becomes an unattainable ideal, though one with a eucatastrophic sense of permanence, expressed in both the Christian and the Marxist (Hegelian) views of history. This stands in contrast to the highly temporary yet attainable Arab view of peace. Mir also assumes collectivism, created and maintained by the village. This is in contrast to the American view of an individually created and maintained peace, which in turn ties into the Second Amendment controversy. Finally, Mir assumes a right ordering of things, an assumption inherited from autocracy and orthodoxy. In direct contrast, peace to a Cossack is an absence of constricting rules and regulations. Therefore, something will always be lost when translating the word ‘Mir’ into a language with different assumptions about the nature of things. There will still be enough commonalities to make the translation meaningful, of course. Mir as ‘World’ implies a totality shared by the rest of humanity, based in the assumption of ‘all-there-is-ness.’ So as long as there are certain shared assumptions, translation remains possible.
Now, let us look at an impossible translation: the Words of God to translated into the words of man. What assumptions do we share with Him? What assumption could hope to confine Him? What commonality can there be? Our problem extends beyond the idea of two different worlds, for His world encompasses our own and everything else, and more. The Mind that forms His thoughts is so far above our own as to be completely unrecognizable. His Words can make or undo our world, for with one word He spoke all of ours into existence, all that have been or ever will be. If looking upon His face is death, then what would hearing His words do? We simply can’t handle His words. So He humbles His words and stretches ours.
Imagine a mother expecting her second child. When the three-year-old firstborn asks ‘where do babies come from,’ the mother may answer ‘babies come from mommy’s tummy.’ At first glance, we would imagine that the mother is lying. But imagine that the mother began to explain the facts of life to the three-year-old. Before she can say ‘fallopian tube,’ the kid is bored and asking for a cookie and walks away with no meaningful understanding of childbirth at all. Now think through what happens when she tells him about ‘mommy’s tummy.’ The three-year-old walks away with some sort of knowledge of a causal link between mommy and baby, as well as a localized identification of the child inside mommy’s abdomen. This is about as good as he’s going to do at that point in his life. Remember, also, that the 30-year-old’s word ‘stomach’ is not equivalent to the three-year-old’s word ‘tummy.’ The three year old may conceive of the entire abdomen as the tummy, without any concept of its contents. So using his definition, his mother’s statement is quite accurate, even if she has a far greater understanding of the contents of the tummy. And this is the essence of myth: the mother humbles herself to the words of her child, yet she stretches his words to include things that he doesn’t yet understand. The mother understands the assumptions that go into the words of the child, yet she takes those words and refines those assumptions before giving them back to him. In the same way, God must enlarge our words when He teaches us of things beyond our assumptions.
Much hangs on the word ‘yom’ in Genesis. What does a day mean? A day means twenty-four hours, and upon this everything rests: if there were not twenty-four hour days during the creation, then the Scriptures are untrustworthy, and we can view every controversial point as metaphor, up to re-interpretation. Or perhaps, ‘day’ is poetry, simply an indication of the proper order of things in the universe. And here is where humility in hermeneutics becomes critical. The problem with both the documentary and the poetic view of Genesis is that they vastly overstate the human capacity for understanding. Perhaps neither reading is appropriate, but rather the True Mythical reading. Perhaps a better approach is: ‘I am an idiot child gazing with wonder upon the mountain of Creation, waiting for God to give my own words back so that I may achieve a glimmer of understanding.’ I can’t tell you exactly what ’yom’ means in Genesis one. But I can tell you that it’s as close as I am going to get with human language.
(I do not in any way mean to deride the recent tremendous advances in cosmology. Rather, I mean to reframe them within the design debate: I am secure that the nearer we come to the truth of origins, the closer we will approximate the words of Genesis, and the deeper we will grasp those words. Therefore, I do not need to fight to the death over each refinement of cosmological theory.)
Think about all the assumptions that go into the word ‘day.’ First, ‘day’ assumes hard causality, for each day will bring the next at its conclusion, which in turn will depart with the advent of the next. Second, ‘day’ assumes orbital mechanics, for the time period itself is based in the rotation of the earth upon its axis, causing the sun to rise and fall upon the inhabitants of the Earth (which, of course, assumes the Earth and the Sun.) Finally, ‘day’ assumes linear time, for if those rotations are not associated with a real and constant progression of events, it is relatively meaningless. So what happens if you change any of these assumptions? ‘Day’ becomes a word that you can’t find in Webster’s (or your lexicon for that matter.)
What is a day without linear time, without causality, without orbital motion? To answer this is to think outside of time, and to do so is to be God. Remember that the very dynamics of human thought involve assumptions about time, for it takes a fixed amount of time for neurotransmitters to move across synapses. What is linear time before linear physics? Time progresses relatively slower the faster you are traveling. Did the tribesman that decided on the sound ‘yom’ take that into account when assigning it to the period of light between the darknesses? Before there is an Earth, how do you measure its rotation? We have no words for such things. Therefore, Someone infinitely smarter than us needs to give us words for these things. But we can not understand any words but our own. Therefore, He stretches our words to fit. All words are a best-fit approximation for things. Epic words are best-fits for things for which there can be no human words.
So our problem all along was pride. Think of Einstein trying to explain general relativity to a group of children. Likely, they will later argue with each other, thinking they understand what he meant, reforming his words to fit their assumptions. But the more they do so, the farther they will get from his meaning. Instead, they should take his words at face value, while understanding that his words are deeper than their own. In this humility they will achieve the greatest understanding. Therefore, the text does not require the excuses of Theistic evolution, nor the straight-jacket of atomic-clock-24-hour-days. Genesis One isn’t written in some fumbling ancient pseudo-science. It’s written in Army-basic-training-style ‘point the gun this way’ pictograms. We’re a lot dumber than we realize, and once we realize that fact hermeneutics gets a lot easier.
Myth as a Bridge.
In the humility of myth-reading, we rediscover the sense of wonderment stolen by modernity. Certainly there are things to be learned from cosmology, but those things may not be the most beautiful or meaningful things. Dissect a cat and you will certainly discover all the parts of a cat. But you will no longer be able to discover its personality, nor its quirks, nor the experience of it curling up in your lap. (Of course, I would hope that the vet is familiar with all the parts of a cat, lest the cat get sick.) Surely it is useful to describe the language of creation using ever more eloquent equations. But if we forsake the experience of the awakening of the universe in the hopes of gleaning a theory that allows us to build a slightly-more-efficient toaster, then surely we have missed something. Myth is not science, and science is not myth, though both may be equally true. They are simply different. I would not describe a waterfall to children in terms of terminal water velocity and time of fall. I would tell them about the crashing of the water and the feel of the mist. And I would be telling them the truth. This is how we should read myth. No strait-jacketing the words, no excusing them, let it be what it is, and gaze upon it with wonder. You are invited to a front row seat for the premiere of a great film. Don’t ruin it by talking all the way through the performance.
Remember that the Chosen People were given two millennia to soak in the True Myths before that Myth wrapped Himself in flesh and dwelt among them. The Word wrapped Himself in myth to be carried by Moses long before He wrapped Himself in flesh to be carried by Mary. Yet what started in Myth ends in flesh; the first chapter of John completes the first chapter of Genesis. And this is the natural progression: from the words of Isaiah to the cries of an Infant. And thus, Matthew links the two, the prophecies and the Messiah.
It should not then surprise us that Paul links the Greek myths to the Messiah when speaking to the Athenians. He transforms a temple to an Unknown God into a gateway to the God who is known. It is the myths that tell us the things we know to be true, the myths that remind us of the One True Myth written upon each of our hearts. It is from that middle place of myth that we descend into Salvation history and climb into relationship with Jesus Christ. So perhaps, from that middle place of myth we can draw others into relationship with Christ.
Lewis once described the difference between pagan and apostate culture as that between a virgin and a divorcee. A pagan culture was speaking in myth of things they had not yet encountered in fact. The apostate culture has encountered both, and little of its innocence remains. But myth digs deep beneath the defenses of cynicism. It was through the innocence of myth that many cultures were introduced to Christ, so perhaps it will be through myth that we will find the innocence to re-introduce apostate cultures to Christ. Our own culture is ravenous for myth. St. Patrick found the Trinity in the Triquetra of Celtic Myth. Perhaps we can find Him in the Middle-Earths of our own myths.
So at long last we end up back at the title of this article. In an Irish pub in Reykjavik, I find myself chatting with an Icelandic opera star. In no uncertain terms, he makes it known that he doesn’t have any desire to talk about religion. Yet he is fascinated by the Norse myths. Much of God’s revelation through nature is documented by myth, and so it was with the Norsemen. So Baldur, the god of innocence and son of the chief god Odin, is destined to die and be resurrected, bringing with him a new world. And so we talk about Baldur, and Asian corn gods, and the Christ. And then we talk about C.S. Lewis’ crazy idea of myth-becoming-fact, and what it would look like. And a guy who expressed very little interest in the religion of Christianity finds himself quite interested in the person of Jesus Christ by way of the language of myth.
The language of science and history feeds the mind. The language of art and poetry bathes the heart. But the language of myth finds its way to the spirit by way of the imagination. It would serve us well to become multilingual. I suggest we begin with the One True Myth.
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