True and False Myths

An example of the sense in which a myth can be true – or reveal our relationship to a reality that is beyond our ability to know in the way we can know things about nature through science or about actions through the judicial system, and so on. That the Creation of man in Genesis, as understood by Michelangelo in his famous Sistine Chapel work:

           

The point is not to give a realistic portrayal of God and Adam, though it uses the pictural language of representation. That would reduce the picture to absurdity, imagining the painting substitutes for a camera taking a snapshot. The point is to symbolize God's love reaching out to mankind, mankind’s love reaching out to its Creator. It is communicated in 'factual' i.e. representational mode, the same mode as is used to paint real people we know and can compare to representation to – this wanting to represent holy or spiritual things disturbs Muslims and iconoclastic Christians, who can only see works like this as attempts to photograph that which cannot and may not be photographed, i.e. represent anthropologically that can’t be so represented without making an idol. (Many Muslims don’t like to be photographed, suggesting that the self or the soul is also transcendent and made into an idol by doing so – interesting.) I see no problem with such representations on the condition that they are understood in the sense that I am understanding them here, which is the same as both the Roman and Orthodox Churches do understand them. I confess I cannot relate to Michelangelo's work even though I think I understand it: the trope of God as an old man with a gray beard, used in so much caricature and comedy, has destroyed my ability to relate to it, perhaps giving some credence to iconoclasm. 

     If myth is like Michelangelo’s painting, a symbolic representation of our relationship to a reality transcendent to our everyday modes of knowing, indeed, to our ideas and language, how can it be true? How can it connect with reality if not through stating facts, falsifying hypotheses through scientific experience, following up on leads as the detective does,  realistically depicting physical objects as in portrait painting, constructing models that can predict future events as in meteorology, proving something deductively – all the ways our minds do make contact with reality.  Even in illustrating a storybook, the illustrator makes contact with the reality of the text – such as this illustration of Beatrix Potter’s character Mr. Jackson (a frog):

The illustration makes contact with the story, brings Mr. Jackson to life. In a way, Michelangelo did something like that with God and Adam, but the difference is that the Genesis story is a myth in the deepest sense, connecting us to a transcendence we cannot otherwise have access to. Again, how can that connect to reality?

     My answer: it pictures transcendence as it could or must be if we are to trust our deepest experiences of life. Wittgenstein related a feeling he experienced during his time as a soldier in WWI:

…the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.

A crazy feeling when you are subject to regular artillery barrages and sniper fire even when not engaged in direct combat. I know this irrational feeling. I could just discount it as a defense mechanism, as Freud would. In many cases, it is probably just that, or something like it. But with Wittgenstein, the feeling came to have absolute or intrinsic value. With me it is connected to the feeling of being unconditionally loved. Also crazy. Freud would say, I suppose, that such a feeling is the echo of an infantile experience of mother love. Perhaps it is, or something else like that. I relive that feeling every time I take communion. Again, Freud would say I am trying to get back into an infantile state, a defense mechanism against a reality in which I am certainly not loved unconditionally. Unconditional love among human beings is rather like an oasis in the desert: rare. The mother who loves and pities her son about to be executed for a horrible crime. The man who puts himself in front of a speeding subway to save a stranger. The soldier who remains behind to face certain death to give his brothers time to get away. I guess these are forms of unconditional love. Whatever its origin the feeling has absolute value for me and so I cannot reduce it to its speculative origin or reduce it to psychological categories. The myths of God reaching out to us in love, and the continuation of that story in God self-revealing and self-sacrifice on earth connect to reality in that they make contact with this sublime feeling – or crazy feeling, depending on how you see it. (You are not irrational if you see it as crazy.) The access to God, to Christ, to a reality beyond our ideas and evidence-based knowledge, is literally this feeling, which I guess you can liken to an inner eye. The rituals (Modern philosophy has no use for inner eyes because it has no use for the idea that feeling can reveal – as well as distort - reality.) All the myths and representational art like Michelangelo’s work – as well as all the conceptual thought that attempts to make sense of the myths – are attempts to illustrate or make sense of something our rational intellects proper can’t: sublime feelings, something we can’t observe in the physical world, can’t empirically test.

Some comments on this:

·       Christianity is great myth, as C. S. Lewis wrote. But it also, for most believers, claims to be history. That raises different issues that are not relevant to my consideration of the truth of myths.

·       Do the myths give rise to the sublime feelings, or do the sublime feelings give rise to the myths? Chicken-and-egg question. But I suppose, logically, the feelings must have come first. It really doesn’t matter to the point I am trying to make.

·       Sublime feelings disrupt normal, everyday experience. They are prägende (soul-forming). Your normal work-a-day relation to people, objects, the world becomes unstable and you either drown, emotionally, or reconstitute the world in terms of a symbolic relation to it. Language or images can only hold in place a symbolic relation to a perception of literally what lies beyond or behind everyday, prosaic experience. This is the source of myth. Examples: to see a loved one in a radically different way through grief over their death; the awe or reverence one may feel in the presence of great natural beauty or heroism – or moral goodness; the transformation of a woman when experienced in the light of a pure Eros; the horror of a Colonel Kurz when faced with the darkest possibilities of human cruelty; the joy over the birth of a child; the pain of a lucid remorse, revealing evil done. These and more are the source of myth.

·       I resist the modern will to reduce feelings to prosaic psychological categories, to cut them off from Being and imprison them in the human brain. The will to do this stems from the general modern will to de-mean “external” reality to conquer and subdue it for human purposes. To do that, “external” reality is seen as science-technology-capitalism must see it to go about their business of conquering nature – including human nature. It is no more or less scientific to believe that science-technology-capitalism exhaustively reveals reality as it really is, absolutely, conclusively, without remainder. That is a metaphysical view, as untestable as Creation by Plato’s Demiurge. If you believe that, it is not for any scientific reason. Indeed, metaphysical theories are like intellectualized myths – which does not mean they are necessarily “false.” Indeed, the myth from which the metaphysical interpretation of reality held by science-technology-capitalism stems is best captured by Milton’s Satan, who states: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.” To embrace that myth I would have to deny the absolute worth of the feeling of being “unconditionally loved” – would have to see it as Freud would have perhaps. To embrace the myths that help explain the world to me, the capitalist would have to give up the project of conquering nature and the elevated feeling of power and possibility that go with it. Myth confronts reality at this level.  

·       A false myth – and this is completely circular reasoning, but nothing else is possible – is one that it used to justify injustice or other forms of evil by demeaning something good, from an animal to the world as a whole. Earlier in the journal I wrote about the myth of Thanksgiving, based on the idea that the natives were “noble savages.” I contrasted that with the extermination of the natives in New England through disease and massacres (yes, the natives also engaged in massacres) in which the noble savages were “merciless savages.” Here rather than myth-making, a cool-headed anthropologist would have been better. The point: real people were seen in light of myths that demeaned or sentimentalized them because they supported a political agenda. The myth was not truth-seeking and sense-making; the myths that support a political regime do not symbolize our relation to transcendence but exploit a purported relation to transcendence for legitimate very worldly purposes, political or personal.