Myth and Metaphor

May 15, 1977
Orl(ando?)

Myth and Metaphor

Do you have a feeling about this Universe and your life within it that you cannot fully express? Do you wonder, ever, the relationship of your conscious life to all that is and all that has gone before? Do you have a feeling at times that there is an aliveness to this universe so mysterious that all the discoveries of science create more difficult questions, not satisfactory answers? Do you ever, after reading all the logical explanations of learned philosophers, feel enlightened but still unsatisfied because some of your deep, yearning questions have been untouched? When you applaud Tom Paine’s neat statement, “the world is my country; to do good is my religion” does it ever come home to you that he stated a great dream for political science a superb goal for humanistic ethics but that even if these visions for humankind were achieved you would still be restless in spirit, asking “is that all there is?”

Because I answer “yes” to these questions, I want to share with you my feelings on myth and metaphor. If your answer is “no” and you judge that I am violating the essential priority of rational thought, then you will, or at least I hope you will, come back at me in the discussion period.

Let me begin by telling you of a conversation I had a few years back with a Christian scholar. He was a man proficient in Greek and Semitic languages, an authority on Biblical origins and literature, particularly the Christian scriptures we call the New Testament. After a lecture he gave, we engaged in conversation. My comments to him went something like this: You are a major league scholar; I’m little league as for erudition in Biblical languages and literature. You know better than I how the early Christian Church produced the gospels; not the gospels that produced the Church. What Jesus actually said and did is historically unknowable, that to separate his actual sayings from the elaborations of later Christians is difficult to impossible, that Jesus, the Jew, who was the leader of an itinerant, anti-establishment group of followers is radically different from the Jesus Christ myth, the incarnate God, the 2nd person of the Trinity, who assures me salvation if I accept him in my heart as Lord and Savior. How then can you be a professing Christian?

He did not resent my inquiry, as well he might, but answered something like this: In no way would I argue the points you have made; from my studies I could mention other serious questions. But when I consider our human consciousness of life and death, when I am sorely troubled about all the evil that exists, the seemingly irrepressible self-centeredness of the human ego, the inevitable, eventual corruption of all human institutions, the mystery of undeserved suffering, the Christian way of salvation by a Savior who redeems me from sin is a metaphor which sustains me.

A metaphor is the “use of a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea in place of another by way of suggesting a likeness or analogy.”

“Myth is an imaginative elaboration of fundamental problems and tensions in the form of a story speaking symbolically to the whole human situation.” (Herberg). Myths somehow rise to consciousness from the depth level of the human psyche. “The world of myths is a dramatic world – a world of actions, of forces, of conflicting powers.” (Cassirer)

The most exciting scholar I have read and listened to is Joseph Campbell, author of MASKS OF GOD and CREATIVE MYTHOLOGY. Two sentences from his vast and perceptive knowledge help me as I have reflected on my conversation with the Christian scholar (from CREATIVE MYTHOLOGY, p. 677-678):

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate center of life beyond reach of vocabularies and reason and co-ercion.

The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, to the universe as it is: the second being to render an interpretive total image of the same. revelation to waking consciousness of the power of its sustaining source.

(Insert: In a recent issue of the paper KAIROS; publ M B Dis of Una there was a trenchant article RR – Prot Theol spoke to the question by “why I am not a Ultr-X: quote)

What myth or metaphor sustains me? As I think back, my early years were dominated by the myth of progress. As we of that age in all societies phrased it, “we believe in the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.” But that myth became increasingly barren in the light of historical events, two world wars, a morale-shattering economic depression, Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Watergate. A rather deviant belief in rational thought and science as savior when one reflects that the same scientific thought that developed anesthetic for pain also developed mustard gas; the marvelous discourses about energy led not only to electric light but also nuclear bombs; the electronic marvels that bring hi-fi, radio, and TV to our living rooms also brought buts for eavesdropping and spying – one could go on.

What sustains me. In my job, for years I traveled the Northeast, much of it by automobile. It dawned on me that I was responding to the rivers of America – I crossed many – the Connecticut, the Deerfield, the Hudson, the Raritan, the Musconetdong, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the Shenandoah; on rarer occasions, the Allegheny, the Ohio, the Monongahela, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the St. Lawrence. Why do rivers and oceans provide me with feelings too deep for words? Let me try with words, although the expression will be inadequate, to affirm the metaphor which sustains me in a way perhaps similar to the way Christian myth or the Exodus myth sustains others. Of course, like everyone of you I am sustained by persons, by human love. I am sustained [by] stimulating work and play, by books, music, art, and humor. But I am speaking in Campbell’s way of reconciling working consciousness to the tremendous mystery and fascination of the universe as it is – to somehow respond to a total interpretative image.

The rivers and waters of the earth are a sustaining metaphor. A scientist wrote, on this planet and the atmospheric envelope which surrounds, water is both irreplaceable and inexhaustible. Water is a continuous cycle – rivers, lakes, streams, underground, clouds, ice. The rivers run to the oceans. I can be cleansed, refreshed, transported, eat of its fish and shellfish.

The rivers are abundant in blessing. Many great centers of human activity have clustered around great rivers and their connection with the seas – the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Rome on the Tiber, Paris on the Seine, New York on the Hudson and the East, Washington on the Potomac, St. Louis and New Orleans on the Mississippi – many others.

But if the river systems are abundant in blessing, they are terrible in punishments, too. We pollute, we pay the price; we build our houses on flood plains; rising rivers do not forgive and are not deterred. We denude the forests and hills of trees which naturally hold back runoff and the rivers flood.

Yes, my metaphor is the river. My sustaining metaphor may change. I may find another metaphor or myth which touches me at below conscious and articulate levels. I do not recommend my metaphor to you. Your own is better for you.

Probably there are those who need no metaphor to compress your longings, wonder, perplexity about this creating universe of which everyone alive or dead is part of the living whole.

I have shared my own feelings with you only to suggest to you that the mysterious quality we call creative imagination is more a part of us than our rational minds and that the images, metaphors, [and] myths welling up from the depths of self can sustain us.