Listening to: Laura Marling: I speak because I can
Why don't we abstract all the truth found in the Bible and cast of the 'husk' of story, and 'myth'?
CS Lewis argues that the mythic elements of Christianity are actually the "vital and nourishing element in the whole concern". The story of the Bible is the "substance", and not "vestigial".
"And yet the human intellect is incurably abstract. Pure mathematics is the type of successful thought. Yet the only realities we experience are concrete - this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma - either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste [...] As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality the less we can think. You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyse the nature of humour while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? [...]
Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. [...]
Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact."
("Myth became fact" in CS Lewis: Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church)
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