Lewis Myth-Fact Paper

http://www.sonic.net/mary/DejaLew-dir/rants/kla-myth1.htm

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A few weeks ago I began a thread entitled _Myth, Truth, and Fact_ that asked for thoughts about the following Lewis quote from _Perelandra_:

"Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra,Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truthfrom myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial - was partand parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body whichresulted from the Fall."

This post is the result of my attempts to grasp the meaning of this quote. After first reading _Perelandra_ (about 11 years ago), I immediately declared it my favorite novel, though I know now that I did not understand some of it. This lack of comprehension became obvious as I read this quote a few months ago while trying to understand Lewis's conception of myth. I did not remember this quote from my previous reading: I suspect the "narrative lust" was upon me then and I just brushed aside any idea that required a thoughtful pause. Shame on me. To have grasped this quote would have heightened my appreciation for the writings of Lewis this past decade.

A serious study Lewis should not neglect his conception of the relation between myth, truth, and fact. It is a difficult subject full of vague, elusive, and transcendental ideas. I tread tentatively while hoping to add shape to my inchoate thoughts on this matter. I will not pick apart or challenge what I might consider weak or flawed ideas, unless they seriously impair my ability to understand Lewis or irreparably damage his case.

This work is not exhaustive; it quickly became apparent that this topic could evolve into a doctrinal dissertation, if someone has not done it already. Please feel free to criticize what I've written. I hope to learn from your comments.

The sources for this "paper" are these Lewis books: _The Pilgrim's Regress_; _God in the Dock_; _C.S. Lewis, A Biography_ (Green & Hooper); _Perelandra_; _Selected Literary Essays_; _Surprised By Joy_; _George

MacDonald: 365 Readings_; _Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer_; and _The Great Divorce_.

MYTH

Lewis's understanding of the nature and function of myth influenced many of his writings and even his conversion to Christianity. His acceptance of the Christian "myth" is described in the fourth chapter of _C.S. Lewis, A Biography_ (Green & Hooper):

"What had been holding me back [from a conversion to Christianity] has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine *meant*: you can't believe a thing while you are ignorant *what* the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense has the life and death of Christ 'saved' or 'opened salvation to' the world..."Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me ... was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose "what it meant". Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that *it really happened*: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the other are men's myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call "real things". Therefore, it is *true*, not in the sense of being a description of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear to our faculties. The "doctrines" we get *out of* the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our *concepts* and *ideas* of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."

Lewis expresses this same idea in his first Christian book, _The Pilgrim's Regress_, which is an allegory that describes Lewis's conversion to Christianity. The protagonist, named John, journeys through basically the same philosophical progression that Lewis experienced. In the chapter entitled _Across the Canyon_, John finally converts to Christianity, whereupon the voice of the character Wisdom

tells John that he has converted to a belief in mere mythology. Wisdom, whom John met earlier in his journey, represents Absolute Idealism, a belief (as represented by Lewis) that the Absolute is impersonal. This belief is shown in an earlier chapter, entitled _More Wisdom_, where Wisdom says, "...for Spirit lives by dying perpetually into such things as we and we also attain our truest life by dying to our mortal nature and relapsing, as far as may be, into the impersonality of our source ..."

Wisdom's argument that John's conversion is to only a belief in mythology is met with this response from God:

"Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then it is My mythology. The words of Wisdom are also myth and metaphor: but since they do not know themselves for what they are, in them the hidden myth is master, where it should be servant: and it is but of man's inventing. But this is My invention, this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live. What would you have? Have you not heard among the Pagans the story af Semele? Or was there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God?"

Lewis eventually regarded Christianity as the consummation of pagan myths. These myths were initially a hindrance to Lewis's conversion. They showed that the dying-and-rising God of Christianity was not a unique idea; it was written all over the world. Eventually, Dyson and Tolkien helped him leap the mythical barrier by convincing him that Christianity could be both myth and fact.

As Lewis most often used the term, a myth is a story that is an imaginative expression of the deepest meanings of life - meanings that are illusive when one attempts to express them. Myths are generally concerned with the same themes: creation, divinity, and the significance of life and death. The effect of myth is one of awe, enchantment, and inspiration. Some might say that they are stories from all over the world that convey a longing for the divine. Lewis explains the nature of myth in his essay _Myth Became Fact_, found in _God in the Dock_:

"Human intellect is incurably abstract...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 -or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, living, hating, we 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, not analyse the nature of humour while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? 'If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain.' But once it stops, what do I know about pain?"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. At his moment, for example, I am trying to understand something very abstract indeed - the fading, vanishing of tasted reality as we try to grasp it with the discursive reason. Probably I have made heavy weather of it. But if I remind you, instead, of Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was suffered to lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared, what was merely a principle becomes imaginable. You may reply that you never till this moment attached that 'meaning' to that myth. Of course not. You are not looking for an abstract 'meaning' at all. If that was what you were doing the myth would be for you not true myth but a mere allegory. You were not knowing, but tasting; but what your tasting turns out to be a universal principle. The moment we *state* this principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstraction. It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience the principle concretely."When we translate we get abstraction - or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always *about* something, but reality is that *about which* truth is), and , therefore, every myth become the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis ('In this valley of separation'). Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular."

So for Lewis, myth gives one a "taste" of reality. It is the "most adequate language" to express reality because it involves a story filled with particularities, and reality consists of particulars, not generalities. Lewis says that the "tasting" is of a "universal principle" and if we try to express this principle we diminish it

because we have left the concreteness of Myth behind and entered into an abstraction. So how do we talk about a particular Myth without mitigating it? We cannot, according to Lewis. This means we have to appeal to humanity's experience to judge whether Lewis is right about the power of myth.

My own experience with the myths of Lewis and also J.R.R. Tolkien suggests to me that Lewis analysis of myth may be correct. Let me share my experience of Tolkien's _The Lord of the Rings_. _The Lord of the Rings_ affected me deeply, though when I first read it I could not explain why. I knew nothing of Tolkien at the time, but I remember finishing TLOTR and wondering if Tolkien was a Christian. Though the TLOTR was never explicitly Christian, it seemed to me full of Christian themes and the presence of God's sovereignty. There are passages in it that disarm my cynicism as they powerfully ring with nobility and hope. One of these passages is from the _The Two Towers_. In it, Frodo and Sam are standing at a crossroads, about to take the road into the evil land of Mordor:

"Standing there for a moment filled with dread Frodo became aware that a light was shining; he saw it glowing on Sam's face beside him. Turning towards it, he saw, beyond an arch of boughs, the road to Osgiliath running almost as straight as a stretched ribbon down, down, into the West. There, far away, beyond sad Gondor now overwhelmed in shade, the Sun was sinking, finding at last the hem of the great slow-rolling pall of cloud, and falling in an ominous fire towards the yet unsullied Sea. The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used."Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king's head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. 'Look, Sam!' he cried, startled into speech. 'Look! The king has got a crown again!'"The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of this stony hair, yellow stonecrop gleamed."'They cannot conquer for ever!' said Frodo. An then suddenly the brief glimpse was gone. The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell."

I cannot read, "Look! The king has got a crown again!' without tingling and thinking about the eventually destruction of the evil in our world and the rule of righteousness. But this easily expressed hope of mine is not the sole source of my goosebumps; part of the source is the inexpressible effect of Tolkien's myth-making.

Later, I discovered that Tolkien was a Christian and, as mentioned earlier, influenced a merely theistic Lewis towards Christianity. On top of that, TLOTR, according to Tolkien's own words, was a myth. Tolkien accomplished what he and Lewis believed myth should accomplish: a "baptism" of the imagination. I know I'm struggling for words to express the power of TLOTR, but that is what Lewis believes should happen. We have to be satisfied by saying that we were "moved" or "filled with a desire for the numinous" by the myth. I knew one young man who had read TLOTR thirty-five times - THIRTY-FIVE times. Why? Was it simply because it was a good story? I doubt it. I suspect he was feeding on the myth.

Perhaps some non-literary illustrations would sharpen the point. The first is the power of music. Most of us have been moved by pieces of music, but if we are asked why a certain arrangement of notes should inspire us so, our response will be inarticulate. Orconsider a mountain landscape. What is it about large sections of land thrust into the air that inspire many of us? Is it too much to say that a desire for eternity awakes in us as we view the expanse of a mountain panorama? The raw "facts" of certain notes and granite are not inspiring, but the meaning of these things is.

Myth's power lay in its appeal to the imagination, rather than to the reason. In _Selected Literary Essays, Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A Semantic Nightmare_, Lewis writes:

"It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition of both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself."

Though this passage does not refer to myth, it implicitly reveals its effect. Lewis considers imagination as the organ of meaning and myth as food for the imagination; therefore, myth provides meaning.

Lewis credits writer and Eighteenth Century Scottish preacher George MacDonald as the man who "baptised" his imagination through the book, _Phantastes_. Lewis writes of his encounter with _Phantastes_ in his autobiography, _Surprised By Joy_:

"The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me on without the perception of a change. It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense the new country was exactly like the old. I met there all that had already charmed me in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time the song of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse. Here were old wives' tales; there was nothing to be proud of in enjoying them. It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world's end was now speaking at my side...There was no temptation to confuse the scenes of the tale with the light that rested upon them, or to suppose that they were put forward as realities, or even to dream that if they had been realities and I could reach the woods where Anodos journeyed I should thereby come a step nearer to my desire. Yet, at the same time, never had the wind of Joy blowing through any story been less separable from the story itself...[The night I read this story] my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally , took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying _Phantastes_."

In Lewis's preface to _George MacDonald: 365 Readings_, he writes:

"What he does best is fantasy - fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem [for the literary critic] is whether this art - the art of myth-making - is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in *words* at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version - whose words - are we thinking when we say this."For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone's words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told the story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all - say by a mime, or a film...

"In a myth - in a story where the mere pattern events is all that matters - this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, 'done the trick.' ... In poetry the words are the body and the 'theme' or 'content' is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes-they are not much more than a telephone..."

In this same preface, Lewis describes the effect of the mythopoeia:

"It is in some ways more akin to music that to poetry-or at least to most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things already felt. It arouses in us sensations was have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and 'possessed joys not promised to our birth.' It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives."

Does everyone have these mythopoeic-induced raptures? Lewis was a strong, sensitive romantic; not everyone is. Nevertheless, probably most persons have had some sort of similar experience because myth is transmitted not only in literature, but also, for example, in music and film. Myth is not something that requires cultivation before it reveals itself. According to Lewis, myth lies behind all meaningful reality. One does not choose to experience myth; it points to the very ground of our being.

With this background of Lewis's ideas about myth, we are ready to examine his conceptions of truth.

TRUTH

How does Lewis use the words "truth" and "true"? Below are portions ofthe above quotes that include these words:

"Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth... it is *true*, not inthe sense of being a description of God (that no finite mind would takein) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear toour faculties. The "doctrines" we get *out of* the true myth are ofcourse less true: they are translations into out *concepts* and *ideas*of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate,namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."

"truth is always *about* something, but reality is that *about which*truth is"

"myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought withthat vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth,abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular."

"For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is theorgan of meaning."

What the mind apprehends and labels "truth" is merely an abstraction,something removed from its subject. Truth is a description of a thing,not the thing itself. Notice how this harmonizes with Lewis's essay_Meditation in a Tool Shed_, found in _God in the Dock_:

"I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The light wasshining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there camea sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks ofdusts floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place.Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, notseeing things by it."Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly, thewhole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) nobeam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of thedoor, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyondthat, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, andlooking at the beam are very different experiences."But this is only a very simple example of the differencebetween looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. Thewhole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him ofsomething he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutescasual chat with her is more precious that all the favours that allother women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, "in love". Nowcomes a scientist and describes this young man's experience from theoutside. For him it is all an affair of the young man's genes and arecognized biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking*along* the sexual impulse and looking *at* it."When you have got into the habit of making this distinction youwill find examples of it all day long. The mathematician sits thinking,and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spacelesstruths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could lookinside the mathematicians head, would find nothing timeless andspaceless there - only tiny movements of grey matter. The savage dancesin ecstasy at midnight before Nyonga and feels with every muscle that

his dance is helping to bring the new green crops and the spring rainand the babies. The anthropologist, observing that savage, records thathe is performing a fertility ritual of the type so-and-so. The girlcries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend;the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has beentemporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax."As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raisesa question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it andanother when you look at it. Which is the 'true' or 'valid' experience?Which tells you most about the thing?"The people who look *at* things have had it all their own way;the people who look *along* things have simply been brow-beaten. It haseven come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thingsomehow refutes or 'debunks' the account given from inside. 'All thesemoral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from inside',says the wiseacre, 'are really only a mass of biological instincts andinherited taboos.' And no one plays the game the other way round byreplying, 'If you will only step inside, the things that look to youlike instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real andtranscendental nature.'"That, in fact, is the whole basis of the specifically 'modern'type of thought. And is it not, you will ask, a very sensible basis?For, after all, we are often deceived by things from the inside. Forexample, the girl who looks so wonderful while we're in love, may reallybe a very plain, stupid, and disagreeable person. The savage's dance toNyonga does not really cause the crops to grow. Having been so oftendeceived by looking along, are we not well advised to trust only tolooking at? -- in fact to discount all these inside experiences?"Well, no. There are two fatal objections to discounting them*all*. And the first is this. You discount them in order to think moreaccurately. But you can't think at all - if you have nothing to thinkabout. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it'is' (whatever *is* means) such and such neural events. But the word*pain* would have no meaning for him unless he had 'been inside' byactually suffering. If he never looked *along* pain he simply wouldn'tknow what he was looking *at*. The very subject for his inquiries fromoutside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside."This case is not likely to occur, because every man has feltpain. But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life givingexplanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, withouthaving been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simplyplaying with counters. You go explaining what a thing is without knowingwhat it is..."We must ... deny from the very outset the idea that looking*at* is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better that looking*along.* One must look both *along* and *at* everything."

To look *at* something and *along* it are both true, but in particularcases, one may be more true than the other. One truth may be full ofmeaning while the other is not. Elsewhere, Lewis gives an example ofthese degrees of truth by examining two truths about poetry. One can saythat poetry is nothing more than marks made on a sheet of paper. One canalso say that poetry conveys man's deepest longings and desires withunrivaled poignancy. Are both true? - certainly. Is one more "true" thananother? Well, one could say that the experience of reading poetry ismore true because only there does it have meaning. Both conceptions ofpoetry partake of truth, though one is more rich and full, moredescriptive --- more *true*.

One of the quotes above does present a difficulty, though. It is foundin the second sentence of _The Pilgrim's Regress_ passage:

"Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: animage, not the very real. But then it is My mythology."

This is puzzling: Lewis's language about Christian myth is inconsistentif in this passage he is stating that Christian mythology is "but truth,not fact." It is clear from his other writings that he believed thatChristianity was myth and fact and that the myth is more than an"image"; it is a taste of the "very real." Am I misintepreting thispassage?

FACT

There is no need to belabor this definition. Lewis used the word in thepopular sense; that is, that "fact" denotes something that hasobjective reality. In his essay _Myth Became Fact_, he regards fact asthat which really happened - "at a particular date, in a particularplace, followed by definable historical consequences."

TRIPLE DISTINCTION

Assuming the above Lewisian definitions of myth, truth, and fact, whatis the triple distinction between them that Lewis refers to in the_Perelandra_ quote? The difficulty of the distinction lies not betweenmyth and the other terms but between these other terms themselves. Donot go to the dictionary for help; this is more or less what you willfind:

truth - the state of being the case: fact; the body of real things,

events, and facts: actuality

fact - the quality of being actual; something that has actual existence;a piece of information presented as having objective reality

Each definition basically refers to the other and I have always thoughtof these terms as near synonyms, until I read Lewis. As stated above,Lewis considered truth as an abstraction; that is, something removedfrom its subject. Again, truth is about *something*; not that*something*." But even with this understanding of truth, how is itdifferent from the facts. Couldn't "fact" also be merely *about*something, and therefore an abstraction, just as is truth. He helps me alittle by using the word "true" in different senses, as discussed above.But in no book can I find Lewis using the word "fact" in differentsenses; it always denotes that which has raw, objective, reality.Nevertheless, I have not satisfactorily distinguished between these twoterms. I wish Lewis supplied some examples to help me grasp thedistinction, if there is one.

If one considers myth as merely a story, then it is easily distinguishedfrom fact. A myth may or may not have historical reality. The elementsof the story do not have to be factual for the story to still beregarded as a myth. Some great truth (or fact?) about the transcendentalmay be conveyed by an unhistorical myth.But does Lewis consider the term "myth" to denote a mere story? Rememberthat in _Myth Became Fact_, Lewis writes:

"Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise whichbecome truths down here in the valley..."

It seems to me that this "mountain" is ultimate reality, the source ofall facthood or, if you prefer, truthhood. Might we say that Lewisbelieved that myth-as-story (even if unhistorical) supremely conveyedmyth-as-meaning.

A DIMINISHING DISTINCTION

Now if the Fall produced a distinction between truth, myth, and fact,what will be our experience when God removes this curse? Lewis, asrevealed in _Myth Became Fact_, believes Christianity has shown us apartial reconciliation:

"Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heartof Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of theDying God, *without ceasing to be myth*, comes down from the heaven of

legend and imagination to the earth of history. It *happens* -- at aparticular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historicalconsequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knowswhen or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order)*under Pontius Pilate*. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth:that is the miracle."

The pagans, and to a lesser degree, the ancient Israelites, groped asthey created stories or performed rituals that bear the influence ofuniversal patterns, such as sacrifice and death-and-rebirth. One neednot look far to see these patterns in our quotidian existence. Forexample, we see the principle of sacrifice everyday, one frequently hasto give up something to benefit someone else. Parents sacrifice timeand energy to raise children; soldiers die so others might live. We alsosee the death-and-rebirth pattern in nature, such as when a seed fallsto the earth to rise again. Lewis even went so far as to write that ifwe had not seen these patterns in the incarnation and resurrection ofChrist, that Christianity itself would seem less convincing.

In _Perelandra_, immediately after the quote that motivated thispaper, Lewis writes:

"Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that thedivision was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been thebeginning of its disappearance."

The first sentence should make most Protestants uneasy, as it seems toaffirm that the sacraments are more than symbolism. And this iscertainly consistent with Lewis ambiguous, "magical" view of the breadand wine. He may believe that the mystery of communion supper is apointer to the crumbling wall between the merely physical and spiritualdimensions of life. In other words, it represents the disintegration ofontological compartments.

In the same chapter as the above Perelandran quotes, Lewis mentionsanother "terrestrial" distinction, which should inform themyth-truth-fact distinction:

"The whole distinction between things accidental and thingsdesigned, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purelyterrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame ofearthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see noconnection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, forour use, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outsidethat frame and the distinction drops into the void, fluttering uselesswings. [Ransom] had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the

larger pattern. He knew now why the old philosophers had said that thereis no such thing as chance or fortune beyond the Moon. Before hismother had born him, before his ancestors had been called Ransoms,before *ransom* had been the name for a payment that delivers, beforethe world was made, all these things had so stood together in eternitythat the very significance of the pattern at this point lay in theircoming together in just this fashion. And he bowed his head and groanedand repined against his fate - to be stall a man and yet to be forced upinto the metaphysical world, to enact what philosophy only thinks."

Words such as "chance" and "accident" are artifacts of our limitedperspective. Every fact, if seen with a comprehensive view, hassignificance. *Every fact*. God produces no incidentals. Lewis expressesthis belief in _Reflections on the Psalms_:

"I suggest that the distinction between plan and by-product mustvanish entirely on the level of omniscience, omnipotence, and perfectgoodness... Surely a man of genius composing a poem or symphony must beless unlike God than a ruler? But the man of genius has no mereby-products in his work. Every note or word will be more than a means,more than a consequence. Nothing will be present *solely* for the sakeof other things. If each note or word were conscious it would say, 'Themaker had me myself in view and chose for me, with the whole force ofhis genius, exactly the context I required." And it would be right,provided it remembered that every other note or word could say no less."How should the true Creator work by 'general laws'? 'Togeneralise is to be an idiot," said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. Butto generalise is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses withwhich our intellects have to make do. How should God sully the infinitelucidity of this vision with such makeshifts? One might as well thinkHe had to consult books of reference, or that, if He ever considered meindividually, He would begin by saying, "Gabriel, bring me Mr. Lewis'sfile..."If there is Providence at all, everything is providential andevery providence is a special providence."

If one assumes that myth, through the imagination, supplies meaning; andif some day myth and fact become indistinguishable, then no facts willbe seem accidental, they will even be inextricably part of the meaning.

CONCLUSION

If Lewis would have distinguished only between myth and fact, I wouldhave no difficulty understanding him. But where does truth fit in to allof this? Is it a third thing. Of the three terms, perhaps truth is the

only one that is purely abstract. Fact is simply itself - a pureparticular, and myth is both abstract and particular. This is only myinterpretation of Lewis; he never conveys (to me, anyway) a clearunambiguous difference between these terms.

By pointing out the distinction between myth, truth, and fact, I believeLewis is saying that in our current fallen state we do not see all oflife as flowing from the "mountain" of all facthood, and therefore, allmeaning. The existence of "philosophy" is needed by creatures whosedeepest truths are not experienced concretely. When God removes thecurse, could it be that all thought will consist of particulars. Lifewill be so rich that there will be no room for the general orhypothetical. The words "accident" and "chance" are invented by theshortsighted. We will see all experience as harmonious, as purposeful,not full of unrelated meaningless incidentals. We will not haveontological compartments, such as nature and supernature, the spiritualand the physical.

God told Moses that He was "I AM WHO I AM." Abstractions such as "good,""merciful," and "just" are useful to us when we talk of God, but theyare not God Himself. Lewis believes that once the distinction betweenmyth, truth, and fact is obliterated, we will no longer talk *about*God, we will "feed" on him. This is illustrated in the _The GreatDivorce_; this begins with the words of the apostate "ghost", who findsrepugnant the idea of a final truth:

"But you must feel yourself that there is something stiflingabout the idea of finality? Stagnation, my dear boy, what is moresoul-destroying than stagnation?""You think that, because hitherto you have experienced truthonly with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can tasteit like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom. Your thirstshall be quenched."