“An Experiment in Criticism, one of Lewis’s recent books, contains a chapter devoted to myth. Defining myth, he says it is not merely the miscellany of stories belonging to a people but only a few such stories that are marked by a simple yet inevitable shape which causes them to rise above the others which are often cruel, obscene, and silly. He thinks that myth is written in all periods, even modern ones, and should include stories like Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kafka’s The Castle, and Wells’s The Door in the Wall. He regards a myth as more nearly a ‘thing’ than a narration and believes it may possess hardly any narrative element. Plato was a maker of great myths. Myth may be told by a variety of writers, even poor ones. George Macdonald, says Lewis, is not a first-rate writer but one of the great myth-makers of the world and a proof that myth is something different from the style in which it happens to be couched.

“A great myth contains universal truth. It makes us less interested in the sadness of a given character than in the sadness of all men. Myth also is concerned always with the impossible and preternatural and is always grave. It is also always awe-inspiring and numinous. In lesser literature the reader follows a plot to its logical conclusion and then puts the book aside. In great myth, on the contrary, he is likely to feel a new world of meaning taking permanent root in him.

“What is the cause of myth-making? There is a great, sovereign, uncreated, unconditioned Reality at the core of things, and myth is on the one hand a kind of picture-making which helps man to understand this Reality and on the other hand the result of a deep call from that Reality. Myth is a ‘real though unfocussed gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination’ which enables man to express the inexpressible. The glory of the Morning Star is somehow not enough glory for us. We want much more, and it is at this point that poetry and mythology come to our aid. ‘We do not want merely to see beauty. . . . We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves.’

“There is also eternal Sehnsucht, the longing which seems to be coexistent with consciousness itself. Lewis’s description of the consciousness of Mr. Bultitude the bear in That Hideous Strength is perhaps as good a statement as any, if we transfer it to man, to suggest the cause of myth-making. ‘There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the colours of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, unattached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life.’”

— from Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S Lewis (Eerdmans, 1964)

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