“Myth needs to be seen in a certain context if it is not to appear negligible or silly. I want to try to describe that context.

“The two most basic characteristics of man, beyond his mere physical needs, is [sic] to know and to worship. The great German psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, thinks that the urge toward knowing is so persistent that it was this urge which brought about his birth and thus his consciousness. ‘Meaninglessness,’ he says, ‘inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness.’

“Our present age in particular is convinced that the main avenue to knowing is the making of statements. Yet all statements whatever, indeed all systems, in becoming statements and systems, become self-destructive. One is at sixes and sevens to translate a language of one hundred thousand words into a language of one thousand words. This is man’s predicament. What man is, what he feels himself to be, makes a wasteland of language. Yet because of man’s insatiable desire to know he requires some sort of verbal actualization. He is like the old woman who said, ‘How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?’ Yet man’s saying, i.e., his systematizing, is always inadequate. The more he defines, the more he abstracts, the farther a satisfying reality seems to fly. A young professor of philosophy said to me, ‘I feel I must write my own philosophy, yet by the end of the twenty years required to do the job, it will be so insufficient as to make the whole task rather foolish.’

“We intellectualize in order to know, but paradoxically, intellectualization tends to destroy its object. The harder we grasp at the thing, the more its reality moves away.

“So what is to be done? Man finds in himself a third characteristic called imagination, by which he can transcend statements and systems. By some magic, imagination is able to disengage our habitual discursive and system-making and send us on a journey toward gestures, pictures, images, rhythms, metaphor, symbol, and at the peak of all, myth. Jung speaks of ‘the slender hints of the knowable’ and the need to discover mythic means of bringing these hints together. Systematizing drives essentiality away, but successful creativity attracts it. While the basic requirement of systematizing is abstracting, myth is concerned not so much with parts as with wholes. Myth is necessary because reality is so much larger than rationality. Not that myth is irrational but that it easily accommodates the rational while rising above it.

“Systematizing flattens, but myth rounds out. Systematizing drains away color and life, but myth restores. Myth is necessary because of what man is. The Roman poet Ovid in the first century said that man was formed in the image of the gods, and unlike animals, was given a ‘lofty countenance and ordered . . . to contemplate the sky and to raise his erected face to the stars.’ The finest explanation of myth is a remark of long ago that man shall not live by bread alone. The truth is that man is less fact than he is myth. Owen Barfield thinks that man did not make myth but that myth made man. Shortly before his crucifixion, Jesus told His disciples that He was going away to prepare a place for them and added, ‘whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.’ But the rationalist Thomas promptly retorted, ‘Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?’ A great living whole is always the answer to essentiality. An advertisement for diamonds says that engagement is a time ‘when mind and heart and all the beauty of the world beat as one.’

“Actually the wish for that condition is lifelong. All statements, including the one I am now making, are unsatisfying because man is fundamentally mythic. His real health depends upon his knowing and living his metaphysical totality. In myth man discovers and affirms not his disparate nature but his mythic.”

— Clyde S. Kilby, “What Is Myth,” the Foreword to Rolland Hein, Christian Mythmakers (Cornerstone Press, 1998) [

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