Both Myth and Fact! (Part Ten)

Throughout this web series I have endeavored to show that the balance of the evidence suggests that the gospel story of the Virginal Conception of Jesus Christ is neither myth nor legend, but most likely based on historical reportage of a biological fact, and that it does indeed make a difference to the wider pattern of the Christian Faith if we accept it as such.

It would be extremely misleading, however, to leave the matter there. Any claim that the Virgin Birth is “fact, not myth” would be almost as indefensible as the claim that the account is “myth, not fact.” The truth is that, rightly considered, myth and fact are not mutually exclusive categories. Drawing upon the thought of the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, Cardinal Christoph Von Schonborn of Vienna addressed this aspect of the subject in his book The Mystery of the Incarnation (1992):

Today we are continually being faced with this either-or: “Is the statement, ‘Jesus is the incarnate Son of God’ to be taken literally or in a symbolic, mythical sense? Was Jesus born of the Virgin Mary in a literal or metaphorical sense? … What if the substance expressed in so many myths like the echo of a great yearning, a shadowy presentiment, has actually become a reality? (p. 16, 23)

For Lewis, as for Cardinal Schonborn, a “myth” is not necessarily something completely false, because reality does not consist solely of “cold, hard facts.” Reality itself is mythopoetic. No doubt there are many factors involved in the creation of the great myths (psychological, social and cultural factors to be sure, perhaps also supernatural factors), but in part, great myths are an imaginative apprehension of the objective, mythopoetic dimension of the world in which we live. As Lewis wrote: “Myth in general is … at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination” (Miracles, 1947 edition, p. 161). A good myth conveys “the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live” (George MacDonald: an Anthology, p. 10).

For example, ancient peoples could not help but observe the patterns of “dying” and “rising” that permeated the natural world around them: the rising and setting of the sun, the waxing and waning of the seasons of the year, the descent into earthen slumber of vegetation in winter, and the rising to new life again, so to speak, in the spring. Is it any wonder, then, that ancient peoples intuited that one clue to the mystery of the real universe in which we live may be found in the mystery of death and resurrection? And so they told myths about dying and rising gods. The stories were not literally true, of course, but they conveyed something that at its core was objectively true enough to anyone with half a brain: that whatever powers lie behind this universe must be responsible for signifying and expressing, throughout the natural world, the mystery of dying and rising.

Again, ancient peoples (just like us) experienced ineffable desires for something that nothing in this world can ever seem to satisfy: transcendent longings that poets, storytellers, and artists know all about. Is it any wonder, therefore, that they told myths about other worlds where, somehow, those longings might be fulfilled, and gave us imaginative glimpses of Valhalla, Mt. Olympus, and the Elysian Fields, even as writers do today when they take us to Narnia, and to Middle-Earth?

One more example: ancient peoples observed (just as we do) that human greatness is never the result of natural effort alone: it involves the mystery of extraordinary gifts and talents, coming together at just the right moment, and in just the right way, with good fortune and providential help — something well beyond coincidence. Hence, they imaginatively attributed to their heroes and greatest emperors extraordinary births and supernatural portents — signs of the element of divine gift and providence that, so they believed, must have been involved in those lives from the beginning. And were they not right in thinking so? Cardinal Schonborn reflects on all this in the light of the work of Lewis:

Surely, the reason why the great myths of the nations have something in common with the story of the Son of God who came down from heaven for our sake is that there is a trace, in the imagination of the great pagan teachers and myth-makers, of the very Incarnation which, according to our faith, is the core of all cosmic history.

The distinction between myth and Christian history is not simply between false and true; myths are not false simply because they are myths. C.S. Lewis sees the relationship between myth and Christian history as the difference between “a real event, on the one hand, and blurred dreams and [imaginative] intimations of this same event on the other hand”:

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when 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. (Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 66-67)

Lewis encourages us not to be afraid if we find that Christianity has parallels to myth. Would it not be a pity if Christianity, in order to assert its truth, had to reject all prior intimations of its truth? If Christianity is to fulfill the “longings of the nations,” it does not need to reject the expression of this longing as it is found in the myths. It sounds like a theological manifesto when Lewis says, “we do not need to be afraid of the mythical luminosity which attaches to our theology” ….

It is not a question of setting myth against reality; because of a defective understanding of “reality” this leads inevitably to the repression of the symbolic dimension of the Christian message, what one might call its “mythical luminosity.” But it is equally mistaken to reduce the historical reality of the events of the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection to a “merely” symbolic significance, as Gnosticism did. Rather, we must say that the history of Christ is the “highest myth” because in it myth has become a reality. (Schonborn, p. 17-21)

Applying these reflections to the miracle of the virginal conception of Jesus, we can see that too many contemporary New Testament scholars essentially take the same position that the Gnostics did: the story of the Son of God who “came down” from heaven and was “born of the Virgin Mary” is “merely” a “theologoumena,” they say, in other words, merely a symbolic and imaginative expression of abstract truths about the “significance” of Jesus, or about his “closeness to God.” On the literal level these stories are just early Christian myths and legends, borrowed in part from pagan mythology, but those Christian myths nonetheless convey profound theological truths.

No doubt they do. But at best, this reduction of the virginal conception story merely to a profound myth — perhaps even borrowed and copied, to some extent, from pagan mythological sources — is no more than a half-truth. For what if what was hinted at and imaginatively anticipated (even yearned-for) by the pagan myth-makers really happened once? What if the pagan myths are actually the copies, and the original was what really happened when the angel came to Mary in Nazareth, and the Child was born on Christmas night in Bethlehem? In short, what if God was working in the hearts of the pagan myth-makers from the beginning, whispering to them the wonder of what he would do for his world someday, to prepare the Gentile world for the real coming of his incarnate Son, just as he was working in the hearts of the Hebrew prophets to prepare his chosen people for the coming of the Messiah?

I have argued that, after considering all the evidence on hand, the miracle of the virginal conception of Jesus can still be held to be an historical and biological fact, and that Christians should resolutely cling to it as such, for the objective truth of this miracle helps clarify and secure central truths of the gospel. All this I believe to be true, and very important — hence the first nine installments of this web series!

Nevertheless, the virginal conception is not just an historical and biological fact: it is myth that has become fact, as Lewis would say, “without ceasing to be myth” — just as the eternal Word became flesh without ceasing to be the Word. Reality is not just a series of cold, hard facts that can be captured in verbal propositions; the real world is also a story: a beautiful, exciting, miraculous, sometimes tragic and terrifying story, one in which each one of us has an important part to play. And the “turning point” of that true story, the truest myth of all (simply because it is also fact) — indeed, as Lewis would say, the central chapter of the story, without which whole narrative of natural and human history does not make sense — that turning point came two-thousand years ago, when a prophecy inspired by the Creator of all began to come true, in real life: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name ‘Emmanuel,’ which means ‘God with us’.”

Next Time: Postscript: Reply to a Recent Book

Robert Stackpole, STD

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