Myth

Perfection hounds us remorselessly. - Thomas Howard (Myth: Flight to Reality)

 Myths have fascinated me since childhood. (I can't remember the first myths I read, although I'm pretty sure I first read about general mythology in an old 1980-something edition of the World Book Encyclopedia.) I read stories about gods, demigods, heroes, monsters, dragons, and cows, and these tales shaped my imagination positively.
Now, some people are adverse to myths -- and fairy tales, for that matter. These people may be well-meaning Christian parents who want to shield their children from "satanic influences" in myths; the atheist who, very properly, scoffs at the notion of a god or something which has not been proven by almighty Science; feminists who attack the unfair sexism of Fairyland, but they all miss the point. Myths have served many roles in human lives, but they were never meant to convert children to Satanism, or to impose theism or deism on atheists, or to convince people to be sexist. Myths might be read -- and are often read -- with no particular purpose other than pleasure, just as children in their blissful ignorance do -- "listen like a three years' child," Coleridge said. I'm thankful that my parents didn't despair over my mythology-reading. The myths I read never made me want to convert to Zeus-ism or join the Church of Odin. G.K. Chesterton writes:

... he who has most most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion.... though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say, "I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune," etc., as he stands up and says "I believe in God the Father Almighty".... (The Everlasting Man)

Another purpose -- if it may be called that -- of the myth is to satisfy man's longing for perfection. Here enters Thomas Howard, Catholic author and brother of Elisabeth Eliott. He says in his essay Myth: Flight to Reality:

The whole poetic or artistic or mythic phenomenon that we find when we look at the history of human imagination represents, I think the search for perfection.... We all have imaginings of it (some poets would urge that we have memories of it). Perfection hounds us remorselessly. It stands over against every experience we have of nostalgia, frustration, and desire....

Politics, medicine, ecology, and jurisprudence are our efforts to repair the damage.... When we've been allowed to take time from our plowing and fighting and brushing our teeth, we have tried to say something about perfection and our experience of the discrepancy that we feel between ourselves and perfection.... 

... We are driven by who knows what -- maybe it's the Holy Ghost -- to complain about this discrepancy, to oppose it, and to transcend it.... Myth is one version of this effort.

Howard argues for myth's high place in the realm of narrative, saying that "[in] it you will find more or less perfectly manifested what is implicit in all art". He then writes an apologetic for the disengagement of the myth world from our own.

... if we move the world of myth away from the immediate... out of our calendar completely, we disengage it from the fuss of our world, and by thus setting it free from our time, we set ourselves free with respect to it. For time may be the tragic dimension of human experience... the agent and vehicle of change and decay and death. This why poetry and the promise of paradise are so attractive to us.  They all offer an escape from time....

We don't want the stuff of myths and fairy stories happening in our particular world, Howard says. We don't want storms instantly happening or volcanoes suddenly erupting because the gods are fighting over who gets the remote. Tolkien expresses this, "I in my timid body did not wish to have [dragons] in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world ("On Fairy Stories")." Yes, in a sense, myths do happen in this world, but no one really believes that the Titans were first born about 150,000 B.C., or that on the morning of June 17, 1967 the sky-god Horus couldn't let the sun rise yet because the storm-god Set was still having fun flooding Alabama. Erik Christian Haugaard writes:

"Once upon a time" is no time.... In reality... it means "at all times, in all places." ("Portrait of a Poet: Hans Christian Andersen and His Fairy Tales")

Even the story like A Tale of Two Cities did not happen in this world. London and Paris exist on Earth, but quite a few of the Tale's characters never lived and breathed on our planet, and for that reason, the world that Dickens created is different from ours.
However, Howard is not defending the myth against those who would merge fantasy and our world; he's defending myth's -- for lack of a better term -- escapism, which he calls "an escape from the unreal, the transitory and evanescent, to the solid and immutable, that is, the real". Howard even makes a good case that most readers, perhaps even avid realism fans, don't actually want stories to be too real, in the sense of worldly tangibility. If a story begins with an all too real description, complete with the exact time, date, address, characters and actions which simply must exist in this world, the imagination feels imprisoned, Howard argues. "The trouble is we know that room," Howard writes. "It's too defenseless against the postman and plumber and electrician, and we don't want them in our midst."

Howard laments that storytellers today are able only "to make their images out of what their world is made of. There has to be some identity of substance between what they make and what we know, so that we can recognize it." However, the stuff of our world can't create high myth; we can't really "get anything huge and wonderful and breathtaking and beautiful", he argues. The world that produced high myths, "those huge worlds of story that are remote from us but terrifyingly close", has disappeared.

... we have decided (sometime in the Renaissance it was and we finished the job in the eighteenth century) to recreate the world. It's a very small one now, limited as it is by microscopes and telescopes and computers, and asphalts parking lots at MacDonald's hamburger stands. And it's a horror. It is, above all, boring, for mystery has fled from it. We have announced to anyone who cares to listen -- and somehow one imagines that angels and elves aren't that enthralled by the information -- that we can explain everything....

By the eighteenth century the myth became sovereign that the analytic and rational capacity is absolutely adequate for unscrambling the mystery of the universe. Somewhere in the process the gods fled. The irony is that in the very effort of modern art to disentangle human experience from the transcendent, human experience turned to ashes. 

 (I have never seen a MacDonald's hamburger stand, but this was the twentieth century.) Howard, just as a good Catholic author should, values mystery and disdains contemporary literary materialism. He does commend authors such as Flannery O'Connor and Tolkien the mythmaker: O'Connor, because, through her striking, grotesque images, has reminded us that things are not the way they're supposed to be and that what we've made from these things haven't been satisfactory; Tolkien, because he has used the "ancient shapes" (because nothing the world had at hand suited his purpose) to create a truer world than what most modern authors have produced. Modern (or postmodern) man has come close to explaining everything they have on hand, but he hasn't found explanations of things which matter. Man still hasn't transcended the mess he's put himself in and, stumbling around in ever-growing darkness, still hasn't a grip even on the shadow of perfection. And until the Perfection incarnate returns and puts the final period this chapter of the story of the world and begins the new and more glorious chapter, man never will taste perfection.

Howard then defends the necessity of myth today. Writers today aren't likely to find in the modern world "an imagery that will suggest the big, real, whole world". He argues that the author would eventually have to retreat to the ancient paths and search for the "heroes and elves and gods".  An author, may he be a realist, a poet, or a creator of fantasy, would do himself a great favor in leaving the realm "cold and lethal myth that holds the whole world in a frosty sovereignty" and visiting the realm of the high myth where he might find "images of glory and mystery and romance and deity and heroism". Mythology, whether pagan or the "true" myths of Tolkien, seeks perfection, restoration -- seeks God. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity:

God... sent the human race what I call good dreams. I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has given new life to men.

Therefore, Howard argues at the essay's end, an excursion "into that world [of myth] [is] never a flight away from reality; they are, rather, a flight to reality".
We would do well, nevertheless, to guard ourselves from forgetting what mythology really is. They are shadows or dreams of reality; they are pictures of the same landscape which may be exactly like the landscape in every detail except that they aren't the actual landscape. Chesterton reminds us, "These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different."
Pagan idolatry, Calvin wrote in his Institutes, stemmed from the knowledge of God which is innate in man. The myths they created of creator gods and heroic saviors betrayed a sorrowful longing for restoration to how things should be. The Word Incarnate -- though embodying everything that a myth should be, everything that mythmakers could only write about -- was surprisingly not myth, and through that Word all the good dreams that God sent man became reality.