Deity and Morality by Porter Burton F.;

Author:Porter, Burton F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 1968-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

B: Myths and Images

A position closely connected with the one described above does not award centrality to poetry in general but to the conception of myth. The word myth is understood in common speech as an imaginative story or fable, that is, as a fictitious but entertaining product of uncritical, primitive peoples. Even more sophisticated judgements have often held that myths make fascinating study for the anthropologist or sociologist concerned with primitive religion, but scarcely deserves inclusion among the verifiable propositions of science. However, in the nineteenth century, interest was revived among both secular scholars and theologians in the notion that myths are an original and necessary means of metaphysical expression, that mythological themes express elements of religious awareness inexpressible in any other form. (On this reading it is as exclusive as similar conceptions of religious expression in poetic terms.) Berdyaev describes myth as ‘the concrete recital of events and original phenomena of the spiritual life symbolized in the natural world, which has engraved itself on the language, memory and creative energy of the people.’13 This is the view which has recently gained considerable popularity.

Not only are rational myths such as Artemis of the Odyssey or the Homeric conception of Zeus regarding as revealing images, but even the irrational myths which Müller calls ‘the silly, savage and senseless element’ such as the metamorphoses of men or gods into animals, trees or stars.14 Instead of attempting to separate unattractive or absurd myths from Christian narratives, by saying that the former are heavily disguised and distorted historical accounts of men as Enemerus and later Banier did,15 or to say that myths were invented by legislators ‘to persuade the many and to be used in support of law’16 as Aristotle did, the modern movement insists that all myth is valuable in so far as it is the essential form in which man reconciles his relationship with nature and the universe. It is ‘an organic function of the culture within which it occurs’, ‘an original and spontaneous form of human understanding, valuable precisely as such. … It secures a practical harmony between man himself and an environment otherwise impenetrably mysterious and menacing.’17

Schelling produced a seminal work in the nineteenth century18 which gave great force to what may be called the myth movement in theology. In his book Schelling fully explored the conception of myth on the assumption that it was a necessary vehicle for expressing our most fundamental relationship with the universe. He maintained that through myths, nature, man and society were harmonized into an organic unity; that the animistic urges of human consciousness and basic primitive experiences universally common to man in his dealings with nature are here given adequate expression. Schelling’s nineteenth-century Romanticism (culminating in a transcendental idealism in which nature and spirit were joined in a series of developments), regarded myth as ‘a necessary moment in the process of self-unfolding or self-development of the Absolute’. All religious myths, even the crudest polytheism of nature religions were necessary stages to an apprehension of ethical monotheism.

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