Christian Mythology [antikvár]

IntroductionThe word myth is used of tales concerning wonders performed by gods and heroes, especially those recited on public occasions such as festivals. It is also used in an extended sense of a story told to throw light on a mystery that cannot be explained. Where all myth is interpreted in this second sense, as it is in some cultures, an antithesis develops between poetry and history, myth and fact, but not necessarily to the disadvantage of poetry. Plato disapproved of poets generally, but concluded his diatribe against the poetry usually accepted in his time with the myth of Er, who came back from the dead with a vision of judgement. Aristotle in his Poetics (c. 9) said that 'poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history*.The disparagement of myth in our own civilisation arises partly from objections to idolatry, which made the early Christians prefer to use some other word, such as mystery or enigma, when they took account of the kind of experience that in other religions gives rise to a myth. This objection was intensified at the Reformation, not only among Protestants but among Catholics in reaction against the revival of classical mythology in the Renaissance. It has been reinforced by the prestige of science, which leads us to make our own myths in scientific terms, and then to read the myths of others as if they were unsuccessful attempts to solve scientific or metaphysical problems. But as Professor Evans-Pritchard has pointed out in some perceptive comments on Levy-Bruhl's theories of 'primitive mentality', all field anthropologists agree that those who live on the primitive level spend most of their time dealing with practical affairs in an empirical manner, 'either without the least re-ference to super-sensible influences, and actions, or in a way in which these have a subordinate and auxiliary role'.In their own field of competence modern savages are, and the men of the Middle Ages were, as scientific and inventive as modern civilised men, but they take for granted a difference between this kind and the kind of insight that gives rise to myth. The extension of our field of competence, and the increasing inter-play of theories of knowledge with practical engineering, have no doubt made this difference more complex, and have made it more difficult to draw the distinction between myth and science at the critical point, but as we shall see the division has always been difficult.Myth in Tribal ReligionOne possible approach to the sources of mythology is the consideration of the structure of human society, and in particular the extended family. Through the long hunting and food-gathering stage in prehistory the extended family must have been the basic unit, larger or smaller according to circumstances. It has remained important down to the present day, not only among Bushmen and Australian aborigines, but in conservative civilised societies such as the old Chinese empire. In such societies the terms of kinship are complicated and important. In some Australian tribes, so long as they retained their own institutions, theOpposite. A page from the thirteenth-century Maciejowski Old Testament. Presented by a papal mission in 1608 to the Shah Abbas of Persia. Upper panels, the drunkenness of Noah; the Tower of Babel. Lower panels, Abraham and Isaac, Jews taken into captivity. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.