Christianity as creative myth

mythology to our daily life and experience. Such a return to myth is made in full awareness that it is myth, but also with the intuition that it expresses truths which cannot be expressed in ordinary discursive language.

But though mythology can express truths or realities which cannot be adequately expressed in intellectual or philosophical language, it is not devoid of rational content. On the contrary, it represents an advance from intellectual thinking, as it is usually employed in our daily life, to imaginative thinking. It is the addition of another dimension to thought which makes it possible to express a wider range of human experience than can be expressed by metaphysical doctrines and mental beliefs. Through mythology it is possible to portray inner realities of soul and spirit, of human development and aspirations, and the workings of spirityal and psychological cause and effect.

Our conceptual thinking is continually advancing and, as it were, pushing back the frontiers of mythology. But mythology can help us to express qualities and notions for which conceptual language has either not yet been developed or is not yet widely enough appreciated and understood. Many people find it hard to visualise the meaning of abstract and conceptual words because they cannot relate them to their personal experience, and for them mythology can be a means of conveying such meanings. This is particularly obyious in scientific thinking, in which the mythologies which are employed are changing all the time. Notions like matter, force, energy, waves and particles all succeed one another and then became out of date. To the ordinary layman who has not been through the active thinking and experimentation which has resulted in these ideas imaginative visual aids are necessary. But it is very important that these visual aids are understood as such and never taken as actual realities. Still more in religious thinking, which is concerned with the inner realities of human consciousness, is it vitally necessary to be constantly aware that the ‘beings’ and ‘ images’ of mythology do not represent actual existences; they are not ‘things’ but general notions. It is the failure to be continuously aware of this that leads to superstition, both in religion and in science.

What then is the attitude to be adopted towards myth? The notion ‘belief’ is not adequate to express it, because although it

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