Christianity as creative myth

can be used to mean faith, it is difficult for a modern person, with our overwhelmingly intellectual and materialistic background, not to confuse this with belief in a mental proposition or in the factual existence of something. The word faith is preferable, because it includes the notion will. William James tried to get round this in his essay “The Will to Believe’. But this does not really solve the problem of how one can will oneself to believe something which one’s mind cannot wholeheartedly accept. Faith presents no such problem. In ordinary life we have faith in fictions. We know that Euclidean points, lines and surfaces cannot in fact exist, but we continually treat them as if they were real. The whole of our modern technology, which undoubtedly works, is based on such fictions. Many of mankind’s highest ideals like liberty and equality are fictions because being selfcontradictory they are unrealisable in practice. So neither myth, nor faith in myth, present us with the mental problem which makes so many people either reject religious belief or have a very equivocal attitude towards it. Towards myth an attitude of mental scepticism is wholly compatible with strong spiritual affirmation.

We require of religion that it should provide us with a vision of humanity, with ends and values, which can relate equally well to the life of the individual and to the whole of mankind: that it should be relevant to every aspect of life; not just to our ‘spiritual’ life, but also to our ‘practical’ life in the world of matter; not just to eternity but also to time. And we require that it should not only tell us about events which happened in the past but also give guidance for the future. There cannot be constructive change in the world without imaginative visualisation of how human life should develop. Mythology can help the imagination creatively in a way that common sense thinking cannot. I hope to show that once the burden of mental belief is withdrawn from Christianity and the inspiration of myth and faith substituted for it, then Christianity can indeed fulfil all these demands right into the foreseeable future, even for the most mentally sceptical and sophisticated person.

Let us go straight to the centre of Christianity. As Vladimir Solovyov wrote in his Lectures on Godmanhood, “Christianity has a content of its own, and that content is solely and exclusively Christ. In Christianity as such we find Christ, and only Christ—

6