I’ve long been fascinated by the academic idea of “myth” as roughly “the stories by which we live our lives.” In that sense, a myth can be true – indeed, one would hope we’d live according to truth, not delusion.
As Wikipedia says in its opening paragraph on mythology:
…The term “myth” is often used colloquially to refer to a false story; however, the academic use of the term generally does not pass judgment on its truth or falsity. In the study of folklore, a myth is a religious narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form. Many scholars in other fields use the term “myth” in somewhat different ways. In a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story...
It was in this academic sense that C.S. Lewis wrote of myth becoming fact in the incarnation of Christ.
There was a time in my life when myth becoming fact would have sounded like gibberish – arrestingly expressed, but gibberish. I know this to a certainty, though I discovered Lewis in college, because I remember branding a new faculty member in my evangelical Protestant boarding high school as “liberal” because he spoke of certain fiction (probably Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner) as being “true.” “Truth” was “fact” – like in the Bible – I knew deep in my bones.
How I could believe that when Christ said “I am the … truth” is beyond me. (It’s obligatory, it seems, for former Evangelicals to call their upbringing “fundamentalist,” but this is one intellectual roadblock I had that seems to warrant the equation of evangelicalism and fundamentalism – at least as expressed at my boarding school.)
One such true myth by which we refuse to live is the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus affair mythically is about scapegoating and bigotry, with the bending of the rule of law thrown in for good measure. (Oh my! People do still hear about Dreyfus, don’t they? It’s not a myth if they don’t.)
I say we “refuse to live by it because of interment of Japanese during World War II and the interment of suspected bad guys at Guantanamo Bay even today. Sometimes, wrongful convictions through prosecutorial misconduct generally is the phenomenon writ small.
There is a review of a newish book on the Dreyfus affair at the Financial Times which may be of interest. I had forgotten how long the scandal echoed loudly in France, and I had no idea that it may have influenced Theodore Herzl to found modern Zionism.
I have tended to admire France, grudgingly (I was treated as haughtily there as any other American), for marching to its own drummer, but the record clearly is not all admirable.
Then again, what history is all admirable? Even modern Israel is writing chapters that, G*d willing, they will some day rue.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 