Myth And Ritual In Christianity Part 1

MYTH AND RITUAL.

IN.

CHRISTIANITY.

ALAN W. WATTS.

GROVE PRESS, INC.

PREFACE.

ONE of the special delights of my childhood was to go and see the cases of illuminated ma.n.u.scripts in the British Museum, and to walk, as every child can, right into their pages-losing myself in an enchanted world of gold, vermilion and cobalt arabesques, of palaces, gardens, landscapes and skies whose colours were indwelt with light as if their sun shone not above but in them. Most marvelous of all were the many ma.n.u.scripts mysteriously ent.i.tled Books of Hours, since I did not know how one kept hours in a book. Their t.i.tle pages and richly ornamented initials showed scenes of times and seasons-ploughing in springtime, formal gardens bright in summer with heraldic roses, autumn harvesting, and logging in winter snow under clear, cold skies seen through a filigree screen of black trees. I could only a.s.sume that these books were some ancient device for marking the pa.s.sage of time, and they a.s.sociated themselves in my mind with sundials in old court, yards upon hot afternoons, with the whirring and booming of clocks in towers, with astrolabes engraved with the mysterious signs of the Zodiac, and-above all-with the slow, cyclic sweep of the sun, moon and stars over my head.

I could see that these books were somehow connected with the wonderful recurrence of interesting seasons with strange names-Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Whit sun, Trinity, Michaelmas-names which marked the rotation of the calendar, and lent a kind of form and music to the simple succession of days. Under all this was a fascination with time itself, with the fact that the seasons and the heavenly bodies went on and yet round, and that men observed their changes with a ceremony of signs and numbers and bells. I had no sense of the pa.s.sage of time as a running out of life wherein everything gets later and later, until too late. I had no z z Myth and Ritual in Christianity.

feeling of it as a going on and on in an ever upward flight to some ultimate consummation. I simply marveled at the way in which it went round, again and again for ever, so that the marking of time seemed to be the proper and wholly absorbing ritual with which one watched over eternity.

Of course the "Books of Hours" contained, not the mysteri, ous hours of time themselves, but the socalled Day Hours of the Breviary, the seasonal ritual of the Work of G.o.d whereby, day after day and year after year, the Catholic Church relives the life of Time's redeemer and creator. And this cyclic reenactment is the surest sign that the Christ/story is not primarily an event which happened some two thousand years ago, but something perennial, both in all time and beyond all time. As the changing miracle of the seasons brightens the mere march of days, so Time itself is delivered from mere inanity by being lived sub specie aeternitatis, under the shape of eternity.

In so far, then, as the inner life of Christianity-the contempla. tion of G.o.d-is not just the reverent remembering of a past history, but the recurrent celebration and reliving of a timeless truth, it is possible for us to discuss the Christian story as something much more profound than mere facts which once happened, to give it not only the status of history but also the tremendous dignity of myth, which is "once upon a time" in the sense that it is behind all time.

Yet, in a relatively short book, such a discussion presents a formidable problem of selection, because it is a subject for which our materials and sources are almost too rich and too vast. Thus in the following approach to the Christian story, every reader will discover that important aspects of the theme have been left out or inadequately treated. For the problem is not merely that the materials are so mult.i.tudinous; it is also that many of them are so familiar. There is, for example, no point in retelling Bible stories which everyone knows already, or, at least, can easily refer to in the inimitable language of the Preface 3 Bible itself. There is an immense quant.i.ty of material, such as the Graal legends and the miraculous lives of the saints, which might have been included in a book of this kind but which would have blurred the clear outline of the essential narrative upon which Christianity is founded.

In order to discuss that narrative in such a way as to present it clearly without merely rewriting the relevant parts of the Bible, and, at the same time, to bring out its profound mytho logical significance, it seemed best to describe it in terms of liturgy rather than history. For the most part, then, this book will a.s.sume that the reader has a general knowledge of the Old and New Testament narratives, and, like a Missal or Book of Hours, will present Christianity as the ritual reliving of the Christ-story through the seasonal cycle of the ecclesiastical year. This has the special advantage of being the form in which Christianity is actually lived, today as yesterday, enabling us to study it as a living organism rather than a dead fossil. Furthermore, it is the perfect form in which to discuss Christianity as a process for the "redemption of time", the dimension of life which is so strangely problematic for Western man.

Even with these limitations upon the material to be used, the subject is endless. It is not only that Christian liturgy and ritual have been so richly embellished through the centuries with art and architecture, poetry and symbolism. It is also that each single element, each symbol, each image, each figure of speech and action which the liturgy employs is connected with such a wealth of a.s.sociations, of history, and of mythological parallels, that at every step one is tempted to go off on fascinating digressions which would interfere with the orderly unfolding of the main story. This accounts for a rather considerable use of footnotes in the following pages, and I trust that the reader will take them, not as an annoying apparatus of pedantry, but as hints of the marvelous complexity of branches, twigs, and leaves which spring from a peculiarly fertile Tree of Life.

4 Myt , and Ritual in Christianity.

Because my subject is not a museum piece but a living symbolism which lies at the roots of our present civilization, and is inseparably bound up with our whole philosophy of life, I cannot possibly treat its mythological aspects from a purely "folklorist" or anthropological point of view. Chris, tian mythology" cannot be studied without bringing in its many implications of a theological, metaphysical, and psychological character, so that I do not feel it necessary to apologize for the fact that a book devoted to a particular form of myth and ritual has also the aspect of a philosophical essay.

ALAN W. WATTS.

American Academy of Asian Studies, San Francisco, 1953.

PROLOGUE.

A BOOK on Christian Mythology has not, I believe, been written before. There are some sound reasons for this omission, for the subject is one of extreme delicacy and complexity, not because of the actual material, but because the whole problem is, in a very special way, touchy. There are extreme differ, ences of violently held opinion about Christianity itself-both as to what it is, and as to whether or not it is a good thing". Similarly, there are rather wide differences as to the nature and value of Mythology, which has only quite recently become a subject of serious study. But when one takes the two together, one is doing something best expressed by the colloquialism sticking ones neck out"-and sticking it out very far.

To begin with, what is Christianity? On this matter there is no common agreement. Does it consist of the teaching of Jesus, or of the teachings of the Church about Jesus, or of both, and, if so, whose versions of the teachings of Jesus, and which Church ? There is simply no way of making a decision on these questions so as to please everyone. Furthermore, because all Western peoples are so closely involved with the Christian s tradition, it is quite impossible to be "scientifically objective" about it, for we do not stand at a convenient "cultural distance" from Christianity. If one attempts to be objective, one is automatically pigeonholed with the liberals as distinct from the "orthodox, and thus gets into a rut in the very effort to get out of one.

Therefore, in order to get into the subject at all without volumes of preliminary argumentation, a decision must be made, and it will of necessity be somewhat arbitrary. This book starts, then, from the avowedly arbitrary position that Christianity is contained in the teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church, both Roman and Eastern Orthodox. Perhaps this decision is not quite arbitrary, for the author is neither a Christian nor a Catholic in any "party" sense of these words. The basis for the decision is twofold. On the one hand, the Catholic tradition is both the largest and the oldest Christian tradition, and seems to have had the greatest cultural influence. On the other hand, it is the richest in mythological content.

This brings us to the second problem: what is Mythology? To use this word in its popular sense, and to put it in the same phrase as the word "Christianity is to invite immediate protest from almost every variety of Christian orthodoxy. For the majority of Catholics and Protestants will insist that everything really important in Christianity is not myth, but history and fact. The orthodoxies do, of course, debate a number of minor, and a smaller number of major, points of factual truth. Protestants, for example, do not agree that the a.s.sumption of the Virgin Mary is an historical event, and Catholics will not insist on the historicity of all the legends about the Wood of the Cross. But debates of this nature will not concern us here, for in this book we are going to treat of the entire body of Catholic tradition without making any dis tinctions as between fact and fancy. In the sense of the word taken by this book, the whole tradition is "mythological".

For the word "myth" is not to be used here as meaning "untrue or unhistorical". Myth is to be defined as a complex of stories-some no doubt fact, and some fantasy-which, for various reasons, human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe and of human life. Myth is quite different from philosophy in the sense of abstract concepts, for the form of is always concrete-consisting of vivid, sensually intelligible; narratives, images, rites, ceremonies, and symbols. A great deal of myth may therefore be based on historical events, but not all such events acquire the mythic character. No one has based any type of cult or religion upon the undoubted fact that Dr. Samuel Johnson drank immoderate quant.i.ties of tea. For this fact is regarded as unedifying and trivial, despite its actually infinite consequences, and despite the philosophical position that any and every fact embodies the entire mystery of the universe.

Alles Vergangliche Ist nur ein Gleichnis.

Even such a momentous fact as the discovery of printing by Gutenberg has acquired no mythological significance, for it lacks those special qualities which fire the imagination, which demand of the human mind that it recognize a revelation of the meaning behind the world.

This definition of myth is probably clear enough, even though many specialists in mythology may not altogether agree with it. The problem is much less clear when we come to consider how and why certain events, legends, or symbols acquire the status of myth. Still deeper is the problem of what, if anything, these myths "really mean. I do not believe that we are anywhere near to a full understanding of the processes governing the formation of myth, of the rationale whereby the human mind selects some narratives as mythic in significance and others as simply historical or merely inconsequential. These processes are very largely unconscious. Only quite rarely do people, upon hearing or witnessing a narrative, say, This is obviously mythical because it clearly symbolizes our philosophical views about the meaning of the universe." For many people who have myths have nothing very much in the way of philosophical views.

Moreover, many stories which become mythical bear no label which marks them as such. It is otherwise with the Christian stories, for the priests and prophets who first uttered them said, "Thus saith the Lord", and felt sincerely that they were not inventing idle tales but were in receipt of divine revelations-and there is no doubt that Jesus himself actually claimed some type of divine origin or affinity. But a great number of hero and fairy tales bear no such obvious stamp. In general, however, it would be safe to say that they are received as mythical because their events have a miraculous or "numinous quality which marks them as special, queer, out of the ordinary, and therefore representative of the powers or Power behind the world.

But it is not at all easy to say why, at certain times, certain of these uncommon narratives, certain images and symbols, seem to embody the "worldfeeling of immense numbers of people and to exercise such a compulsive and moving quality that men have the sense that life itself depends on their repet.i.tion and reenactment. Why, for instance, was the mind of Western man captured by the Christ,myth rather than the story of Mithras ? How is it that myths lose their power, and that, after flouris.h.i.+ng for centuries in Egypt and pa.s.sing over into Roman civilization, the myth of Isis and Osiris did not live on in Western Europe ? How is it, however, that the myth which becomes dominant retains some of the characteristics of the myth that wanes, that there are certain important resemblances between Osiris and Christ, Isis and the Virgin Mother?

This, of course, is inseparably bound up with the problem of what myths really mean-this is, if they do mean some/ thing and are not just "natural growths" like flowers and fish.

Perhaps myths come out of the human mind in the same way that hair comes out of the human head. Now there have been many fas.h.i.+ons of opinion among those who claim to interpret myths scientifically. Anthropologists of the era and school of Sir James Frazer inclined to the view that the significance of myths was either astro_rmical~ etative, or s.e.xual-a view that still carries a great deal of weight. Myths were held to be naive explanations of the behaviour of the heavenly bodies, of the mysterious forces governing the growth of plants, crops, and cattle, or of the entrarncing powers behind s.e.xual love and generation. With the development of more sophisticated theological and philosophical ideas, these explanations under, went transformations which frequently involved a change of the mystery being explained-as the mind of man conceived the powers in question to be more than the sun, the crops, and the feeling of love themselves. In other words, the actual stories remained, but their meanings as well as the names of their central characters were changed to fit more mature ways of thinking.

While this theory probably accounts for some myths, there are several ways in which it is unsatisfactory. The older generation of anthropologists were always apt to see "early" or primitive man in terms of the a.s.sumption that intelligence began with the Greeks and reached a fulfilment in Western Europe-in comparison with which all other cultures were in relative darkness and superst.i.tion. They therefore invented an idea of "primitive man as a being whose total intelligence was supposed to consist in some rudimentary fumblings towards the kind of wisdom monopolized by Western civilization. Hardly dreaming that there are other-and highly developed-types of intelligence and wisdom, as well as different life,goals, than those contemplated by Western man, these anthropologists found only what their prejudices enabled them to see. Their premise was that their own culture as the "latest in time represented the height of evolution. Earlier to Myth and Ritual in Christianity cultures must therefore be elementary forms of modern culture, and their degree of civilization and intelligence had to be estimated by the degree to which their values approximated to modern values.

Thus we still speak of certain peoples as primitive and "backward because they do not care to rush about the earth at immense speeds, to acc.u.mulate more possessions than they can possibly enjoy, to annihilate all peace and silence of the mind with an incessant stream of verbiage from newspaper or radio, or to live like sardines in the din and the fumes of great cities. It seems to have escaped our imagination that evolution and progress have occurred in quite other directions than these. In short, these socalled early and primitive cultures were not so stupid as we like to think, and th ;ir mythologies may have had purposes quite other than attempts to solve the special problems in which our own science is interested.

We should therefore consider two other theories of myth, the first of which derives from the researches of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Stated simply, his theory is that myth originates in dream and spontaneous fantasy, rather than in any deliberate attempt to explain anything. This is based on the discovery that the dreams and free fantasies of thousands of modern patients contain the same motifs, patterns, and images as ancient mythologies, and that very frequently they arise without any previous knowledge of these ancient materials. For this Jung has an explanation which is much more simple and direct than his terminology suggests at first acquaintance. His theory of the origination of myth in the Collective Unconscious sounds highly speculative and "mystical", for which reason it is unpopular among lovers of scientific objectivity.

For the Collective Unconscious is not some kind of trans. cendental ghost permeating all human beings. Consider the human body. At all times and in all places it a.s.sumes the same general shape and structure, and it does not surprise us in the least that men born today in New York have the same bone/ formation as men born four thousand years ago in Mohenjoi daro. Furthermore, the bone/formation, as well as the complex structure of respiration, circulation, digestion, and the entire nervous/system, was not designed by us consciously. It just grows, and we have only the vaguest notions of bow it grows. And the physical structure of a physioichemist grows neither more nor less efficiently than that of an illiterate peasant. Thus the material form of man is collective in the sense of common to all men, since men-by definition-are creatures which have just this form. The process by which this form develops is unconscious-and thus the Collective Unconscious is simply a name for this process which is both unconscious and common to all men.

Extreme differences in the human form are largely the result of some conscious interference with this process, as when Ubangi women stretch their lips around wooden disks. But when one leaves the shaping of the body to the unconscious process, a body grown in Africa remains in all general respects just like a body grown in America. a.s.suming that thoughts, feelings, ideas, and images are either parts of the human body, or functions thereof, or at least activities shaped by the same process-one would expect to find the same collective or common character when thoughts and images are allowed to develop without conscious interference, as in dreams and spontaneous fantasy. This would give us an explanation both reasonable and simple for the fact that myths "dreamed up" five thousand years ago in Chaldea are in essential respects like those found three thousand years later in Mexico or today in London or Los Angeles .l If Jung's theory is correct, does it tell us anything about the significance of myth? Jung believes that he has very strong One can account in the same way for the common character of logical thinking. It is evident to both a Greek philosopher and an Indian pandit that two and two make four because the structure of the brain is common to both.

ra Myth and Ritual in Christianity evidence for the fact that dreams and fantasies are symptoms of the directions being taken by unconscious psychological processes. In other words, they enable a psychiatrist to diagnose a psychological condition of health or disease in the same way that feeling the pulse, making a blood count, or taking a urinalysis enables a physician to test the general health of the body. From this comes a further idea of immense importance.

So far as bodily health is concerned, we estimate "health by a collective or normal standard. That is to say, a man is healthy if his unconscious physical processes work without special interference, enabling him to survive without undue pain to the greatest age which seems attainable by any large number of human beings. Furthermore, the healing work of a physician is usually a matter of helping unconscious processes of the body to accomplish a resistance to disease in which they are already engaged-with immense ingenuity. Not unreasonably, Jung has transposed this into psychological terms. He believes that the psychiatrist heals most effectively when he helps mental processes which are similarly unconscious, formative, healing, and common to all men. This has led him to trust and respect the wisdom of the psychological Unconscious, just as physicians trust the ingenious wisdom of the body.

What is particularly interesting for our purposes, however, is his contention that the dreams and fantasies of psychologically healthy people tend to resemble the general form of those great collective myths which underlie the spiritual and religious traditions of the race. For example, he finds that in the final stages of psychological healing patients will dream or produce in fantasy the image of a quartered circle or mandala under an enormous variety of particular forms. Strangely enough, mythological traditions as widely different as the Christian and the Buddhist use types of this circle or mandala image to represent their different notions of fulfilment-famous instances of the Christian mandala being the rosewindows in Gothic cathedrals and the vision of G.o.d in Dante's Paradiso.

The general implication of Jung's theory is, then, that the great collective myths in some way represent the healing and formative work of man's unconscious psychological processes, which he must learn to trust, respect, and aid in his conscious thought and action. With a few changes in terminology, there is nothing in this theory which should be objectionable to a Christian of almost any variety. I have stated the theory in its most physical farm, but since no one has now any very clear notions as to what physical or material things are, or whether such words mean anything at all, it would not be stretching things too far to equate the "wisdom" of the Unconscious with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit-always provided that we are not too c.o.c.ksure as to what the Holy Spirit may have in mind. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isa. 55: -9) Jung's theory of myth is useful and highly suggestive so far as it goes, particularly in its explanation of the way in which myths are actually formed. Yet it leaves something to be desired in its actual interpretation of the symbols of myth, for the final "meaning" which emerges is a life theory, a psychological philosophy, which is Jungs own personal hypothesis, despite the fact that it contains a number of universal and time, honoured elements. I feel that a still deeper light has been thrown upon the whole nature of myth by one of the most learned and unaiversal,minded scholars of our time- the late Ananda Coomaraswamy, for many years curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Coomaraswamy represented an increasingly growing school of mythological and anthropological thought which has outgrown the provincialism of the nineteenth century, and has ceased to equate wisdom, progress, and culture with the peculiar abnormalities and agitations of the modern West. Since h.o.m.o sapiens has probably inhabited this earth for something 14 Myth and Ritual in Christianity like a million years, it is rather rash to suppose that culture is a relatively recent phenomenon. Ananda Coomaraswamy has ably shown that extremely sophisticated and profound cultures have existed quite apart from the special types of apparatus which we think essential-such as writing, building in brick or stone, or the employment of machinery. Obviously, such cultures will neither pursue nor attain the life.goals which we consider important, but will have other goals out of all relation to the peculiar desires and "goods of modern man.

Indeed, modern man confesses-in effect-that he has no lifeegoal. Progress, as he conceives it, is not towards anything save more progress, so that his life is dedicated to the ever more frantic pursuit of a "tomorrow which never comes". Coomaraswamy has pointed out that in this respect our culture is historically abnormal, and the greater part of his work was a vast doc.u.mentation of the fact that in almost every other culture there has existed a unanimous, common, and perennial philosophy of man's nature and destiny-differing from place to place only in terminology and points of emphasis and technique. This was not philosophy in the current sense of "speculative theory; it was the love of a wisdom which consisted, not in thoughts and words, but in a state of knowing and being. In such cultures this philosophia perennis occupied a central and honoured position, even when any deep interest in it was confined to a minority.2 Today we have come to identify philosophy with thought -that is, with a vast confusion of verbal opinions-to the extent that we mistake the traditional philosophies of other cultures for the same sort of speculations. Thus we are hardly 1 See especially his Am I My Brother's Keeper (New York, 1947), published the same year in London with the tide The Bugbear of Literacy.

2 This is Coomaraswamy's view, which I would modify to the point of saying that the philosophia perennis certainly exists within our culture, in however an unhonoured position, but that we are not at a sufficient historical distance from out own time to determine its actual influence.

mare of the extreme peculiarity of our own position, and find it difficult to recognize the plain fact that there has otherwise been a single philosophical consensus of universal extent. It has been held by men who report the same insights and teach the same essential doctrine whether living today or six thousand years ago, whether from New Mexico in the Fax West or from j.a.pan in the Far East. To the degree that we realize its existence at all, we call it "metaphysics or "mysticism", but both the insight on which it is founded and the doctrine or the symbols in which it is expressed are so generally misunderstood that "it would hardly be an exaggera, Lion to say that a faithful account of it might well be given in the form of a categorical denial of most of the statements that have been made about it" both by its contemporary critics and by many of its present/day enthusiasts. For amongst both the opinion prevails that "mysticism is a retreat from the realities of life into a purely subjective frame of mind which is declared to be more real than the plain evidence of our senses.

By way of "categorical denial I might begin by saying that a traditional "metaphysic" of this kind involves a far more acute awareness of the plain evidence of the senses than is usual, and that, so far from retreating into a subjective and private world of its own, its entire concern is to transcend subjectivity, so that man may "wake up" to the world which is concrete and actual, as distinct from that which is purely abstract and conceptual. Those who undertake this task unanimously report a vision of the world startlingly different from that of the average socially conditioned man-a vision in whose light the business of living and dying, working and eating, ceases to be a problem. It goes on, yes, but it ceases to be the frantic and frustrating pursuit of an ever.receding goal, because of the discovery that time-as ordinarily understood-is an illusion.

i I adapt some words which Cootnaraswamy used with specific reference to Hinduism, in his Hinduism and Buddhism (New York, 1943), p. 8.

One is delivered from the mania of pursuing a future which one does not have.

Yet another consequence of this acute awareness of the real world is the discovery that what has been felt to be one's "self" or "ego" is also an abstraction without reality-a discovery in which the "mystic" oddly joins hands with the scientist who "has never been able to detect any organ called the soul". That which takes the place of the conventional world of time and s.p.a.ce, oneself and others, is properly described by negations-"unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, unformed"-because its nature is neither verbal nor conceptual. In brief, the "seers" of this reality are the "disenchanted" and "disillusioned"-those who are able to employ thoughts, ideas, and words without being spellbound and hypnotized by their magic.'

Before indicating the connexion of their doctrine with myth, I must briefly summarize its general principles, realizing, however, that the form in which they must for the moment be stated is not that best suited for their comprehension at the present day. The world of conventional, everyday experience appears as a mult.i.tude of separate things extended in s.p.a.ce and succeeding one another in time. Their existence is always realized by contrast or opposition. That is to say, we realize or 1 The doctrine of these "knowers of the real" const.i.tutes the central cote of three of the great historical religion/philosophies of Asia-Hinduism, Budd/ hism, and Taoism. In Islam it appears in a sectarian form as the teaching of the Sufis. In Judaism it is found chiefly as the Holy Kabala-a corpus of teaching contained in an early mediaeval work called the Zohar, descending, perhaps, from Philo Alexandraeus. In the traditions of Greece it appears, somewhat diluted and confused with other elements, in a line of doctrine which runs from the Orphic mysteries, through Plato, to the Neoplatonists of Alexandria-in particular Plotinus, Proclus, and the Christian Clement. In Christianity itself it exercised a far reaching influence from the Syrian monk known as Dionysius the Ateopagite in the sixth century, through John Scotus Erigena, St. Albert the Great, Meister Eckhart, and John of Ruysbroeck, to Nicolas of Cusa in the fifteenth century. In the Neat East and the West, that is to say, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the doctrine has almost always been "at odds" with an official orthodoxy bitterly opposed to its universalism, because of an immature compulsion to believe in the exclusive perfection of one's own "patty/religion".

isolate the experience of light by contrast with darkness, pleasure with pain, life with death, good with evil, subject with object. Opposition, duality, is therefore the inevitable condition of this world, however much we may struggle to overcome it, to hold to the pleasant and the good and to reject the painful and the evil-an effort which is of necessity a vicious circle, since without pain pleasure is meaningless. However, this world of opposites is conventional and "seeming"; it is not the real world. For reality is neither multiple, temporal, spatial, nor dual. Figuratively speaking, it is the One rather than the Many. But it appears to be the Many by a process variously described as manifestation, creation by the Word, sacrificial dismemberment, art, play, or illusion-to name but a few of the terms by which the doctrine accounts for the existence of the conventional world.

In sum then, the manifold world of things proceeds from the One and returns to the One, though in actuality it is never at any time other than the One save in play, art", or seeming. Its coming from and returning to the One, its Alpha and Omega, appears to be a temporal process because the art by which it is manifested involves the convention of time. So long as the human mind is enchanted by this "art", it takes the convention for the reality and, in consequence, becomes involved in the tormenting vicious circle of wrestling with the opposites, of the pursuit of pleasure and the Right from pain. But one may be liberated or saved from this everlasting (circular) torment by disenchantment, by seeing through the illusion.

Coomaraswamy has shown that this doctrine is communi cared in two ways. One is by the moreor,less direct statement of its principles such as I have just given, and such as one finds in the explicit teachings of the "mystical tradition. The other way is by figurative statement or myth. In some cases myth may have originated in parable or allegory, that is to say by the deliberate composition of "tales of instruction" by teachers of the traditional doctrine. But probably in many more cases the origination of myth is unconscious and spontaneous, in the manner suggested by Jung, but represents the same truth as the doctrine-because it springs from a submerged level of the mind which has never actually been "taken in" by the illusion of the conventional world. This may seem to be a fantastic hypothesis, but surely it is no less fantastic than the common psychoa.n.a.lytic practice of healing neuroses by following the hints and directions contained in the wisdom of dreams. If, as Jung maintains, the dream is the symptom of unconscious but formative processes of the mind which work towards wholeness as certain bodily processes work towards health, it should not surprise us that myth represents what is also taught in the doctrine of disenchantment-for it could well be that freedom from illusion is the proper health of the mind. The human body is often wiser than the sophisticated doctor, and we might well expect the still more amazing organism of brain and nerves to be wiser than the conventional philosopher and theologian.

Thus while Jung does not go quite so far as Coomaraswamy in equating the content of myth with that philosophia perennis which has had its honoured place in almost every culture save our own, his theory of the formation of mythical symbols provides us with a reasonable explanation of the process whereby a wisdom of this type could be divined by the unschooled and unsophisticated folk mind from which those symbols emerge. Indeed, there are ways in which the symbols express their truth more adequately than the more formal and exact language of the doctrine, for the truth in question is not an idea but a realityofexperience so fundamental and alive It is really the most astonis.h.i.+ng bybris to suppose that the highest wisdom is const.i.tuted by the standpoint of conscious reason, for we hardly begin to under, stand the neural processes without which the very simplest act of reasoning is impossible. The entire possibility of logical and scientific thought rests upon a structure which was formed unconsciously, which we do not understand, and cannot manufacture. Should the finger accuse the hand of clumsiness?

that we cannot "pin it down and know "about it" in exact terms.

An expression that stands for a known thing always remains merely a sign and is never a symbol. . . . Every psychic product, in so far as it is the best possible expres/ sion at the moment for a fact as yet unknown or only relatively known, may be regarded as a symbol, provided also that we are prepared to accept the expression as designating something that is only divined and not yet clearly conscious .l

Coomaraswamy makes the same point in a slightly different way:

It is one of the prime errors of historical and rational a.n.a.lysis to suppose that the "truth" and original form of a legend can be separated from its miraculous elements. It is in the marvels themselves that the truth inheres: Wonder-for this is no other than the very beginning of philosophy," Plato, Theatetus rS5o, and in the same way Aristotle, who adds, "So that the lover of myths, which are a compact of wonders, is by the same token a lover of wisdom (Metaphysics 982 B). Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.'

In this sense the absolute truth" is not the end/result of rational speculation, but the most central and fundamental, and thus the most real, state of our own being, which is only divined and not yet clearly conscious.

In a book devoted to a special mythology, as distinct from Mythology in general, there is not s.p.a.ce to give any complete argument as to the merits of these two theories-for which the reader must resort to the works of Jung and Coomaraswamy

r Jung, Psychological Types (London and New York, 1933), p. 602. 2 Hinduism and Buddhism (New York, 1943), p. 33, n. 2r.

quoted in the course of this book .l The argument about the nature of Mythology must now be brought to the same rather arbitrary conclusion as the argument about the nature of Christianity-if this book is ever to begin. For it will be impossible in the field of so inexact a science either to please or to convince everybody, and, if pursued rigorously, the whole endeavour will resemble the race between Achilles and the tortoise. The Achilles of scientific scholars.h.i.+p will never catch up with the tortoise of the subject, because it must ever stop to split hairs, and to split split hairs ad infinitum.

An entirely different solution to the problem of this book would be to explain the Christian and Catholic mythology in the terms provided by the official doctrine of the Church. I am well aware that a strong argument can be made for this course, for the work of modern Catholic apologists such as von Hugel, Gilson, and Maritain is of the highest intellectual respectability. Yet this course has some overwhelming defects which, I think, will appear sufficiently in the course of this book so that at this point we need only summarize them.

The first is that the Church's official doctrine confuses its own position by trying to include within the myth, the dogma, statements which define the myth-as that the events described therein are historical or metaphysical facts, or that this myth is the only true myth. Now a statement which attempts to It is my great regret that at the time of writing this book I was unable to consult Jung's recent magnum opus on the symbolism of Christianity, the 384.page volume Aion, lately published in German. Neither have I been able to obtain access to nearly as many of the obscure writings of Coomaraswamy as I could have wished. Helen Ladd's marvelous bibliography of his works in Ars Islamica, vol. 9, I9, lists no less than 494 books, articles, and reviews from his hand, excluding many more written in the few years before his death. But the problems which confront anyone wis.h.i.+ng to make an exhaustive study of his researches are considerable, since he had a "squureLlike" tendency to bury the best of his knowledge in elaborate footnotes in articles contributed to the most obscure journals-often published in fardoff lands.

state something about itself is always a meaningless vicious circle-like trying to think about thought A while you are thinking thought A! It is thus that, on the authority of the Church or the Bible, one believes that this is the only true authority.

The second is that what I have called the philosopbia perennis does not have this defect, since the authority of its exponents is always corroborated by others, who speak from the standpoints of entirely different cultures and traditions. The Christian who maintains that, say, the doctrines ofthe Vedanta or of Mahayana Buddhism are inferior to his own, must not forget that he bases his judgement upon standards which he has acquired from Christianity-so that his conclusion is foregone or, more plainly, prejudiced. It would seem that in the present state of our knowledge of other spiritual traditions than the Christian, there is no further excuse for religious provincialism. This knowledge is now so extensive that it is becoming hard to see how anyone can be considered theologically competent, in the academic sense, unless thoroughly well versed in traditions outside the Christian alone.

The third, and perhaps most important, defect, is that the official doctrines betray a strange anxiety to prove the literal factuality of the myth as a basis for belief. But this believing in the myth, this anxious clinging to it as fact and certainty, utterly destroys its value and power. A G.o.d conceptually defined, a Christ believed in as a factual rock, is at once changed from a creative image to a dead idol. The anxiety to believe is the very opposite of faith, of selfsurrender to the truth-whatever it is or may turn out to be. In the philosophia perennis there never was any question of belief-of the fervent wish that truth be consoling-not because there is no wish to be consoled, but because of the clear understanding that the human being has emotions and desires of a nature so contradictory that they cannot be consoled by any truth! Further, more, the truth with which it is concerned is out of all relation to any beliefs or cherished ideas, since it is quite impossible to express it-save mythically or figuratively in any positive statement. This truth is one which mythology divines but does not define, and any attempt to understand it by treating its statements as if they were of a precise, historical, or scientific character is-if ever there was one-a sin against the light.'

There are two-rather understandable-reasons why cone temporary theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, close their minds to any interpretation of Christianity in the light of the philosophia perennis. One is the fear of a syncretism, of the growth of a new religion which will be a hodgepodge of the best elements" of the existing traditions, a development which has indeed been advocated by people of theosophical inclinations. But because the essential features of the philosophia perennis are complete in every great tradition, an arbitrary syncretism of the best elements" of all would undoubtedly leave out certain vital aspects of doctrine and symbol. By and large, a mythical tradition is not deliberately constructed; like every living thing, it grows-and an artificial syncretism would, in comparison, be a lifeless and rigid affair.

The other reason is a fear of the supposed individualism" and acosmism" of anything connected with mysticism. This is almost a case of the pot calling the kettle black, for what could be more individualistic than the claim of official Christianity to be the sole truth, or even the best version of the truth e The fact that such claims are made by a group makes them no less individualistic than when they are made by a single person. Such claims are, furthermore, as remote from the mind of any seer of the Rea" as anything could be, for it is transparently clear to him that his individuality is merely conventional, and that it is precisely to the degree that he is no more an individual that he enjoys knowledge of Reality. As ' To give the phrase its literal and proper meaning-to miss the point when it is luminously clear.

for "acosmism"-the notion that the whole conventional world is valueless and false-the philosophia perennis says no more than that "my kingdom is not of this world". The point is that conventions attain the value of art and beauty only when they are seen to be conventions, and are employed from a higher standpoint which is "not of this world". The conventions of time, s.p.a.ce, multiplicity, and duality are false until they are seen to be conventional, whereafter they are "redeemed" and attain the full dignity of art?

In the pages that follow, our main object will be to describe one of the most incomparably beautiful myths that has ever flowered from the mind of man, or from the unconscious processes which shape it and which are in some sense more than man. We shall not be concerned with how much of the myth is woven out of historical facts, and how much out of fiction-seeing that we have defined myth as any narrative, factual or fanciful, which is taken to signify the inner meaning of life. This is, furthermore, to be a description and not a history of Christian Mythology, which would require a work to itself, since our aim is to show what this flower is, and not how it might have been put together. After description, we shall attempt an interpretation of the myth along the general lines of the philosophia perennis, in order to bring out the truly catholic or universal character of the symbols, and to share the delight of discovering a fountain of wisdom in a realm where so many have long ceased to expect anything but a desert of plat.i.tudes.

Anyone who has studied Christianity by present/day methods employed in universities and theological schools must accustom himself to a rather unusual perspective in approaching Christianity as a coherent myth. Today, And one might note that the true artist does not rebel against the limitations of his media, but rejoices in the possibilities of how much can be expressed witb such limitations. The conventions and limitations of art are not abolished, but only changed, when all their possibilities have been exhausted.

Christianity is almost invariably studied as an historical development out of Hebrew and Greek origins. If we were to follow this method, we would have to approach Christian Mythology through preliminary chapters on Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, a.s.syrian, Persian, GraecoRoman, Celtic, and Teutonic Mythology. But this kind of historical perspec, five was not the worldview of the Patristic and Scholastic ages, during which the Christian Myth came to full flower. I with to describe the myth more or less as it would have appeared to a man living in the golden age of its power, say, the end of the thirteenth century.

For such a man, the centre of history was the appearance of Christ, and Al history was read in terms of Christ. That is to say, the Old Testament was read backwards, and regarded as a prefiguring of the Incarnation and the Church. The story of the Creation and the Fall of Man was read and understood in terms, not of primitive Hebrew mythology, but of the highly developed dogma of the Holy Trinity and of the Angelology and Cosmology of St. Dionysius pseudoAreopagite, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas.' Anyone who has visited the great mediaeval cathedrals of Europe or studied the pages of the illuminated ma.n.u.scripts will have noticed an entire absence of historical realism in the mediaeval mind. The patriarchs and prophets as well as the figures of the New Testament wear the clothes and live in the dwellings character, istic of Western Europe between 900 and 1400. Incidents from the Old and New Testaments are juxtaposed according to the theory of types, wherein the Tree of Knowledge stands opposite the Tree of the Cross, the Exodus opposite the Resurrection, the a.s.sumptions of Enoch and Elijah opposite the Ascension, and so forth. All this goes to show that the primary interest of the mediaeval mind was not so much the i For example, Genesis does not say that the serpent who tempted Eve was the fallen angel Lucifer or Saran, nor that the angelic world was created before our world.

history as the symbolism of the Christian story. The Feasts of the Church in which the faithful relived the events of this story were not mere historical commemorations, but rather ways of partic.i.p.ating in the rhythm, the very actuality, of the divine life. Of this life the historical events were the earthly manifestations, the doing of the will of G.o.d on earth as it is-per omnia saecula saeculorum-through all the ages of ages in heaven.

A similar s.h.i.+ft of perspective must apply to the ordering and interpretation of the sources of the Christian Myth. A modern Protestant would base everything on the Bible, but for a Catholic the primary source of Christian revelation is "Christ/ in/the/Church", or rather the Holy Spirit himself informing and inspiring the living Body of Christ. This gives rise to the Catholic principle lex orandi lex credendi-the law of wors.h.i.+p is the law of belief. Lex orandi, the law of wors.h.i.+p, is not mere liturgical rule; it is the state of the Church in wors.h.i.+p, which is to say, in the very act of union with G.o.d here and now. Thus the Church, in this authoritative position, promulgates, first, the Liturgy. This includes primarily the Ma.s.s and the Six other Sacraments, all of which are held to have been inst.i.tuted by Christ himself and thus to embody the earliest and most basic law of the Christian life. Second in order come the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and the Apocrypha, considered to have been written or approved by the Church in such a way that the authority of scripture derives from the Church, and not vice versa. Third in order come the Apostles and the Nicene Creeds, being the Churchs official summary of the essential points taught in both scripture and tradition. Fourth in order comes another part of the Liturgy, the Divine Office, contained in the Breviary and consisting of the day4oday wors.h.i.+p of the Church outside the Ma.s.s itself-composed of the Psalms with their seasonal antiphons, the official hymns of the Church, and various lections from the scriptures and the writings of the Fathers.

These sources, with the special perspective involved in their hierarchical arrangement, give the basic structure of the Christian Myth, and as the bare branches of a tree are filled in with innumerable leaves and Rowers, this structure is enfoliated with the vast wealth of symbolism in art and ceremonial, of legend, hagiography, and tradition, to make-as a veritable Tree of Life-one of the most complete and beautiful myths of all time.

CHAPTER I.

In the Beginning In the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with G.o.d, And G.o.d was the Word.

He was in the beginning with G.o.d.'

'John is t-z. "In the beginning", is en arche or in principio, the same as the "once upon a time" which begins all folktales. Mythology is the representation of the supernatural, the unthinkable and unknowable, in terms of sensible images having spatial and temporal dimensions, apart from which the mind cannot think at all. G.o.d is perforce represented as having existed from an everlasting past, from beginningless time. But it is a useful reminder of the relativity of all mythological images to make the following transposition of terms: Refer all references to the beginning of dme to that which underlies time, so that G.o.d is not merely first in a series of events but the ground or field in which the series takes place-not in time but beyond time. Similarly, all references to G.o.d or heaven as above may be translated within-i.e. at the very centre of things, since "the kingdom of heaven is within you". For the myth is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual fact-that is, of the unconscious origin of consciousness, of that which sees and knows, but does not become its own object of sight or knowledge. Myth portrays or divines that which we cannot