A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
more and more myths. Myth arises from “gleams of celestial strength and beauty failing on a jungle of filth and imbecility,” as he put it in Perelandra. A “pressure from God” lay upon the Pagan mythmakers. Yet they would have been as surprised as anyone else if they had learned that they were talking a better thing than they ever dreamed.
If Pagan sources did so well, what of sacred ones? We have two excellent reasons, says Lewis, for accepting the truth of the biblical second meanings. One is that they are holy and inspired, the other that our Lord himself taught it and indeed claimed to be the second meaning of many Old Testament passages such as Isaiah 53, the Sufferer in Psalm 22, the King in Psalms 2 and 72, and the Incarnation in Psalm 45. Lewis confesses that though he once believed the interpretation of the Bridegroom as Christ in the Song of Songs was “frigid and far-fetched,” he later began to discover that even in this instance there might be second meanings that are not arbitrary and meanings indeed that spring from depths one would not suspect.
As to the inspiration of the Bible, he does not consider the Old Testament as “the Word of God” if by that we mean that each passage, in itself, gives us impeccable science or history. Rather, the Old Testament “carries” the Word of God, and we should use it not as “an encyclopedia or an encyclical” but “by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.” He cites St. Jerome’s remark that Moses described the creation “after the manner of a popular poet” and Calvin’s doubt whether Job were actual history as his own views also. The fact that miracles are recorded in the Old Testament has nothing to do with his view on inspiration. Belief in God includes belief in his supernatural powers.
Lewis is even willing to accept the Genesis account of creation as derived from, though a great improvement upon, earlier Semitic stories, which were Pagan and mythical—provided “derived from” is interpreted to mean that the retellers were themselves guided by God. And so with the whole of the Old Testament. It consists of the same kind of material, says Lewis, as any other literature, yet “taken into the service of God’s word.” God of course does not condone the sin revealed in the cursing Psalms but causes his word to go forth even through the written account of sin and the sinner who wrote it. We must even suppose that the canonizing and the work of redactors and editors are under some kind of “Divine pressure.”
One might be at first inclined, says Lewis, to think that God made a mistake in giving us such a Bible rather than a rigorously systematic statement of his truth in a form as unrefracted as that of the multiplication table. But even the teaching of Christ, “in which there is no imperfection,” does not come to us in that manner and is not a thing for the intellect alone but rather something for the whole person. Understanding the true meaning of Christ is not learning a “subject” but rather “steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself.”
The seeming imperfection in the way the Bible is composed may be an illusion. “It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way—to find the Word in it, not without repeated and leisurely reading nor without discriminations made by our conscience and our critical faculties, to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God’s gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works. . . . Certainly it seems to me that from having had to reach what is really the Voice of God in the cursing Psalms through all the horrible distortions of the human medium, I have gained something I might not have gained from a flawless, ethical exposition.” Even the “nihilism” of Ecclesiastes with its “clear, cold picture of life without God” is a part of God’s Word.
In view of the importance of scriptural inspiration to many Christians, I take the liberty of submitting here an additional comment that Professor Lewis was kind enough to send me.
I enclose what, at such short notice, I feel able to say on this question. If it is at all likely to upset anyone, throw it in the waste paper basket. Remember too that it is pretty tentative, much less an attempt to establish a view than a statement of the issue on which, whether rightly or wrongly, I have come to work. To me the curious thing is that neither in my own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question in fact ever assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone—both first class as literature—is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question ‘Is Ruth historical?’ (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It can still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g., the Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened, but the value of others (e.g., the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain.
To Lewis the story of creation in Genesis is mythical, but that does not mean it is untrue. It means rather that it is truer than history itself. The account of Adam and Eve, God and an apple, symbolizes clearly a time long ago when catastrophe fell upon mankind. “For all I can see,” says Lewis, “it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no consequence.” Indeed, one might ask whether humanity and history are not actually as mysterious as myth. The great historians are quite agreed that to state the facts of history may be to leave out its essence, since history is made up both of objective, overt actions and also of the joys, agonies, and deep motives of the human soul. Christianity is the Christian creed, but it is also the glorious experience of God in the heart of a believer. We must not think we have a greater thing when we accept the “hypostasized abstract nouns” of a creed as more real than the myth which incorporates them and Reality itself. Melville once remarked that the true places are never down on any map. A myth is indeed to be defined by its very power to convey essence rather than outward fact, reality rather than semblance, the genuine rather than the accidental. It is the difference between the factual announcement of a wedding and the ineluctable joys actually incorporated in the event. Corbin S. Carnell says that for Lewis “the great myths of the Bible as well as of pagan literature refer not to the non-historical but rather to the non-describable. The historical correlative for something like the Genesis account of the creation and fall may be disputed. But the theological validity of the myth rests on its uniqueness as an account of real creation (out of nothing), on its psychological insight into the rebellious will, and on its clear statement that people have a special dignity by virtue of their being made in God’s ‘image.’”6 The historical correlative is less significant than the thing it signifies. All facts are misleading in proportion to their divergence from Eternal Fact.
Perhaps Marjorie E. Wright stated it correctly when she says that for Lewis and certain other writers Christianity itself is the great central historical embodiment of myth. “It is the archetypal myth of which all others are more or less distorted images.”7 Christ is the great Reality that makes every other reality a jarring note and cracked vessel. The trouble, says Lewis, is that we are so inveterately given to factualizing Christian truth it is practically impossible for us to hear God when he says that one day he will give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun.
Only once did myth ever become fact, and that was when the Word became flesh, when God became man. “This is not ‘a religion,’ nor ‘a philosophy.’ It is the summing up and actuality of them all.”
It would be a bad mistake to infer from what has been said in the last few paragraphs that Lewis regarded the Bible as simply another good book. He repeatedly calls it “Holy Scripture,” assures us that it bears the authority of God, sharply distinguishes even between the canon and the apocrypha, presses the historical reliability of the New Testament in particular, and often assures us that we must “go back to our Bibles,” even to the very words. The biblical account, says he, often turns out to be more accurate than our lengthy theological interpretations of it. It is all right to leave the words of the Bible for a moment to make some point clear. “But you must always go back. Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how