Alone. Welcome to Mythic Mind. We would pursue wisdom of the past between
primary secondary worlds. I'm your host, Andrew Snyder, and I'm always grateful
for your company. Today, I'm gonna talk a bit about Tolkien's great poem
Mythepia. During my conversation with John Carswell a while back, he suggested that
I needed to cover this at some point in the series, and he was
right. But before I get to it, I want to thank all of
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meaningful community. But now onto Mythipia. To briefly give some background, this
is a poem written by Tolkien after having a conversation with not yet Christian C.
S. Lewis about the value of myths, which at the time Lewis
described as lives breathed through silver. And so in this poem, Tolkien is
addressing the value of myths and myth making. And I'm going to skip some
parts of the poem, not for lack of importance, but for the sake
of brevity, and also because I admit that I don't really know how copyright
laws apply here. But in any case, I'm gonna be going back and
forth of it between reading some stanzas and providing some reflections. Okay, so
Tolkien says you look at trees and label them just so for trees or trees
and growing is to grow. You walk the earth and tread with solemn paste.
One of the many minor globes of space. A star's a star,
some matter in a ball, compelled to courses mathematical amid the regimented cold inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain. See this is a profound problem
with the modern scientific worldview, namely that it is no worldview at all,
serving rather as a curtain hiding the true man pulling the levers, who himself
is not very scientific at all. You see, as I've discussed before,
science is not a worldview. It is a tool for empirically investigating the material
world, but it is incapable of operating in the realm of meaning. Science
can tell us what kind of rock we live on, and it can tell
us something of our trajectory in the vastness of space. Yet it can tell
us nothing of what any of this means, let alone what it means for
us, or how we ought to live upon it. Science, therefore,
is but a tool, the value of which depends on its intended use and
the skill of wielder in using it for an aim beyond itself. There's no
life beyond the mere world of what is, and even calling scientific facts alone
a world of what is is likely a misnomber because it existence itself is suspended
and more of a mythic metaphysical understanding. What kinds of things exists in this
world? And for what purpose? If we, proud people of science make
no room for such questions, and we come to find that there's no longer
any room for any of us either, just a world of cold facts interpreted
by cold facts, because an essence, that's all that we would be.
Yet everything about the history of human experience screams against us. Why would we
even be driven to pursue science if not for some value, for some response
to the world that continually presents itself to us as significant, that is,
with a significance that science itself can ever reveal, but can serve to amplify
if carried out with proper wonder. And so it's not merely that the scientific
way of seeing the world is wrong. It's actually disingenuous to even phrase it
that way, because the world itself is suspended in narrative, it's an attempt
to make human experience something that it is not and never could be. We
and by extent the cosmos itself, as it is revealed to us, are
bursting with life. I've recently been reading, or at least listening to C.
S. Lewis's Ransom trilogy, and if you have not made this journey
yourself, I would highly recommend that you do so. In any case,
Ransom, the protagonist on a less than desirable interplanetary journey, arrives at the
following beautiful realization concerning what we are trained to call space in Out of the
Silent Planet, Lewis writes. But Ransom, as time or on, became
aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightning and exaltation of heart.
A nightmare long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in
the wake of science, was falling off of him. He had read of
space at the back of his thinking for years, had lurked the dismal fancy
of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness which was supposed to separate
the worlds. He had not known how much of it affected him till now
now that the very name space seemed a blasphemous libel for his imperian ocean of
radiance, in which they swam. He could not call it dead. He
felt life pouring into him at every moment. How indeed could it be otherwise,
Since out of this ocean all of the worlds and all of the life
had come. He had thought it barren, and now saw that it was
the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly, even
upon the earth, with so many eyes, and here and how many more.
No space was the wrong name. With this, Lewis marvelously tells us
that there is no such thing as dead space. This universe is teeming with
life and with wonder, and Tolkien continues this a bit later along these lines
and takes a bit further, as he says of the myth maker, he
sees no stars who does not see them first of living silver made that set
in burst to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song, whose very echo after
music long has since pursued. There is no firmament, only avoid unless a
jewel tent, myth woven and elf patterned, and no earth unless the mother's
womb went, all have birth. The heart of man is not compound of
lies, but draws some wisdom from the only wise and still recalls him.
Though now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Disgraced
he may be, yet is not dethroned. He keeps the rags of lordship
once he owned his world dominion by creative act, not his to worship the
great artifact. Man subcreat the refracted light, through whom it is splintered from
a single white to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move
from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we filled with
elves and goblins, though we dare to build gods in their houses of dark
and light, and sowed the seats of dragon tways our right used are misused.
The right has not decayed. We've make still by the law in which
we're made. So the slack went on there first. Continuing this theme of
phenomenology, or how we experience the cosmos, he notes that we don't initially
see stars as these material things in the vacuum of space, but rather as
living silver blooming beneath a cosmic song. Our ancestors look to the stars,
and they saw gods, and they saw guides. The stars have been associated
with the angelic host and of course, we have been trained to leave such
things behind us as useless relics of old paganism or what maybe even worse,
medieval cosmology. Yet can we effort actually do this? Can any of us
look up at the stars on a clear night and see something beyond wonder and
a shifting perspective away from our petty little problems to something transcendently glorious. Our
stars mere facts among facts? Or are they living entities calling forth a song
that rises up in our souls and points us to something greater and more glorious?
Surely not. The stars are living things that speak to living things.
They burst, and they dance with the music of life that reverberates through all
glorious things. And they speak to the hearts of men, calling us both
to fear and to rejoice. Now, why is this now? On a
material level? We know that stars are material, or at least we think
we know what that means. And furthermore, I mean, who is to
say, after all, that material things must only be material? We certainly
don't say that of us. Why must that necessarily be the case with the
stars? In any case? Tolkien makes the point that we fallen into strange
as we may be cannot help but to draw wisdom from the wise and to
create in the image of whom we are created. God provides the primordial stuff
of existence, the raw facts. But we have the ability and the obligation
to create, not as God does, but in imitation of God's creation.
Just as God brought order out of chaos to establish the created order, so
too we take features of this created order and established new features out of our
ordering minds. And we do this constantly. Every time we envisioned what could
be, we're putting together a creation that is different than the world that currently
is. And so although we do not create ex nihilo as God does,
and thereby we are not capital see creators, we are subcreators making why that
creative law with which we ourselves are made. And this is why humans across
time are natural storytellers. This capacity can be misused and often is misused,
but the capacity itself is a glory of humanity. We interpret the world through
mythmaking, and of course not all interpretations are equally valid, which is why
there are good miss are bad myths. Good miss pull us into a grand
story than what we would experience by way of course, and Thereby they make
our lives grander bad miss alternatively provide myopic vision, or still worse, they
render us blind while calling it true vision. As Tolkien says in On Fairy
Stories, mythology is not a disease at all, though it may, like
all human things, become disease. Okay, So, skipping down a bit,
Tolkien continues, blessed are the legend makers, with their rhyme of things
not found within recorded time. It is not that they have forgot the night,
or bid us flee to organized delight in lotus aisles of economic bliss,
for swearing souls to gain a circuit kiss and counterfeit at that machine produced bogus
seduction of the twice seduced. Such aisles they saw far and once more fair,
And those that hear them yet may yet beware. They have seen death
and ultimate defeat. And yet they would not, in despair retreat, but
after victory, have tuned the lyre and enkindled hearts with legend ry fire illuminating
now in dark hath been with light of suns as yet by no man seen.
And so these legend makers, the myth makers, do tell of realities,
but not realities, bound within recorded time. You see recorded time deals
with changing realities. Real miss, however, true miss reside in the world
of being. They deal in eternal realities portrayed in temporal terms. In this
sense, they are ever true, which is why I hate when fiction is
categorically defined as being not true, because fiction, or at least good fiction,
is true, but in a manner that transcends mere facts. Good miss
therefore do not neglect reality, but they portray it in the most meaningful manners.
That C. S. Lewis writes in Myth Became Fact, that myth
is not like truth abstract, nor is it like direct experience bound to particular
It is rather the isthmus that connects these two realities together. And so the
good poets, the good myth makers, understand reality and present it in one
of the most meaningful ways to our experience. And I know that I find
this to be deeply true. It's one reason why I love Tolkien and Lewis,
as well as their various sources for inspiration. Tolkien has been particularly meaningful
to me, especially during a season of great sorrow which extends into my forever
present. Reading Tolkien has really given me solace as he does a remarkable job
of interweathing love, beauty, and sorrow in a profoundly Christian integration of hope.
And it's not as though I didn't already know such things on the doctrine
roal or the abstract level. The Tolkien's mythic telling connected these abstractions in a
deeply existential and meaningful way that made them more real for me, and I
believe that he's had a similar impact on many others as well. Because this
is the power of good myths. They help us to experience the things that
we know, as well as to experience new truths along the way. And
Tolkien continues with a rather powerful verse as he writes, I will not walk
with your progressive apes, erect and sapient before them gapes the dark abyss to
which their progress to ends, if by God's mercy progress ever ends, and
does not ceaselessly revolve the same unfruitful course with changing of a name. I
will not treat your dusty path and flat, denoting this and that, by
this and that your world immutable, wherein no part the little maker has with
Maker's art. I bound not yet before the iron crown, nor cast my
own small golden scepter down in the supposed worldview of scientific materialism with which we
have already dealt, we are simultaneously told that there's no meta narrative to human
existence and that history is continually marching toward progress. Now, this conundrum may
be a bit of a straw man, as it pulls into competing philosophies and
calls them one, but this absurd outcome is a popular position. Nonetheless,
it is behind many postmodern calls for progress. We hear the slogans all truth
is relative, there is no truth, live your truth. Morality is entirely
subjective. Yet we also talk of the right side of history, as morality
is built into the fibers of time, and so as long as we keep
up with the time, will be progressing ever higher compared to our brutish ancestors.
And there's Neanderthals who continue to oppose progress. And again, this progress
means abandoning meta narratives while pursuing our glorious destiny of enlightenment. No, leave
the notion of cold facts behind. Do not let scientism track you beneath the
iron bars of supposed facticity. Never forget your homeland or your destiny, you
still carry a small golden sceptor, revealing that you are commissioned to create and
to tell stories. We are storytellers, made by the original and the great
storyteller. To deny this is to shackle ourselves beneath the light, stealing iron,
crown wearing tyrant. Of all those who are by nature free, talking
continues in paradise. Perchance the eye may stray from gazing upon everlasting day,
to see the day illumined, and renew from mere truth, the likeness of
the true. Then, looking on the blessed land, twill see that all
is as it it is, and yet made free. Salvation changes not,
nor yet destroys garden, nor gardener, children, nor their toys. Evil
it will not see, for evil lies not in God's picture but in crooked
eyes, not in the source, but in malicious choice. And not in
the sound, but in the tuneless voice. In paradise they look no more
awry. And though they make anew, they make no lie. Be sure
they still will make, not being dead. And poets shall have flames upon
their head, and harps wear on their faultless fingers fall. There each shall
choose forever from the all this is a beautiful way to conclude, and I
don't even want to spoil it with commentary. If you'd like to continue on
this concluding theme further, be sure to listen to my episode on Leaf by
Niggle. But I think that I'll leave it there for now as a reminder,
welcome you to join our fellowship in the Mythic Mind community over at patreon
dot com slash Mythic Mind. And for now, until next time, I
wish you many me for roads ahead.