This doesn’t sound like Lewis on the foreshadowings and “good dreams” of pagan myth. Where does he say this? (I know—I don’t like it either when people make me dig through my library looking for something. Sorry.) :hypno:
Here are a few quotes from Lewis:
from a letter of October 18, 1931
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I like it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that
it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myth: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is
true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get
out of the true myths are of course
less true: they are translations into our
concepts and
ideas of the wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also
nearly certain that it really happened.
from the essay “Myth Became Fact” (1944)
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God,
without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It
happens–at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order)
under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myth. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.
from the “Preface” to George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946)
[Myth] may even be one of the greatest arts; for it produces works which give . . . as much delight . . . as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest poets. . . . It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and ‘possessed joys not promised to our birth!’ It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives.
A lot of criticisms do seem to take for granted that intention does not matter - that if one is using incense, & as the Romans did, one is behaving like a pagan: even if
- which means: Mr. Spock = the 666. I reckon this PROVES St. John had TV.