The "Truth" of Symbol Part I (Demanding Evidence part 2)

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Hi all,

In the “Demanding Evidence” thread OP I carved out a space within which demands for evidence in support of claims of religious beliefs need not be respected. It is a small space, but nevertheless… Before trying out this argument in conversation with others, I would have expected that any objections to a space that beliefs can occupy without public justification would have come mostly from the atheist side of the argument, and I would have thought that a believer would appreciate the effort in trying to find such a space. In my experience that has not been the case. Fundamentalist Christians in particular tend object to such a notion. The Fundamentalist way of being religious is distinct from other ways in that it involves taking the Bible to be historical in places where other more moderate Christians see the Bible as metaphorical. People who have other ways of being religious criticize the Fundamentalist view that the Bible should be read as literal history, but most Christians, even ones who take a liberal view in interpreting the Bible, seem to take at least some parts of the Bible as historical. The term “Fundamentalist” then seems to be used to talk about disagreement as to which parts should be considered historical and which as metaphor rather than the difference between seeing Christianity as an assertion of historical truth or not. Almost every Christian I am aware of sees affirming the historical truth of at least some claims (e.g. the crucifixion and the resurrection) as important to Christianity–they are almost all Fundamentalists to greater or lesser degree–and with such claims come the obligation to provide evidence in support of these beliefs which are intended as participation in the public project of doing history.

What is criticized as Fundamentalism by more liberal interpreters of scripture is an extreme version of a common error to which believers as well as nonbelievers are susceptible. Joseph Campbell explained that theists and atheists tend to have positions which are two sides of the same coin. He notes that both athiests and theists tend to mistakenly read myths as if they were historical records. The only difference being that one says that these myths are historically true while the other says that they are historically false. Given these choices, the atheist certainly has the intellectual high ground in denying the scientific truth of two and three thousand year-old cosmologies and the historical truth of legends growing around the various religion’s prophets, but Campbell argues that both sides are guilty of missing the point of myths. In Campbell’s view, historical and scientific truth are completely separate issues from that of the truth of myth. Myths should be read with an ear for symbol and metaphor rather than with the criteria for discernment of historical or scientific fact.

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Campbell and the truth of myth
Joseph Campbell is most popularly remembered for his PBS series “The Power of Myth” with Bill Moyers. The series of interviews which took place at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch*, was broadcast in 1988, one year after Campbell’s death. (*Campbell’s “The Heroes Journey” was credited by Lucas as helping him create a universally resonant structure for the Star Wars films.) At the time of the interviews, Campbell was at the end of a long career articulating a way of reading the world’s myths as psychology rather than as history. Campbell said, “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums…” In other words, myths misread as factual accounts are dead myths, false history, and bad science rather than vital stories of a completely different concern from the facts of history. Reading myth as history rather than reading myth as symbolic is the common error that unites and thus defines atheists and Fundamentalist theists.

Campbell faults modern religious adherents for, in effect, worshipping the finger in their hypostatization of religious symbols. They are frequently “…unable to grasp the idea of a worship that is not of the symbol but of its reference, which is of a mystery of much greater age and of more immediate inward reality than the name-and-form of any historical ethnic idea of a deity, whatsoever … and is of a sophistication that makes the sentimentalism of our popular Bible-story theology seem undeveloped.” In affirming the truth of religious mythology, Fundamentalists are asserting the scientific-historical truth of the writings of people who never could have intended such because they wrote in a pre-scientific era. The most sincere believers then often misinterpret the myths of their own religious traditions entirely and instead are merely clinging to bad history and bad science in the guise of faith.

To understand Campbell’s perspective on reading myths as symbolic, he suggests that we read the myths of other cultures rather than those of our own, “…because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts–but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. Myth tells you what the experience is.” When we read with our modern sensibilities the myths of our own culture which were written in pre-scientific times, we don’t hear the stories the way they would have been heard at the time they were written. If we want to try to listen to the ancient stories as they would have been heard in the past, we have to listen with poetic ears. The mistake that we so often make with regard to ancient myths is in reading symbols in terms of prose rather than listening with an ear for metaphor. We hear the literal denotation instead of the metaphorical connotation in the symbols of myths.

Campbell said, "The function of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of “Aha! Yes. I know what it is, it’s myself.” To use a Buddhist metaphor, symbols are fingers pointing to the moon–symbols that point to “That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought. The myth puts you there all the time, gives you a line to connect with that mystery which you are.” When we take such symbols literally, we are focussing on the finger rather than allowing ourselves to be guided to that to which the finger points.

Atheists are apt to read such myths in this same way that theists typically do and point out that these myths, read as history, are obviously false. To such claims Campbell counters, “Mythology is not a lie. Mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.” While Campbell endorses metaphorical rather than historical interpretation of myths, he would bristle at the phrase “merely metaphorical” and the implication that metaphorical truth has second-class status when compared to historical truth. For Campbell, the truth of myth is a much deeper and significant sort of truth than the truth of science and history. Since I have a tendency to be a literal rather than a literary thinker myself, poetry has little affect on me, and such an account of the truth of myth is appealing but sounds somewhat like evasion and obfuscation. How can we know that there are deep truths that can be known and not told? Accepting Campbell’s premise prevents us from even asking for examples of such truths since whatever they may be, he simply can’t tell us because by his definition, mythical truths can’t be articulated.

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Mythos-over-logos
How can we possibly become convinced of the existence of any true assertions that cannot be told? If such truths are unknowable, then does it make any practical difference whether we say that they do or do not exist? Campbell claims that though such truths can not be put into words, they can be hinted at through stories. As a pragmatist, I can grant that a group of people who find meaning in one story have different habits of action than those of a another group who interpret their experience in light of other stories. Such differences in belief, whether or not belief is even the right word, pass the pragmatic test that any difference must make a difference since they do indeed make a difference–that sort of difference we are referring to when we say that such groups have different cultures. Whether or not the orientation toward one set of myths or another is rightly called belief, and whether or not it is coherent to talk about the truth of a myth, I think Campbell is right that such stories and myths are at the bottom of how we interpret our experiences. In other words, the meaning of life is conveyed through myths and all other stories through which we make sense of the world. The meaning of life–what it means to be alive–is not a set of propositions to be affirmed or denied. It is not any single truth or any single set of truths to be known since there are so many forms of life. It is in this sense entirely unknowable.

Campbell treats the unknowable to which myths point as something that can only be seen out of the corner of the eye in our peripheral vision. If we try to look directly at it, it simply dissolves. It can’t be put into literal terms, but it can be pointed to with symbols and metaphors. The unknowable–the meaning of life–cannot be adequately expressed in language because it it is alive and dynamic while descriptions of the unknowable, once they are expressed, are fixed and static. Poetic use of myth as metaphor is a way of maximizing whatever dynamic potential language may have as symbol for conveying the unknowable with the inherently static signs of language. Yet it is not clear to me that we can talk about truths revealed about the unknowable since the unknowable cannot be known, so instead of talk about a given myth as being true or false, I favor the terms “live” and “dead.” (I’ll return to this suggestion later.)

Though I have concerns about whether “truth” is the right word at all for describing the quality of a given myth as Campbell sometimes (though not often) does, I still find a lot of value in the way Campbell unpacks the world’s myths. Myths in Campbell’s view are not historical fabrications but rather “eternal truths”–truths that stand appart from affirmations and negations of historicity–and affirming the validity of such myths then need not conflict in any way with the account of reality offered by scientific and historical inquiry since such pursuits have separate purposes and can stay out of one another’s way.

I agree with Campbell and the mythos-over-logos thesis which says that it is only through such stories that we make sense of our experience and come to even have such concerns as historical and scientific truth. The mythos is the broad story of a culture from which members of a culture draw their shared meanings and values. As Neils Bohr said, “we are suspended in language.” The mythos is whatever sustaining substance such language can be thought of as having. Joseph Campbell thinks that metaphor is our best hope for getting “past all categories of definition” to have a sense of our own suspension in language to understand the mythos in which we ourselves are dissolved.

The logos, on the other hand, is the intellectual content of language. In purely intellectual terms, an assertion only has meaning because of its inferential relations to other assertions. The mythos is what grounds the logos as relevant to human experience. Neither a single intellectual assertion nor even the logos taken as a whole can contain the mythos because the logos is in a sense made of myth. Just as we are suspended in language, the logos is suspended in the mythos. Any supposed utterly demythologized propositions needed to explain the intellectual meaning of a system of mythology could themselves have no meaning since myths and other stories are what give any content to our sentences beyond the inferential connections our sentences have to other sentences.

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Atheists and theists
Campbell laments the state of affairs between atheists and theists and their lack of understanding of mythology as metaphor in his book, Thou Art That. He wrote “…we have people who consider themselves as believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think that religious metaphors are lies.” Where such is the case both sides have missed the point. Campbell would agree with the atheist who insists that religious myths don’t stand up to the criteria for affirming them as historical or scientific truth, but he would also be quick to add that the historical question is moot. The power of a myth lies not in that it actually happened at some particular time in history. Whether or not it ever did is irrelevent since the answer to such a yes/no question could never bear the heavy burden of the meaning of life. The power of a well-functioning myth lies in the truth that it happens all the time. A myth is true for Campbell if it is happening in some sense even right now.

As I suggested earlier, to say that a myth is true may be better put to say that it is live. A myth is live if it is actively performing its function of conveying what it means for us to be alive. If we think of myth as performing that broad function, we can see the inherent problem with looking to words to contain such “truths” about life’s meaning (if we agree to follow Campbell only this far in using the term “truth” in this context). Language can’t hope to contain what it means for us to be alive if such meanings need to be presupposed for words themselves to have any meaning. A myth is then not only a finger pointing to the moon where interpreters are prone to the problem of finger/moon confusion. (Campbell spent his long and fruitful career trying to cure us of this ailment.) Based on the mythos-over-logos thesis unpacked above, interpreting a myth also has the problem of an eye trying to see itself or of a smaller container trying contain a larger one, so any intellectual intepretation of a myth should begin with an understanding of the futility of the endeavor. Because of this problem, myths need to be continually re-interpreted and old interpretations need to be criticized or they cease to function as live myth. We will see the same emphasis on self-negation as theologian Paul Tillich explains the term “faith” in the next post as I continue to explore how being religious perhaps may be practiced in such a way that it need not run into demands for evidence on scientific and historical grounds. Such ways of being religious would need to include a Campbell-like perspective on religious myth as myth, as symbol and metaphor rather than as claims to scientific and historical truth.

Do any Catholics ever have this sort of perspective on myth, or do all Catholics think it is important to assert the historical factuality of events described in scripture?

Best,
Leela
 
Hold up, Leela! We’re not done with “Demanding Evidence part I” yet!🙂
 
Leela said:
The only difference being that one says that these myths are historically true while the other says that they are historically false. Given these choices, the atheist certainly has the intellectual high ground in denying the scientific truth of two and three thousand year-old cosmologies and the historical truth of legends growing around the various religion’s prophets, but Campbell argues that both sides are guilty of missing the point of myths. In Campbell’s view, historical and scientific truth are completely separate issues from that of the truth of myth. Myths should be read with an ear for symbol and metaphor rather than with the criteria for discernment of historical or scientific fact.

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they are historical records, and they can be metaphorical as well its not like its all one giant book, or even a single story to a book. science doesnt have anything to say about the veracity or plausibility of Biblical events.

we have as much proof for the various events in the books of the Bible as we have for the moonlanding, the original magna carta, or world war one.
 
Leela said:
Atheists are apt to read such myths in this same way that theists typically do and point out that these myths, read as history, are obviously false.
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which part is obviously false, name any you would like.
 
Leela said:
Do any Catholics ever have this sort of perspective on myth, or do all Catholics think it is important to assert the historical factuality of events described in scripture?

Best,
Leela
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most events are historically factual, like Jonah and the Wale, some are metaphorical like the parables.
 
Leela said:
Do any Catholics ever have this sort of perspective on myth, or do all Catholics think it is important to assert the historical factuality of events described in scripture?
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Interesting comments, and I’m glad that you are willing to seek, not presuming that you’ve already found…

The Bible functions both mythically and historically. You are right to point out that a merely historical reading is perfectly pointless, but I think that a fully mythical interpretation misses the point as well. Campbell and similar authors seem to have the opinion (correct me if I’m wrong) that “there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy”, and yet it’s all “behind the curtain”, waiting to be revealed. But if God exists, why should there not be wonders all around us, if only we had eyes to see?

Tillich, as I’ve mentioned before, seems to have some significant insights about faith. And yet, I’m afraid you will find that his own opposition to “collectivism” leads him to an overly individualistic (and perhaps overly intellectual) approach to meaning. In the aftermath of two world wars, such extreme existentialism was quite compelling, but this was an overreaction. People find meaning by being a part of something bigger than themselves.

Perhaps the question to ask is this: why does a thinker like Tillich want to downplay the historicity of Biblical events? Doesn’t this allow for greater individual freedom of interpretation? But is such freedom really a good thing?
 
warpspeedpetey said:
most events are historically factual, like Jonah and the Wale, some are metaphorical like the parables.
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This is your summary of the “greatest story ever told”?

Can you give me the information about the historical facts of Jonah and the Whale?
 
StrawberryJam said:
This is your summary of the “greatest story ever told”?

Can you give me the information about the historical facts of Jonah and the Whale?
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sure. Jonah Got swallowed by a whale or big fish for three days. he got out, etc. im sure you know the story.
 
warpspeedpetey said:
of course, what reason do you suppose them not to be the historical facts?

i dont believe in magic, i assume you dont believe in magic. so whats the problem?
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The burden of proof lies with the one making the statement, as you are aware I hope.

So let’s backtrack. I hope you realize that catholics are not held to a literal understanding of the story of Jonah in the bible.

For some reason, you seem to think it is literal. I want to know more.
 
StrawberryJam said:
The burden of proof lies with the one making the statement, as you are aware I hope.
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my evidence is the Scriptures. do you have some kind of counter evidence?
So let’s backtrack. I hope you realize that catholics are not held to a literal understanding of the story of Jonah in the bible.
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of course, im Catholic myself.
I want to know more.
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and i want to know why you wouldnt hold it as literal?
 
warpspeedpetey said:
my evidence is the Scriptures. do you have some kind of counter evidence?

of course, im Catholic myself.

and i want to know why you wouldnt hold it as literal?
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Another facepalm

If a catholic does not have to see this story as literal, why should I? Furthermore, why should you? Please explain.
 
StrawberryJam said:
Another facepalm

If a catholic does not have to see this story as literal, why should I? Furthermore, why should you? Please explain.
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like i said, because the Scriptures say so. why dont you? ive asked acouple ties now and your not giving me any reason to disbelieve. i assume you dotn believe it. why?
 
warpspeedpetey said:
like i said, because the Scriptures say so. why dont you? ive asked acouple ties now and your not giving me any reason to disbelieve. i assume you dotn believe it. why?
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  1. the Scriptures don’t “say” anything, we read them to the best of our ability.
  2. I refuse to believe it is literal. I can’t say why without loosing charity. You can’t seem to say why and have all the freedom in the world here to do so.
 
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