In his book The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton presents a view of history that reveals how the longings in the heart of man throughout time, and his very journey through all the ages of our world, center upon Jesus Christ. It is he who reveals man to himself in revealing the true face of God, and it is he who unveils for us the true depth and beauty of our dignity and destiny—rooted as it is in the paternal love of the heavenly Father, who looks upon each one of us with incredible tenderness and cherishing delight, with a love that is neither dimmed nor obstructed by our sins, our foibles, and our brokenness, but rather stirred simply to seek us out, that we may return at last home into his everlasting embrace, into the welcoming bosom of the eternal Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—which is our true origin and our everlasting end.
One of the themes of this book by Chesterton is myth, an exploration of the religious longings and imaginations of humanity throughout its ancient history and even up to the present.* In his exploration it becomes apparent that man is a storyteller in his very nature, and that by telling stories he seeks to make sense of the meaning of the world and of his own place within it. And most especially he seeks to approach and to comprehend in some way—or better, to enter into contact with—the mystery of God.And yet these stories that man has made, these myths, are not meant to be history in the literal sense, nor do they aim to pin a name upon the nameless divinity that man cannot but aspire toward and worship. The only name by which God may truly be called is the name by which he calls himself and reveals himself to us.
Thus throughout history myth has been a religious activity, a spiritual aspiration, a form of primal theology and philosophy—indeed a particularly vivid and important form of human thought which includes all the different facets of human contemplation in a unified whole in a way that story alone can achieve.
But with the coming of Jesus Christ, the unnameable God has entered history; he has revealed not only his name but his face, indeed his open and exposed heart. He has unveiled before us our true origin in his creative love, and he has unveiled before us our destiny to find everlasting home in his embrace; and he has connected the two together, beginning and end, by the outpouring of his redeeming gift, by grace flowing from the Heart of Christ—Incarnate, Crucified, Risen, and Eucharistic—sweeping us up into the dramatic story of his own eternal life of intimacy and joy, and granting us to participate in it, and to share it with others, through every moment of this mortal life, until eternal life is ours.
This is the great adventure, the true journey, the story that makes sense of all other stories—a story that shall not cease with the last page of our mortal existence, but rather shall commence then in fullest and freest measure. All of our wanderings in this temporal world are but like the first chapter of a great epic, a never-ending story, a perfect romance. This God has revealed to us in the story of Christ, and in salvation history as a whole, from the first creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis to the final words of the book of Revelation, and indeed in this history as it continues to unfold within us and our history until the end of time. Yes, divine revelation takes up all the aspirations of man’s story-telling, of myth, and the glimpses of beauty and truth that it bears within it, and fulfills them. For this is the true story, which not only expresses truths about reality, but is the truth, the truth of God’s eternal being wedding itself to the concrete truth of historical time, and becoming the true story of humanity and of the entire cosmos. All man’s stories, therefore, both imagined and lived, are but participations in and expressions of, this great Story in which all things are contained, and in which is found endless adventure, wondrous discovery, ceaseless play, and ecstatic joy in the abundant embrace of perfect Love.
So if mankind has long approached the mystery of God and the world through a mythological theology, through creating stories that seek to make sense of the wonder and drama, the anguish and joy, the ugliness and beauty, of the cosmos, so since the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ—since his full entrance into the history of our world—we no longer need practice such a mythological theology. We no longer need approach God through our frail imaginings of what he might be like, giving a thousand faces to his mystery through the invention of a pantheon of gods or archetypal stories of good and evil. But this does not at all mean that we do not seek, nor need, to weave the tapestries of beautiful stories in order to unfold all the richness contained within the great events of salvation history, the richness of God’s presence and activity in our own lives, and “the breadth, length, height, and depth of the love of Christ, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:18-19).
Rather, meeting us precisely in the incarnate richness of our historical humanity, God meets us as the great Storyteller speaking to created storytellers, and, by giving us our true Story, he enables us to tell stories anew, and more deeply still, in the light of his love and his activity that ever shines upon us. Thus the religious longing, the human aspiration, and the story and thought by which man has sought to make sense of reality—in the light of God’s redeeming activity in Christ—gives way now to Christian theology and philosophy, to liturgy and life, to ethics and evangelization, and to all the beauty of life bathed in the radiance of the Trinity’s Love. But this is not all, for man remains a storyteller, even as his story is ever being told by God’s loving voice spoken within him and by his own joyful and humble cooperation. Thus man’s stories do not cease when his true story is revealed. Rather they deepen and expand. What was before a mythological theology now becomes, among many other things, a theological mythology.
Within the light that shines from the eternal Word made flesh, one can look anew upon the world, and upon the creative work of the imagination, and bring forth stories that manifest the truth of this Word in various ways, giving a true “exegesis” of the Gospel reality even while respecting both the transcended historical reality of the events of salvation history and the integrity of the co-created, imaginary story. A splendid example of this is the early mythology of the world fashioned by J.R.R. Tolkien, found in The Silmarillion, in which he gives a creation story of the world Arda, which is the same as our own world, unveiled as it were in its “lost history.” It is a story that aligns completely with the truths of Biblical revelation and is undoubtedly indebted to them, and yet does not merely repeat or allegorically interpret the Bible. Rather, the tale of the creative love of Eru Ilúvatar and the Ainur whom he fashions, who sing the world into existence and many of whom become the Valar, the guardians of the world and its history, illustrates a wholly Catholic vision of history and of the world. It is the fruit of a mind and imagination impregnated with the truths of the faith, and yet which creates not primarily as a form of evangelization or apologetics, but in sheer love and playful wonder—in the image of the Creator himself.
And this wonder and play, this gratuitous creativity, is the key that makes myth so fruitful also as theology, as exegesis, for it is a form of contemplating the beauty of the real, and especially the beauty of the face of the Triune God, in the medium of storytelling. This face is veiled, but it is veiled in order to draw near and reveal itself to us at the heart of our own imagination and the awe that we feel before a truly good story. In fact, there are so many themes that can be treated, and into which we can plunge our hearts, in the creation of fantasy, as in all story, though here with a special depth and freedom. This has been what has inspired my heart in the writing of the Dawnbringer myth, fruit of an awareness, and a world, that has been present and growing since my adolescence.
A heart that gazes long and deeply upon the majesty and beauty of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and upon their loving work in this world and in the intimate recesses of human hearts, cannot but manifest this also in their creative storytelling. And though human storytelling always falls short of the Word—not only the Word who is the Son in the bosom of the Father and the Word that is his activity in the world, recorded in Scripture—but also of the word of inspiration to create placed in the human heart itself, it is a true word nonetheless. In fact, in my opinion The Silmarillion of Tolkien is a deeper and richer myth than The Lord of the Rings, and for one reason in particular: in the former he did not veil the presence of the divine and the aspiration of man toward the divine. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explicitly removed all references to religion, faith, and prayer so that “the religious element could be woven into the story itself.” And this has made the story accessible to millions even of those who do not share Tolkien’s faith; and many of these indeed have been led to faith through this story.
But in my own longtime acquaintance with the LOTR, I have felt ever more keenly the absence of God and of the religious impulse of man. I have felt keenly that the “veiling” that Tolkien sought to achieve in The Lord of the Rings has also limited the depth and breadth with which he could explore the deepest longings and aspirations of the human heart. This has inevitably led to a certain diminishing of the “vertical” dimension of the story and its innate word concerning the religious and spiritual nature of man. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I think that the absence of Eru Ilúvatar and of the Valar—and of nearly all references to any sort of relationship with the divine—in the LOTR is an impoverishment of the depth to which the story goes, and of the realities that it could unfold before our gaze. It makes its intimacy to the heart that seeks God and prays to him less than it could be, a “far-off gleam” of the Gospel, to use Tolkien’s words; but what I want is not a far-off gleam, but an intimate participation, a profound exploration of the drama unfolding between God and human hearts even in the very heart of myth. Of course, this “veiling” and limiting may precisely have been both Tolkien’s and indeed God’s intention regarding The Lord of the Rings, and the story is all that it was meant to be. And the rest of his legendarium helps to flesh out these aspects as well.*
But I believe that we need other stories that are not afraid to explicitly plunge the depths of the erosic longing in the heart of man to return to his Creator, nor to explore the center and pinnacle of human life as faith and prayer, nor the foundational fact that when God is forgotten, the face of the creature itself is obscured and eventually shatters into absurdity. Yes, myth need not be content only with “natural theology,” with the general truths about the God discerned in nature and conscience, about the mysterious providence that works all for good while remaining hidden (even though behind this certainly stands all the richness of the revealed God, illumining and teaching), but can also explore the central truths of revelation in God’s fatherhood, in the call to intimacy with God as the heart of human existence and the very purpose of life and our everlasting destiny, and the profound closeness of God’s love in every moment. After all, other stories are not afraid to treat explicitly of the religious dimension, even if they do so often in a profoundly inadequate or even atheistic way—for example A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire), as well as in all the stories set in The Forgotten Realms (the Dungeons and Dragons universe). These have gods and religion, clerics and paladins and temples and prayers, and I think in fact that they tug deeply on the hearts of so many people precisely because they speak openly to these longings and capacities within us. They allow us to explicitly process and fictionally enact these capacities. Nonbelievers and atheists rarely seem to be put-off by the presence of the divine in these worlds, indeed it seems an important part of them. How beautiful an avenue, then, to explore all that is deepest within us, this common longing and capacity in the humanity of all of us for communion with the divine!
This is a delicate path to walk, of course, such that the exploration of faith and prayer, of pain and providence, of the gods and the true God, of angels and demons, of the spiritual journey to heaven and the earthly journey through the heroic quest, does not become a card-board thin allegory or a preachy pastiche. But I am convinced not only that it can be done, but that it must be done. I am convinced that myth-making not only can but must be a dimension of humanity’s dialogue with God, and a means by which we both seek his face and also seek to unveil his face, his true nature, that it may appear on the page before us, filling our storytelling to overflowing with his transcendent yet immanent presence, and lifting these stories hereby to a whole new level of depth and beauty, not thereby destroying their integrity and beauty, but fulfilling them.
Yes, we remain ever creators and imaginers, since we bear in us the image and likeness of the one true Creator. Storytelling is part of our dialogue with our Creator, an aspect of the gift of ourselves back to him who first gave himself to us, and in this gift gave us all things. We thus yearn spontaneously to co-create, to sub-create by the light that shines within us, and to give expression to the beauty and meaning that we behold, and which touches our hearts. And when God is fully revealed to us—in the breathtakingly beautiful drama, the ravishing story that is the Gospel—this storytelling bursts open in depth and beauty. For God’s salvation does not just stir conceptual thought or study, but it also fecundates our imaginations and fires our sense of adventure; it stirs us both to think and to imagine, to imagine and to live, all as part of that flowing current of love that surges on like a river throughout every moment of our life, carried from Love unto Love by Love, unto the consummation that awaits us in the new creation, in the definitive happily-ever-after where God shall be All in all, and all shall be fulfilled in him.
I truly do believe that storytelling, and in particular fantasy, faerie story, mythology (whatever name we give to it) is and should be another theological expression of the richness of the Gospel, standing alongside theology and philosophy and unfolding it in the way that is so unique and proper to storytelling. For here anew the “Word becomes flesh,” and the mystery of reality becomes present within us in a vivid way, permeating places of our life that remain recumbent, that they may be evangelized by the light of God’s love and truth, and may shine in his light, unfolding in the dramatic story that he intends for us. And indeed, how can the heart so touched by such love, and caught up in such a story, not become a storyteller in response? And the heart does this, not merely to teach lessons or to share the Gospel with others (though this also is true) but also simply because such is the attitude and action of a child, born of ceaseless wonder at the miracle of reality and at the undeserved gift of existence, and in the abiding play that is the truest and highest activity of humanity, indeed the very nature of the everlasting life of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
****NOTES****
*To summarize more holistically and succinctly this theme in Chesterton’s book, we can provide a direct quotation: he says that Christianity “met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story” (p. 310).
*I will give two examples of how theological realities can be expressed mythically while becoming neither allegorical nor preachy, but rather profound explorations of the real in a mythical context. In a less-known work (Morgoth’s Ring, Vol. 10 of The History of Middle-Earth), Tolkien portrays a conversation in which elves intuit the necessity of the Incarnation: “I cannot see how else this healing could be achieved. Since Eru will surely not suffer Melkor [the devil-figure] to turn the world to his own will and to triumph in the end. Yet there is no power conceivably greater than Melkor save Eru only. Therefore Eru, if He will not relinquish His work to Melkor, who must else proceed to mastery, then Eru must come in to conquer him.” And even more fundamentally, a quote from the creation account in The Silmarillion: Eru speaks, and says,“‘Therefore I say: Eä! Let these things Be! And I will send forth into the Void the Flame Imperishable, and it shall be at the heart of the World, and the World shall Be…’ And suddenly the Ainur saw afar off a light, as it were a cloud with a living heart of flame…”