The issue of mythology arises in this article about the responses of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), and some related thinkers, to neopaganism in modern times. The article tells us:
In [the] judgment [of a philosopher supporting polytheism], man always needs myths, and the important thing is that these myths be numerous and open to infinite variations, as in ancient mythology, unlike Judaism and Christianity, which rest on unique and incontrovertible historical events.
I’d like to make two quick points. First, I’d like to give an opinion about the true nature of myths. Secondly, I’d like to comment on the refusal of most Christian thinkers to engage God’s Creation in the richer and more complex terms made possible by modern empirical knowledge.
In an earlier article, What is Wisdom?, I quoted with approval Garet Garret’s definition of wisdom:
Wisdom is the fumbling substitute for perfect knowledge. [The American Story by Garet Garret, Henry Regnery Company, 1955 and made available as a pdf file on lewrockwell.com through the generosity of Lew Rockwell and his associates.]
In a similar vein, I’ll provide this definition of myth:
A myth is an obscure telling of a part of the story which is our world, sometimes deliberately obscure.
As such, myth is an oft-abused tool of metaphysics and theology. It can be a useful tool. I don’t use myth in my metaphysical or theological writings but that’s largely because I live during a time when the major task for philosophers and theologians is to make sense of the empirical knowledge we’ve gathered over the past few centuries, knowledge of God’s work as Creator. Plato and Nietzsche used myths extensively and I have to say that I found Nietzsche’s honest critiques of decadent Christian thought to be more useful in my journey as a Christian thinker than the writings of any modern Christian thinkers but Etienne Gilson and, maybe, Flannery O’Connor. Even Joseph Ratzinger takes the backseat to Nietzsche in insight into the problems of modern Western thought which is far too often little more than a senile version of Christian thought.
Nietzsche also provides a bridge to my second point, one related to claims made by Joseph Ratzinger and Etienne Gilson. I’ll not bother to separate the contributions by those two men and me.
The Christians of the West built a home for the Christian Church and that home was called Western Civilization. In recent centuries, we haven’t proven ourselves worthy successors to those builders of the first 11 or so centuries of Christianity following the collapse of the Roman Empire. But ‘builders’ is perhaps the wrong term. A civilization is a large complex of human communities traveling through time. As such, it can be regarded as an evolving colony of organisms. In recent centuries, we haven’t proven ourselves worthy successors to those men and women who nurtured Western Civilization in the 11 or so centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire. We’ve wandered off to straight and wide and level paths which lie off the paths which Christians should be traveling. Those better and more demanding paths lead us towards the home of the Body of Christ and it is on those paths that the mortal Body of Christ will form. But those better paths lead us through dangerous and harsh regions and we prefer to travel in comfort. We prefer cheap and settled answers to responding to the puzzles which the Creator continually poses to living minds.
As a modern Christian thinker traveling apart from the herd, I’ll be blunt about those who travel with the herd. They’re analogous to bleached-white sepulchers. On the outside, they display regularity in structure which speaks of rigorous thinking and well-organized libraries. Inside, they’re just dead human systems of thought incompatible with the world outside of themselves. That world is God’s Creation and needs to be understood in terms of the best empirical knowledge of a specific age of men before the Bible and the Creeds can make sense to the men of that age.
Joseph Ratzinger isn’t guilty of this lack of responsiveness to reality but his — in a manner of speaking — entrapment in Church duties has kept him from developing his ideas. I think his way of moving Christian thought into the modern world wasn’t adequately empirical, that is — adequately respectful of God’s work as Creator of a particular Creation. Yet, despite Ratzinger’s reputation in some circles as being a rigid traditionalist, he wanted to move forward and would have likely at least inspired students to deal with modern empirical knowledge. See an earlier article, Hellenistic Metaphysics is Too Small, for my critique of one of Pope Benedict’s talks on the subject of reason in the West and its Hellenistic foundations.
We the unworthy successors of Augustine and Aquinas and Galileo should be modest in criticizing the pagans of the modern world who’ve attempted to make sense of this world as we Christians have remained safe and secure — or so we imagine — traveling in circles on our green pastures. If we wish to have a Christian civilization, we should put on our traveling clothes and start exploring the more dangerous paths that lead to the Body of Christ.
In any case, it seems that God is now at work destroying those pastures and forcing us to move somewhere.