How Did Christianity "Fulfill" Pagan Myth?
Response to a question asked on Substack
SUBSTACK NATION (GLOB)—A man named Stephen Kent asked a question in that part of the Substack App where random stuff just shows up (you know the section in the menu bar that looks like Home Plate on a baseball diamond), and it forced art out of me. Well, an attempt anyway.
Stephen invited anyone to help him understand how Tolkien helped bring C.S. Lewis back to Christianity with the assertion that Christianity “fulfilled” much of pagan mythology. And that pagan myth was a precursor pointing to Christ.
It would help to understand how Tolkien viewed myth, and I think it fair to say that the writings of GK Chesterton were also an influence. Here is Tolkien on myth:
1. "On Fairy-Stories" (1939)
“The peculiar quality of 'joy' in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.”
"The eucatastrophe of the story, the sudden joyous turn, does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance."
2. Letter to Milton Waldman (1951)
"I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth,’ and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode."
This reflects the thought of Thomas Aquinas that “Whatever is received in something is in it according to the mode of the receiver, and not according to the mode of the giver.” This means, in effect, that if I want to send you a message, I need to send it to the radio station you are listening to. If you are on 910 AM and I am broadcasting on 93.3 FM, I should not be surprised that you don’t get my message. There is something in us that appreciates Story, and is well disposed to receiving information in this manner.
3. The "Mythopoeia" Poem (c. 1931)
This poem, written for C.S. Lewis, challenges the idea that myths are "lies breathed through silver."
“He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued.”
4. Tolkien and Lewis’s "Great Conversation" (c. 1931)
Tolkien likened myth to glimpses of the true myth, which he saw as fulfilled in Christianity.
5. Letter to his son Christopher (1944)
In a wartime letter, Tolkien wrote:
"We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God."
Elsewhere, Tolkien suggests that all the great myths involved great loss, and triumph over evil. For him, the echo of these in the story of Christ was clear.
Tolkien wasn’t the only one who saw this. Decades before, Chesterton had already laid the groundwork for this way of seeing myth.
From Orthodoxy (1908)
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”
“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learned in the nursery... The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.”
“The test of all happiness is gratitude.”
From The Everlasting Man (1925)
“Paganism was the biggest thing in the world, and Christianity was bigger and came to meet it. The Church is bigger than the world.”
“There is something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it means it means violently.”
From Tremendous Trifles (1909)
“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”
From The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
“We are on the wrong side of the tapestry.”
What I get from all this is that the pagan myths, wild stories that they may be, have had staying power and are regularly revisited in one way or another. One may think we have moved past myth, but then how does one explain the explosive success of all the super hero movies; what are they but riffs on the gods and goddesses, myths and legends of pagan origin?
The contention of Tolkien and Chesterton is that these myths are echoes of a deeper truth, something woven into the fabric of our being, the tapestry of existence, if you will. We all feel it, don’t we? That sense of loss, of something missing, of things being broken in some deep way that cries out, nay demands mending. The yearning for justice and mercy. These myths are glimpses of the True Story, the one that finds its fulfillment, not in legend, not in super hero movies, but in Christ.
Tolkien helped Lewis see that myths weren’t just stories—they were shadows of something real. And when Lewis followed those shadows to their source, he found Christ.
It's also important to note how influenced Lewis was by Frazier's "The Golden Bough" which claimed that Christianity was just a copy of earlier pagan myths. The main argument was that there are many parallels between pagan myths and the gospels, therefore the gospels were just a retooling of earlier myths. What Tolkien helped Lewis realize was that there may be parallels between the old myths and Christianity because Christianity is the fulfillment of those myths, the myth made real. Lewis writes about this in his essay "Religion Without Dogma?":
"If you start from a naturalistic philosophy, then something like the view of Euhemerus or the view of Frazer is likely to result. But I am not a naturalist. I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed—true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in storytelling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. We need here concern ourselves only with the latter. If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are, of course, instances of the same, or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation. To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. And I still think that the agnostic argument from similarities between Christianity and paganism works only if you know the answer. If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles, then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief."
He writes a bit more on this in his essay "Myth Became Fact":
"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."
He also discusses it in his autobiography, "Surprised by Joy":
"I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion—those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them—was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not “a religion”, nor “a philosophy”. It is the summing up and actuality of them all."