Transcript
Good evening. On behalf of the C.S. Lewis Society, I'd like to welcome each one of you here tonight. This is the last of six lectures in a series given by Dr. Clyde S. Kilby. Dr. Kilby arrived Wednesday from his college, as he calls it, which is Wheaton College, Illinois, where he has served as professor of English for over 30 years now and was chairman of the department for 15 of those years. Dr. Kilby is also
presently curator of the most complete collection of the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, and others. And in these past two days, he shared with us briefly on some of the thoughts of each of these men. The title of tonight's lecture is You Are a Myth. Did you know that? Well, I've been with Dr. Kilby now for two days, and I'm still not convinced that I'm a myth. The
only hint I've had, in fact, is his definition of myth, which is the else unspeakable. I trust that I'm not giving anything away by telling you this definition, because I also need to be brought into the know tonight. I'd like to remind you that we have a book table at the back of the room where you can obtain Dr. Kilby's books, as well as a collection of Lewis and Tolkien books. A tape of tonight's lecture will
be available, and you can pick up an order form for those tapes, as well as tapes of the other lectures in this series. And again, I've been asked by the Chapel Fellowship to announce a Sunday night fellowship dinner to be held at Murray Dodge, but I haven't been given any more details, so if you're interested, please get in touch with someone in the Chapel Fellowship, such as Tom Gibson. Also, Mrs. Norma Smith has very kindly set
up in Murray Dodge Hall refreshments, which you're all invited to after this lecture. This will be an informal time of discussion with Dr. Kilby, and so we hope that we'll see all of you over there following this lecture. Now I'd like you to join me in welcoming Dr. Kilby. I should make one small correction in what Stuart's just said. We have seven authors in the collection back at my college, but we do have the best collections
in the world on four of them, but not on Tolkien, and not on Chesterton, really. The four that we do have the best on are Dorothy Sayers, Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield. We wish we had the rest, but we feel it's a miracle that we've been able to get such remarkable collections on those, and I'd like to offer you a real welcome, not merely say it, but to come to see us. We are 26 miles
directly west of Chicago and catch a train that comes out there in about 40 minutes, and you'd be most welcome to see what we have there. Excuse me. I'd like to say to you who belong here at Princeton, that this has been a remarkable experience for me. I didn't know much about Wheaton, but I have been, I've just recently been at the University of Minnesota, my old alma mater, where there are 40,000 people running across
the campus. It's unbelievable. I was a student at University of Minnesota many years ago. I won't tell you how many, because then you'd know that I belonged to the period of Abraham Lincoln. But in those days, there were 12,000 people, and I thought that was a tremendous crowd, and I used to try to see walking across campus from one class to another, if I ever saw any person twice, and I don't remember that I ever
did, always strangers, and something uncannily bad about it, in my opinion. I've been thinking about that Latin phrase that used to be very customary, alma mater, the fostering mother, and it is a joke at our great state universities. There's nothing, I'm sure that's an overstatement, but there seems to be nothing but busyness. The notion of the whole scheme of things, and I'm sure it hasn't come about because of some bad men somewhere, but it's drifted to
the point where the university takes no notice of anything except the head. It's their job to put facts into the minds of students, and this is only too true, of course, of all the rest of the institutions. The rest of the person can go hang. It's turned out that way. It was not that way in the beginning. It was truly an alma mater situation. I'm very happy to say that I feel it keenly here. I've read
your alumni magazine. I've read your local school paper, and I've watched, and I've talked with a lot of you, and I'm very, very happy about what I found. Just try your best to keep it. The great tendency will be to lose it. There's a real friendship here, and I'm more than happy about it. I usually tell one joke when I go away, and I've not told it, and I'll tell you now. I'm really impressed with it
when I start to talk about Lewis. It's about a man who wasn't very bright, but wrote a letter to God asking for $100. The postmaster didn't know what to do with it, so he put it in the mail for Washington, and it happened to land somehow on the desk of a senator. It had a return address, and the senator felt sorry for the story the man told and put a $5 bill in a letter and mailed
it back to him. The man got the $5 and wrote another letter to God in which he said, I want to thank you for answering my prayer, but you made one terrible blunder. You sent it through Washington, and they deducted 95%. I'm just beginning seriously to think about my income tax, and that's an appropriate joke on that count. But what I really mean about it is that you've managed, thanks to these fellows here, and they're planning,
scheming, to get an awful lot out of me in various ways. Good scheming, I agree. I like them, or I wouldn't say that, but I still feel as if you're the sort of people I'd like to sit down with for two or three weeks, eight hours a day, and really see what we can say about C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and some of these others. Well, I'll have to confess one more thing to you also as
I begin. I've had this happen to me once before in planning for an occasion such as this visit. I have to give out some kind of titles of what I'll talk about, and I have a second time now, and this is the time I'm guilty of having given a title and then wondering later on what I meant when I put it down. You know, there's a story about Browning that he writes pretty difficult poetry, not after
we got Eliot and a few others, but used to say. One of his stories was somebody said, What do you mean by these lines? A couple of lines, and Browning read them carefully and thought a moment and said, Well, when I wrote them, God and I knew, and now only God knows. But I would like to try to say something on this. I really have never talked just this way before, and you'll have to bear with
me when I try to say something to you that I think is meaningful. I realize that I'm going to try to say things that are very large, very incorporative. Let's say I talk about almost everything in the world, but there are things that you are acquainted with. I'm just trying to put together things that I think you know about, and I will have to generalize in very large terms. And I know that many times here there
are things that you might object to or feel I'm not covering totally. I'm aware of those things when I start, but I do have an end in view. And so I hope you will bear with me and try to understand what I am trying to say on this subject. You are a myth. And I think I'd like to say that I think most of the time we look upon ourselves as anything but a myth, because we
have a notion that this is some kind of a fancy ephemeral effervescent sort of thing. And we are six feet one and 175 and gray eyes and we have good hearing and we have a Social Security number and we're very solid and massive in a physical sense. We have mass, we have weight, we are anything but a myth. We are a number, if you want to say it that way, a case, an artifact, a statistic. And
we live on a good solid earth. If you drill down in the earth, almost anywhere in the United States, you find rock. We live on a good solid earth. And the earth is not mythic. I'm suggesting that the earth is mythic too, by the way. You get that free. And it's all very solid, it's all very massive. It is a fact, it is a final reality. I think this is the way we generally think about ourselves.
So why should anybody call himself a myth? I can begin by quoting a very good authority. I mentioned this I think once before here. Carl Gustav Jung, a great psychologist, sat down at the age of 83 to write his autobiography and he said, I will now tell you the myth of my life. So you see, I'm already off to a good start. I remember too, by the way, that Shakespeare said, And we are such things as
dreams are made on, which helps me out a little bit here. And to answer this question, or to state this situation, I'd like to talk about your ancestry. For years, I used to, when I was chairman of the English department especially, I came in contact with all the lit majors. And then I taught a lot of students. And students often came and talked to me about their problems and their hopes and joys. And one of them
was getting married. And one of the things that I told students seriously, smiling but really meaning it, was if you mean to marry this guy, if you really think you're going to get engaged to him, maneuver some way to get him to take you to his home and take a very good look at his mom and papa. And also, if possible, at his grandma and grandpa, because it's very likely that he will develop, as time goes
on, the traits. In many cases, this doesn't happen. But I think in most cases, some of the traits, a mother and father and even grandpa and grandpa come into people. I've seen a great deal of this, I think, in my own life and in other lives. And of course, this raises a question. How far back does that built-in condition that you can do nothing about and how far back does it go? I remember that when
I was in college, there was a great deal of talk about the famous Adams family. We're hearing a lot about the Adams family on television now. A very worthy sort of thing to talk about John Adams and his family and his ancestry and his successors and many generations. This was one of the things that I heard a great deal about when I was in college a long time ago. The Adams family and something was built into
them that continued for generation after generation, something good. On the other side, by the way, we used to hear about, and I haven't heard about this in many years, the Calicac family, where it was the other way, a whole line of people who were bad. I think they found too many exceptions, maybe, to talk too much about that Calicac family anyway. But you have in you, if you think about it a little bit, characteristics that may
go back for many generations. If we talk about the Adams family, I might move to another person named Adam. We can all be sure of one kind of ancestry. If you want to run a genealogical chart, you can always put Adam at the top. We are all descended from Adam. Whether you believe that historically or believe it mythically, it doesn't make any difference in this case. You have a long ancestry. You have Adam and Eve. You
have both the glorious Garden of Eden and all that's involved there. You also have that other thing, which is even more significant, the fact that they were driven out of this garden. I'd like to mention, because you know this already, two or three views of ancestry. One of them, I've just read an interesting article in the Festschrift dedicated to Owen Barfield, my friend, who had a Festschrift dedicated to him, came out about a year ago, maybe
a little longer, an article on this whole subject. Again, I had not kept up with it in recent years, but this thing is told all over again there by a scientific man that a wandering atom or molecule or a very small particle, it gets smaller and smaller as time goes on, a wandering particle or atom, in billions of years, produced Einstein, very appropriate to mention Einstein here, since he lived very near by. Produced Einstein, Michelangelo, Beethoven,
Saint Paul, the Parthenon, everything in the world produced you in your whole totality. Now, I know that many scientists will say no, no to this, but most scientists, of course, my observation goes, would rather not say anything about it. Some of them will say that first little particle was miraculous. I've read an article recently in which that much was said, but all the rest of it was purely materialistic in its assumptions. The atoms in due course
became cells, and so you are here. You are here. You are in existence because of that. And there is nothing more. That's the point. And I say again that some people will deny this. Who holds the notion of the wandering atom? But I think most of the time, this is what it amounts to. Suzanne Langer, whom I have read with great interest, has written a wonderful book called Philosophy in a New Key, a really tremendous book.
It goes out of her way in this book to say that she is a chemical and nothing else, and everything about her is chemical and will disappear when she dies, and that will be absolutely the end of her. There is nothing else. Very strangely, by the way, Suzanne Langer, in the very next paragraph, after a long explanation, description of herself as a chemical and nothing else, says, I am a heretic to my religion. And I think
that means that she is saying, while I am writing this book, I am not a chemical. And she allows nothing in man except one thing, and it seems so strange to me. She says that he believes in making symbols. He is a symbolizer. And so she bases her book, and it is a very good book indeed, on symbols and metaphor and signs and all of this, which is a very valuable information. But she calls herself a
chemical. But if we have come to be nothing else than a wandering atom and billions of years, we have a number of problems before us. You know about them, but let me just mention. One is, how do we comprehend ourselves if we are totally structured, without our ability to do the least thing about it into what we are by this selection that goes on, picking the best thing and maintaining that best thing in a given organism?
How do we ever get to the point where we have self-consciousness and the ability to look at ourselves? This is a very great problem in that picture. Another one, of course, is how this big football player, who is very solid and very non-mythic, how he comes to know whether he is a good football player or a bad football player, or whether a given game is a good game or a bad game, or whether his
conduct is good or bad. Where does the moral axiom come into the life of somebody who considers himself merely mass and merely atoms which have developed into himself? And above anything else, Lewis points this out and other people have. C.E.M. Joad of the University of London, a philosopher, pointed out, where in the world do we get an oughtness in the world? Where in the world can you get an ought out of such a situation
as wandering atoms that turn into cells and make you, in all your parts, where can you possibly get an ought? How that oughtness resulting from cells, which simply got together, is a very strange thing. Joad, by the way, made a distinction in one of his books that I've never forgotten, and I think it is a very wise decision. There's a big difference between mind and brain. Brain is physiological, pure and simple. Mind is another kind of
thing, and there's something comes in from the outside into what we call mind. That's his position in a word or two. Well, another thing you can say about ancestry, another way you can look at ancestry, and this is very common on television and around us today, we look back to the caveman. Our ancestors were cave dwellers. They were half animal. They were experts with their stone axes and their flints, but essentially they were brutal. I think
this may be a portion. If there's an anthropologist here, he'll understand that I'm only quoting a few popular things that we're told. It is the old story, perhaps, of Tennyson's line, nature read in tooth and claw. I remember how this hit me many years ago. Nature read in tooth and claw, which seemed to be a description of the world for him at one time. Generally, you can call this the anthropological view, and we know a lot
about it from what we see and hear more or less daily. There's one tremendous parenthesis to this. Some years ago, I got very curious about cave paintings. You know, the anthropologist looks up the stone axes and the flints and pieces of bone, which is legitimate, but you get one whole thing, not a partial thing, from the caveman, and that's the cave paintings. I did a little study of this. By the way, there's a remarkable book which
you'll find in the library here, and I recommend you get it out. It's a big book. I got out of our library so much that I nearly wore it out. It's called Paleolithic Art. I did some study, and I looked into this to check on what other people had said about it. I was interested in art and aesthetics myself, and I concluded personally that some of the cave drawings were among the great art things of the
world. A very different kind of thing with the stone axe, brutal, half animal. They are very beautiful paintings at their best. We have very seldom bettered them. That's what I concluded. And in this book, you'll find what was an amazing thing to me that the Stone Age man pictured himself, and there isn't a single picture in this book that is like the pictures that I generally see of the Stone Age man, because he drew himself on
the walls of the cave. Get that book and take a look at it. By the way, Lewis says, let me read you something that C.S. Lewis says, and he's talking about prehistoric. Well, that's what you have, of course, in the Stone Age. The cave man is prehistoric, which is a very strange word, by the way, to say much about a prehistoric person, but we do all the time. Lewis says this amazing thing. We forget that
our prehistoric ancestors made all the most useful discoveries, except that of chloroform, which have ever been made. To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry, very oddly, isn't it? Poetry and agriculture. That's a quotation from The Problem of Pain. And now here you get the mythic view when you talk about the cave man and about that time, you begin to come into what I
call the mythic view. The great study of the myths of the world was that of Fraser, published early in this century, called The Golden Bough. And at one time, incidentally, C.S. Lewis, as a young atheist, about 16, wrote his boyfriend, and with great scorn, his boyfriend, they had been together a great deal, but they never talked about religion, and after Lewis went away to England to go to school, his boyfriend wrote him a letter and
said, what do you believe about religion? And Lewis simply scourged him in two long letters saying, I thought you had more sense than to believe in this stuff called religion. And took the point of view exactly of Fraser's Golden Bough. Fraser did a great job, but I think a bad interpretation of what he found, or an incomplete interpretation. And Lewis later came to believe this very thing, too. I want to talk to you about one thing
that's built into myth. There are many things that you could talk about for a week or two, but one thing. And that one thing is this, that our ancestors, prehistoric, whatever that means, and of course, to some extent, we can observe this in historic times, believed with all their heart, or very deeply, let us say it that way, in blood. I have here the index to Fraser's Golden Bough, the section on blood. It covers more than
two full columns in very fine print. And I find, shall I read you a little? I shouldn't take time for this, but here are some of the references. Blood shed at circumcision and sub-incision, the uses of drawn from virgin bride, the flow of arrested by blood stones, whatever that means, a sympathetic connection between a wounded person and his shed blood, of contracting parties sprinkled on their footprints in making a treaty, not a strange use of
blood, used to imitate rain, smeared on regalia, smeared on king's throne, sacrificial victim, inspiration by sucking the blood, offered to trees, and so on. One of the longest indexed items in Fraser has to do with blood. You know this, but I just want to emphasize it here. They knew nothing of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood, this amazing discovery that was made in the 17th century. And they would have cared little for such a discovery
in their larger context of the meaning of blood. By the way, you know, I think, and this is slightly different, that blood letting was practiced for a thousand years in medicine. And it was practiced up to the 19th century, as a matter of fact. And I'm waiting to hear someday in the newspapers that it's being practiced again. But the blood letting was a common practice for to even up the humors, the four humors of the body,
and so on. But that isn't what I'm really talking about here. But the ceremonial use of blood in many ways through back past the prehistoric and sometimes within the historic. And I give you another view of what this leads to now. And this is the one which I think gets us close to Jung himself. And Jung's calling himself a myth. And the idea of man is a myth. I think Lewis would say, as I was saying
at dinner this evening to someone, Lewis tends in all things such as psychiatry and Darwinianism and things of this sort, to point out that they don't go back far enough. They may have values, but if you kept on going back, you would find other things. Many believe we should start at another place altogether to get an explanation of such a thing as blood. I'm trying to carry that word blood to pick one little thing out of
the whole mythological world that is historic mythology into a new figure. And blood is the most significant word. Blood is a great scarlet theme, somebody has said, that runs through all history. And if we go back of all this, we find that even the caveman, I believe this is true, even the caveman had in him that thing that is said in the book of John 1:8, or 9. That was the true light that lighteth every
man coming into the world. I think a very great many of us would like to just forget that every man, but that's what the scripture says, every man coming into the true world was lighted by the light which was Jesus Christ, the Lagos. What a world of difference it makes when man is made in the image of God. You see, this can account for the blood in a way very different from the way Fraser accounts for
it and other things in mythology. The really important thing about man is not his physiology, as you very well know if you think, but most of the time we don't do much thinking, is not his physiology, is not this atom growing up into a good solid football player, let's say 22 men doing their stuff, as it will be here tomorrow, I understand. Is not his physiology, but his being made, fashioned, maybe as an artist fashions a
painting, being fashioned like God, what a terrific thing it is, and said over and over by, in effect by the pagans as well as by Christians, man is a spirit. The football player may get drunk and carouse, but he is nevertheless made after the image of God. Also the real meaning of all the blood in the myth was put there because prehistoric man, as I say, was himself, Imago Dei. The light that lighteth every man shined
on the prehistoric man as well as the football player. And by the way, Lewis says that this is the way the myth arose. That's a little too simple, but I think we can generalize it to that in a moment. That's how the blood got to have importance for him. The efficacy of blood as experienced by the prehistoric man became, as Lewis says so beautifully in God in the Dock, that set of essays, which is very good.
The efficacy of blood was experienced by the prehistoric man because historic became historic in Jesus Christ. The blood which had been a fact, a scarlet stream or thread in all history, in primitive peoples, and very little so, I'm sorry to say, in our time. There's been a great deal written on this subject of how it disappeared, and very improperly disappeared, by the way, they say, many people. Became historic one time. All the myths became historic one
time, and that was in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Lewis believed this. What he is saying, you see, is that the blood, it was like, well, the prophets of the Old Testament, it pointed a finger ahead toward Christ, and only once did myth become fact in the world's history. That's Lewis's idea. Many football players and many others accept this view of man, that is, that he is a mago dei. He is both six feet high and
weighs a certain weight and has gray eyes and a social security number, but he is vastly more. He is made in the image of God. He knows about God instinctively, by conscience, by the beauty and glory of the creation, and also by a message God has sent to man saying that God died to reparadise him. Mercy Eliade, who is called the greatest of all religious historians, says that mythology or myths demonstrate man's, quote, nostalgia for eternity.
Now, you can accept any one of these views. I've tried to say them very briefly. You can believe that man is merely chemical, and when he lies in his coffin, he is already on the way to absolute and everlasting extinction. He was and now is not, and that's the very end of it. Or, and I'd like to say this, you can waver between the views I have mentioned. You can do as Screwtape wished. You can live
your life so that at the end you either, you say to yourself that you neither did what you wished nor what you ought. I think that's where a vast deal of us live, and we all have to fight, or we will live there. He can fully accept the Imago Dei and all its implications and see that the blood of Christ is something able to satisfy his built-in desire for wholeness, because we do have such a
desire to be one person, not a multitude of personalities that drives us to the psychiatrist. By the way, he can see that a little bit of God, or religion, is as impossible as a little bit of pregnancy, as somebody has said. He can see God, as Lewis says, as the whole show. He can come to see God, and his everlasting calling is the main thing. And secondly, that pain, war, ravages of earth, poverty, and all such
are a result of man's rejection of God in favor of self. Coming to this view, I'd like to just say this. I know that we recognize these things, but they ought to be said. We ought to think about them consistently at times. We can rest in this last view in such propositions as these. And I think I might say that in this time, we are two poles. I feel it so often, we are two poles. Here
are people that believe these things, and then there are people that think that all things non-material are to be sneered at, or even worse, to be forgotten. They can't forget them, but they take this attitude, sometimes for a lifetime. So this is what the man who accepts this last position believes. God is creator of all things. Man once was close to God, but lost that estate by sin. In due course, man chose himself over God.
Either a man says to God, says Lewis, either a man says to God, Thy will be done, or finally God is forced to say to that man, All right, your will be done. Christ is the Savior of all who have faith that he indeed is. Prayer is as real as a football. Shall I say it that strongly? God answers prayer. Expecting to have man's choice of him really means something. God gave man freedom. This is one
of the sticking points of all of us through our whole lives, and you ought to try to settle it sometime, one way or the other. But I believe God gave man absolute freedom, absolute freedom, to curse him from the day he is conscious of anything to the day he dies. And that's a very dangerous thing, but there are very many dangerous things about God. We don't like it. We'd like to get God in our pockets frequently
and take care of him. Miracles are only the freedom of God. Somebody has said that. I think it may have been Chesterton. Miracles are only the freedom of God. This man believes in miracles. I believe in miracles. I don't believe that miracles are commonplace, but I believe that God, who has made the world, can have his exceptions if he wishes them. Lewis wrote a whole book on miracles, you know. Here's one that you might not be
quite so much aware of as the other. Shame for sins is healthy. Shame is a healthy thing in this relationship. God calls all men everywhere 24 hours a day, and so does Satan. Not merely Sunday morning that God calls men. If this isn't an actual truth, it is certainly a strong metaphorical truth. I believe it's an actual truth myself. God is utterly holy, utterly loving, utterly fair. You've got to settle in your life sometime, whether that's
true or false. I believe with all my heart God is utterly holy, utterly loving, utterly fair. I didn't come upon that notion easily, but I concluded that. The joy of heaven and the terror of hell are both all together logical. Lewis has a little poem, by the way, that begins, God in his mercy made the fixed pains of hell. History is God's story, as lots of people have said. Whether so acknowledged or not. You know the
Durants, after they spent a lifetime writing history, I was amazed to read a statement in a periodical somewhere that they said, history is half prejudice and the rest is guessing. But this is not what a Christian would believe. And then finally, in this little list of things I jotted down, all men are destined for eternal life, every single person, but not in the same place. By the way, I should tell you something. There's a book coming
out. There's no publisher yet, but it will certainly come out. It's a marvelous story. Of a young couple who hated the word marriage. This was many years ago, by the way, before all this became familiar to us. And made vows to each other, very serious vows, and began to live together. Later they did marry, later they did become Christians, by the way. And one of the things they pledged themselves as young people and young pagans, not
believing in God at all, was that if either died, the other would commit suicide. And much later, after his wife had died, after 15 years of married life, he wrote Lewis about this. He was still thinking about it. He had become a Christian and had given it up, essentially. But he still kept thinking about it, that he had made a pledge of this kind. And Lewis knocked it clear out of his system with one sentence in
a letter. You'll be able to read that within a year from now, I'm sure. He said, How do you know you're going to get together if you commit suicide? See, they wanted to be together in this life and in the next life. So one or the other would commit suicide. How do you know you'll be with her if you commit suicide? And he dropped this thing forever after that one sentence. These things are not grudgingly confessed
by the spiritual man, the Yamago Dei with all it means, the Christian way with all it means. They're not grudgingly confessed. Sometimes it looks that way, but it ought not to be that way. They are joyful absolutes even when one fails to live up to them. See, S. Lewis belonged to this group of people that held to these, what to many people would be funny things about angels, for instance. He believed in angels. You ought to
believe in angels if you're a Christian. They're mentioned over 300 times in the Bible. He believed the whole thing. He was one of the most brilliant men of our time, as I think we can say safely to you. Lewis bet his life that this was true. I think you finally bet your life on God, on this way. I remember that lovely part of the silver chair, one of the Narnia stories, where the green witch way down
below the earth has put a spell over the prince, has had a spell over him for a long time, and tries to put a spell over the marsh wiggle and the children who got down there. She has almost done it with the incense in the fire, her witchery through that and her witchery through music, and she has almost got them under their total spell. The marsh wiggle suddenly jumps up and runs over and stamps out the
fire with his bare feet. Then he makes a speech to her after they have begun to recover from her witchery. The witch had tried to tell them there was no upper world, no stars, nothing up there. This was all an imagination. It almost made them believe this. The marsh wiggle says, I am going to believe in that world, whether it's there or not. I would rather believe in that world if it isn't there. It's so much
better than your world that I'm going to bet my life that that world exists and I'm going to live that way even if it doesn't exist. I like that. Lewis mentioned that another place. You bet your life. That's a way to say it, I think. I had to say this to a young man working in a hospital this summer who didn't believe in God. I said, well, you finally bet your life on one thing or the
other. And it's a great thing to say, I bet my life on the whole Christian way. And just forget that all the doubts that tend to come into your mind. Lewis Gose of Forrest insists that Christians are, quote, little Christ. I can hardly get over this thing, but he says it many times. You are a little Christ, which for many people would say going a little too far. I've told you about Psyche and Oriole. Here was
Psyche who accepted God so easily, longed for God. And Oriole, her sister, who spent over 40 years trying to rationalize God, insisting that he show himself and when he did show himself on more than one occasion, not wanting him to show more of himself. This is a very natural thing. Come on and sit down with me and let's have a long talk. God, in effect, is what she was saying. And when I'm thoroughly convinced in my
mind that you exist and I believe in you, that isn't what the Bible teaches at all, of course, that you keep on working God out. By the way, I heard an amazing thing on television just two or three Sundays ago. A pastor from Chattanooga said this, and I thought it was tremendous. And he said, trust as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of Jesus Christ. There are so many people who
say, yes, I think I'd like to believe these things, to believe in this kind of world rather than the other sorts of worlds that come along. But I've got to read several more books. I've got to talk to several more people. And so and so. And I think they know in their hearts that this isn't the way it's done. I like what that pastor said. Trust everything you know about yourself to everything you know about Jesus
Christ. Every man knows he ought to turn to God. A memory of Eden rests somewhere in us, some realization of a vast good lost. Lewis suggests the strangest of our saying, how time flies. Or of some child, how he's grown. A thing as strange as if a fish were surprised over the wetness of water. As if we were not made for time at all, but for another dimension. And Lewis also says, there's no neutral ground in
the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan. And Lewis goes on to say that Christianity does not set out only to make you a nicer person, less selfish, more kind and considerate, more honest with yourself. What it sets out to do is make you a new person. Lewis keeps on emphasizing this. A new person, a child of God, a little Christ, a brand new creature. By the way, I
heard the day before I came up here, somebody came in my office and told about a man who had been a cynic and skeptic and somebody gave him a copy of Mere Christianity. And he rather nonchalantly said, well, if you want me to, I'll read it. And in between the covers of that book, he found Jesus Christ. And now he doesn't want to talk about anything but what's happened to him. A new person, and it happened
in the last few weeks. And it keeps on happening, of course. The great case, by the way, if I can mention it to you, and I hope you'll read that great book by Charles Colson, Born Again. I went to it to see what he said about C.S. Lewis, and I couldn't put the book down. There's the slightest question, a lot of people were skeptical about that, whether it really happened to him. You can't read that
book and not know that it's 100% correct. And it's a confirmation, 100% of the whole New Testament, and it happened in our time to a very prominent person. If you get into this particular camp and bet your life, the devil will work at you harder than he does now. But you'll have the assurance that God dwells inside your skin, and that angels are about you. You'll have a priority that you can live with. Ori
will found at the end of over 40 years of complaining about the gods, but this means God, actually, in Lewis's interpretation, and suffering, going through tortures. And at last in Limbo, after death, after all her friends had died, her father and so on, she was called in a vision in this story to appear before the dead and tell her case against God. And she found, when she did tell it, three things that shocked her. First was,
it was very short. She thought it was a long case. It was very short as she read it, honestly, before her judges. It was very repetitive. She found herself saying it over and over. And lastly, she found it was not even in her own hand. What an amazing thing Lewis does in saying those things. This is what I find about people that I know in Wheaton and elsewhere. Their case against God, if they have one, turns
out to be very short. Even the case of Bertrand Russell. I have his book called Why I'm Not a Christian. If you really look it over carefully, it's a pretty short case. It's very repetitive. It's the same old things that we've heard all the time. And I must say that I think this last thing is true. It was not in Oriole's own hand. I think what Lewis means when he says that is that we are called
to something that's higher than all our meager and anti-God thoughts, all our materialism. We're called to something higher. Let me end up by reading you one or two sentences from an article in a magazine of the University of Chicago. And it is an introduction to a speech made by Mershi Eliade, this famous historian of religion. And this man who introduces this article, and I talk about the article for a whole hour to my class, I
used to, I'd like to read you just one or two sentences that this introducer says. Talking about myth, by the way, in this, Eliade discusses certain things in the myths of various people on different continents. And this I break in here. In other words, says this man, If it be true that modern man resolutely rejects the religious axis of his being, and that's his mythic act, the mythic axis, this blood matter, and such a thing as
he calls a drunken house warming, as over against a religious ceremony in which, I'm not sure this is precisely the way to say it, but I was up in Scandinavia once for some time, and I made it my business while I was there to look at new houses that were being built, and I found two new houses on which there was located an evergreen. An evergreen had been put down, cut down, and brought, and tied to
the roof of two different new houses that I saw. Now here's a ceremony that is mythic. It has ancient origins, and I'm not sure that I draw the exact parallel, but they do talk here in this introduction about a drunken house warming. You see, what you're doing in a house warming that is thoroughly secular is denying the whole mythic structure that goes back into the ancient past. Now let me read again. In other words, if it
be true that modern man resolutely rejects the religious axis of his being, that is just what I've described to you an instance of, he may be in the condition of being unable to believe what he must believe. One solution to a dilemma of this kind, of course, is to go mad. Now you see what he's saying? If you deny this long history, such as that of blood, such as that of the roof tree, and many other
such things, if you deny these things and become merely a secular person, merely a materialistic person, a person who will, as I said one night here, instead of, there are two ways to look at the sun. One is to consider it merely gases, merely great heat, merely chemicals. That's one way to look at it. The Greeks and people generally for millennia of our history considered the sun a god. Now I've been saying, and I believe it's
true, that it is better in living a life, it is better to believe that the sun is a god than to believe that it is merely chemicals and so on. You see what I'm talking about? Now neither one of these do I agree with, you understand, explicitly. But for living a life, and that's what this man is talking about, unless you will see things outside, let's put it in the old terms, I don't like to, but
unless you will see things outside the mere materialistic realm, the notion that the way to get at truth is by the microscope and by cutting anything, cutting whatever into smaller and smaller pieces, down to atoms, molecules, atoms and so on. But this is the way to truth. And our religion today, I have often said, and I think it's true, our real religion today is science. And I like science, I'm not saying a word about science, I'm
saying something tremendous against scientism, which is a very different kind of thing. And that's the belief that science can solve any problem. As long as you believe that science can solve any problem, why should you believe? You know, they will explain all these myths away, and then we will be really educated. But this man is saying, if you explain all the myths away, you will go mad. And I believe he's right. And that may sound like
strange stuff to you, but I've been thinking about this a long time. I'll read this again, just for what it's worth. If it be true that modern man resolutely rejects the religious axis of his being, and he's not talking about Christianity as such here, of course, he may be in the condition of being unable to believe what he must believe. Isn't that a strange statement? One solution to a dilemma of this kind, of course, is to
go mad. And I quoted you here once, what a psychiatrist in New York City said, that 85% of the people there are either psychotic or neurotic. And of course, that might apply to other places too, like Chicago. Not Wheaton, because that's different, but like Chicago. And I think I see this kind of thing on every hand. And I think the trouble is, as I see it, is that men belong to that tradition. You can't help
it, as this thing says. You can't help it. It's there. It's for you. If you become merely material, as we are doing in effect, even when we want to believe something else or think we believe something else, you will go mad in our day, something like that. And we are going mad. And I think we're headed straight for destruction, if I can say that to you, in all honesty, and in different ways. And I'm sorry I
get off into this kind of ramble, but you see what I'm trying to say? Man indeed is mythic. He belongs to the mythic tradition. He does not belong to the scientism tradition. It's only in the last three or four hundred years that we have got this thing under our skin, this new religion, and we have it very badly. It is soaked down to where we live now. And we're suffering from this kind of thing. And we
are called to another kind of thing because we are another kind of creature. That's what I'm trying to say, and I'm sorry to ramble so long. I'm sure there are questions in your minds, because I tell you again, I have skipped around and tried to say a number of things, and sketchily. And with that, I think I will stop. And then if you have a question, I will try to answer it. Thank you. Can you please
direct your questions to Dr. Kilby so that we can all hear them? We'll take a few minutes now for any questions that might have been raised in your own minds. It's still unclear as to what the definition of myth and mythic is. I'm afraid that many persons interpret myth as being a story one makes up to explain a fiction, whereas I think what you may have said is that it's a story that explains reality, that explains
the truth. It does happen to come to us almost entirely in story form, in fictional form. And of course, this is the very thing, let me just quote the president of my college who came to there in a very fine president in 1860. He was a good old Victorian. I like the Victorians, incidentally. I don't like things that are said against them, a lot of things. But he said very emphatically, a novel, quote unquote, a novel
is at best a well-told lie. And this is the notion of a very great many Christian people, especially. But it's only through the creative process, the making process, that this is possible. I told you that C.S. Lewis wrote me a letter. I had a copy here somewhere in which he began by saying, an author, quote, I think I can almost quote it exactly, an author does not necessarily, it was about till we have faces,
an author does not necessarily know more about the meaning of his story than anybody else. And I will tell you what I think my story is about for what it may be worth. Can you imagine a plumber writing a book about plumbing and saying that? Or anybody, almost. A philosopher saying that and a book about philosophy. And this is only possible, only possible in mythic writing. It is the else unspeakable which manages to get spoken, let's
not say through novels or fiction, but let's say through metaphor and image and symbol. Those are mysterious things that Lewis says in one of his books, as I think I quoted you, that the complete study of metaphor would probably be a lifetime job. This little thing that you probably learned about in high school or somewhere, you know, is one of the most mysterious things I've spent a lot of time studying the metaphor myself. One of the
most mysterious things in the world. And it is that thing which is beyond the common. Lewis said all the time that a good myth says more than the man knows who writes it. And it is a mystery and is not explainable. I'm going to a convention in Hillsboro, Hillsdale College in Michigan, and I've been asked to talk about myth for one hour and illustrate it for one hour. And I find I taught a course for years
called Modern Myth, and I found it took me a whole quarter to get this. But I must add to get this settled as best you can settle it in the minds of my students. But I will tell you again what I've said here before. I have never seen anything in my life work magic on students, half, a third, a tenth as much as that course did. And I'm talking about the books we read. Lewis, Tom Keen,
George MacDonald, and Charles Williams. You would not believe, I can't really, I took things off the final exams. And I still can't believe when I read those things that they're there. The students didn't read them for me to take off. I didn't ask them what they thought of the course or anything. They just said that their lives had been changed. And it was changed because of this mysterious thing called myth. And it never would have happened
if I had done an expository course. I have taught courses in expository methods. That's about the only way you can do it, where the whole thing was that. And there's no elevation. There's a rise up to a certain level. Of course, if you teach well enough, you can get students up to a certain level. But you go beyond teacher, beyond books, beyond anything. This is the unspeakable thing that happens. It's a mystery. But I think it's
what I'm talking about tonight, that you are mythic. You are already mythic. And I've seen hundreds and hundreds of young people whose lives were, they said, totally changed. And they were Christians already. They were bright students. We pick our students and we get a very high class student. And the brighter they were and the more Christian they were, the harder they were hit by this. I don't know what to say. I just know those things are
true. It is a mystery how the thing goes. But it has to be a created thing, a created thing. And there are very few people. Shakespeare is not mythic. John Milton is not really mythic. He's epic, but he's not mythic. There are very few things, and most of them have been produced in our time. But now the ancient myths, Greek and Roman and Norse, probably had this kind of meaning to those people. But it doesn't carry
over to us. Except, as Lewis most carefully points out, if you will let them, if you can find in them the vestigial truths that are there. Lewis says, for instance, that the first time he ever read the myth of Cupid and Psyche in the Greek, he felt, and he was certainly not a believer at that time, he was sure there was something there beside that story. And in due course, he wrote a book about that myth
in which he reveals one truth that he thinks is there, one truth. But in a great myth, there are innumerable truths. That's why Lewis could say, I'm just giving you my opinion. You say more than you can say in writing a myth, a true myth. Who can say what Tolkien's Lord of the Rings does to you? I've taught this book, this book of the story. I have read it over and over. I have tested myself by
opening one of the books somewhere and just beginning to read and to see how long it would be before this spell came upon me. Sometimes one sentence. And always in about one page, the spell is back. You can't tell where it came from. We have become an expository age. The medieval, you know, believed in poetry. It's only in the last three, four hundred years that we have come to be more and more materialistic, expository, prosaic. You
know that one of the great discoveries I've made as a teacher of literature, I can't believe it hardly yet. Do you know that poetry always comes first in a nation? You'd think that these cavemen spoke prose, wouldn't you? And we in our refinements would speak poetry, which is far better than prose. It's the other way. And that's saying a very great deal for the cavemen. Or way back, let's just say that, unless we get in trouble.
The earliest poetry, the earliest writing, so far as you can judge. For instance, in English, you have Beowulf, a great epic poem. As the beginning, I've taught a survey of English literature, you begin with Beowulf. And it is pure poetry of a very high order. And we have become more and more prosaic, more and more material-minded. We didn't mean to, but that's the way things have drifted. You've got to fight against that, or else you
will yourself. Well, this is, I think, to a very large extent, the cause of divorce. Perhaps the cause of crime, a lot of crime. And the misery that we all are experiencing today. Just as this man said, we've lost that axis of our being. I'm saying this rather badly, but I hope you get some notion of how very significant the whole thing is. And that you're made a certain way, and you cannot remake yourself into a
mere materialistic object. Merely computerized, if you will. You know what I mean there, certainly. You can't do it that way. And keep on doing it without, as he says, a man from the University of Chicago, and perhaps not a Christian, I'd guess I would say not a Christian, says plainly, one alternative to this is to go mad. Well, excuse me for preaching at you, but I feel a very great significance here. I had to work my
way into this through years, so if you have a little trouble with it, that would be it. I suggest that you read a thing like, well, to get out of it. If you read Perilander, you may be thinking about the Bible all the time. If you read in the Garden of Eden and so on, but read until we have faced this. Here you have a pure myth from one end to the other, with a couple of
myths inside the big myth. And see what happens to you. And keep on reading it and keep on watching to see what happens to you. See if something doesn't transpire deep inside you that is inexplicable. And that you can call myth, the effect of myth. Again, I haven't I know answered your question in nice plain English, but I've said something. The else unspeakable, the best definition I've heard that doesn't solve the problem, but it gives you
an idea right away. The else unspeakable, the else unspeakable. It cannot happen except this way. And Lewis says the myth does not give you truth, which would be great, wouldn't it? It gives you something better than truth, reality in its finest form. And this is what changes young people's lives. And I've seen it in hundreds of cases. I've seen it outside my classes in lots of cases. And this is one reason that Tolkien and Lewis are
having a tremendous effect upon this country. One of the stories I heard of one of our librarians at Wheaton College went out to the Hoya, California as a public librarian. And she wrote me a letter and told me a story about a mother and a little boy that came in to the library. The boy was very shy. And the mother got to talking with this librarian and said, My boy read The Lord of the Rings at
the age of 10, which is not phenomenal. But this is phenomenal. She said he wept for two days afterwards. I can imagine a boy of 10 weeping for five minutes or 15 minutes or an hour. But it's totally unthinkable to me that he should weep for two days. I tried afterwards to get in touch with that boy, but this librarian had not gotten the names. And I couldn't. But I'd like so much to know what went
on in that in that boy's head. I'll tell you one more story that I told some of you privately, I think, since I've been here. I had I had a woman from Philadelphia, the neighborhood of Philadelphia, in my summer class and myth at Wheaton. And she made it her business. She was in the course, took the course. She made it her business to be back in Wheaton. She did have a son who had graduated there and
was in the neighborhood. But she made it her business. And I thought it was accidental to be back in the course the next summer and then the next summer. She was in my course three times. I mean, we were especially when we were talking about talking. And by this time, we'd gotten acquainted with her, my wife and I. And she told us a tale. She had two children, the boy. They're both doing fine now. But that
was several years ago. Her daughter, who did not go to Wheaton, went some other college, had gotten mixed up with an older man and looked like she was going to be involved with him in marriage or some way. And this mother told us quite explicitly that the thing which saved her from a mental breakdown was reading The Lord of the Rings over and over and over for a whole year. That was what she said. And I
believed her. You see, what was happening was that this mythic medicine was working for her. Go ahead. Well, talking makes two definitions of escape, the word escape. One is that of the person who needs the attention of a doctor. That's a normal meaning of escape, of course, you know, a daydreamer, this kind of thing. But also the escape of the prisoner, by which he means you, imprisoned in materialism, in the things that will naturally occupy all
your time. And I believe very much in that kind of escape. And I believe that if you don't have that kind of escape, you are very likely to be in serious trouble up to insanity. It seems to me that the focus on materialism would be just as harmful as the focus on some kind of subjective aspect of life that would not also be true. In other words, emphasizing the quality of the myth rather than that which
is true. It seems to me just as bad as emphasizing materialism. I would not say that myth is subjective at all. It really turns out to be a very objective kind of thing, though inexplicable. But when a thing gives you a brand new view of man, nature and God, a new view, as I got from reading G.K. Chesterton 40 years ago and as I had totally renewed as I read C.S. Lewis, I would not call
it subjective. It is a very objective thing. It is good for the whole being, physiological and mental and spiritual. I don't know that I'm answering your question. The question in a nutshell is, is it more profitable to be for the rings three times or the New Testament three times? Oh yeah, well, it is not a question of this or that, but both, I think would be the answer there. Talking was a Christian. Talking probably would have
said, read the Bible. But this is also a good thing. Let us be sure to say it that way. Myth is also a good thing. If you're a Christian, you'll always put it that way, of course. Anybody else have a question? I think we're staying as long as we should. My voice is about to give out anyway. Thank you very much.