“Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.” ~~ author unknown
Around 1926 C.S. Lewis was admittedly a ‘theist’ but he was not a Christian. Lewis had come from a decidedly atheist position only recently, and the idea of Christ as Savior by death on a cross 2,000 years ago seemed to him without purpose—‘how the life and death of someone else…could help us here and now.” One night, not dissimilar to many nights shared thus together, Lewis was having a discussion with his best friend, a devout Roman Catholic, name J.R.R. Tolkien about the ‘purpose’ of Christ in true religion.
Lewis, a classicist by training, had for years been very fond of mythology. Tolkien pointed out to Lewis that he was demanding unnecessarily something from Christianity that he was not demanding from pagan mythology—when he encountered the idea of sacrifice in the mythology of a pagan religion he admired it and was moved by it; indeed the idea of the dying and reviving deity had always touched his imagination… But from the Gospels Lewis was, so argued Tolkien, requiring something more, a clear meaning beyond the myth. Could he not transfer his comparatively unquestioning appreciation of sacrifice from the myth to the true story?
But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.
No, said Tolkien, they are not.
“You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a ‘tree’ until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.”
‘You mean’, asked Lewis, ‘that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.’
Twelve days later Lewis became a Christian.
The power of fiction, myth, of the imagination and the ‘unreal’ is not indifferently avoided, save to one’s folly and misfortune.
*for historical account please see Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, chapter four.