Parallel Myths (48 page)
Authors: J.F. Bierlein
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
Karl Jaspers, a native of Oldenburg, Germany, began his working life in neuropathology and the emerging discipline of psychiatry. These led him to his now-famous career as a philosopher, one of the important existentialist thinkers of this century along with such men as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.
A professor at both Heidelberg and Basel, Jaspers was fascinated by the independent and parallel development of the world’s great religions over a comparatively short period in history, roughly five hundred years, during which prophets emerged independently of one another in China, India, Iran, and Palestine.
Jaspers noted that this was the first great shift from
mythos
to
logos
, or from a mythical view of the world to a philosophical speculation, and
religion in our present sense of the word. During the “mythological era” of thinking, relationships with the gods were transactional, based on appeasement or rewards with sacrifices and offerings. The “gods” now gave way to God. In Greece, philosophers abandoned the polytheism of their ancestors and began to speak of “God” as a unified force for the first time. Jaspers speculated on why this happened at one time in so many places independent of each other.
Jaspers called this period the “axial period.” He chose the word
axial
because, for Christians, the “axis” of their history is the life and ministry of Christ. However, Christianity is only one of several world religions, and the “axis” seemed to extend throughout other cultures in Europe and Asia.
The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-Tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-Tse, Lieh-Tsu and a host of others; India introduced the Upanishads [scriptures] and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical speculation down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Herclitus, and Plato—of the tragedies—Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.
According to Jaspers, what had taken place was a wholesale advancement in human spiritual thinking, an “evolution” of thought from objective, transactional deities in a polytheistic and ritual-bound world to the concept of a universal God. This necessitated a transformation of the function of myth.
The mythical age with its tranquility and self-evidence was at an end. The Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers were unmythical in their decisive instincts, as were the prophets in their ideas of God. Rationality and rationally clarified experience launched a struggle against the myth; a further struggle
developed for the transcendence of the one God against nonexistent demons, and finally an ethical rebellion took place against the unreal figures of the gods. Religion was rendered ethical, and the majesty of the Deity thereby increased.
Do you remember that Pierre Janet wrote that a society abandoned its gods when the gods failed to speak? This is a basic description of what appeared to happen during the axial period.
The myth, on the other hand, became the material of a language which expressed by it something very different from what it originally signified; it was turned into parable. Myths were remoulded, were understood at a new depth during this transition, which was myth-creating after a new fashion.
The myth persisted, but it had matured into a vehicle for truth, not an unquestioned truth in itself.
Jaspers felt that humanity was on the verge of a new axial period, the first period in history where the globe was united by telecommunications. This too could prove a critical juncture in the spiritual development of mankind.
Jaspers saw science as the modern myth, but an incomplete myth. Certainly science, like so many of the earlier myths, appears to explain the natural world around us. But science can only answer
how
things happen; it is unable to tell us
why
.
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)
[Myth and] religion are not phases in human consciousness, but a part of human consciousness itself.
Mircea Eliade was born in Romania, but spent most of his life in France and the United States. He was probably the world’s foremost scholar of myth as “sacred history,” and of the distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane.” For Eliade, myth was the record of the breakthrough of “the transcendent into our world.”
A professing Christian, Eliade believed that myth and religion are permanent parts of human consciousness and that it is truly human to think in terms of things that are transcendent or infinite. Eliade was careful to distance himself from the psychological schools of myth, stressing, for example, that when he used the word
archetypes
it did not mean the same thing that Jung meant by the term. Eliade was most concerned by the reduction of “man’s innate religious” function to a mere psychological projection, and he even spoke of the psychological theories of the interpretation of myth as “a second Fall from grace,” a modern version of the Fall that took place in Eden.
Eliade felt that no society could be understood without an understanding of its sacred history; all of the institutions, morality, and culture of any given society were vitally dependent upon a shared sacred history of the “breakthroughs of the transcendent.”
In explaining parallel myths, Eliade was a diffusionist; he was particularly indebted to Frobenius’s theory of the myth-producing cultural centers.
As to answers to the question of meaning, Eliade felt that the Christian religion offered a complete set of mythic images that satisfied an innate human need. Rather than abandon Christianity as a societal myth, Eliade argued that the Christian faith must be reexamined in light of our modern society.
*
Garcilaso de la Vega, a Spanish priest, was fascinated by the Peruvian legend of Thunpa, a wise and revered teacher who erected something resembling a cross. De la Vega identified Thunpa as Saint Thomas, who was reputed to have traveled to India during the missionary expansion of the early Christian church. De la Vega believed that Saint Thomas had traveled from India across the Pacific to Peru, where he preached the gospel.
*
Deshi
is Sanskrit for “of the country.”
NOTE:
Bangladesh
means “country [desh] of the Bengali people
[Bangla]”
*
Dürkheim, and later Jung, use the term
psychic
to mean “of the mind,” recalling the Greek word
psyche
for “soul.” It is not used in the popular sense of the word to mean “paranormal” or “supernatural.”
*
You will recall that Freud viewed myths as projections of the personal unconscious only, and that mythic thinking would inevitably be superceded by “scientific” thinking.
*
Marcel Mauss was Durkheim’s nephew.
*
See
Carl Jung and Christian Spirituality
, edited by Robert L. Moore (New York and Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1988).
*
See the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
entry on “Myth.”
But time and again it is seen: for us the Deity, if it exists, is only as it appears to us in the world, as it speaks to us in the language of man and the world. It exists for us only in the way in which it assumes concrete shape, which by human measure and thought always serves to hide it at the same time. Only in ways that man can grasp does the Deity appear.
Thus it is seen that it is wrong to play off against each other the question about man and the question about the Deity. Although in the world only man is reality for us does not preclude that precisely the quest for man leads to transcendence. That the Deity alone is reality does not preclude that this reality is accessible to us only in the world; as it were, as an image in the mirror of man, because something of the Deity must be in him for him to be able to respond to the Deity. Thus the theme of philosophy is oriented in polar alternation, in two directions:
deum et animam scire cupio
. [Latin: “I desire knowledge of God and the soul.”]—Karl Jaspers
Christian Myth
The word “myth” is used in the title of this volume in a specific and definite sense. A myth is a symbolic story which demonstrates, in Alan Watts’s words, “the inner meaning of the universe and of human life.” To say that Jesus is a myth is not to say that he is a legend but that his life and message are an attempt to demonstrate the “inner meaning of the universe and of
human life.” As Charles Long puts it, a myth points to the definite manner in which the world is available for man: “the word and content of myth are revelations of power.” Or as A. K. Coo-maraswamy observes, “Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.”Many Christians have objected to my use of this word even when I define it specifically. They are terrified by a word which may even have a slight suggestion of fantasy. However, my usage is the one that is common among historians of religion, literary critics, and social scientists. It is a valuable and helpful usage; there is no other word which conveys what these scholarly traditions mean when they refer to myth. The Christian would be well advised to get over his fear of the word and appreciate how important a tool it can be for understanding the content of his faith.
—Father Andrew Greeley,
Myths of Religion
Myth, whether Christian or other, is an exposition of truth in the form of a story. The meaning given to “myth” in the 19th century—i.e., that myth is fiction—continues to exert a pervasive influence in popular and journalistic literature. It is this 19th-century view of myth as fiction that has caused many Christians to reject the notion that Christianity contains within its Scriptures, theology, and practices various mythological elements. Mythological themes taken over from the Greeks and the Jews … have been transformed by Christian concepts of history and the development of Christian doctrine.
… The function of Christian myth is to express in imaginative and often dramatic terms answers to the most significant questions asked by man: Who am I? Where am I going? Though these questions are universal, in Western Civilization they have been answered, for the most part, by those cognitive and imaginative elements influenced by Christian myth. Concerned with the nature, origin and destiny of man, his society and the world, Christian myth seeks to elucidate and describe the truth of the human condition (for those affected by Western Civilization) in a manner that goes beyond the mere apprehension and comprehension of facts that can be empirically verified—i.e., substantiated by the senses.
Employing the imagination to communicate concepts, Christian
myth is concerned with the realm of the spirit—i.e., the sphere of meaning and value. That area—involving man’s understanding of himself and his relationship to his society and his world and to the sacred or holy …—Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 15th ed., entry on “Christian Myth and Legend”
Jewish Myth
A distinction must be made, of course, between myth and legend. In common parlance, a myth is a story about gods or otherwordly beings. Judaism, however, is a rigorously monotheistic religion; hence, in this narrower sense, there can be no original Jewish myths…. If, however, the term is interpreted in a larger sense, to mean the portrayal of continuous, transtemporal [beyond time] concerns in the context of particular and punctual events, myth is indeed one of the essential vehicles by which Judaism conveys its message; for it is only when historical happenings are translated into this wider dimension that they cease to be mere antiquarian data and acquire continuing relevance. In Judaism, for example, the Exodus in Egypt is projected mythically from something that happened at a particular time into something that is continually happening, and it thus comes to exemplify the situation and experience of all men everywhere—their emergence from the bondage of obscurantism [i.e., “the state of being obscure or causing to be obscure or unknown”], their individual revelations at their individual Sinais, their trek through a figurative wilderness, even their death in it so that their children or children’s children may eventually reach the figurative “promised land.” By the same token, the historical destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem is transformed by myth into a paradigm of the continuing mutual estrangement of God and man, their exile from one another.
Legend, on the other hand, implies no more than a fanciful embroidering of purportedly historical fact. Unlike myth, it does not transcend the punctual and local.
—Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 15th ed., entry on “Jewish Myth and Legend”
This chapter is a necessary one: The study of mythology naturally raises questions for the believing Jew, Christian, and Muslim, the
heirs of the religion of One God, revealed. Myth has much to say in helping us understand the concept of our faith and the faiths of others. However, the “stuff of myth consists of stories of pagan gods and goddesses—“false gods,” according to our tradition.
