Myth and Reality

I’ve been reading a book by Rolland Hein called Christian Mythmakers and it has been a true blessing as it has confirmed a lot of what I have been thinking over the course of the past 9 months. One of the more powerful passages I read was something from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. In it Chesterton writes:

“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery . . . The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticized elfland, but elfland that criticized earth.”

The nature of myth as Tolkien and Lewis defined it is a story that has at its core eternal realities and truths. It allows the eternal to break through into the temporal, just as it does in reality every day. Reality is not simply what we see around us, it is the eternal present within the temporal. Any other view presents something other than reality—it presents fiction.