Category Archives: Myth Conceptions

Tolkien’s Christian Detractors

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[NOTE: This short essay assumes as important context the several introductory articles for this section of the site, most especially The Imagination: Pitfalls and Prospects.]

In my experience as a long-time reader of Tolkien, objections to his work come in two basic varieties.

The “Bible Only” Objection

Usually attacks not just on Tolkien and his good friend C.S. Lewis, but on all fictional products, come from the quarters of “Bible Only” Christians, believers whose thoughts about everything are (they think) totally controlled by their personal mastery of a handful of “clear” Bible verses that interpreted in a “face value” manner unanswerably support whatever objection they feel led to come up with to anything fictional. 

So mythology of any type is off-limits because it features “gods” but The Bible says that there’s only One God. Stories that use words like “witch” and “sorcery” are off limits because The Bible has many verses that condemningly use those words. Angelic-like characters purporting to be servants of the One True God but who don’t look and act exactly like the very few appearances of angels in The Bible must be avoided. For the really extreme advocates, just the very notion of any beings not mentioned in The Bible (Elves, Orcs, Hobbits, dwarves, aliens, etc.) might as well be blasphemy.

Another important angle for this type of critique is that it is almost always wedded to a militant variety of Young Earth Creationism which isn’t conceptually able to consider any other options for how God created the world and governs it. I make no assertions here about whether Young Earth Creationism is true or false, but one thing I have noticed is that as a literary interpretation it is almost always articulated in an extremely weak and question-begging manner.

Basically, as it is commonly articulated, YEC amounts to the sort of wooden interpretation that would require a consistent thinker to say that Jesus is a vine and is a door and is a shepherd, that God Himself is a bird having feathers (Ps. 95), and that Revelation 6:13 really does mean that physical stars will fall down from the sky and, presumably, totally burn up the earth. Thankfully this sort of believer really isn’t ever consistent – but contrary to his piety, that’s not a virtue.

These things said, I don’t wish to hang too much on the YEC angle. For it is possible, of course, to distinguish one’s well-grounded belief in Young Earth Creationism from a strictly literary appreciation for and advocacy of Tolkien. It is quite possible to hold YEC as being the hermeneutically proper (≠ “literal” as I’ve been using it), to not be wooden literalist, and to be a serious enthusiast of Tolkien and other imaginative works.

Nevertheless, the YEC angle remains important as a species of “Bible Only” critique because its highly restrictive understanding of chronology and history really do stand in serious contradiction to the eschatologically practical literary implications of Tolkien’s system of “Ages of the World.” (But this will have to be covered elsewhere.)

My conclusion is that the “Bible Only” criticism of Tolkien (and other such imaginative works) is an intellectual, literary, and spiritual dead end.

The “Light of Nature” Objection

Whatever else may need to be said about the “Bible Only” type of objection to Tolkien and similar works of Christian imagination, there exist an altogether different sort of Christian critique of such. This is a critique emanating not from the Bible, which theologians call special revelation because it was given specially to Israel and to the church in a special way. The new critique emanates rather from what theologians call general revelation because it was given to all human beings in general. 

This newer critical claim, in short, is that imaginative writing of the type we see in Christians such as Tolkien and Lewis is, on the criteria of general revelation, blameworthy in most or all of the same ways that all Christians should blame merely pagan and idolatrous imaginations. 

As I write this (Dec. 2021), I should acknowledge that I’ve only recently become aware of this mode of critique, so I am myself in the process of reading up on it and digesting it so as to more adequately respond. Consequently, I can here only give the barest of outlines of how I’ve thusfar seen it presented – and I have to restrict it to the single issue of Tolkien’s idea of subcreation. So here goes:

This newer critique, just as Scripture says the pagans ought to have known better because general revelation is clear, rendering them culpable before God, so too ought Christians like Tolkien and Lewis have known better, rendering them culpable before God for leading unbelievers and believers alike astray. In particular, the very idea of subcreation upon which the coherence and literary purposes and effects of these imaginative works totally depends, appears to have a few major problems. 

One angle of the criticism is that subcreation is repugnant to reason. Since there is only one God, only one Creator, it must follow that any other acts by creatures of God can’t be called “creative.” Behind this objection there appears to be a (for lack of a better term) puristic definition of “Monotheism” such that the quality divinity can only be ascribed to the Self-Existent, Eternal, Immutable One from Whom all else derives its finite being.

Moreover, there are types of of Christian theology that are animated by a very jealous regard for the sole glory of God and so which see the notion of creatures “helping” God do creative works as a gross elevation of creatures at God’s expense.

Consequently, Tolkien comes under fire because his Silmarillion prominently features what seem to be angel-like beings whom God created and to whom he then sort of “farmed out” the duties of actually physically shaping and governing the created world. Critics of this literary representation sometimes seize upon phraes of Tolkien’s such as in the early sentences of the Valaquenta describing the Ainur, “The Great among these spirits the Elves name the Valar, the Powers of Arda, and Men have often called them gods.” (emphasis mine).

This whole conceptual apparatus seems to evoke Israel’s long history with chasing after idols instead of after God, and so not only the zeal of the Old Testament prophets against everything from Ba’al to Nehushtan may be called to witness against Tolkien’s stories of the Valar, but also the Apostle Paul’s charged polemic in Romans 1 and his less scathing, but still firm, rebuke of idolatry in Acts 17.

Yet, as I have tried to show near the end of my essay Genesis 1 Compared with the Ainulindalë and Valaquenta, this mode of attack is hardly obvious, let alone inherently persuasive. A great deal of substantive argument has to be made in defense of all the items of this critique, and for many of us, at the last some critical pieces of it may be beyond our ability to prove or disprove apart from gaining expertise in the Hebrew language so as to thoroughly analyze its terms that get translated, as context seems to require, as “God” or “gods.” Again, a topic for much further elaboration elsewhere.

A second angle of the general revelation-based criticism – though it may be more of an addendum to or elaboration of the first rather than a distinct second point – is that subcreation is inconsistent with the main principles of Christian theology and philosophy. For there are no lack of historic, venerable Christian theologians whose writings may be marshalled in defense of what I earlier called the “purist” view of Monotheism, the necessity of stamping out idolatry, and the pious duty of defending the glory of God. Only rash enthusiasts of Tolkien would simply dismiss any such historic Christian witnesses, so these will have to be interacted with at appropriate points.

A third angle of the general revelation-based criticism as I’ve seen it articulated is that subcreation is almost certainly productive not of legitimate piety but of a corrosive downward slide into an entirely counterfeit mode of religion. What is to keep the Christian who, say, accepts as a legitimate theological and philosophical possibility the existence of angelic “subcreators” of the world from the sorts of dualistic or naturalistic falsehood found in pagan religions such as Zoroastrianism or the Babylonian Enuma Elish?

Essentially this assertion flows from the first two, for if the Valar are simply detractory of God’s sole glory as Creator and simply inconsistent with Christian theology and philosophy, it should follow that believers who enjoy and defend Tolkien’s work are skating on thin ice on a slippery slope to bowing to golden calves or of “offering strange fire” (improper, sinful modes of worship) before the Lord.

Admittedly, this sort of criticism ought not to be dismissed out of hand. For we have it as the ipsissima verba (“the very words of God”) that we are to have no other gods before Him, nor make any images of anything He has created so as to offer it worship. When it comes to idolatry, the human heart is, as the Reformer John Calvin said, “an idol factory.”

As I outlined in my opening essay The Imagination: Pitfalls and Prospects, there exists an enormous danger of ourselves as image-bearers of God possessing signficant (sub)creative powers of making verbal and conceptual images of an idolatrous nature. All I can say here is that Tolkien himself was quite aware of this problem, for in explaining his idea of subcreation he wrote, “Great harm can be done, of course, by this potent mode of ‘myth’—especially wilfully.The right to ‘freedom’ of the sub-creator is no guarantee among fallen men that it will not be used as wickedly as is Free Will.” (Letters, p. 194)

If Tolkien was aware of this danger, any Christian who highly values his work ought to be as well. I will close this essay with an appropriate quote from Tolkien which, to me, opens up important theological and conceptual “room to maneuver” for the imaginative Christian. Again speaking of the Valar as more or less a sort of subordinate type of “god,” he wrote:

“On the side of mere narrative device, this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can yet be accepted—well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity.” (Letters, p. 146)

Genesis 1 Compared with the Ainulindalë and Valaquenta

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As noted in the brief opening for this section of the page, Tolkien has many Christian detractors. These may be divided into two broad classes: those who object to his mythology on the basis of special revelation and those who object on the basis of general revelation. (Of course, the same objector may have objections in both categories of revelation.)

On this page I begin – but can by no means complete! – a textual analysis of what Scripture tells us about the creation of the world and what the Silmarillion tells us. Are the two sources contradictory? Does Tolkien use his important idea of subcreation in a way that violates either or both general and special revelation in his mythic account of the world’s creation? Is Tolkien presenting us with some sort of thinly “Christianized” variant of polytheism, an idolatrous system which we must reject in order to preserve the sole glory of God Himself?

I think not, and here is my first effort at showing why this is so. I invite the reader to carefully read, perhaps several times, these three passages placed in parallel:

Genesis 1 Ainulindalë Valaquenta
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.




There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought,and they were with him before aught else was made. Then those of the Ainur who desired it arose and entered into the World at the beginning of Time; and it was their task to achieve it, and by their labours to fulfil the vision which they had seen. Long they laboured in the regions of Eä, which are vast beyond the thought of Elves and Men,
until in the time appointed was made Arda, the Kingdom of Earth. Then they put on the raiment of Earth and descended into it, and dwelt therein.		In the beginning Eru, the One,
who in the Elvish tongue is
named Ilúvatar, made the Ainur
of his thought; and they made a
great Music before him. In this
Music the World was begun; for Ilúvatar made visible the song of
the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness. And many among them became enamoured of its beauty, and of its history which they saw beginning and unfolding as in a vision. Therefore Ilúvatar gave to their vision Being, and set it amid the Void, and the Secret Fire was sent to burn at the heart of the World; and it was
called Eä.

Textual Comparison of Genesis 1:1-5 with The Silmarillion

Where to begin, since the three sources at first seem vastly divergent? Perhaps the best way to begin is to question that very premise – that the three sources are vastly divergent.

Over a number of years of working with Tolkien and observing Christian objections to his work I have noticed that many believers think inside a very “wooden” box-like concept of biblical inspiration.

That is, an extremely powerful but quite unliterary understanding of “the literal interpretation of the Bible” tends to control their thinking, especially about issues of creation. I make no apologies for saying up front that this variety of literalism must be understood as both a product of and a reaction to the prevailing intellectual winds of evolutionary theory that have for so long captured our general cultural mindset.

Now it may very well be that when all the necessary interpretive factors are well taken into account we will find that Genesis does in fact teache that the universe as we now observe it was created very recently, on the order of 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. It may very well be that humankind is therefore a very young race, and that all the unpleasantness of whatever kind that we see about us through all of our recorded history are simply and finally the result of the Fall of man in the Garden. It may be very well be that the waters of the Flood covered every square inch of the planet. And so on.

Items like this are typically what the type of Christian I’m referring to here means when he speaks of “interpreting the Bible literally.” And it is usually in the grip of such thinking that objections to Tolkien’s creation account as found in The Silmarillion arise. For on the basis of such thinking, isn’t it just obvious that Tolkien’s writing contradicts the Bible?

Well, er, no, it’s not obvious. Or rather, it’s only obvious if this type of Christian is allowed to simply beg the question about what exactly”the literal interpretation of Scripture” consists. This is far too big an issue to diverge into in this essay, but I will note (with the caveat that much further explanation must be given) that the Bible, though coming to us from God and so constituting the only infallible rule of our faith and practice, essentially is a piece of literature written in human languages, and so the interpretive task must follow the established conventions of literary interpretation.

The Bible is indeed sui generis (it’s own unique thing) in terms of its origin, but it is not so in terms of how it is to be read. The Christian who has not had his mind significantly shaped in literary manner – including the serious study of history, at least one or two languages other than the English he reads the Bible in, and a wide variety of genres of literature – is just flat not in a position to lecture those who have had such formation as to what “literal interpretation” must mean.

But let me return to the parallel texts above. Are the creation accounts given in the second and third columns (The Silmarillion) contradictory to that given in the first (Genesis 1)?

No, because contradiction means “opposite” or “conflicting,” and disallowing that wonderfully begged question about so-called “literal interpretation” it’s going to turn out to be pretty difficult to prove Tolkien’s words have those two qualities as compared with Genesis. Let’s take just a few of the fronts of argument that must be worked through.

First, Genesis 1 states that in the beginning God “made the heavens and the earth” while The Silmarillion states that in the beginning God made some spiritual beings called the Ainur as “the offspring of his thought.” Now the hasty reader will jump to “Contradiction!” without realizing that if God made the heavens and the earth He certainly made the beings contained in it – and these Ainur are nothing more than a species of those created things. There is no contradiction here, though there is certainly a difference.

And herein we see one major way that the wooden literalism I noted above infects the interpretation of Scripture, particularly the first 11 chapters of Genesis. The so-called “literal” interpreter gratuitously assumes that if the Bible doesn’t say a thing exists or happened in very clear and exact words, well, that thing cannot be real or true. (A pastor’s wife I knew once claimed, on the grounds of such illogical, universal negative reasoning, that because the Bible never mentions the word “aliens” we can know that there is no such thing anywhere in God’s created universe.)

So the problem with asserting contradiction between Genesis and The Silmarillion appears right in the beginning of the compared accounts, and is rooted in nothing more than the assumption that “heavens and the earth” can’t be expanded, even if only as a literary device, and the expansion treated only in terms of mentioning a few items not mentioned by Scripture.

But this is just simplistic and flatly unreasonable, since “heavens and earth” are catch-all terms necessarily implying all the vast array of individual beings contained therein. The Bible never mentions hamburgers or art galleries or tyrannosauruses or laptop computers, either. Perhaps sentences in fictional works that speak of such things are therefore “contradictory” to Scripture?

Second, purely textually, Genesis 1:3 tells us that “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The hasty so-called biblical literalist again jumps to “Contradiction!”, for he has apparently not noticed that the Ainulindalë specifically states, “Ilúvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.” Whereas Genesis speaks in the third person singular of God Himself, “God separated the light from the darkness,” the Ainulindalë speaks in the third person plural from the point of view of God’s creatures, “and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.” Moreover, somewhat later than the part I cited above, Iluvatar tells the Ainur that He is going to make their song about the world a reality: “Therefore I say: Eä! Let these things Be!”

It would take a particularly obtuse reader – or at least one who has an agenda not related to what the text itself says – not to see the parallel ideas and language in the two accounts. “Let there be light!” / “Let these things Be!”, and so forth. The Ainulindalë does not here “contradict” Genesis 1 so much as it expresses the same truths about the all-powerful, eternal God’s unilateral creation of the finite world in language different from that of Scripture. Difference is not necessarily the same thing as contradiction. The burden of proof lies here on the so-called “literalist,” not on the literary reader of both the Bible and Tolkien.

I have above given two text-based reasons why it is improper to assert that the creation accounts of Genesis 1 and The Silmarillion are “contradictory.” A third, which I consider possibly more important than the other two, consists of the fact that Tolkien himself tells us the Silmarillion is not a literary work that can be judged by criteria that arise from the experiences of human beings. Quite simply – though there are profound depths here! – the Silmarillion is a collection of Elf-centered legends and tales about Elf experiences with humans, other creatures in the world, and God Himself.

A crucial explanation from Tolkien himself appears on pp. 194-196 of his Letters, where, explaining the whole literary purpose of his mythology is to explore “the physical effects of Sin and misused Free Will” he adds of the Valar subcreating the physical world, “in this myth, it is ‘feigned’ (legitimately whether that is a feature of the real world or not) that He gave special ‘sub-creative’ powers to certain of His highest created beings…” Note the word “feigned” and the phrase “whether that is a feature of the real world or not.”

These are Tolkien’s own qualifications, and they express his recognition, first, that his imaginative universe has a carefully theologically circumscribed didactic purpose and second, that he himself is quite aware that none of what he wrote may have any factual connection with the world God actually created. As he himself put it in one of his letters, “On the side of mere narrative device, this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can yet be accepted—well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity.” (Letters, p. 146)

The Valar as agents of God in the creative shaping of the world, then, need not be taken as Tolkien attempting to detract from God’s sole glory as Creator by setting up a possibly (or likely) idolatrous chain of other objects of worship. Any critique which doesn’t take Tolkien at his word here, granting him maximum charity of interpretation, is a critique I won’t find persuasive.

Again, there is a great deal more that needs to be said – I have hardly even begun to scratch the surface.

For instance, on the basis of the parallel texts above, the literalist Christian will next jump to attacking the very concept of God using other beings which He Himself made to perform the actual physical creative works of shaping the world. The objector may urge that such a concept somehow diminishes the sole glory of God as Creator, or that it borrows from anti-Hebrew and anti-Christian paganisms, setting up a thinly-veiled variety of polytheism for the believer to become enamored with (as Israel of old with her golden calves and Asherah poles) instead of God and His revealed truths in nature and Scripture.

These are objections worthy of exploration, but they will have to be taken up in another essay.

General Revelation: An Indispensable Christian Category!

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A faithful use of the imagination by Christians must begin with recognizing and upholding the historic theological distinction between two types of God’s revelation: special and general.

Many Christians today seem to recognize only one type, special, (which they often don’t realize even has a name) and only one exemplar of that type: the Bible. Negatively, nothing can be true that contradicts something found in the Bible, and positively, the Bible has something definite to say about pretty much everything with which human beings might have to deal.

Yet this is actually a reduction of the category revelation which is not supported even by the Bible. The Bible, in fact, though the only example of special revelation, itself teaches us pretty clearly about the other type, general revelation.

The classical passages from Scripture that outline the existence and operation of general revelation are two:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

Psalm 19:1-4

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Romans 1:18-20

The reader will note that these biblical descriptions of general revelation are themselves pretty general. Insofar as the words of the Bible itself go, we aren’t told exactly what are the contents of this mode of revelation to all mankind. We are only told a description of the contents, namely: “the glory of God,” “knowledge,” “what may be known about God,” and “God’s invisible qualities.” In the Romans passage, the last of these items does break down into the dual category “his eternal power and divine nature,” but even so, no further elaboration comes. 

The clincher, it seems, is the precise way in which Paul tells us that people know these things and so are without excuse: His invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, are all “understood from what has been made.” It is by observing with our senses the created world and pondering with our minds what we observe in the created world that Paul says clearly show all human beings everywhere and at all times certain general truths about God. No special revelation (like the Bible) is needed for this general knowledge about God, and this is exactly why all human beings everywhere and at all times have no excuses for denying God.

As it turns out, the substantial difference between the nature, content, and mode of reception of these two types of revelation is crucial for the proper use of the human imagination. Arguments from special revelation must marshal specific texts of Scripture to support their points, after which the complex process of textual interpretation begins. By contrast, arguments about the implications of general revelation must take place on the grounds of setting forth observable features of the created world and then drawing from them philosophical and theological inferences.

Of course the question begs to be asked: What might these inferences be? 

The Apostle Paul was not, of course, writing in an intellectual vacuum. For several centuries Greek philosophers had gradually articulated a broad and deep systematic understanding of the created world as rationally ordered and governed. Some of them even came to call this rational principle the Logos – which certainly ought to interest us since the first chapter of John’s Gospel articulates the incarnation of Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, in terms of “The Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Though none of the Greek schools of thought came to full knowledge of the truth, the broad outlines of a metaphysic and epistemology that was at least not simply inconsistent with special revelation existed, and it is clear that Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, appealed to these things in many of his theological arguments. 

Not merely in Romans 1 do we see this appeal, but in Romans 2 also (“the law written on their hearts”) and in the justly famous Areopagus sermon of Acts 17, in which Paul deals directly with several ideological descendants of Socrates, the Stoics and Epicureans. In this latter passage, indeed, we find Paul noting, quite interestingly, that the philosophers, not having special revelation, nevertheless didn’t get everything wrong, and that is why God rightly now calls them to repentance and belief in Christ.

The Knowable Truths of General Revelation

Later generations of Christians (Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages) developed these premises and implications further, refining propositional expressions of the specific contents of general revelation. For the sake of space, I will only refer to one such later Christian treatment, that of John Calvin at the time of the Reformation. 

In his Commentary on Romans, Calvin explains the contents of what all men know about God from observing and thinking about the things that have been made with these headings:

  1. Eternity – God, having no beginning or end, is the uncaused maker of all things
  2. Power – God at all times actively upholds all of existence
  3. Wisdom – God providentially arranges and governs the world
  4. Goodness – Nothing outside God constrains Him to create or preserve the world
  5. Truth – God is immutable and unchangeable; therefore truth doesn’t change
  6. Righteousness – God punishes the guilty and defends the innocent
  7. Mercy – God, who is slow to anger, bears with the perversity of fallen men

Given a list like this, we may certainly say that the contents of general revelation are not at all vague, let alone difficult to understand. Obviously, each one  to be “unpacked” and exposited in much detail – a task which has already been done for us by numerous Christian authors of the past (necessitating that we will take the time to read those authors.)

We may certainly say, also, that all people everywhere at all times have this knowledge, whether they have ever encountered a Bible or a Christian – and also no matter how vehemently they may deny having any knowledge of God. And again, it is their actual possession of this very substantial and clearly seen knowledge about God that renders them “without excuse.”

All of this really should be uncontroversial for the biblically literate and reasonably historically informed Christian. The knowable phenomenon of general revelation, inclusive of at least the above list of clearly knowable truths about God’s nature, ought to be just “givens” of our approach to unbelievers. 

When we are asked a reason for the hope that is within us (1 Pet,. 3:15), there is no need for us to play the skeptics’ game, granting them that the basic truth about God is really quite hard to find and there are just so many legitimate reasons why a person might not see it. Let alone is there any reason for us to retreat to subjective appeals to our own private devotional contemplation of the Bible and our own personal spiritual experiences.

The Imagination: Pitfalls and Prospects

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As will often be noted in the materials found here, many Christians harbor great suspicions about the imagination. Their suspicions, expressed in a variety of ways both vulgar and sophisticated, cluster around two of the most important theological truths of our Faith: special revelation and general revelation. These two are covered in their own articles on this site, so referring you to those I here move straight to the topic of the pitfalls and prospects of the imagination for Christians. I begin with a bold assertion:

At its root, an attack on the imagination is an attack on reality.

Now this remark may seem contradictory at first. Aren’t the two items listed, imagination and reality, simply opposites? The real is, well, that which ​is the case​, while the imagination, as its etymology shows, consists of an ​image​. And isn’t an image at its best only an artificial imitation of something real and at its worst an attempt to copy something real which ends in falsification of the real?

What can it mean, then, to assert that an attack on the imagination is an attack on reality?

​I would begin to explain it by making an important distinction: (1) the imagination ​as such​ and (2) the imagination ​​as application​.

The former category picks out the thing itself, our God-given ability to mentally ​image​ things in the world (just as we ourselves most essentially ​image​ God Himself) and think about, manipulate, and communicate those images. It’s difficult to see how this category of imagination could be intrinsically a bad thing, since it’s just part of our created nature itself.

We can no more avoid ​imaging​ things in the world than we can avoid ​thought itself​.

In this sense, then, an attack on the imagination ​as such​ is an attack on the reality that God made and into which He has put us and commanded us to live for Him. This seems an odd thing to say since we so often associate the imagination with fiction, which we (falsely) think means “that which is not true.” Since we are Christians, we think that we must shun whatever is not true. And so many of us are tempted to shun the imagination because we think it stands in opposition to Truth – either the truth found in the pages of the Bible or the truth found in the “pages” of general revelation.

One thinks here of well-meaning Christians who think it their Stoical duty to inform other people’s children that, for Really Reals and In Real-Not-Fake Reality, there just absolutely aren’t any such beings anywhere in all of creation as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Alas, such well-meaning Christians have probably never carried out the quite illuminating exercise of taking seriously the title of that book on Mr. Tumnus’ shelf which Lucy saw on her first night in Narnia: ​Is Man A Myth? 

What I mean is just this: one of the chief values of the imagination for Christians is how it enables us to come at our own personal views, which are so comfortable and “obvious” to us, from a vantage point that is so different it makes us aware that we might just be assuming too much, or at least assuming some things that aren’t accurate. ​

What if those among us who vehemently contend that there cannot possibly be any such thing in God’s universe as fauns (either “Because the Bible doesn’t mention them” or “Because weird creatures like that violate the Nature which God gave us to look at so we could know His truth clearly”) found themselves the topic of a learned book in another world questioning whether there could be any such thing as human beings in God’s universe?

Maybe there is no answer to this sort of question. Maybe it will turn out to be a ridiculous question after we’ve examined it thoroughly from every angle we can. But just the activity of asking it exposes as merely an assumption – and quite an overconfident one! – that we already have the answers to any questions about possibilities that could be thought of to be asked.

Which attitude amounts, really, to just simple arrogance. God has not deigned to tell us everything about His creation, nor is He obligated to do so. He has told us just what we need to know to accurately know Him and seek salvation from our sins.

Other inferences we may wish to draw about what can or can’t or does or doesn’t exist somewhere else than our small world at some other time than our own limited lifespan are just that – personal inferences or prejudices that we should never hold with the sort of dogged temerity we would actual Articles of the Faith.

And yet, to try to be fair to the multiple types of Christian detractors of the imagination, surely one can see through their pious zeal for a hyper-literal concept of “Truth” (whether appealing to the Bible or to Nature) to the more general and quite real danger it is trying to recall: the danger of idolatry.

And this brings me to the second part of the distinction above: imagination as ​application​.

It doesn’t take much reflection on Scripture to realize that thanks to sin breaking the world, our God-given and good ability to make images – indeed, our very desire to make images – has itself become fundamentally skewed. What is the Second Commandment, after all?

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.​

Exodus 20:2

And from there, of course, we must never forget the powerful lesson of Israel’s history which were “written for our instruction” (Rom. 15:4, 1 Cor. 10:11), that a major source of God’s own people departing from His clear instructions was, precisely, ​chasing after images​ that they had set up in idolatrous competition with God – sometimes even culpably confusing those very images with God.

Whether with Aaron (Ex. 32:1-35) or with Jeroboam (1 Kgs. 12), the people confused images made by hands with God Himself. Hezekiah had to destroy the brazen serpent that Moses himself had made, for it, too, had become an object of sinful worship (2 Kgs. 18:4).

But if we need a crowning biblical proof of the great danger that attends the human tendency not just to be interested in images but to actively pursue them in spite of God Himself, the Apostle Paul condemns the whole human race because they had “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles” (Rom. 1:23).

So here is another bold assertion to offset the one with which I began:

The use of the imagination in terms of making non-physical images is an inherently dangerous thing, not to be done without first engaging in serious reflection about the substance of God’s revelation to us in Nature and in Scripture.

Having said that, I still maintain that when we reject the imagination outright, we do so at a terrible price. Wanting rightly to avoid the idolatry-snare to which our fallen capacity for imaging is prone, we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Although many among us, operating with a constricted understanding of “truth” as consisting only of ​literal​ statements, are dogmatically convinced that such things as myth and magic are evil and have nothing to do with “true spirituality,” I think we can find and defend a positive vision of the imagination in the Christian’s life.

​In the sense that I want to defend it here, imagination should be seen as a creative reconfiguration of the things we find at hand in God’s world, an activity undertaken first to glorify Him by expressing the creative ability He Himself built into us as His image bearers, and second to explore points of contact we as believers can and do have with unbelievers.

Writing of just this activity, Tolkien explained that “sub-creating” worlds by taking actual things God has made and imagining them in different modes or forms is, contrary to a kneejerk polemic about idolatry, rather to be seen as:

“a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which it indeed is exhibited…I am not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysic—there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones—that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!

Letters, pp. 188-189

Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis wrote similarly of what he did in his Narnia books:

“​[Aslan] is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’

The Letters of C.S. Lewis, pg. 283

Although much more needs to be said on this topic, I will close this article by reiterating – with Tolkien and Lewis at my back! – that attacking imaginative work in any “totalizing” manner, as if the thing itself is wrong rather than just abuses of it, amounts to fighting against the goodness and beauty of the real world that God Himself has made.

Orpheus and Orphism (Pt. 2)

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Most scholarly sources I’ve consulted acknowledge one critical fact about Orphism: there is a real paucity of records from the time period in which it arose (apparently 6th century B.C.). Thus, scholarship teaches us by its wide disagreement over many details, much of what may be said about Orphism in its original context is at best of a reconstructive nature, and so may contain significant errors. ((An important remark in this regard is given in a source I cite several times below, James Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece, Lecture 5: “…it would be rash to affirm for certain that everything which I shall put before you had a place in the Orphic religion so early as the sixth century B.C. It is none the less true that the family resemblance between the different ideas to which I shall call your attention is sufficient to justify their claim to a common ancestry; and in this case we must be content to infer the character of the parent from that of the children.”))

However, since Orphism continued as a live religion for many centuries, we do, as it turns out, have some substantial remarks about at least as it was in the 5th and 4th centuries before Christ. Here our two main sources are Plato and Empedocles. ((For the sake of disclosure, I initially discovered all the references to these writers which I looked up and transcribed below from James Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece, Lecture 5. In other words, nothing in the present post on this blog is original scholarship!))

For instance, in Plato’s Laws the Athenian Stranger, discoursing about founding a new state and ensuring its colonists know that Justice is written into the very fabric of reality, says to the colonists:

“Men, according to the ancient story, there is a god who holds in his hands the beginning and end and middle of things, and straight he marches in the cycle of nature. Justice, who takes vengeance on those who abandon the divine law, never leaves his side.”

– Laws 715e-716

Note that this conception of the nature of the universe is pantheistic, asserting that all things which exist are divine, and especially that all which doesn’t seem to be divine (like us mortals) were in fact made out of God Himself. Though Plato does not mention the word Orphism, the myth he has the Athenian Stranger relate here comes from an Orphic source that runs, “Zeus is the first and the last, the head and the middle, the one out of whom all things were created.” ((As cited by James Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece, Lecture 5: Ζϵὺς πρω̑τος γϵ́νϵτο, Ζϵὺς ὕστατος, ἀργικϵ́ραυνος, Ζϵὺς κϵϕαλή, Ζϵὺς μϵ́σσα, Διὸς δ̕ ϵ̓κ πάντα τϵ́τυκται.)) The remainder of this part of the Athenian’s discourse is fascinating in its own right in terms of the view of Justice it outlines, but I will have to relegate that discussion to a different post elsewhere.

Another place Plato mentions Orphic doctrine is in the dialogue Cratylus:

…some people say that the body is the tomb of the soul, on the grounds that it is entombed in its present life, while others say that it is correctly called ‘a sign’ because the soul signifies whatever it wants to signify by means of the body. I think it is most likely the followers of Orpheus who gave the body its name, with the idea that the soul is being punished for something, and that the body is an enclosure or prison in which the soul is securely kept…until the penalty is paid…

– Cratylus 400b-c

A third citation from Plato, which again does not name Orpheus directly but does, say scholars, probably represent Orphic ideas, is this from the Gorgias:

But then [Callicles] the life of those people you call happiest is a strange one, too. I shouldn’t be surprised that Euripides’ lines are true when he says,

But who knows whether being alive is being dead
And being dead is being alive?

Perhaps in reality we are dead. Once I even heard one of the wise men say that we are now dead and that our bodies are our tombs, and that the part of our souls in which our appetites reside is actually the sort of thing to be open to perusasion and to shift back and forth.

– Gorgias 492e-493a

It is the idea of the body as the “tomb” or “prison house” of the soul that should raise alarm bells for the Christian student of ancient mythology. For though Scripture does exhort us not to be excessively attached to earthly things, since the goal of Christ’s redemption is the resurrection of the body Christianity proper does not denigrate the body in an “Orphic”-like fashion.

Nor does the next part of Orphism mesh with Christianity: the cycle of reincarnations that the soul must undergo in order to be purified. As one Orphic source wrote of the conditions of the soul in this cycle:

“wanders from the home of the blessed, being born into all kinds of mortal forms, passing from one laborious path of life to another. For the mighty Air chases him into the Sea, and the Sea spits him forth upon the dry land, and Earth casts him into the light of the blazing Sun, and the Sun hurls him into the eddies of Air. One takes him from the other, and he is hated of them all. I also am one of these, an exile and a wanderer from the Gods.”

Fragment 115.6ff, as cited in James Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece

The soul’s reincarnation, indeed, knows no physical boundaries: ““Ere now, I too have been a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, and a scaly fish in the sea.” ((As cited by James Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece, Lecture 5))

It is often argued that Plato’s presentations of the soul were heavily influenced by Orphic doctrines. Among passages cited in this regard are this lengthy one from Republic X.614b-615c:

[Er] once upon a time was slain in battle, and when the corpses were taken up on the tenth day already decayed, was found intact, and having been brought home, at the moment of his funeral, on the twelfth day as he lay upon the pyre, revived, and after coming to life related what, he said, he had seen in the world beyond. He said that when his soul went forth from his body he journeyed with a great company [614c] and that they came to a mysterious region where there were two openings side by side in the earth, and above and over against them in the heaven two others, and that judges were sitting between these, and that after every judgement they bade the righteous journey to the right and upwards through the heaven with tokens attached to them in front of the judgement passed upon them, and the unjust to take the road to the left and downward, they too wearing behind signs [614d] of all that had befallen them, and that when he himself drew near they told him that he must be the messenger to mankind to tell them of that other world, and they charged him to give ear and to observe everything in the place. And so he said that here he saw, by each opening of heaven and earth, the souls departing after judgement had been passed upon them, while, by the other pair of openings, there came up from the one in the earth souls full of squalor and dust, and from the second there came down from heaven a second procession of souls clean and pure, [614e] and that those which arrived from time to time appeared to have come as it were from a long journey and gladly departed to the meadow and encamped there as at a festival, and acquaintances greeted one another, and those which came from the earth questioned the others about conditions up yonder, and those from heaven asked how it fared with those others. And they told their stories to one another, the one lamenting[615a] and wailing as they recalled how many and how dreadful things they had suffered and seen in their journey beneath the earth—it lasted a thousand years—while those from heaven related their delights and visions of a beauty beyond words. To tell it all, Glaucon, would take all our time, but the sum, he said, was this. For all the wrongs they had ever done to anyone and all whom they had severally wronged they had paid the penalty in turn tenfold for each, and the measure of this was by periods of a hundred years each, [615b] so that on the assumption that this was the length of human life the punishment might be ten times the crime; as for example that if anyone had been the cause of many deaths or had betrayed cities and armies and reduced them to slavery, or had been participant in any other iniquity, they might receive in requital pains tenfold for each of these wrongs, and again if any had done deeds of kindness and been just [615c] and holy men they might receive their due reward in the same measure; 

Much more could be written on these themes, but this will suffice for this very short, unskilled attempt to sketch the ancient Greek “Orphic” religion built on the myth of the great singer Orpheus.

Orpheus and Orphism (Part 1)

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Given that engaging mythology is a significant part of classical Christian education, it’s likely that most of us have some familiarity with the figure of Orpheus. Sometimes he is reported as the son of the god Apollo and the Muse Calliope; outside myth storybooks, he is rather reported as the son of the Thracian king Oeagrus and Calliope. Parentage disagreements aside, Orpheus is famous for a couple of widely-cited reasons: the aid he gave to Jason and the Argonauts on their quest for the Golden Fleece, ((Apollonius, Argonautica)) and his descent into the Underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, which ended in failure but at least showed that Orpheus’ music could charm even the god of the dead. ((Ovid, Metamorphoses X.1-85)).

Orpheus Among the Thracians

Greek tragedy offers additional information about Orpheus that needs to be carefully processed, including that his songs had power over inanimate objects as well as animate, and that he had connections with Bacchanalic frenzies. ((See these plays of Euripides: Rhesus 944, 946; Medea 543; Iphigenia in Aulis 1211; Bacchae 561; Cyclops 646; Alcestis 357; Hippolytus 953; Bacchae 561)). In a fascinating historical connection, some sources tell us that when the Dionysian cult invaded Thrace, where Orpheus lived, he refused to honor the new god and instead taught his countrymen to abhor as a great evil the sacrificial murdering of human beings. ((Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vol. 1 (London: The Folio Society, 1996), pp. 112-113)) Contra Dionysius, Orpheus preached the supremacy of Apollo, for which “blasphemy” Dionysius apparently had the Maenads tear him apart. ((Graves, ibid., p. 113. The rest of the story as related by Graves definitely “demythologizes” the children’s storybook version of Orpheus: while condemning Dionysian promiscuity, he apparently also advocated homosexuality, which made Aphrodite his enemy, as well!)) An alternate version of his death is that Zeus struck him with a lightning bolt for having revealed divine secrets via the mystery religions he set up. ((Graes, ibid.)) Though without mentiong the how of Orpheus’ death, no less a source than Plato has it, perhaps surprisingly, that Orpheus’ descent to Hades was an act of cowardice supposedly typical of minstrels, and that the god of death tricked him by showing him only an apparition of Eurydice – after which the gods arranged for his death:

In this manner even the gods give special honor to zeal and courage in concerns of love. But Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, they sent back with failure from Hades, showing him only a wraith of the woman for whom he came; her real self they would not bestow, for he was accounted to have gone upon a coward’s quest, too like the minstrel that he was, and to have lacked the spirit to die as Alcestis did for the sake of love, when he contrived the means of entering Hades alive. Wherefore they laid upon him the penalty he deserved, and caused him to meet his death. ((Symposium 179d-e))

All these interesting items aside, Orpheus bears far greater import for classical Christian educators than just these “grammar-level” stories and criticisms. Perhaps most importantly for how we Christians deal with pagan mythology, Orpheus has been credited with formulating at least the rudiments of a system of “hyperspiritual” religious rites that eventually became a robust pagan religious offering, Orphism.

As Orphism and its influences is, as far as I can tell, a little-commented-upon topic in classical education circles, and as I myself am in no way an expert on it, this post is merely an attempt to sketch the issues. The remainder of this post and much of the next, in fact, draw very heavily upon classicist W.K.C. Guthrie’s The Greeks and their Gods. ((Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1950))

A Bare-Bones Sketch of Orphic Ontology

6th century B.C. Greece, in which Orphic religion arose, occupied itself largely with the thorny metaphysical Problem of the One and the Many. In a world teeming with Many individual, distinct things, what held them all together into the One overarching cosmos that was equally undeniable from experience? Concentrated in the religious imagination, this conundrum took the form of how to explain and express the presumed basic unity between the divine and the human soul. ((Lest this sound immediately and entirely unbiblical, recall that most basic of biblical doctrines, creation in the image of God, as His offspring, which implies some sort of union-connection between God and His image-bearers, not to mention the Apostle Peter’s remarks about becoming “partakers of the divine nature” through Christ. It should be clear that per se the notion of unity with God is not necessarily unbiblical and anti-Christian.)) One solution was offered by the followers of Dionysius, who believed the god would at special times lift the human soul out of itself, so to speak, through the practice of passionate and frenzied mystical experiences. But, interestingly, Dionysian orgia did not widely catch on, for the Greek mind in general held the maxim, “mortal thoughts for mortals,” and so wanted to steer far clear of such uncontrollable ecstasies as being rather unhuman. ((Guthrie, pp. 316-317.))

The Orphics, by contrast, tried to solve the One-Many dichotomy by positing a sythesis of the mystical Dionysian and rational Apollonian religions. This Orphic synthesis turns out to be that the human soul simply is divine and also immortal, but requires a continual and rigorous process of catharsis, or purification by way of elaborate ascetic rituals in order to be “clean” enough for union with the divine.

Orphic ontology (beliefs about being) were crassly mythological, beginning with the generation of a cosmos by the first great god, Eros (Love), one of whose children, Zeus, swallows the whole thing and recreates it anew. Although superficially similar to other stories, such as Kronos swallowing his children and Zeus swallowing his first wife, Metis, this Orphic ontology should be of interest to Christians because, as Guthrie puts it, “through these crude folk-tales a new idea is set forth, the idea that the god who rules the world is also its creator.” ((The Greeks and Their Gods, p. 319))

What we should make of this germ of truth is certainly open for debate. In the next post, I’ll finish bare-bones sketching Orphism so that between these two posts there will be a foundation for further exploratory work relative to the myths themselves.

Glossary of Terms (Myth Conceptions)

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Below is a glossary of basic terms necessary for a properly studied Christian view of classical mythology. Lacking a broad understanding of the concepts at work “behind” the myths, Christian critiques of pagan thought run the significant risk of being mere projections of a simplistic kind of “worldview thinking.” Such critiques tend to foster what is sometimes called a “hermeneutic of suspicion” that teaches students (albeit not necessarily deliberately), to be cynical about ancient texts, and so to be primed for deconstructing the Western Tradition itself and retreating to fideistic defenses of Christianity rather than a really robustly classical Christian orientation to the world.

Athanatoi – a Greek term meaning “deathless” and referring to the gods; in mythology, being athanatoi is the key distinction between the gods and human beings

Catharsis – “purging”; the goal of the dramatic form of tragedy (see below), especially as we see it in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Through participating (by viewing) the tragic plays, the audience could symbolically encounter terrible sins or taboos, of which they themselves might, by common human nature, easily become guilty, but instead “purge” themselves of negative and even violent emotions resulting from such evils.

Fate(s) – see Moirai, below

Hermes Trismegestus – A semi-legendary figure that seems to have been an amalgamation of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The purported author of the Hermetica, he is often held to be the founder of the hyper-spiritualized (i.e., “gnostic”) Hermetic tradition. Among other famous utterances, we are told that he said, “That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.”, and again, “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” These remarks function as expressions of the analogous philosophical concepts of the macrocosm and microcosm (see below). Hermes Trismegestus was often criticized by Christian Church Fathers, most especially St. Augustine of Hippo, for illicitly attempting to unite God and creation.

Logos – a Greek term with a variety of related meanings, including “reason,” “plan,” “reckoning,” “account,” and “word”. In distinction to mythos, “story,” logos conveys the idea of a systematic explanation of phenomena carried out by human reasoning powers. As Greek mythology and philosophy advanced, and particularly as the latter increasingly “rewrote” mythology to expunge its viler “literal” elements, Logos in the sense of Reason came to be seen as that which underlies and holds everything in the world together as an ordered, coherent, intelligible whole. See also macrocosm, microcosm, and mythos below.

Macrocosm – “great world” or “great order”; the Greek philosophical term for the universe as a whole, encompassing all smaller, particular things which are, thus, its constituent parts. The idea is frequently dualistic in the sense of positing that the universe is made up of both matter and soul (though “soul” in this sense doesn’t necessarily mean what it does for Christians). See particularly Plato’s Philebus (28d–30d) and Timaeus (29d–47e) for detailed explanations of both this term and its corollary, microcosm. Both concepts are closely related to the distinction between the One and the Many (see below).

Microcosm – “little world” or “little order”; the Greek philosophical term expressing that a whole (say, the universe) can be understood by looking closely at a much smaller version of it (say, the soul of an individual human being). The comparison is, therefore, a kind of analogy: the human being is a microcosm, a “little world,” all to itself, and if this smaller world can be rationally understood, by extension the larger world of which it is a part (the macrocosm) can be rationally understood as well. See particularly Plato’s Philebus (28d–30d) and Timaeus (29d–47e) for detailed explanations of both this term and its corollary, macrocosm. Both concepts are closely related to the distinction between the One and the Many (see below).

Moirai – three Greek goddesses: Klotho, “the Spinner,” spun the thread of each man’s life; Lakhesis, “the Apportioner of Lots,” measured each thread, and Atropos, or Aisa, “She Who Cannot Be Turned,” cut each thread at the apportioned end. Frequently Christians criticize Fate / the Fates as being totally arbitrary, but it is noteworthy that in some sources Zeus, the supreme god, appears as either the executor or even the leader of these three – which gives rise to the significant question whether Fate really is a multiplicity of divinities or an overarching unified (and possibly in some way personal) force guiding and directing all things toward an ordered and intelligible end. By the time of the Roman Stoics Fate will be identified with Reason itself, the very “soul” of the all-encompassing universe, which also leads to interesting theological connections to the Christian doctrine of Providence explored by the Medieval poet Dante in the Divine Comedy.

Mythos – a Greek term meaning “report,” “tale,” “story; does not necessarily mean a falsehood, for it encompasses a wide variety of stories, including true ones; but the term is often used in distinction to logos (see above)

One and the Many – This is a key Greek philosophical concept that expresses two important truths about the world: (1) we experience a great deal of diversity of existing things (the Many) in the world, but somehow all of it contributes to a single, unified whole (the One). Many myths are attempts (focused on various aspects) to engage or explain the interplay between the One and the Many, and the concept also relates to those of Macrocosm and Microcosm (see above).

Ontology – “the study of being,” or, “the study of existence.” Things that exist share the quality of “existing,” and ontology studies what it means to say that a thing “exists.” The term “ontology” comes from the Greek words ontos (being) and logos (the study of). Ontology answers questions like these: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is a “something” in the first place? What kinds of “somethings” exist? How can we organize, or classify, the kinds of “somethings” into groups so we can better understand them? What happens to a “something” when it experiences a change? How much can you take away from or change “something” before it becomes “something else”?

Orphism – This was a systematic religious tradition that emerged in the 6th century B.C. which based itself on the myth of Orpheus, the demigod singer (son of Apollo and the Muse Calliope). Orphism was initially an attempt to grapple with the Problem of the One and the Many (see below) by focusing on the idea of the human relationship to the divine in terms of seeing the human being as the “microcosm,” or a “little cosmos.” The religious ideas associated with Orphism tend to be rather complex, and their relationship with the mythology that represents a much simpler, and much more widespread and politically-important mode of religion, deserves much more serious thought in Christian accounts of pagan culture.

Problem of the One and the Many – Building on the constituent concepts of One and Many (see above), this pivotal Greek philosophical conundrum involves attempting to discern exactly how diversity and unity relate to each other. Among the early options the natural philosophers held (which came down to Plato and Aristotle, who each modified them in their own ways), were the idea that (1) there isn’t any actual unity because, as Heraclitus put it, “You can’t step into the same river twice,” or (2) there isn’t any actual diversity because, as Parmenides put it, distinctions are illusory because all things are simply One.

Supernatural – Despite the popular tendency to simply equate anything dealing with “gods” with the supernatural, this is not the case in the pagan myths because all the divine beings are themselves part of the natural order, just like stars and humans and animals and plants and rocks and all the rest. In other words, unlike in Christianity, there is no actual supernatural activity in the myths, a fact that helps to qualify both the nature of the myths and their general function of non-rational, almost certainly symbolic and allegorical mode of explanation of the world.

Tragedy – a term that has several relevant meanings to Christian engagement with pagan mythology: (1) as used by Aristotle, a story in which someone neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally evil (e.g., Oedipus, Agamemnon, Hecuba), but average and relatable to the audience, comes to a bad end through a significant character flaw. (2) a dramatic part of annual performances, particularly in Athens, during the Festival of Dionysius; tragic plays served a crucial political function by allowing the citizenry to symbolically, through the safe distance of drama, encounter terrible sins or taboos and “purge” themselves (see catharsis, above) of negative and even violent emotions resulting from such evils.