Myth provides the framework for any comprehension we have about moral truth--that's the way it was for the ancients, and that's the way it is for us. Mythos operates at a level deeper than what we call "belief systems", because belief systems are too rational, too open to comparison in a market of competing belief systems. Belief systems are profane ideologies even if they are religious, like Christian or Islamic fundamentalism. Myth, like poetry, uses language to represent what is incomprehensible in terms of our ordinary states of consciousness. It establishes some common ground with the familiar, but draws us into unfamiliar depths.
Myth thrives, therefore, only where there is the possibility to experience depth upon depth of sacred meaning, and fundamentalism and rationalism are terrified of depths because they lose control there. Mythos withers in the fluorescent glare of a hypertrophied rationality, and it suffocates in the oxygenless chambers of fundamentalism and dogmatism. For mythos to be mythos it has to deliver a sense of the sacred, a sense of the near presence of the gods, of angels, of the ancestors, of the beloved dead, and that we are all part of a cosmic web of relationships which is there for us to discover if we have any desire to understand what the meaning of our lives is. If we have any desire to understand what it means to live a good life, that is, to have some understanding about why what we do or fail to do matters, why our life adds up to something or fails to.
What we know is dwarfed by what we do not know. And yet whatever part of that ocean we have explored and have gotten to know is connected to the vastness that lies beyond it. And we can deduce some things about what the ocean is like elsewhere based on what we have learned about it locally, but such deductions are provisional at best. How the ocean works near the surface is quite different from how it works in its deepest depths, and what might be true about its laws here could be very different from its laws there. And yet there is a continuum that connects there with here.
It might be an interesting to approach each of the great myths to try to plumb its depths in this way, but for the near future, I want to restrict myself to the myths that have shaped the soul of the West. And that is the Christian mythos, offspring of the marriage of the nt==mythos of Jews and Greeks and the way both were influenced by the more ancietn mythologies of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The central Christian symbol is the cross, which points the essential structure of the Christian mythos as chiastic,i.e., reversing or turning the meanings and commonplaces of the world of our ordinary experience upside down: the last shall be first and the first last.
All of the ideas that surround Christian thought and practice have to be understood within the context of this fundamental chhiastic mythic structure. One cannot but read the Gospels with an open mind and come away from them with a sense that on the one hand they are talking about the ordinary world as we all experience it, and yet they present a narrative that is in very significant ways a contradiction to the world as we ordinarily understand it to work. I do not think it is possible to grasp the astonishing significance of the information given to us in the Gospels unless one opens himself up to the possibility that the world as he has come to know it is not necessarily the world as it must always be.
There is the kingdom of this world that operates according the austerely rational Newtonian and eat-or-be-eaten Darwinian principles, and yet within that framework there is another kingdom that Jesus said is "within," which as it grows in strength has the power to subvert the outer kingdom, to turn it upside down and to transform it into something very non-Newtonian and non-Darwinian. Lions will someday lie with lambs, and swords shall indeed be made into plowshares.
And this brings me to what I wanted to say about the 'Myth of Redemptive Violence', which exemplifies how we have come to assume that the law without, the eat or be eaten law, is the only one to be taken seriously. It's primal source is the Enuma Elish, and I will recount here quoting from Wink's The Powers that Be:
In the beginning according to the Babylonian myth, Apsu, the father god, and Tiamat, the mother god, give birth to the gods. But the frolicking of the younger gods makes so much noise that the elder gods resolve to kill them so they can sleep. The younger gods uncover the plot before the elder gods put it into action, and kill Apsu. His wife Tiamat, the Dragon of Chaos, pledges revenge.
Terrified by Tiamat, the rebel gods turn for salvation to their youngest member, Marduk. He negotiates a steep price: if he succeeds, he must be given chief and undisputed power in the Assembly of the gods. Having extorted this promise, he catches Tiamat in a net, drives an evil wind down her throat, shoots an arrow that burst her distended belly and pierces her heart. He then splits her skull with a club and scatters her blood in out-of-the-way places. He stretches out her corpse full length, and from it creates the cosmos...
In this myth, creation is an act of violence. Marduk murders and dismembers Tiamat, and from her cadaver creates the world. As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur observes, order is established by means of disorder.
I agree with Walter Wink that the myth of redemptive violence is the one that unconsciously saturates our culture and shapes our perceptions about what is most real, what is admirable, and what has cultural legitimacy.
There are a lot of Christians who are more influenced by the cosmogonic myth of redemptive violence with its roots in the Enuma Elish than they are in the cosmogonic myth presented in Genesis. They accept that the world is ruled by the strong who dominate the weak, and that if you're smart you put your money on the strong man or you get branded as a loser. They look to the God of power and might before they look to the God who speaks in a still, small voice. They look to the strong, violent man for redemption before they look to the suffering servant. They feel more comfortable entrusting their fate to the Boromirs than they do to the Frodos.
In talking about these cosmogonic myths, I'm, of course, not talking about literally believing or disbelieving that this is the way world was made, but in the extra-rational archetypes that frame our sense of what is real. My intention eventually is to get back to the Genesis myth and to contrast this one with that one, and then to ask: Which myth do most people professing to be Christians live by? I think it should be clear that a Christian like George Bush is as much a Babylonian as Saddam was, at least insofar as both live within the frame by which the myth of redemptive violence shapes their respective understanding of the real world and the laws that govern it.
For the myth of redemptive violence is a powerful representation of how much of the world does in fact operate, but it's not the whole story--at least that''s what Christians like me are struggling to find a compelling way to communicate. The Christian mythos represents a turning upside down of the Babylonian mythos, and if understood correctly is subversive of it.