Mythos, Logos and The Breaking of Myths:
An Exploration
Mythos in Action
Much of what follows are borrowings from many authors, including Karen Armstrong (from
whom comes the pair ‘Mythos’ and ‘Logos’)1, Paul Tillich (from whom comes the term ‘broken
myth’), Rudolf Bultmann and his appeal to existentialism and Richard Holloway who has
discussed Tillich in detail2.
‘Mythos’ and ‘Logos’ are two different and complementary ways of knowing. Each
has its own way of recognising what counts as ‘truth’.
Logos is the way of reason, of objective testable knowledge expressed in challengeable
propositions and defended by appeal to universally acceptable evidence. In applying Logos,
one could even arrive at a point of conceding that what is being proposed is undeniably and
logically true, however inconvenient that realisation might be, because the evidence is beyond
question. A person operating under Logos – perhaps a scientist or a philosopher – will have a
sense of detachment from what is being debated. It will be of little or no existential
significance. The current climate change debate is clouded by instances of imperfect uses of
Logos, on both sides of the argument.
In contrast, Mythos relies on intuition and emotion, which are traditional non-rational ways
of knowing. Its truth does not depend on a one-for-one correspondence between the statement
and the state of the world, because Mythos deals in non-literal modes of thought which
resonate with the reader’s past experiences. The substance of Mythos is typically ‘Story’ and its
sub-forms: myth, society-defining narrative, exemplary narrative, novel, fantasy, magic realism,
anthropomorphised animals dramatising human situations … any many more. The truth
arrived at in Mythos is personal and existential. It says as much about the believer as what is
believed.
The word ‘Mythos’ is sometimes used as a formal synonym for ‘myth’. Sometimes it is used to
refer to a collection of myths. But a more profitable use of the terms is to regard both Mythos
and Logos as epistemological categories – ‘ways of knowing’ – and to refer to ‘Myth’ as a
particular kind of story, with its characteristic blend of imagery and supernatural explanations.
Seen in this way, myth joins the larger group of the story forms which package the existential
truths asserted by knowledge category Mythos.
Even Karen Armstrong seems inconsistent in this regard. While she sometimes uses
‘Mythos’ as the way of knowing and at other as a synonym for ‘myth’ she has no similar
1
treatment for ‘logos’. However she seems to offer a sort of bridge in using the Greek words
mythoi and logoi in what appears to be an attempt at consistent usage3. Elsewhere she offers a
concretatisation for ‘Logos’: ‘[by the 18th century the] old myths were beginning to be
interpreted as though they were logoi’ and ‘By the end of the nineteenth century, the severance
of logos and mythos seemed complete’4
In addition, in our personal collections of beliefs, opinions, commitments, observations,
obsessions, fears, hopes and doubts, we tend to indiscriminately merge ideas which, considered
separately, may have well-defined places in either Logos or Mythos.
Myth as Metaphor
Much of the Christian Bible was written in the expectation that it would be read in what we
now recognise as the Mythos register. Truth was proclaimed, revealed, intuited. No critical
standards were asked for or offered. It was never intended to be seen as value-neutral history
or scientifically-demonstrated science. If it was history, it was history with attitude. God led
the battles, God guided the desert refugees, God addled the languages at Babel. Its myths
(Eden), sagas (Exodus), moral debates (Job), musings (Psalms) and prophetic utterances were
all written in language that is value-laden and highly symbolic. As Jung demonstrated, much of
it ‘gets a free ride’ into our psyches because it is written in the kind of symbolic language with
which we dream and encounter visions.
To take such material literally is to ill-serve both it and ourselves. The rise of the
requirement to do so seems to be what Karen Armstrong is alluding to in The Case for God
when she divides religious and philosophical history at about the year 1500CE – the dawn of
modern science, rationalism and the later Enlightenment.
Holloway says this:
The myth is seen as a powerful metaphor for real human experience. It is kept not because it is bad
history, but because it is good poetry, because it provides us with a powerful shorthand for complex
human experiences of alienation and regret.5
To attempt to render the categories which subscribe to Mythos as literal history (Eden) or
geology (Creation) or linguistics (Babel) is to leave them unnecessarily exposed to the acids of
rationalism while missing their points entirely. What they say is said in the key of Mythos, not
the key of Logos.
Confronting Myths
Let us assume that a significant number of literate and scholarly people decide that a
particular story is a myth. In labelling it as such they will not necessarily be attempting to
discredit it but they will be making an implicit judgement about its status vis-a-vis objective
reality. Depending upon such background assumptions and of any privilege accorded to
scriptural writings, a reader confronted with a myth is faced with three choices.
2
Literalise: Assert that what is written is, or was, literally the case. There was a Garden and
a Talking Snake, the Ark truly grounded on Ararat and expeditions are still looking for it. Jesus
was conceived by a virgin and later returned from the dead. In the following passage from
Tillich he sets out the danger of this approach. The reader is cautioned to note that although
Tillich refers to ‘demythologisation’ he is using the term in a more general sense than Bultmann
with whom it is usually associated. Tillich wrote:
The resistance against demythologisation expresses itself in "literalism". The symbols and myths are
understood in their immediate meaning. The material, taken from nature and history, is used in its
proper sense. The character of the symbol to point beyond itself to something else is disregarded.
Creation is taken as a magic act which happened once upon a time. The fall of Adam is localised on a
special geographical point and attributed to a human individual. The virgin birth of the Messiah is
understood in biological terms, resurrection and ascension as physical events, the second coming of
Christ as a telluric, or cosmic, catastrophe. The presupposition of such literalism is that God is a being,
acting in time and space, dwelling in a special place, affecting the course of events and being affected
by them like any other being in the universe. Literalism deprives God of his ultimacy and, religiously
speaking, of his majesty. It draws him down to the level of that which is not ultimate, the finite and
conditional.6
We might see, in this process, the mistake of reading these stories in the light of Logos – a
kind of ‘pseudo-Logos’ – as with supporters of Intelligent Design and The Rapture who attract
the criticism of offering ‘bad science and bad religion’.
Discard: When confronted by a myth, discard it. Of course snakes do not talk, neither can
parthenogenesis yield a male child (where would the Y chromosomes come from?) and a
person, even one who came back from the dead, cannot violate laws of the conservation of
energy and of thermodynamics by walking through walls. “No”, such a critic says, “Reason goes
all the way down the explanatory pile and discards what is plainly untrue.”
Adapt: Re-Interpret or De-Mythologise: The third choice, required explicitly by Tillich,
Bultmann and Holloway and implicitly by many others, is to change the myth to current ways
of thinking. This involves first acknowledging that the narrative is not literal – the use of
supernatural entities is probably all that is required and the usually lush use of symbols and
metaphors will reinforce the opinion. Next we discern what the narrative is probably asserting
in terms of the world-view of the author. Finally, we re-tell the story with whatever figurative
or literal language best suits the current reader or hearer. In expanding on Tillich, Holloway
notes that
symbols [in general] may represent something beyond themselves; they may even, in some sense,
7
connect us with it; but they are never the thing itself.
Tillich used the term ‘broken myth’ to name this process, which can lead to the
misapprehension that the myth is thereby rendered disfunctional or is discredited but his
intention is better served by the term ‘broken open’ or even ‘revealed’, ‘discovered’ or ‘reinterpreted’. This process can be difficult, if only because what is to be attempted is not well3
understood. Every myth is to be understood to be precisely a myth and not as a literal report
about some supernatural order that parallels the world.
Tillich, Bultmann and Borg
As Tillich points out in The Dynamics of Faith, the myth must be re-interpreted afresh for
each new age. For believers in the Bible to fail to ‘break open’ a myth is to risk he idolatry of
literalism. This is avoided, as Holloway explains, when “the myth that has been broken open …
[and] now yields its inner meaning through interpretation and the power of metaphor.”
Readers of Marcus Borg will recognise a ready mapping of the above three options into the
process of spiritual maturing suggested by him8 as graduation from ‘pre-critical naivety’ via
‘critical thought’ to ‘post-critical naivety’. Since myths can be effectively encountered only in
naivety (that is, not in Logos but in Mythos) the most appropriate way to extract value from
them is to re-interpret them in the mode of post-critical naivety.
Running parallel to Tillich’s re-interpretation is Bultmann’s call for ‘de-mythologisation’ in
which he proposed to replace traditional supernaturalism with existential categories. He
attempted to reconcile Christian teaching with existentialism in which each person experiences
judgment, not in the afterlife but in each moment, as he or she chooses to reject or accept the
call of God in the human heart. He understood this as the evangelical task of clarifying gospel
proclamation, by stripping it of elements of the first-century supernaturalist, pre-scientific
world picture that had potential to alienate modern people from Christian faith.
Tillich's programme, though similar, has significant differences in that Tillich insists that it is
impossible to do avoid in religious language. Myth is not to be replaced but, as it were, looked
at from another angle. For Tillich, it is inevitable that every religious assertion must be made in
symbolic speech, and a myth is simply an ordered sequence of religious symbols.
In summary, Bultmann and Tillich differ in what a myth is to be converted into. Despite the
wording of Tillich’s quote in ‘Confronting Myth’ (above), what he demands is not ‘demythologising’ but ‘de-literalization’. For Bultmann, the supernatural references, even
symbolic, must be subordinated to human existential categories. But, for Tillich, we continue
to deal with the claims of the myth in its own terms but at some ironic distance. We know that
it is a myth, which is more than those who first developed it did. We know that we could
approach it via Logos, and discard it as deceptive fiction, or in the modern pseudo-Logos of
biblical literalists and, by not breaking it open a myth, implicitly literalise it. But we best serve
it and ourselves by using it in the same subjective, intuitive, value-asserting way that we use
other literary modes that inform our Mythos, especially metaphor and poetry.
continued ………….
4
Summary: appropriate “ways of knowing” Biblical Writings
Mythos
Logos
Biblical Writings (strictly fictional)
Myth
supernatural
involvement
Propogandist
History
Biblical Writings
(strictly nonfictional)
Exemplary
Biography
evidence of author prejudice
which can be allowed for
Parable
History
offered as
fiction, no
adjustment
needed
subject to the norms of
historical research and
so a fit candidate for
Logos
responses to

Accept as literal truth („Pre-Critical Naivety‟) = „pseudo-Logos‟

Discard as deception „Critical Thought‟ =in this case an inappropriate
application of Logos

Adapt to 21C conditons: „Post-Critical Naivety‟


Bultmann: De-mythologise and rediscover the hidden existential
challenges buried under the myth
Tillich: Re-interpret the myth converting the mythically-rendered
message to 21C terms
Noel Cheer, May 2010
1
Well articulated in the Introduction of Armstrong, Karen The Battle for God HarperCollins 2000
2
One of Holloway’s themes that did not readily fit in this paper but which is worth considering is to start with Thomas Kuhn’s idea of
‘paradigm shift’ as applied to science, extend it to human knowledge in general and to our response to myth in particular. See especially
http://homepages.which.net/~radical.faith/holloway/myths%201a.htm
3
Armstrong, Karen The Battle for God p355
4
Armstrong, Karen A Short History of Myth Canongate 2005 pp128 and 131
5
Holloway, Richard: The Myths of Christianity: The Broken Myth http://homepages.which.net/~radical.faith/holloway/myths%201a.htm
Gresham College Lecture 15 November 2000
6
Tillich, Paul: The Dynamics of Faith pp51-52,
7
Holloway, Richard: The Myths of Christianity: The Broken Myth Gresham College Lecture 15 November 2000
8
Borg, Marcus: Reading The Bible Again for the First Time HarperCollins 2002 pp49-51
5