The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes

by Louis A. Markos

For example, he encourages parents to build upon their child’s knowledge of the heroes of Greek literature by bringing to their attention heroes of the Bible.

The myths introduce a child to virtue through the exploits of Hercules, Ulysses, Achilles, and the like. This teaches the child what the “soul of a hero” is like.

As Flannery O’Connor reminds us in her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”: “The whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.”

“Before the modern period, the main vehicle for passing down the benefits of virtue and the dangers of vice was stories.”

“Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning,” writes C. S. Lewis.

Medieval Christians believed that the coming of Christ was the fulfillment of pagan yearning and longing. That longing was expressed in pagan myths, philosophies, stories, and the predictions of the sibyls.

Could it be that Christ truly is the Savior of the world, for whom all the world was longing (and, indeed, still is longing) even before his name was known? Could it be that Christ was born in the fullness of time, when pagan religion and philosophy were growing weary and fatigued and were therefore primed for the birth of Christ?

Without downplaying the central Christian belief that Jesus fulfilled the Law and Prophets of the Old Testament, Michelangelo presents Christ as having fulfilled as well the deepest yearnings of the pagan nations.

“God,” Newman writes, speaks amid the incantations of Balaam, raises Samuel’s spirit in the witch’s cavern, prophesies of the Messia[h] by the tongue of the Sibyl, forces Python [the Oracle of Delphi] to recognize His ministers, and baptizes by the hand of the misbeliever. He is with the heathen dramatist in his denunciations of injustice and tyranny, and his auguries of divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes from Him.

Not only is a large percentage of the Bible written in poetry; Jesus himself chose to convey many of his teachings through the form of fictional short stories that we call parables.

If Lewis is right, there are aspects of Christianity, and of Christ himself, that can only be accessed by way of the imagination.

Christians, Lewis taught us, did not have to check their brains at the church door, but they also did not have to surrender their deepest yearnings and longings for beauty, wonder, and magic.

What Lewis helped us to do—indeed, what he gave us permission to do—was to listen for God’s voice in a hundred different mediums.

Lewis taught us that wherever man has sought with his entire being to perceive the truths of his Creator, God is there.

The designation “proto-Christian” is simply meant to highlight pagan writers whose works God often used as a bridge from paganism to Christianity;

We are by nature storytelling creatures, but we are also ourselves part of a larger story that began with the Garden and that will not end until the New Jerusalem descends from heaven like a bride (see Revelation 21:2).

they replaced them with a set of five pseudo-virtues to fill up the virtue-shaped vacuum in our hearts: tolerance, inclusivism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism.

Still, these five virtues—which I will henceforth call values, since they are man-made and culture-bound rather than eternal and cross-cultural—have never stood at the center of morality.

Worse yet, none of them represent active virtues that affirm that we are human beings who deserve equal respect because we were made in the image of our Creator.

To the contrary, they are passive values that deflate and reduce our God-given worth and uniqueness into a bland,...

Worse yet, the swapping out of traditional virtues with progressive values has helped create a generation of young people who say to themselves, “Well, yes, I may be living a sinful lifestyle, but that is OK because I recycle cans.”

In the moral-ethical haze that sets in when values take the place of virtues, it becomes all too easy to redefine narcissism as self-esteem, envy as fairness, and consumerism as a natural and inalienable right.