Demythologizing versus Demything

Introduction
So, this post is a bit funky because it is a question with which only those studying ancient texts, particularly in biblical studies, are likely to be familiar. But I am hoping that, in discussing it, I can provide enough context that even those who have not run into it before or are not as familiar with the conceptual rubrics in this field can gain something in reading. Also, it relates to other posts I have put up recently (creationism vs evolutionism, the defense of Lost, etc).

History of the Question:
I should relate that this subheading is an actual term in use in academic studies, or at least close to it; I think "status of the question" may be more commonly used. In a piece of research, it is an introductory section giving the history of scholarly writing and debate on the question: who first posed it as a distinct question with this particular terminology, what specific literature they were examining the issue in, what their main theory was in answer to the question, and what other scholars have done in working on the question since then. For instance, Martin Noth first introduced the theory of "The Deuteronomistic History" as an originally separate and unified whole work spanning Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings (in the Hebrew TANAK canon, Ruth does not come between Judges and 1 Samuel, but is rather a part of the third section of the canon, the Writings). In Noth's original theory, he claimed the DH was done in one redaction (edition). In subsequent scholarship, several major scholars have proposed that it was actually in two editions. The first covered up through the reign of and religious reform by king Josiah in the kingdom of Judah and took a highly favorable view of Josiah, making him sort of a second Joshua (a military/political leader who obeyed the law handed to him by prophets, just as Joshua conquered Canaan following the Law given by Moses, the great prophet). The second redaction edited the first and added to it the last four kings between Josiah and the exile and the material on the evil king Manasseh who reigned between Hezekiah and Josiah, basically as an explanation for why, if Josiah and his reform were so great, God chose to send the people into exile as punishment (Manasseh's apostasy and leading the people in the same was just too great for even the great king Josiah to totally undo). I know all of this because I did the DH as one of my comp questions in my doctoral studies (things of this nature are still only theories, and there is much debate on different parts or aspects of them). The "status of the question" introductory section is pretty much a standard requirement for PhD dissertations.

The term in question in this post is "demythologization."  It occurs in two major instance in biblical studies, with two fairly different but connected meanings. I'm not sure which came first, but I believe it was the work of Martin Dibelius and, particularly (in its most radical form), Rudolf Butlmann (whose main type of criticism was "form criticism") in New Testament, and in particular in the Gospels. Bultmann distinguished the "Christ of Faith" from the "Jesus of History" and said that the former in merely mythological construction using the tropes of mythological thinking of that time period ("forms," in his use of the word). The task of the exegete, for him, was to strip away the mythological thinking by stripping away the mythic "forms" in which it is embedded and to find the "real" historical Jesus.

To me, contra Bultmann's version, there is a great value in form criticism when used rightly, examining set tropes, "forms," by which biblical authors express the truth of the events they relate because this mythic [versus "mythological," see below] expression goes beyond a preoccupation with mere facticity and shows that the events are about more than historical facticity, although this does not negate a historicity to them, and in fact the historicity of the events is very important because of not just the doctrine of the Incarnation, but because of the principle discernible in it - that Christ, "myth become fact" in C.S. Lewis's language, is the fullness of all reality, including that of historical fact. Thus, I strongly disagree with this scholarly "demythologization" of the New Testament "Christ of Faith."

(Aside: the late Fr. Joseph Fitzmeyer had a great response on the whole "Jesus of history" issue in his Scripture: the Soul of Theology. He said that this "Jesus of History" would be every bit as much of a construction as scholars like Bultmann say the "Christ of Faith" is. He would be constructed out of the things determined to be "facts" by their pre-commitments of the type of man they wish to find, and those facts would be arranged according to the same [in my language, the core myths of materialist scientism constructed in the specific language tropes of that belief system]. For one, the "facts" outside of the biblical account are simply too scant to find out anything that is not already formed by the Faith of the Church.)

I am going to leave further specifics of Bultmann and NT studies aside for now, partially because I am not at this time enough "in the game" of overall biblical studies to productively discuss the NT/Gospels question, but mostly in order to move on to the second instance (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament), which is the one with which I am more intimately familiar and which bears more fruit for my particular interests here (although, see my caveat below on the Quadriga for my agreement with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church that the Old Testament cannot, at the end of the day, be examined in complete isolation from the theology of the New Testament, at least not within the discipline of Christian theology).

Paul Ricoeur is my main theorist for what follows, but I will not delve into him yet because I need to lay more groundwork. But I must give a disclaimer here as well. It is has been a while since I have delved into Ricouer, whose thought is dense (he has a whole chapter at the end of his The Rule of Metaphor [in the French original, "the life of metahpor"] on the copula, the word "is," that I am not sure I got fully even at the time I was reading it for comps and came to it after having followed his whole three-hundred previous pages, in fact, I am pretty sure I didn't). My interest here, as related in my main descriptor for this blog, is to get my thoughts out in concrete form, and thus I do not have the time (especially having another book to start copy-editing soon) to dig my books out of bins in the basement and try to see if my notes on PR managed to survive the loss of one of my external hard drives (not sure what I stored where) and do some real research. So it is not possible at present for me to entirely demarcate between his original thoughts and my own extrapolations and use of them in conjunction with my own.

Mythologization in the Old Testament
I want to start this section by clearing up the difference in the two terms I use, "Hebrew Bible" and "Old Testament." The latter is a specifically Christian term and embodies Christian interpretation of the former in the new light of the fullness of Revelation in Christ. The easiest way I can think to describe the situation is to give the system of biblical interpretation known as the "Quadriga" and correlate my two terms to that. That name is obviously taken from the word "four" and it means the four-fold "sense" of Scripture and relates most to the Old Testament's relation to the New. The first sense is the "literal." This means exactly what the words meant at the time of their composition (it is not just literalistic but also literary). The second sense is often referred to as the "allegorical," although "Christological" would be accurate too, if by that term we mean specifically the historical life, Passion, and Resurrection of Jesus. It is called allegorical because things and events are viewed as allegorical foreshadowing of specific things and events in Christ's time concretely on Earth. So, for instance, when Moses strikes the rock at Horeb and water comes forth, it is a foreshadowing of Christ being pierced in the side on the Cross and water and blood coming forth. The third "sense" is the "tropological" sense, which is basically the moral sense, although it is also allegorical in nature. For instance, the Temple prefigures the individual Christian, who must keep themself pure, as the Temple was kept pure (this is the most well known because of its direct statement by St Paul in the NT). The fourth and final sense is the "anagogical" (from the Greek verb for "to lead up"). This is the eschatological or final sense: the Temple prefigures heaven, our final goal (the example being most well-known in the book of Revelations).

(Note: this system goes by several other names that emphasis different aspects, such as the "sensus plenior [fuller]," and the "spiritual sense," but Fr Joseph Fitzmeyer rightly advises caution about simply slinging these terms around, as the nuances carry with them dangers of misinterpretation ... if one wishes to investigate, beyond Fitsmeyer's Scripture: The Soul of Theology, the two seminal Papal encyclicals on biblical studies are Providentissimus Deus by Pope Leo XIII and Divino Afflante Spiritu by Pope Pius XII, and the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum, is a good dropping in point.)

An example of the difference between the literal sense and the allegorical is that at least some of the material on the Messiah in the OT, in its original literal sense, did not mean Christ because, for one Christ had not incarnated yet. But even before that, the figure was not an unknown person far in the future. The term "messiah" literally means "anointed one" (as does the Greek translation term "Christ"). Specifically in the OT it means the legitimately anointed king. David refers to Saul as the "Meshioch" when his companion urges him to kill Saul when they find him sleeping, since Saul was out to kill David and it could be considered legitimate self defense: David replies, "I will not raise m hand against the Lord's anointed [Meshioch]."In 2 Sam 7, the term takes on a new specification. God promises to David, through the prophet Nathan, that there will always be a king from his line sitting on the throne in Jerusalem. Thus, now it becomes not just any king, but the legitimate king from the line of David. It is, at this point in the literal sense, not a singular personage in a distant and unknown future time, but an ongoing office in the present situation of the kingdom. If this promise is viewed as a Messianic prophecy, it has an immediate fulfillment in Solomon, and then Rehoboam after him, etc. (to give credit where credit is due, the statement about Solomon comes from a course lecture by Scott Hahn, although I am sure it can be found in other OT scholars who predate him ... but that is where I first encountered it).

I don't really have time here to go into the development of thought in what is known as the apocalyptic phase of Jewish thought, but that is where the Messiah becomes the unknown Davidic king who will come at some unknown future time and usher in the Messianic age, the last age of this world before the coming of the new world, the next age. But this is the final and full form of Jewish Messianic thought fulfilled in Christ. So, as regards a passage like 2 Sam 7, the "literal" sense is that promise fulfilled immediately in Solomon, and then in Rehoboam, and eventually in Hezekiah and Josiah, and even in Zedekiah (who played games trying to double-cross Babylon and had his eyes cut out right after the last thing they saw was the slaughter of his sons ... I cannot remember if I picked this up from a particular scholars work or not, but Zedekiah, as the last king going into the exile, probably is meant to mirror Samson, the last of the judges before Samuel, going into the nadir before Samuel anointed a king: Samson reigned only half the usual length of a judge and was involved in the same types of game-playing as Zedekiah before likewise having his eyes gouged out).

When I use the term Hebrew Bible, I am referring to that literal sense, rather than the full Christological/allegorical meant by "Old Testament." However, especially when writing in a hurry sometimes, I use them interchangeably. But for the most part, in this section, I mean the literal sense when I use either of them. This was the sense that I focused on formally in doctoral studies.

I must note however, that as a Christian thinker (it's unclear whether I could still be called a scholar, but this holds, according to the Magisterium for full scholars in the setting of Christian theology), I accept the teaching of the Magisterium that that distinction between literal and Christological, even for the OT, applies only to the human authors. But the real author of Scripture is God, and thus studying the Christological sense is a real part of exegeting the literal sense because it is the sense meant by the true author. Not just an interpretive stage after exegesis. But there is also the thought that all Christological senses have to have some concrete correlation with real tenets in the literal sense of the human author of OT passages. And thus studying the material as "Hebrew Bible" is, I believe a legitimate endeavor ... true Christian exegesis simply cannot be thought to stop there.

Hebraic "Demythologization"
So, now that I have the matter of those terms and that system cleared up, I can relate that scholars note in the Hebrew Bible, across the whole span of the canon, a quality that they call "demythologization." This is different form the scholarly project of Bultmann (although similar in general type); it is what the Hebrew Bible text itself does (without calling it that) in relation to the mythologies of surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures. This is a quality of the Hebrew Scriptures in the literal sense of the human authors, even before we get to the Christological interpretation in Christianity.

What it means is that there is a tendency to take things that appear as gods in nearby mythologies and treat them as mere elements and historical realities. I believe that positing such a quality in the inspired Hebrew Scripture still does not go against an idea of inspiration as relating historical realities (rather than simply a human author applying this practice to pre-existing mythologies) ... it could be seen as, through inspired demythologization, God revealing the non-divine truths of the events that the other religions turned into mythological gods and such. The "deep" at Creation really was just an element, not a god. The heavenly bodies (sun, moon stars) were merely that, not deities.


As a final note in this section, I will describe what I do think is taking this observation of the demythologizing tendency in the Hebrew Bible too for, and actually I think it goes hand in hand with the "demythologization" practiced by Bultmann, as an application of that principle to the Hebrew Bible. I find is slightly saddening because I like the scholar from whom I heard it, and actually I learned a lot in his class. One semester in doctoral studies, I took a course on 8th century prophecy (books like Amos and Joel) at Union Theological Seminary on the Upper West Side in Manhattan (right across the street from Columbia on Broadway), taught by a scholar from Jewish Theological Seminary, literally right across the street from Union (for the grammar nazis, I mean "literally" in the correct sense here: JTS was at Broadway and 122nd, not just in the same neighborhood but a few avenues over etc). The scholar's name was Alan Cooper (he was actually the lead singer for ShaNaNa back in the sixties when they opened for Jimmy Hendrix at Woodstock, before he left the group to pursue his career in Biblical Studies and they picked up Bowser for the TV show ... he told us that the name was actually a play on how everybody pronounces Jewish New Year as "Ra-sha-shanah" instead of the proper way, "Rosh ha-shanah," "head [of] the year"). He posited that there never was a king David, that the name was originally a name of a minor god that was "demythologized" in the Hebrew Bible into a "historical" king (his theory is supported by the legitimate fact that it is difficult to find any mention in the records of surrounding kingdoms of the proposed time for David, around 1000 BCE, of a kingdom of Israel with the empire status that Israel is described as having in the Bible, but one should be able to find surrounding records if the kingdom were historical, as one does find mentions of relations with one kingdom in another kingdom's records ... while, I think this is serious evidence that must be contended with and accounted for, I don't think it requires jettisoning any idea of David as a real king of the united twelve tribes of Israel at some level).

Myth in my own language and Paul Ricoeur's
Now that a distinction has been made between the "demythologization" as done in the Hebrew Bible and that done by the likes of Bultmann, I can state that I think that what is really done by the latter is "demything" and that is was this against which Ricoeur argued and to which he objected. It is the removal of any mythic element whatsoever.

In order to explain this, I find it helpful to do a little exposition on the meaning of "myth." We tend to think of it as "that which is untrue," and indeed we use it very often in this sense. But that is not its original meaning, and, as I have at least hinted at in other posts, I think radically defining it solely in this way is the product of the biases of what I call "scientism," which arose in the scientific revolution in the modern era of thought.

Among the earliest uses of the term is that by Aristotle in his Poetics. This work is among the earliest works of literary theory. For him there, "muthos" (the upsilon in Greek is usually translitered in English with the "y") is the plot of a story. As I think of it, a story is made up isolated events, and then they are arranged in a such a way that the movement from one to the other (the plot) presents certain ideas of causality. One event does not just precede another, but  causes it (this logic of causality usually is tied to aspects revealed in things like characterization).

(Sidenote: Aristotle's Rhetoric and his Poetics are the two works with which Ricoeur begins his survey of the history of thinking on metaphor in his Rule of Metaphor, and if I remember correctly, he says that the latter has a better picture of the operation of metaphor than does the former.)

I like to use two other examples to understand what is really at the heart of myth. The first is the "connect the dots" pictures we all did as children. The dots are like the isolated events in a story. "Myth" is like the lines that connect the dots to give us a coherent picture. The dots don't mean anything by themselves (in fact, I don't think they even really "exist" for us by themselves, but hopefully this will be a little clearer in a few paragraphs). The other is music. The events are the notes, and we can have some sense of harmony, and we can have some understanding of rhythm. But we really need melody, the coordination of harmony with rhythm in a movement, to hear the music. And the movement is the point, just like the movement of a story's plot - they are mythic in nature.

If we look at myth in the terms of C.S. Lewis's essay, "Myth Become Fact," which I have mentioned before, myth always assumes fact up into itself. But it is only in the case where the higher truth (God, Christ) first came down into the world of fact that this can be done rightly.

This definition makes "myth" applicable to all stories, both fictional and historical, including to the "myths" of the gods in polytheistic culture. Most importantly, here, I want to draw attention to the fact that I just said "historical" too. I highly doubt that you could give me an account of the events of the past six months of your life without being very selective of the events you present and loading them with a narrative theme, even if unconsciously (this branch of "literary genre" is called "historiography," and when teaching, I always described it as "history with a point," and had students break up into groups and each group come up with a list of the most important events of the past five years, and then we examined each list to draw out a core theme that was important to each group).

Here is a key place where Ricoeur's thought comes in helpful. I have sometimes (mostly joking I think) been accused of reversing the old saying that "art imitates life" so that it reads "life imitates art." I think this happened online when I was likening my entry into NYC to Harry Potter's entry into Hogwarts, using details of NYC topography and professors in my department correlated with professors at Hogwarts etc. It was only later that I read Ricoeur's theory of "threefold mimesis" and realized that it didn't start with me and that it was a legitimate thing to do. Basically it says that art imitates life because "life" first imitates art. What it means is that, when we think the word "life" to describe out own lives, we cannot help but borrow narrative plots from art, from stories we heard in our formative years as children (like Bible stories) as matrices in which to understand the meaning of our lives, as the lines that connect the dots to give us a picture of our "life." Keep in mind here, there is more that goes on cognitively in our formative years as far as learning to interpret our experiences than most of us ever take account of. When we enter this world from our mothers' wombs, we don't even have the firmware, let alone the OS or specific software programs (I'm hoping it's not too crass to borrow computer language here, but I think it does fit).

To cut to the chase, mythology, meaning the polytheistic mythologies of the ancient world, go beyond this metaphorical pattern. Here I would warn against thinking of metaphor as purely "figurative," and thus not real, but to fully expound that I would have to actually send you to Ricoeur's Rule of Metaphor to see his challenges to "traditional" dualist readings of metaphor - and that is one thick and deep book. But the main point I want to make is that, as I remember Ricoeur (or as I read my own synthesis of him when I read him; as I said, hard to tell which is which at this point), the problem is that mythology uses myth to explain fact in a "scientific "way. I will try a little later to describe this in terms of Aristotle's thought on and system of "causality," But for here I want to be clear that this is different than "mything," which, from the human side (see last section), is discovering the mythic truth within the factual events. Mythology is using those to explain the actual facticity of the events. There is no problem with the Hebrew Bible stripping away the mythology of other cultures, and in fact it is good. But what Bultmann and others have tried to do is to take away the mythic element altogether and leave only the "historical facts," which, not to play with words too much, I think are complete myths in the negative sense of the word (cf. Fitzmeyer's comments above on the quest for the "historical Jesus).

 Remembering what I said above about C.S. Lewis's thoughts and fact being taken up into myth, we can see mythology as the reverse, as fact dragging myth down to its level and pressing myth into its own service. The ancient, idolatrous, version matches what I would call a sort of idolization of "scientific fact," "materialism" as an almost religious "ism."

(Aside: I got a great essay one semester from a Chinese student who said that Marx's system of thought used constructs learned in the Jewish milieu in which he grew up for the shape of its presentation, using five elements: "Regularity of History"=God; Proletariat="Chosen People";  Party/State=Prophet/Messiah; Revolution=Final struggle [the Messianic age conceived in Apocalyptic Judaism]; and communist/egalitarian state after the struggle=next age [Christian heaven])

I see all of this as relating also to the issue of scholarly demythologization in that that project seeks to use the "myths" to find out what the facts were, and then wants to discard the "myths" because it sees them as never true in the first place because, according to the core tenet of what I call "scientism," the only real truth is materiality.

Causality in Mythology.
So, I have said that demythologization is good when it means stripping mythology (but not when trying to strip the mythic, which only ever ends in replacing one mythic with another, the unstated mythos of "scientific fact" anyway); and I have said that mythology is the attempt to use the myth to explain the facticity of facts. Now, I am going to use Aristotle to try to explain a little better what I mean by this "explanation" and causality.

This involves a primer on Aristotle's thought on "causes." St. Thomas Aquinas uses Aristotle's system heavily in his five classic proofs for the existence of God, and when teaching this material in a college-level intro to theology course, I found it helpful to use a word other than "cause" because, in modern times, we generally only ever think of what Aristotle calls the "efficient cause." Substitute the word "explanation" for the word "cause."

For Aristotle, there are four cause: the formal, the material, the efficient, and the final. Substituting "explanation" for "cause," we can speak of the "formal explanation" of a table. This means the form, the essential "tableness" that would be common to all tables worthy of the name. It would involve a flat, horizontal, hard(ish) surface supported by at least one vertical leg that can uphold it in its horizontal position (a pedestal, or it could have two pedestal legs, one at either end, or three legs in a triangular arrangement, or four legs at the corners, you get the picture). The second "cause," is the material explanation, which means the material from which a particular table is made, be it wood, or metal, or plastic, or whatever that crap is from which is made assembly-required furniture at Walmart and Target, which really only ever last through one assembly, even though they say it will do more). The third is the "efficient cause," which is the one of which we usually think - the carpenter etc who put the table together as a table. The fourth cause/explanation is the "final." This means the goal or aim, what it is made to do ... which is to support things at such a height and in such an arrangement that they are easy to work on or with.

In mythology, the problem is that the myth (which is valid on its own as a mythic element, say the truth that thunder resembles anger in its rumbling) becomes the efficient cause (the god of the clouds is angry and the thunder is his voice). This is why they are usually always polytheistic. We can see the mythic element, but we can see lots of them. In most polytheistic religions, that myth-become-god, or at least certain of them, becomes also the material cause, as when, in the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, Marduk splits Tiamat's body and makes the heavens from half of it and the earth from the other half.

In theses mythologies, the valid mythic element becomes the two basest causes in Aristotle's system, the material and the efficient. It is the demythologization that strips or reverses this that I/Ricoeur think/s is good. The other "demythologization," which is really de-mything, is, I think, only the flipside of polytheistic mythologization - rather than the "god" becoming efficient and material cause, material and efficient causality are elevated to godlike status and become the sole definition of causality, discarding the formal and final (which I see as those that are highest in defining humanity's relation to God, as made in the image of God and destined for communion with Him ... but those do not discard the material and efficient, which would be to deny the Incarnation).

Another hook by which to possibly get a handle on the difference between mythologization and mything is to note the "-ology" in "mythology." It's the same as we use for sciences that provide material explanations. Mything is something other, not focused myopically on material explanation.

The Issue of Revelation
The thought here may be a little jumbled because it feels like a complex one to get into words, but I think at least some progress can be made. The difference between mythologization and true mything is the starting point, from fact or myth. Mything starts from myth, but the only fully true, ultimate myth is God/Christ. Humans on their own can only do the other way round. Humans can start with and observe facts and sense, dimly, a multiplicity of mythic truths, but not the true myth, God, and so, on our own, we can only ever mythologize. We can only perceive mythic truths; we can't provide them; we can only provide false mythologies. Only God can en-myth, which we call Revelation. Thus, while I am trying not to cast stones for fear they be revealed to be boomerangs, it really does seem to me like the "de-mything" of Bultmann and others (disguised as "demythologization") is an attack on the Revelation of God, and thus on God. And, indeed, the stated goal in their project is to encounter the historical, not to come to know the transcendent.