If Ever a Myth Had Become Fact

In Surprised By Joy, C.S. Lewis tells of his spiritual journey from atheism to Christianity. In the following excerpt he reflects on the connection between the great myths and the story of Jesus–the one point in history where Lewis believed “the myth must have become fact.”

“I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion – those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them – was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson…, yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god – we are no longer polytheists – then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not ‘a religion’, not ‘a philosophy’. It is the summing up and actuality of them all.” –C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy