Mystery and Myth in Beauty: The Role of the Christian Artist

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve spent the past couple years in seminary earning an M.A. in Ministry in the Global City. For my big final work, sort of a thesis-equivalent, called a capstone, I wrote a mythology out of New York City history. I picked common myths and overlapping vignettes and people and times and themes from the true history of New York, and I retold those historical moments with mythic creatures and elements. For instance, I wrote the consolidation of the five boroughs in the style of the Lenape creation myth, and I wrote about Evelyn Nesbit as a sort of “Fall” myth. 

I am also taking a class to become officially “ordained” as a minister through our sending organization, A.C.T. International. In this class,  we spent a little time discussing possible Biblical definitions of beauty. Our founder highlighted that beauty, Biblically, is connected repeatedly with moral goodness and righteousness; it is not simply about aesthetics, but about truth. But I brought up another dynamic that I never really see discussed: 

I think beauty is also about mystery. It’s a combination of truth/righteousness and something like hiddenness, or coding.  

I am reminded of a quote from V for Vendetta: “Artists use lies to tell the truth.” As a kid watching the movie, this line resonated with me, and now as an adult, I still think about it all the time.

In all of the research I did for my capstone, I read about the concept of “demythologization,” which is basically stripping myths for parts and treating them merely as allegories–or disregarding them altogether in favor of “the lesson” they represent. This process sounds natural enough to a Western, rational mind, but it does damage to the myth in a couple crucial ways. 

Firstly, each singular meaning attached to each symbol ignores other possible meanings; for instance, in my studies, I saw how demythologization applied specifically to the Garden of Eden myth; the “Serpent” is replaced, with all its complex possible symbolism (eternal youth, for instance, because of the shed skin, or sexuality because of the shape) for merely a “tempter” or “Satan” specifically. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the Serpent isn’t Satan, but there is little Biblical basis for this interpretation and certainly there’s a reason the story doesn’t just say “Satan” here. So–demythologization can strip the character of all its nuanced associations and meanings and flatten it into merely a single idea. 

Secondly, as a result of this process, the myth is traded for a set of ideas, or a simple moral. The story becomes extraneous; what is the point? Continuing my example, the Garden of Eden myth is no longer told or considered as a narrative, but the point is extrapolated: Satan got us to disobey God and so we were punished with death and suffering. Straightforward, right? And not necessarily incorrect, but certainly not the whole story. What is the role of Adam versus Eve in such a tale? What is the process of temptation? Why does it matter that the fruit “looked good” to eat? Why a fruit at all? None of these questions really matter anymore; the point is made, and the moral is known, and everything else is just a way of teaching us the point. 

This leads to the third pitifall of demythologization: the myth loses its power entirely. If the story is extraneous, a made up thing that exists solely to serve the point, then of course, you have to wonder: who made the story up? What was their motive? Suddenly, the point itself is even suspicious; mightn’t the story have been created by those in power to convince people not to follow their own desires? To threaten people with punishment for trying to rise above their stations? There are a lot of points a lot of people are trying to make for a lot of different reasons; shouldn’t we each approach these ideas with our very best skepticism, and take what resonates with us personally and discard the rest? 

So demythologization is ultimately not just potentially inaccurate or reductive, but it’s actually isolating. Myth has always been a part of what has connected people to past generations and to community; it provides morality and meaning, and not merely for individuals, but for civilizations, and indeed, for humanity itself. So demythologization was viewed by every writer I came across as something of a modern-day crisis, harmful to the moral health and mental health of a culture; the need for “remythologization” was discussed at length. 

But there is beauty in the complexity and mystery of the story. That’s why it’s told that way.

Poetry is more beautiful than daily speech; a musical is more beautiful than a plot summary, as chords move you in ways you can’t fully explain.

In shrouding the didactic meaning, in complicating it, there are glimpses of truth that tantalize the reader and beckon them closer.  You can see this value of mystery in the Bible itself, which is composed mainly of narratives, poems, and songs; it is a collection of Scriptures, not a manifesto. 

As an arts minister, I am lucky enough to see firsthand the connection between mystery and beauty; each month, I host events where a variety of people respond to art, and it flows immediately into hermeneutical conversations about the meaning of life, purpose, worth, love… I see these responses flow out of movies, plays, concerts, and paintings. Each artform invites people to look a little closer, to press in for meaning, to grasp at it, but not quite understand what they’re understanding. 

Something that is important is how different the Western view of truth is from the kind of truth described in the Bible. In fact, the Hebrew word for truth, emet,is often translated as “faithfulness,” because the word is so relational in its meaning. The personification of truth in God is therefore much easier to understand to a Hebrew mind than a Western one, because truth is not just a collection of cold facts, but something alive.

So relationship, another kind of knowledge, can be more important to understanding the truth than purely rational knowledge. In fact, many languages have words for relational knowledge; English is pretty unique in that it makes no distinction between knowing something and knowing about it. 

Shrouding the truth, covering it a little, can get us closer to knowing that truer truth: that reality is mysterious and beautiful and spiritual in its very nature. Remythologization can provide a potent hermeneutic for a spiritual reality–and for Christian artists, I think often, this is our task. 

How can you remythologize things in your life that you’ve stripped for understanding? 

Where do you glimpse the mysterious beauty of the world?