Have you ever thought about the notion that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life? This is John 14:6 and it is one of the first verses I was ever taught to memorize. But then I started to dig a little. These self-ascriptions are very interesting and these concepts in themselves could preoccupy a scholar for the rest of his or her life. What I want to focus on is Truth. And I’ll be brief. After investigating this from an angle I’ve never seen before, it’s somewhat of a thrill to inject new life into such a boring sounding concept.
Jesus is the truth. Now, I am no scholar. But I decided to find out how this word ‘truth’ might come to have more meaning for me. In Greek mythology, Truth is represented by the goddess Aletheia, a virgin, dressed in white, perhaps to suggest purity. Because she was hard to find, legend has it that she hides at the bottom of holy wells waiting to be discovered by only the most dogged of seekers. Curiously, Aletheia is the daughter of Cronus, the god of agriculture, justice, and strength. Yet agriculture jumps out at me the most. In agriculture, food is produced through farming. The food will come only if the field is tended to. What I find interesting is that the daughter of Cronus was the goddess of truth. It’s almost as if myth was teaching us that Truth is only produced after the field is tended to, only after there is a farming process. And until then, Truth will remain hidden.
Interestingly, the Greek word for truth is Aletheia, which actually means ‘not hidden’. In essence, Jesus is the naked truth, the wisdom without the veil. Even Martin Heidegger noticed the power of Aletheia. Aletheia is contrasted with another Greek word called Leth, which (in Greek mythology) is one of the five rivers that flow through Hades. If you drink from the river Leth, you forget everything and have perpetual amnesia. In Heidegger’s philosophy of art, he saw Art as an avenue through which Truth lies unhidden, disclosed, not forgotten. In Orthodoxy, even Chesterton says that we’ve forgotten who we are. Empty rationality and common sense means that we forget that we’ve forgotten, that we’ve drunk again from the river Leth. But all that we call Art, ecstasy, and passion means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.
Matt Damore
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Lovely post
ReplyDeleteThanks! I've recently fallen in love with mythology. The famous psychologist Carl Jung used it as the bedrock for his view of psychology. He basically believed that in mythology we find visual representations of our own psyche! e.g. the monsters of myth are really monsters of the mind! Remember when we talk about 'feeding the dragon'? Jung would think that myth's choice of a 'dragon' rather than a lion or a shark has a reason behind it: that there are elements a dragon has that mirror the libido or perhaps the preference for vice in general.
ReplyDeleteTo give another example: the myth of the Werewolf traces back to Zeus morphing King Lycaon (Lycaon comes from the Latin 'lycos', meaning 'wolf') into a wolf! From 'Lycaon' we get the word 'lycanthrope', and I'm sure you notice 'anthrope', which comes comes from 'anthropos', meaning 'man'. According to Jung, the myth of the Werewolf tells us something about human nature, the beast within, how uncontrollable it is, the remorse we feel after morphing back into a man. The silver bullet probably stemming from the silvery hue the moon gives off: just has the silver hue of the full moon causes the transformation, the Werewolfe's death involves being shot by a bullet with that same hue.
So, according to Jung, whatever is going on in our life or mind can find a correlate to a myth, and contemplation of the myth entails better understanding of your life or what is going on in your mind.