Why Berserkers Went Berserk

Far gone is the Teutonic world of St. Boniface who, upon encountering a people who had entrusted themselves to the Norse gods, was compelled by the love of Christ to chop down their sacred oak tree. In the secular West of today, Christ is no longer preached as the real God in contrast to made-up deities. Instead, a colder, more sterile world, a world which denies the existence of things not observed through empirical study, confronts the Christian message, in effect forcing the Christian to help safeguard his belief in the supernatural by befriending the pagan of the past. It is the materialistic age of the 21st-century that rejects any talk of things or beings existing beyond our senses. All can be explained by thorough scientific study our age says. The life of the spirit, the life of the invisible is not real.

Because of this, the myths of pagan cultures must not be dismissed or disregarded by the Christian at such a crucial time. In some sense they are part of his heritage too because they bring to focus a transcendent world that exists beyond the control of man. Part of being Christian is to discern different aspects and representations of the truth wherever they may be found in the hopes that they might bring us closer to some dimension of the Truth. These myths that provide us with alternative stories of the unseen influence or etiology of things must be respected rather than outright repudiated, for oftentimes they open our minds to the reality of a spiritual world that goes unnoticed by modern man.

No longer does Haephestus' smithy cause the volcanoes to smoke or Thor's hammer the skies to light up. Persephone's six-month imprisonment in Hades is no longer an enlightened way to speak of the bitter dead of winter. As elves have left the forests and nymphs have abandoned the seas, the population of the earth has been narrowed down to but one lonely species: modern man.

The unpredictability and extraordinariness of reality is comfortably explained away by our positivistic culture that places supernatural trust in itself and the empirical sciences it reverently bows down to. Poseidon's temper does not cause storms- we do by warming the planet with our pollution. Asclepius does not keep us safe from harm by a virus- we do by keeping six feet away and wearing a mask. More and more, man is becoming the center of his own modern myths. "The sphinx must solve its own riddle" (Ralph Waldo Emerson, History) at the risk of devouring itself and man must become the solution to his own problems at the risk of being confounded in his anxiety. What is not seen, what is not observed, is not real; we are real and we are the center of our own story. Whereas the gods were temporarily supplanted by God in the age of Christendom, now God has been supplanted by man in the age of scientism.

Perhaps, if our times are wrong in attributing the cause of all things to either ourselves or other natural causes, the ancients may have been right in attributing some extraordinary things to supernatural causes. Of course, metamorphic gods and other worldly creatures are not factually real. Nevertheless, mythic imagery is conducive to creating within us a sense of awe and mystery towards the world around us. There is a certain wonder that we ought to have when we encounter realities like sunsets, forests, oceans, or even the intimate hearths of our homes, and mythology gives us an imaginative sense of this wonder by seeing these things as much greater than ourselves. Perhaps something is to be learned from the myth-makers of old when they attempted to personify the action of events, the onset of human emotions, the origins of various things with powerful deities and fanciful creatures. Maybe there is truth to be gleaned from such extra-sensory and imaginative thinking.

Could not a greater comprehension of the panic of battle be had by visualizing, as Homer does, a raging god like Ares fight amidst Trojan battle lines than by simply dismissing any thought of supernatural forces (demonic or angelic) that might possibly surface during war? Why Berserkers went berserk was not simply because they wanted another's food, treasure, or women. The seemingly entranced warrior wanted to be found worthy by Odin's Valkyries to be admitted into Valhalla, there to feast and await that final battle of all things at Ragnarok. He did not merely want what other humans had, the economic reasons why he fought were only secondary. He primarily wanted to enter into that cosmic fight for the universe between gods and giants. Myth does not just bring with it the levity of made-up creatures and immature deities. Its storytelling allows us to witness this gravitas of life that indeed invites us into things and events much larger than ourselves.

Chesterton says that paganism can be summarized as "an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone"(G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man). Within its own limited framework (or unlimited, if we speak of the imagination as unrestricted by the reasoning of the intellect), mythology certainly provides intimations of truth that ring true to the ears of any man in search for God or of how he ought to live.

Zeus may not hurl lightning bolts, but picturing his strong arm throw one as if he were throwing a spear is perhaps an enlightening way to envision the power of One who is even stronger than Zeus. Prometheus may not have stolen fire from the gods and given it to men, but it might be a helpful way of imagining the beneficence of One who, though owing nothing to His creatures, generously stooped down from His throne to share with them such a gift. Odin may not have lost an eye in his quest for wisdom, but somehow that story fittingly applauds the wise man who has not counted the cost nor heeded the suffering necessary to acquire wisdom. Can it not be said truthfully that much like Eros refused to allow Psyche to see him when he came to make love to her in the evening, the Lord permitted Moses to only see His back as His glory passed by?

Having a firm belief and trust in the one true God that the Church has preached to us allows the Christian to do more than simply enjoy the fruit that divine revelation provides him (as good as that is). In addition, it allows him to swim out into the deep waters of the human imagination and there tread the surf of myth as well. May it never be that the Christian is forbidden to use his imagination in this way!

Nonetheless, the imagination is not self-sufficient in its path to achieving a true knowledge of its Creator or of reality in general. Indeed, it must be limited within the bounds of reason if it is to provide us with the fullness of truth. It as if natural religion holds up one's belief in things divine and subjects them to his reason, while mythology allows man's imagination to soar unfettered by reason into realms as beautiful as the unsurpassed beauty of Helen of Troy. As useful as reason is, in and of itself it cannot bring us to these heights of beauty. Yet, as helpful as the imagination is, lest we begin to worship the many gods of the heathens, we must keep it in check by the use of our reason. Only in the Christian religion is the imagination (i.e. the Son who was born of a Virgin, the One who can control the storms of Galilee, the Suffering Servant who defeats Death by His own dying) and reason (i.e. the Divine Logos, The First Cause, the Eternal Reason) are bound together so closely that a Person is formed in their union: the Word that was made flesh and dwelt among us (c.f. Jn 1:14).

It was for good reason the Apostle Paul applauded the Athenians for building an altar to an unknown god for, indeed, what the Greeks erected in ignorance redounded to the greater glory of the Lord Jesus who would soon be preached to them (c.f. Acts 17:22-31). Their ignorantly built altar pointed them to a Truth that surpassed their understanding and so too do their stories reorient our hearts towards the lessons our faith further purifies and crystalizes. For if the assertion nihil ex nihilo means anything, then truly the content of these stories must have come from something else that can be traced back as true. The question arises: whence do these stories, these myths come?

The Anglican priest and physicist John Polkingshore aptly put it that myth conveys truth so sacred that it can only be transmitted by means of a story (c.f. Science and Religion in Quest of Truth). It is the story-format that most properly and adequately conveys the essence of any profound truth. This is probably why our Lord spoke in parables so often. Our minds seem to be more deeply affected by characters and their actions than by ideas and data. When we put a face to a name we are more likely to remember it in the future. If we put a truth about something into a story we are more likely to grasp and appreciate the essence of that truth.

Although there are beliefs and worldviews to be shunned by the follower of Christ as he reads through ancient myths, already possessing the fullness of truth in Christ Jesus, the Christian is in a unique position to be able to extract truth from falsity by holding up pagan beliefs related through mythic stories to the standard of divine revelation that has been received from the Church. He must sift through the waters, the rocks, and the dirt of these stories to find the gold along the river bed. As St. Basil once said, Christians must be like bees who carefully "do not visit all the flowers without discrimination, nor indeed do they seek to carry away entire those upon which they light, but rather, having taken so much is adapted to their needs, they let the rest go." (Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature).

It is obvious that a Christian ought not think Homer or Hesiod are theologians on par with Augustine or the Cappadocians. That the theology believed by pagans is in contrast to the theology believed by Christians is clear enough. But what is this essential honey that St. Basil says the Christian bee can extract from the flowering pagan myth?

Besides the exaltation of virtue that the Greeks suffused their literature with, besides the limitless bravery the Norsemen held up as the standard for all in their stories, the idea that should inspire the Christian of today is that the world is moved by forces beyond our sense and understanding. The greatest Christian to ever express this deep truth by the telling of his own myth is J.R.R. Tolkien. His story of Middle-Earth is a beautifully syncretistic myth of how a world could have been formed under the direction of his fictional divine being Eru, or The One.

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien has the world come about by means of secondary agents that Eru creates from his mind. These emanations from the mind of Eru, or the Valar as he calls them, are the immediate causes of what eventually brings about the existence and splendor of Middle-Earth. Tolkien inserts these divine-like beings in his creation account of Middle-Earth to express a deep truth by way of the story/mythological format. This truth is that God can and does use freely acting agents to bring about the world we live in. The Valar are the ones who sing into being Middle-Earth by their own unique creativity. They truly create what will become Middle-Earth by, first hearing the initial note provided by the divine mind of Eru, and then elaborating on it themselves.

Should a Christian see this as blasphemy, a world brought into being by god-like figures who then themselves create beings to populate it? As Tolkien was a devout Christian himself we cannot quickly jump to that conclusion. What might he have been thinking in creating the Valar? Who are they?

Perhaps in a way that is reminiscent of our modern age's anthropocentric focus, could not "Man" be substituted as such a potentially creative character in our world? Does not man mysteriously participate in the divine creation of Genesis' Creator by himself creating a new world when he procreates? Does he not also additionally shape an ever-new, ever-evolving world by freely choosing good or choosing evil in the innumerable decisions he is demanded to make throughout the day? "You have made him little less than a god; with glory and honor you crowned him, gave him power over the works of your hand, put all things under his feet" (Ps 8:5-6).

Perhaps, even more sublimely, a Christian understanding of the Valar could be seen in the beings we call "angels". Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis seems to have thought along this same line when he had angel-like figures rule and protect the various planets of the galaxy in his Space Trilogy. Interestingly, he seems to have patterned these angelic beings after the personalities of the Greek gods and goddesses of old.

Regardless of whether or not our world was created by angelic assistance, The Silmarillion rings with some truth as an adequate possibility of what may have brought our world about. Maybe God did create our world through the medium of angelic power. This ought not strike the orthodox thinker as heterodox, for it is only a occasionalist who would deny such a possibility.

Heavily developed during medieval Islam, philosophical occasionalism denies any genuine creative power in creatures to bring about effects. Rather, the Islamic occasionalist, under the guise of protecting the all-sovereignty of God, propounds that every effect is wrought directly by the immediate, active will of God. But not only does this position attack Tolkien's creation of Middle-Earth by the Valar, it also undermines the belief in an eternally fruitful creativity of God whose creations are enabled themselves to freely create. The angelic doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, refutes the occasionalist by: "There are certain intermediaries of God's providence, for He governs things inferior by superior, not because of any defect in His power but by reason of the abundance of His goodness; so that the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures" (Summa Theologiae, Part 1, Q 22, Art 3).

How wonderful is the idea that God created the world! How more wonderful is the idea that God's world is full of causal agents empowered to imitate their Creator in creating! This is a hierarchical order to the universe that both Christians as well as pagan myth-makers can jointly acknowledge.

It is as if the world is a symphony assembled by a composer under the direction of a conductor. The cause of the music is not limited to the composer writing the music nor to the conductor directing the musicians. It is not even limited to the skill of the musicians themselves. The causal chain of the music extends back to the makers of the instruments themselves or even to maker of the pen with which the composer wrote the piece. Each is properly said to be a cause in the existence of the music, some more immediate, some more remote. Perhaps God's creative power works similarly with an almost innumerable chain of causes working together to form the world we live in. It sounds a bit like the pagan pantheon with their list of gods superior to other gods, who themselves reign supreme over other gods who existed before them, etc., etc.

We may only acquire a fuller knowledge at the end of time of how God works and how he has chosen to weave the fabric of existence, but until then we have myths to provide us with illustrations of different values we honor in life, different qualities all of which find their ultimate perfection in Him. As long as our minds are not like ships "surrendered to the rudder, to follow whither they list," drinking poison alongside of honey (c.f. St. Basil, ibid.), we can rest assured that we can glimpse at certain truths about God and about the world from an illuminating light by reading mythology. While leaving aside what is not true, the wise Christian can recognize the worth of such powerful stories that develop outside of divine revelation, stories that speak to us through shadows and symbols of a much greater reality that lies behind them. Indeed, Hamlet could have been speaking to modern materialistic man as well as Horatio when he said: "There are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy". There are more, not less.