Myth, History, Theology

[Ian] Davie has an interesting section where he talks about the nature of mythological and poetic writing—which is the genre of the Vedas and other early Hindu scriptures on which the later, more philosophical commentaries were based. Having distinguished the vertical (ontological) dimension from the horizontal (historical, empirical), he explains that the "vertical" is always best expressed in poetry and myth. This leads him to deplore the "demythologization" of religion. In a theological context, he says, the word "mythology" means "the horizontal (i.e., spatio-temporal) representation of a vertical (i.e., eternal) truth: when there is no vertical dimension, I would want to say we are dealing, not with theological myth, but with theological fable."

The theological method... is neither one nor the other; neither mythological nor historical, but a combination of both. Thus it uses history as a critique of myth, and myth as a critique of history; for the whole theological purport of myth is to indicate the limits of history, to elicit from the mythological language (which it necessarily uses in speaking of events which are transhistorical, in the exact sense that they are limits of history) a sense of what lies beyond history, the "beyond" of all time.

—Ian Davie's Jesus Purusha, quoted in Stratford Caldecott, The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity (2013)