09.13.09
Logos/mythos issue in Armstrong
The Nature of Myth – And More Good Stuff by Robert Bringhurst
This blogger at Beliefnet picks up the ‘logos/mythos’ nonsense that is peddled by Karen Armstrong, originally in The Battle For God.
The question of logos, and mythos, as handled by Armstrong is a cliche argument against the backdrop of the gross distortion of the Greeks that we see in her works, along with her denigation of modernist rationality as she trumpets some kind of postmodern ‘second Axial Age’, etc, etc…
The question of logos and mythos in Greek culture, in the context of the Axial Age is something that is beyond Karen Armstrong’s capacity to analyze, given here assumptions.
Let me note that in my treatment of the Axial Age in World History And The Eonic Effect the Greek Axial Age is shown to be the real key to the ‘age of revelation’, and that it is at once the source of secularism, and of its own take on religion. It is also the first (or else, the most dramtically first) democracy, an Axial innovation.
Armstrong could never handle Axial Age Greece in her work, and the reason might become clear from the study of the eonic effect.
Armstrong’s attempt to make patty cakes out of logos and mythos creates something not present among the Greeks.
In any case, the perception of mythos generally spells the end of that mythos. You might check out Plato on Homer, what to say of Euripides on Greek tragedy.
You can’t start serminizing to secularists about ‘belief’ as a form of embrace of mythos. It is a sophisticated con, and a disservice to tradition.
Pagan cultures have always made use of two sources of knowledge about the world, which Karen Armstrong defined in her book The Battle for God as mythos and logos. Modern societies, including most modern religion, limits itself to one, logos. We need both.
Logos is knowledge arrived at through evidence and reason as we usually think of it. It gives us knowledge about things, but not whether they have interior dimensions of meaning and awareness. You cannot measure consciousness.Mythos addresses the meaning in the world, the value that exists there intrinsically. When it is abandoned, the world slides towards meaninglessness. Being myself schooled in logos, that is, modern ways of knowing, it took me many years even after I became Pagan, to realize its limitations as well as its strengths